542
PARTISAN REVIEW
Rosenfeld spent the 1950s in drift and dishevelment amid small, dingy
rooms. Yet there was a principle of perverse monasticism in this life. As
Bellow noted , here was a disorder that had ended up by becoming a disci–
pline. We ought not be surprised. The therapeutic radicalism of Rosenfeld 's
youth was built upon a deep strain of Puritanism and it is not hard to see
how a disciple of energy might in time wind up mortifying the senses in
squalor and purifying the emotions in abstinence. For what the culture of
the orgasm and monastic withdrawal share in common is a wish for purifica–
tion . The first promotes decontamination through the genitals, the other
through the bowels. Rosenfeld was not the first to demonstrate that a hedonist
could also be a monk. Here, then, was a sort of religion after all, a courting
of the spirit that demanded a renunciation of all but essentials. But life
itself, with all its necessary compromises, deceptions , and contaminations,
may, under such a regime , be inessential.
Rosenfeld half wanted, I think , to be a saint. The demands he placed
upon himself-to seek joy through terror and to refme thought
in
isolation–
can only have sainthood as their goal. He denied the world's nurturance; at
first lest it disappoint him, later, lest it compromise him, and substituted
for the sustaining relationships of an ordinary life, rites of purification. He
set out to purify his style, his courage, his passions, his sensibilities. In time,
each failure
to
achieve beatitude, or genius, only brought a redoubli.ng of
the effort and a deepening of the isolation. For the hunger had also to be
preserved, since it was the original condition under which his struggles took
on meaning. Rosenfeld 's early death of a heart attack seems to have been
the fulfillment of the impossible logic of these crisis years.
He knew something of what that logic entailed . In writing of Simone
Weil, with whom he shared a genius for self-denial, he refused to sentimen–
talize her sainthood at the expense of understand its component of ordinary
neurosis. " . .. How can our world speak of Simone Weil without using its
own language, in which the words, severe and unforgiving though they may
be, are , by definition , hysteria, masochism, etc. ?" Weil's sainthood, her
abstinence and eventual starvation, defined a personal sanctity but lacked
sharable significance. "For all her firsthand knowledge of politics, exile, and
universal doubt , she made her way out of our world and ceased to represent
it. " Rosenfeld was speaking here out of his own experience of private beati–
tude and public irrelevance, for , as his own conflicts deepened , his solutions
grew increasingly private and his writing more fitful and hermetic. The
problem with
The Enemy
is that it was written in too private a code; its
appreciation required not readers so much as initiates.
There are signs that in the final months Rosenfeld experienced a break–
through of sorts , or at very least a remission of conflict that showed up in his
