IRVING HOWE
553
When I knew him, in his few happy years after the war, Isaac
made me feel the world was spacious. There was room for him and
for me. Our friendship didn't last long: he must have smiled at my
opinions, while I fretted at the splashing away of his gifts. All we had
in common was being young, Jewish, in love with English words,
and a rationalism that no one can escape whose childhood has been
soaked in Yiddish. Isaac chose to move beyond that rationalism, as I
could not, but even while fearing the price he must pay, I envied his
staggering freedom. Little remains of this flawed, noble spirit: a
minor first novel , some fine critical miniatures, and a legend of
charm and waste , a comic intelligence spent upon itself.
I visited Isaac as friend but attended Harold Rosenberg as
audience. Never have I known anyone who could talk with such
unflagging manic brilliance, pouring out a Niagara of epigrams. In
the late forties Harold was not yet a famous art critic, and the con–
sciousness of public power that shadowed-perhaps over-shad–
owed-him was not yet a barrier. Whatever fears may have assailed
him, he surely could not have known the fear of running dry that
haunts so many writers. He was always available, and always noth–
ing but himself. Harold was Harold as granite is granite. He lived
by a consciousness of historical crisis, making himself theoretician,
prophet, advance man , and inner critic of aesthetic modernism. The
sectarianism of the radical vqnguard he reenacted through the her–
meticism of the artistic vanguard.
As Harold rasped along in his high-pitched voice, did he ever so
much as notice who stood before him? I used to think, when visiting
his studio: suppose I were suddenly to drop dead, would he stop
talking? All the while he was the most ingenuous of democrats, one
ear being as good as another. I would leave his studio gasping from
overstimulation .
If
only I could "bottle" all I had heard, there'd be
enough to work with for a year. But his ideas could not be "bottled,"
they had a curious way of evaporating into the upper air.
It
was as if
they came alive only through his voice.
What I learned from Harold Rosenberg was not a particular
idea, since he had so many, but the wonders of abundance and still
more, the satisfaction of going one's own way. In those years Harold
was somewhat isolated, having remained closer to his apolitical
Marxism than most other New York writers to their earlier political
ideas.
If
this isolation bothered him, he never showed it. A man who
could fill a room with his lunging, arrowed body and rivet attention
