FROM ISAAC ROSENFELD'S JOURNALS
Introduction
In
the I940s, when
Partisan Review
specialized in promis–
ing careers, few gave more promise at the outset than Isaac Rosenfeld's.
Though he eventually made his mark largely as a critic and reviewer,
his ambition was always to be a major novelist, and he made an
auspicious debut in fiction in
Partisan's
winter 1944 issue with "The
Hand that Fed Me," a story of a young man's stymied yearnings and
fantastic illusions. The following year he would win the magazine's
Novelette Award with "The Colony," a chapter from the "Indian"
novel he never completed, but there already some of the demons that
were to plagClc his writing were in evidence: abstraction, "analysitis,"
and, as one wimess has put it, "a grand operatic mask" through which
his voice " strained into grandiloquence."
It
was in large measure a
difficulty in discovering his natural voice that bedevilled and finally
defeated him, as he would note in his journal with bitter self-reproach:
"I sit down at the typewriter. Whom shall I imitate today?"
But "The Hand that Fed Me" was a mature performance for so
young a writer (Rosenfeld was twenty-six), remarkable for its apparent
ease and spontaneity and the way it captured the self-defeating tactics
of the spurned lover.
It
was also an early disclosure of Rosenfeld's
personal leitmotifs: the anguish of love, the inevitability of humilia–
tion , the lure of the emotional underground. As an imitation of
Dostoevskian self-mortification, it bore obvious resemblances to Saul
Bellow's
Dangling Man,
a portion of which had also appeared in
Partisan
just a short while before and would be published as a novel
that very year. Indeed, Rosenfeld and Bellow were known in New York
as the Chicago Dostoevskians for the somber and "Russian" mood they
sought to capture in their early writing and for their heroes, inhabiting
imaginary Saint Petersburgs and acting out mute and desperate
yearnings in their searches for redemption through self-abasement.
"My patron saint," Rosenfeld announced in his journal, "is Dostoev–
sky's Underground Man," and added, "I hold the conviction-it
amounts to something of a theory-that embarrassment represents the
