526
PARTISAN REVIEW
stories survive rereading, it is the criticism that
comes
back to our attention .
If criticism can
move,
then
An Age o/Enormity
is a moving book.
It
is the
spiritual diary of a special state of mind: an energetic alienation that took
its
cues
from deep emotional distress while insisting all the while on logic
and analytic rigor in defining its predicament. That is, Rosenfeld's mind was
analytic by way of being both rational and mercilessly diagnostic, and both
in the service ofwarding off desperation .
As may be guessed from what I've just said, Rosenfeld was not a critic
like Lionel Trilling or Kenneth Burke to whom one
goes
for broad syntheses;
his reviews were never
test
borings for bigger explorations . Moreover, he
lacked, or did not bother to cultivate, a sense of history and though he was
for a
time
a student of philosophy, he had little talent for large, theoretical
formulations . Rosenfeld cultivated inwardness and strove to perfect a per–
sonal responsiveness that would be ground enough for aesthetic judgments;
his essays provide the view of a mind struggling to refine itself against the
resistance of its own backward tendencies. Among other things , perfecting
sensibility meant for Rosenfeld bringing the elements of his modernity-his
psychoanalysis, his awareness of oppression and terror, his alienation, and
hisJewishness-into full consciousness in order to comprehend their psycho–
logical presence within him and their impact on his own character. More
than anything
else,
it is Rosenfeld's effort to define the twentieth century as
a psychological condition of his own
life
that makes
An Age
0/
Enormity
the
absorbing book that it is.
Like so many Jewish intellectuals who came to political consciousness
in the 1930s, Rosenfeld made a brief entry into radical politics and was
active for a while as a Trotskyite in Chicago . But his Socialism, such as it
was,
seems
to have been something of the sort that Alfred Kazin character–
izes
in
Starting Out in the Thirties
as a Socialism of atmosphere, an almost
biological expression of a race , a moment, and a
milieu .
The testimony of
his writing is that he was never committed intellectually to left politics and
that he was therefore not much affected by its collapse in the early 1940s.
It
is hard for someone like myself who knows Rosenfeld only through his
writing to imagine him at any
time
believing strongly in progress through
social action , and I assume that his interest in political theory and organiza–
tion did not go deep . Not that he was morally aloof from reality; certain
crucial facts of modern
life ,
like the normalization of oppression and brutal–
ity, were never far from his mind, and in fact constituted a grain of constant,
personal terror about which much of his intellectual
life
grew. But certainly
by 1943, when he appeared as a critic, organized politics had lost its appeal
for him, and he never afterward alluded to it in writing with any enthusiasm.
His 1947 story, " The Party, " is about an unnamed political party that caves
