STEVEN ]. ZIPPERSTEIN
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Howe wrote in his memoir,
A Margin of Hope-as
the "golden boy" of
New York's fiercely ambitious literary intelligentsia. Eager to launch the
next great American novelist, leading figures in this circle predicted it
might well be Rosenfeld. According to
Partisan Review
editor Philip
Rahv, Rosenfeld in his prime was a more expansive writer than Delmore
Schwartz, and more erudite than Bellow. "There was," writes Howe,
"an air of yeshiva purity about Isaac that made one hope wildly for his
future." Rosenfeld, not Bellow, won a
Partisan Review
literary contest.
("We were all entering" it, admitted one of his competitors.) He was
selected as an assistant literary editor of
The New Republic,
and, almost
immediately after arriving in New York as a philosophy graduate stu–
dent at NYU, in
1941,
he started publishing in the best national intel–
lectual magazines. Bellow, still in Chicago at the time, remembers
thinking that Rosenfeld had left him behind in the dust. After his death,
five (still) unpublished novels were found among his papers.
In retrospect, it is the distance between promise and execution that
tends to be remembered about him. James Atlas writes in his recent biog–
raphy of Bellow that Rosenfeld "had always represented [for him] the
obverse of Bellow's startling rise to fame. The obscurity that was Rosen–
feld's reward seemed a far more plausible outcome of literary aspiration
than winning the Nobel Prize and just as dramatically compelling."
So much was expected of Rosenfeld. When he was only fourteen, Bel–
low informed friends at Chicago's Tuley high school that Rosenfeld was
the only boy in the city to have read all of Immanuel Kant. Bellow later
captured this amazement with the young Rosenfeld: "In short pants, he
was a junior Immanuel Kant. Musical (like Frederick the Great or the
Ezterhazys), witty (like Voltaire), a sentimental radical (like Rousseau),
bereft of gods (like Nietzsche) ...Not only did he study Hume.... but
he discovered Dada and Surrealism as his voice was changing."
Why, then, in his late twenties, did he write a book about the most
predictable of themes in American Jewish literature-the uneasy rela–
tions between a Jewish son and his father? He seemed to wander about
too much, all-too-visibly, vocally, openly-between married and single
life, between jobs, between many, sometimes patently unsuccessful,
forms of writing. And he wondered at times, in his copious journals, at
least, whether what seemed to be his obsessive womanizing might have
been prompted by an inclination-one which he found terrifying-to
wander beyond heterosexuality, too.
So, in the memoirs of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, William Phillips,
and others, Rosenfeld was made into (at best) a poignant, (at worst) a
ridiculous failure. Kazin, once again in his memoir
New York Jew:
"As
