48
M OR RIS DICKSTEIN
Fiedler and Robert Warshow -- whose essay on the Rosenbergs is
a companion piece to Fiedler's - - do more ingeniously, is to
completely dehumanize the Rosenbergs and turn their execution
into an impersonal act, almost a merciful one. (This casts a rather
sickly glow on Judge Kaufman's banner of "the sanctity of the
individual." As individuals the Rosenbergs were accorded not
much more sanctity than the defendants in the Moscow purge
trials.) In line with the strategy of blaming the victim, they accuse
the Rosenbergs of having destroyed themselves -- by adhering to
ideology, by becoming a "case." Both Fiedler and Warshow ana–
lyze the published prison letters of the couple to demonstrate
their vulgarity of mind, "the awkwardness and falsity," says
Warshow, "of the Rosenbergs' relations to culture, to sports, and
t~
themselves." The supposed meaning is that "almost nothing
really belonged to them, not even their own experience ." The
implicit moral is that they were so empty, so crude, so bereft of
style that there was nothing for the electric chair to kill. It takes
Fiedler with his talent for blatant absurdity to announce this
message clearly: "They failed in the end to become martyrs or
heroes, or even men.
What was there left to die?"
(my italics)
What all this postmortem textual criticism with its vengeful–
ness and personal animosity tells us about the issues in the case is
hard to fathom, but from our vantage point it tells us much about
the Cold War mentality of 1953 (especially as expressed in the two
leading journals of intellectual anti-Communism,
Commentary
and
Encounter,
where the articles first appeared). For all their politi–
cal, even propagandistic intent, both essays show an eerie displace–
ment of politics into aesthetics: issues o f power and justice -–
indeed, of human life itself -- get argued in terms of taste and
style. For these two clever critics the Rosenberg letters are a
godsend, a text, life in an orderly bundle. In their mixture of
high-minded platitudes about politics and middlebrow cultural
opinions the letters provide an ideal foil for the myopic fifties
highbrow with an axe to grind, for the literary mentality with a
tendentious cult of style. The unity of personality -- in this case
the Popular Front personality -- that E.L. Doctorow would grasp
so beautifully in his novel about the case
(The Book of Daniel)
completely eluded Fiedler and Warshow, or proved too threaten–
ing for them. The strange synthesis of Communism, Judaism,
