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PARTISAN REVIEW
turning to the inventive and fantasy mode of science fiction as a
vehicle for her social imagination. Thus there are now two
literary Doris Lessings, though both her earlier and her later
work express values and concerns.
In
any event, as a person as
well as a writer, the honesty and directness of her vision-in both
genres-are bound to have enormous influence on the way we
see ourselves in our world today, both in fiction and in our lives.
• •
•
Isaac Rosenfeld first wrote for
Partisan R eview
in 1948. He
had the kind of perverse and radi cal sensibility tha t would have
flourished in the sixties. Unfortunately he died in 1956 before
he realized his talents or found his literary place. As it was, he was
cast in the wrong period, in a period, that is, when criticism was
formal and narrow, and fiction was expected to be broad and
naturalist, with recognizable human concerns and modes of
narration. Rosenfeld's reviews and essays were involved in a
form of social criticism that went back to the thirties and, at the
same time, heralded the popular, media-oriented, and freewheel–
ing counterculture of the sixties. His fiction tended to be abstract
and allegorical, like an early version of Barth or Pynchon. He was
also an anarchist before it became popular to be one, a premature
Reichian, a prophet of the sexual revolution.
Isaac was short, stocky, roundheaded, bushy-haired. Usually
warm and jovial, he had; however, a streak of rage that sometimes
burst out at you. When seemingly under control, it showed itself
in a curled and petulant lip, and I suspect that he was a competi–
tive and angry man, envious of the greater success of some of his
contemporaries. He was not a great talker, but a lively and
eccentric one, and he loved to argue unpopular subjects and
causes. He used to rail against the conservatism of the scientific
establishment-he knew nothing about science-and go all out
for Wilhelm Reich's orgone theories. And he went so far as to
make an orgone box-it was cheaper to make than to buy one–
that looked like a miniature telephone booth, in which he sat for
hours, insisting that it rejuvenated him and restored his creative
energies. I tried to argue with him about it at the beginning but
soon gave up when I realized how much he had committed him–
self to this homemade therapy, and how much he was drawn to
