10
PARTISAN REVIEW
true state of affairs,
&
the sooner we strike shame, the sooner we draw
blood. " How cha racteristic it was of tha t postwar moment of paralys is
when to be neuroti c and "alienated" was to imagi ne oneself a li ving
representation of the modern condition is sugges ted by Willi am
Barrett's recollection of Delmore Schwartz reading and rereading
The
Brothers Karamazov
and crying out a t the memory of some outrageous
act of his own : "What a scoundrel I am !"
Rosenfeld's story describes a young man 's efforts to strike shame in
his relations with a woman through a series of intima te and contradi c–
tory letters, though he has met her onl y once, three years earli er whil e
signing up for the WPA. Of course, she disdains to a nswer his a ppeals,
which are drenched in neuroti c fantasy, but her silence onl y excites hi s
efforts to achieve that total embarrassment tha t is the tr ue sta te of
affairs. Though not so extended a performance as Bell ow's novel, thi s
portrait of the alienated intell ectual whose very es trangement is his
passport
to
moral ascendancy is memorable for the vividness of its
feelings and its contained reckl essness, the nervous intima ti on that
anything can happen next.
Though Rosenfeld would la ter write a number of brilli ant stories,
his earl y promise was never fulfill ed . Much of hi s subsequent writin g
lacks the immediacy of "The Hand tha t Fed Me"; it is largely a bstract
and all egorical, owing more to Kafka than to Dostoevsky, and con–
scio us of makin g a major sta tement.
In
the end, Rosenfeld p ubli shed
just a single n ovel, his tale of painful adolescence,
Passage From
Home.
A subsequent n ovel,
Th e Enemy,
was to p rove un p ublishable,
and the " Indian " novel,
Th e Em pire,
was abandon ed after years o f
work. He contempl ated a t least two o ther novels, set respecti vely in
Russ ia and Greenwich Vill age, tho ugh , so fa r as I kn ow, neither wa
carried out beyond the stage o f notes. As the
I
940s drew to a close, it
became pl ain
to
Rosenfeld tha t hi s talent was inexpli ca bl y frozen, and
tha t if h e were to continue to write, he would first have to free it up , to
restore its £low. His contact with Wilhelm Reich 's theori es of the
sexual, la ter, "orgonomi c," basis of the life processes con vin ced him
tha t his writer's block was a token of some more bas ic, sex ual,
inhibition, and he spent much of the la te forti es locked in a p ro tracted
guerill a warfare with hi s own emoti ons.
At a certain point Rosenfeld broke contact with the nexus of
modernist literature and pos trevo luti onary po liti cs tha t p revail ed a t
Part isan R eview
and moved away, no t onl y from the centers of New
York intell ectual life, but New York itself, go ing to the Uni vers ity of
Minnesota to teach for three years and then, fin all y, to the Uni vers ity o f
