ISAAC ROSENFELD
13
In publishing these excerpts from Rosenfeld's private journals,
which his family has generously allowed me to see and quote from, it is
not my purpose to reconstruct unwritten books or to resurrect another
generation's gossip, but to bring
to
focus the image of a life carried out
with all the passion, deliberateness, and integrity a man could muster.
Rosenfeld knew that life is largely sleepwalking, and he refused to
remain asleep. Of course, this desire to awaken was also a desire to
break loose from his powerful inner contradictions, a native passion–
ateness hedged by powerful and, as he saw it, "Jewish" reservations,
and his irreconcilable yearnings toward health
and
illness: health as a
condition of unobstructed emotional freedom and illness as a valoriza–
tion of the underground, the only refuge of honor for a spiritual radical
at a time when mental health had become synonymous with compo–
sure. "In my time," Rosenfeld wrote in his last journal in 1956, "the
young looked upon
life ~as
an adventure. Today, they regard it as an
investment." Within weeks, maybe days, of writing this, he died of a
heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. He did not live to see his
cherished ideal of living at full pitch gain broad acceptance in the next
decade, when his underground became a transcontinental highway and
the adventure of living the rallying cry of a generation.
MARK SHECHNER
Today went by
N.Y.V.
Went into the cafeteria, got tray, silver
&
napkin
&
was about to order when I found myself unable to order. I
went out in the rain, to Alex's where I feel I now belong. But if I have
put academics for all time behind me, why do I sneak back?
Really wanted to go up to philosophy office
&
talk to Hook. Why?
To prove what? To show I'm right, better off? Thought of Burnham
and ducked, not wanting to run into him. Still feel I've been a big
disappointment
to
them all. Imagined conversation:
B: "I liked your story."
I: "I wish I could say the same for your piece." ""
B: (Mutters something, smiles shyly, his face red).
·Rosenfeld's prize-winning story, "The Colony," and James Burnham's
reassessment of Stalin, "Lenin's Heir," appeared together in the winter 1945
issue of
Partisan Review.
Burnham's article puts forth the thesis that Stalin can
no longer be viewed as the betrayer of the deepest principles of the Bolshevik
Revolution but their fulfillment.
