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which we should have given them a reprieve. They don't quite earn
their death; they aren't big enough for it. "The betrayal of their essen–
tial humanity by their comrades and themselves left the burden of its
defense upon us." Mercy is an aesthetic necessity. Fiedler wants mercy
for the Rosenbergs and yet he fails, in the words of the common saying,
to do them justice. His demands upon them are intolerable; he wants
to tell Communists and traitors just what sort of speeches and letters
are proper. He ignores or fails to take seriously enough the Rosenbergs'
peculiar and mysterious triumph. Nearly everyone, everywhere, felt un–
easy about this execution and certainly Fiedler no less than others. His
analysis of this uneasiness as a kind of benevolent mist rising out of the
Rosenbergs' bad taste, a cloud of generosity covering their errors of feel–
ing and expression, is as fascinating as it is outlandish. The whole thing
becomes a novel with a weak ending. The uneasiness among ourselves
and other people was more complicated. We were not asked to restore
the Rosenbergs to the order of delicate feelings and daring generosity
in the face of danger, but ourselves. Perhaps this was a foolish request
which no nation could be asked to honor. The reason the request was
made had very little to do with the vulgarity of the Rosenberg letters,
the fraudulent religious appeals, or the Rosenbergs' supposed loss of
their "humanity." These are definitions from the literary world, not
from the world of political and national emotions.
All the essays in this excellent collection heat up a boil of argument
and dissent. Fiedler lectures, he presumes, he asserts with impatience.
On the liberals, the 'thirties, and like subjects it is difficult to tell just
what age the author is since he is everywhere on his own terms. He
seems to come up to all of us, whatever our age, saying, "I've got all
your good qualities, but none of your defects." You are reminded of a
new drug which has no past but a great future; it works and yet who
knows what extended use may bring.
Still, the remaining emotion at the end of this book is that Fiedler's
talent is unusual, his brashness is genuine, and his work is always of
the greatest interest. For those feelings, one can put up with a lot.
Elizabeth Hardwick
