12
PARTISAN REVIEW
though, after a lifetime of training in inhibition, his championship of
sensuality was largely a matter of precept.
The journals, which Rosenfeld kept filfully from 1941 until his
death in 1956, were both workbooks for his fiction and diaries in which
he monitored, with meticulous care, the turbulem ebb and flow of his
emotions. The greater part of them cover the years before 1950, when he
was trying to secure his reputation with a second novel and symhesize a
way of life in the unexplored margins between the Bohemia .he found
increasingly unsubslamial and the middle-class that repelled him.
What comes across most poignantly in them is the high cost of the
struggle to gain clarity, both in living and writing, as his experiences
and work cominued to disappoint him.
"The Enemy
bores me," he
complained typically. "How I've ruined it with this stuff [i.e., the
psychoanalytic allegorizing], I want in Pathfinder a person, not a case–
history. A
character,
by God!" The plague was everywhere, and he
studied himself, as he did others, with the cold eye of the moral
clinician, sparing nobody the grim diagnosis. He would observe of
himself, during a stay at Black Mountain College in 1948, ''I'm at the
poim here of no longer being able to regard any student's thought or
expression of opinion as something in its own right, but as a trait of
character, merely an ironic datum. The whole place, a page for my
notebook." Bellow, always the reliable witness, would later recall in
his forward to Theodore Solotaroff's collection of Rosenfeld's essays,
An Age of Enormity,
"There had been a quality in him in earlier days,
described by one of his friends as 'hardheaded
Gemutlichkeit. '
For
eight or ten years his mood was anything but
gemutlich.
He judged
people harshly, he was no less harsh with himself."
Most of the character portraits and anecdotes in these journals, I
imagine, were intended for the Village novel, which would have been a
roman
Ii
clef
after the manner of two of his best later stories, "George"
and "Wolfie," both of which are collected in the posthumous volume,
Alpha and Omega.
Unlike the intervening allegories, the Village book
was to be a return to what Rosenfeld had done so well at the outset, a
fiction of direct impressions, sensuous, personal, and filled with the
pathos of unused emotion . And, like everything else he wrote, it would
be plotted along the curve of his apocalyptic imagination. For its
climactic scene he imagined a Passover seder for Jewish Bohemians
who can't read the Haggadah and would rather smoke marijuana and
have a regular Village party. The seder quickly degenerates into a party
and then a brawl and finally a sexual pairing off, as even the host leaves
with another woman. Upon his early morning return, his wife quietly
determines to ca ll an end to the marriage.
