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PARTISAN REVIEW
through his stammer of phrases-why should he feel unhappy about
his isolation?
Years later his old friend Lionel Abel would sum up the essence
of the man: "That which is prior to, more fundamental than radical–
ism in art, radicalism in action, is the homelessness of spirit that
gave rise to both.... Harold addressed himself to making clear
that no alternative to, or ideological therapy for, our condition of
homeless ness has yet been found, and until something of that order
is discovered, our only valid works of art, our only valid actions,
must continue to express a certain distance from things, from others,
and even from ourselves." Thirty years ago I could not have made
so lucid a claim for this spirit of modernism, but some glimmer of it I
had, and that may be why I found myself so dizzied by the hammer–
ings of Rosenberg's mind.
Even when brief, such friendships brought lasting pleasures
and rewards, but there were also missed occasions due to my muddle
of shyness and vanity. Long before I thought of becoming a literary
critic, I read with admiration the essays that William Troy was print-
ing in
Partisan Review.
He was not part of its inner circle and had no
apparent interest in politics, but each time he wrote-on Lawrence
l
or Fitzgerald or Virginia Woolf-I admired his lucidity. Troy was a
"pure" critic and he helped-it was about time-to unsettle my
provincial notions about what criticism had to be. There was an aus-
terity to his work, a hard, undeviating concentration on the literary
text, which set him apart from other contributors to the magazine:
he never bothered to be merely brilliant, he never rattled his emo-
tions in one's ear. Several times in the late forties I started writing
him notes of admiration but always tore them up, suspecting I might
be trying to cozy up to a famous man . A few years after Troy's death
I met his widow, the poet Leonie Adams, and when I told her of my
repeated failure to write him about my feelings, she let out a kind of
moan.
In
the fifties he had been a troubled man, uncertain of him-
self and his work, and the admiration of a young stranger, she said,
might have given him pleasure. She wheeled on me: "Why did you
worry so much about your motives? Suppose they weren't pure?
Don't you see that what matters is what we
do?"
Her words shaming
me as few stronger rebukes ever have, I turned away in silence, to
carry with me through the years a dislike of that vanity which drapes
itself as scruple.
I used to think of the rise of the New York intellectuals as a his-
