MARK SHECHNER
535
Such a sensitivity
to
the tactics of style was enormously resourceful, and
yet it had limits, for the leverage it afforded Rosenfeld against the defensive
stylists like Hemingway or Irwin Shaw was of no use against those writers
who had shown the virtues of obliquity, ambiguity, and complication: the
modernists. Rosenfeld had nothing to say about modernism as such, or
about Eliot, Joyce, Pound, or Proust, in particular, and had praise for
Lawrence only as an ideologue of the orgasm. Gide, about whom he did
write, he approached through the journals only, and read as a case study in
the transmutation of neurosis into art. Moreover, Rosenfeld, in company
with most of his generation ofJewish, left intellectuals, had nothing impor–
tant to say about poetry. But of course, this is an overstatement, and the
conspicuous exceptions are instructive. Delmore Schwartz, the only poet
among them, wrote copiously about poetry and modernism. The art critics,
Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, were important critics of modern
an,
but then, what competing "humanist" tradition was there for them to
deal with? But those who focused their attention on fiction and politics, the
usual combination, had little or nothing to say about poetry, modernism, or
the major modernist writers. The novel only, and -primarily the naturalist
or realist novel at that, was the place where culture, morality, and politics
were defined, while poetry, to the extent that it lacked explicit social
content and achieved its effects by rhetoric, was outside their scope
The rationalist in Rosenfeld was always suspicious of the aesthete in
him and he seems to have chosen his subjects for review as though his
aesthetic sense were under quarantine. Having committed himself ferociously
to the championship of innerness and energy, Rosenfeld had no vocabulary
for dealing with stylistic innovation. In matters of style, evidence of strain
or resistance or evasion, which he uncovered everywhere, was interpretable
psychoanalytically-the ego was always guilty of mismanaging its fund of
instinct. But where symbolism was more an issue than statement, and arti–
fice, indirection, and even concealment were aesthetic virtues, Rosenfeld
had little to say. Very likely he was an unannounced enemy of modernism
and looked upon it as did Ortega, as the dehumanization of art. Clearly,
Rosenfeld and most other left intellectuals who wrote for
Partisan Review,
the
New Republic,
or the
New Leader
in the 1940s and 1950s, held philo–
sophical realism to be the major tradition in the novel and the most moral
in virtue of its potential for education. For all that they may have admired
Joyce, they rarely wrote about him.
The critical feature of Rosenfeld' s modernity, as I see it, was his repul–
sion by the modern world and his refusal to collaborate with it. In the .40s
he was indistinguishable from his contemporaries in his conspicuous aliena–
tion, the Jewish intellectuals' shorthand for their exclusion from and their
