528
PARTISAN REVIEW
moted the Jewish achievement of "a virtually flawless Americanization."
This alienation was a crucial leitmotif to which Rosenfeld always re–
turned . He held it to be the irreducible condition of the emotions and the
first principle of any respectable psychology or literature. And while
an
awareness of his own conflicts precluded the fashioning of a systematic politics
or social philosophy-since the irony demanded by a dissociated sensibility
sabotaged in advance all tendencies toward ideological consistency-it did
allow him to frame an aesthetic, for in matters of art one can take a stand
on one's own uncertainties, and even insist upon a literature that is true to
the human facts of conflict, alienation, and neurosis . Alienation, as Rosen–
feld understood it, was a constant property of the modern character, and
fiction was character in action. Every writer was a man divided against him–
self, and his books communiques from a hidden battle front. (In fact,
The
Enemy,
Rosenfield's second novel, which he was never able to publish, was
an allegory of just such unconscious warfare .) Accordingly, the novel was a
lesson
in
character and a blueprint for emotional management, and therefore
subject to analysis as a successful, or failed, encounter with the instincts .
Literature that did not acknowledge the struggle earned Rosenfeld's dis–
missal as minor, and he accused nearly all contemporary writing of lacking
psychological validity. His criticism of the short story was typical. In two
wartime reviews of Martha Foley collections he charged short story writers
with having surrendered their creative resources to conventional formulas
that undercut imagination and relieved them from having to respond to
authentic psychological pressures . "The present collection [1943] offers very
little evidence that these ideas symbolize crises in perception, moral anxi–
eties, themes or fantasies deep in an artist's life: they lack the obsession of
the personaL" The vast majoriry of short stories, he complained , are aca–
demic, written according
to
learned techniques, and their meanings do not
emerge from within but are laid on from without. Their characters, too, like
their themes and situations, are only tidy contrivances, "receptacles for the
flow of narrative and they never overflow, nor do they receive their fill. "
He returned time and again to the failings of minor fiction, and several
of his early reviews are ingenious dissections of the novel of manners. Two
excellent essays on the English novelists, Charles Williams and Henry Green,
define what Rosenfeld meant by minor fiction and its failings . " I should
define a minor novelist," he began the Williams essay, "as a writer incapa–
ble of doing these two things at once-creating both art and life ." The
minor novelist is not deficient in talent, which he may even have in abun–
dance, but in sensibility, that link between feeling and thought that estab–
lishes the texture of human meaning in his writing. The province of minor
sensibility is style, in which the writer's efforts to distract himself from his
