MARK SHECHNER
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dered each jailer a father , tormenter, and friend at the same time. "A prison
camp, " Rosenfeld declared in an essay on the Soviet and Nazi camps, "is a
kindergarten in a slaughterhouse, in which the penned must go round and
round in a forced march to childhood, regressing to what they never were . . .
that there may remain no interval of time or reflection between the word of
authority and the obedience." Orwell's apprehension of that reality and his
horror at it had, in past writing, been held in check by habits of good sense
and optimism. Elsewhere, as Rosenfeld observes, his anger did not rise
above the note of "You don't do such things! " Only in the last extremity,
his tuberculosis unquestionably terminal, could he break free of lifelong
habits of restraint to summon up the terror. "Life being what it is in our
world, the onset of death is often the first taste a man gets of freedom."
That was the freedom, not only to grasp the forbidden secret of modern
politics, that' ' the objective of power is power," but also to torment himself
for a lifetime of denials . Through his own sickness Orwell penetrated to the
heart of the world 's sickness and released a flood of truth that had been
withheld from the other Orwell, the journalist. What mattered in 1984 was
Orwell's achievement of imaginative depth, not his fidelity to history or
politics.
All that matters is the force of the passion with which the man, who
began as a writer in a small way, at the last came through . The force
with which he ended is the one with which greatness begins. This force,
it will be observed, was enough
to
kill a man.
One is brought up short by such an aphorism, for it is a portentous
phrase that calls up Rosenfeld 's own eventual isolation and death. According
to the testimony of his friends , Rosenfeld's last years were bitter ones,
marked by stubborn self-denial and gradual self-defeat. After
1951
his work
slacked off, or, at any rate, became more private. There were certainly fewer
reviews. He began work on a book on Tolstoy which he did not complete.
His second novel ,
The Enemy,
turned out to be unpublishable. Despite his
considerable reputation, Rosenfeld could find no publisher to take the
book, and those excerpts that have appeared, with their flat-footed allegori–
cal prose , explain why. His marriage broke up and he drifted from New
York to Minneapolis, where he taught briefly at the University of Minnesota,
and then back to Chicago . Like Bernard Miller, the youthful hero of
Passage
from Home ,
Rosenfeld had to leave his father's house in order to return
home, only to find there, not the tears of joyful reconciliation , but a con–
firmation of his exile. He was apparently planning to leave Chicago again
just before he died .
