WILLIAM PHILLIPS
547
ideas that had something of the intellectually forbidden about
them and were beyond the reach of reason and evidence. When
he moved to Queens with Vasiliki, his wife, an attractive and
energetic woman who indulged his eccentricities though it was
not clear whether she shared them, he built a little pastoral
orgone box to vita lize his vegetable garden . They had the usua l
suburban toma toes, peppers, string beans, peas, and lettuce, but
he kept the seeds in the orgone box before planting them, and he
was sure tha t the orgone rays stimula ted the growth of the vege–
tables . His Reichianism, however, was no t just a fad; it was pa rt
of his thinking, and one could see in Isaac the process by whi ch
memori es, ideas, neuroses, and fantas ies were fu sed, as they were
in tortured writers like Kafka or Joyce. But there was also the
simple, homey side of Isaac, which displayed his Jewishness, his
famili a l charms, his earthiness, and his deceptively mild humor
and irony. His
piece de resistance
was his transla tion of "The
Waste Land" into Yiddish, whi ch he wouldrecite with the appro–
priate mixture of solemnity and impishness while everyone roa red
at the absurdity and folksiness of Eliot in Yiddish .
Rosenfeld was not only ahead of his time in his eccentrici–
ties, but he missed out by his early death on the rewards and
seductions that came later to writers in the form of grants, uni–
versity sinecures, advances, sales, magazine markets. At the end of
his life he was beginning to move into the university circuit.
Before then he was usually broke. The
Partisan Review
prize of
one thousand dollars for his short novel,
The Colony,
published
in 1954, was a bonanza. (Two other prizes went to Peter Taylor
and George Orwell.) In 1945 I helped him get the munificent
job of book editor of the
New Leader,
which paid, as I recall,
fifteen dollars week. Though he was an anticommunist, this
was not his main concern, and his working at the
New Leader
could not be considered an act that was ideologically inspired.
