MARK SHECHNER
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vated its resources of texture and rhythm and had , in his criticism, as clean
and hard a style as any of his contemporaries . His fiction, by contrast, is
marked by mannered and pretentious styles that reveal his strictures upon
directness and authenticity to be exhortations to himself, but his criticism
was obedient to his own lessons about style as resistance . Rosenfeld's criti–
cism featured what I would call a styleless prose, by which I don't mean an
absence of style so much as a perfection of it. The effects he cultivated , like
the epigram, read like natural properties of language rather than adorn–
ments , and his prose accordingly bears no obvious signature of his genius
except its subtlety and its economy. Like many another second generation
Jewish intellectual he subjected the English language to his mastery as an
act of aggressive assimilation . Indeed, the Jews have become to writing in
America what the Irish have long been in Britain: masters of the language
of the dominant culture. Rosenfeld was one of many who took possession
of Henry James's language without at the same time caving into Jamesean
fastidiousness . There is a strong impulse toward Anglophilia among Jewish–
American intellectuals that is built into the logic of their Americanization,
not the least part of which is their romance with the language, but Rosenfeld
never responded to that cultural possibility as did , say, Lionel Trilling.
Rather , he collaborated in the more customaryJewish project of synthesizing
an intellectual culture out of James's English and Dostoevsky's pessimism.
That marriage of American high-style and Eastern-European
Schmerz
was
responsible for much of the best in both fiction and criticism that the second
generation ofJewish Americans produced .
Inevitably, the contrast between Rosenfeld 's clarity as a critic and his
patent artificiality as an author raises questions about his own relation to the
aesthetic he so incisively applied to others. By his own definitions he was a
minor writer, being unable to create both art and life at the same time. His
intention was
to
write a fiction of alienation , but few stories succeed in
bringing his conflicts to life; most do little more than announce them. In
the main, the stories are cold tableaux of isolation and failure, peopled by
passionate and lonely characters who are cut off from their energies and
denied , by circumstances or impotence , the comforts of human companion–
ship. These impotent heroes include an ownerless baseball team that plays
out a losing season for lack of anything else to do; a brigadier of a nameless
army in a nameless war whose passion to know the enemy leads him to
torture his captives but yields him no knowledge; a railroad traffic controller
who is self-exiled in lonely cabooses ; a political party whose motto is " Ends
Never Meet"; a scholar of the dance who dies of paralysis; a Greenwich
Village raconteur who cannot touch the woman he loves and gives her instead
to another man . The stories themselves tun to the sUrreal and Kafkaesque;
