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PARTISAN REVIEW
even the [Greenwich] Village desperados noticed, Isaac was a 'failure.'
Precocious in everything and understandably worn out, he died at
thirty-eight. Even his dying would be a kind of failure."
"Everyone knows the great Dr. Johnson," writes British biographer
Richard Holmes at the opening of his splendid biography of a biogra–
phy,
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage,
And the scholars seem
to
know him in the minutest detail; almost
no one knows anything definite about the obscure, minor poet
Richard Savage. But Johnson and Savage were friends-intimate
friends-in London for about two years in the 173os. In those dark
days in the city, dark for both of them in many senses, the position
was almost exactly reversed. Johnson was then unknown, and Sav–
age was notorious. Thereby hangs a small, but haunting mystery of
biography.
Isaac Rosenfeld, unlike Richard Savage, was never notorious; still
what I've learned of his life reveals something comparable, at least in
terms of the awful risks and, of course, the occasional, lavish prizes of
a life spent with literature.
It,
too, is a tale replete with reminders of
life's many contingencies. An examination of his life highlights the
unpredictable vagaries of literary reputation, the fluid, critical intersec–
tions between an individual life and the various settings in which it is
lived.
It
examines the vagaries of influence, of literary isolation, and also
those intrusions so crucial-and also, at times, so devastating-to one's
work as an intellectual.
Since discovering Rosenfeld, I've asked myself often that question
raised by so many about the nature of biographical work, but put so
well in Julian Barnes's
Flaubert's Parrot:
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave
well alone? Why aren't the books enough? Flaubert wanted them
to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written
text and the insignificance of the writers' personality; yet still we
disobediently pursue. The image, the face, the signature; the ninety–
three percent copper statue and the Nadar photograph; the scrap
of clothing and the lock of hair. What makes us randy for relics?
Don't we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a
life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson
died, his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling the
hair which she claimed
to
have cut from the writer's head forty
years earlier. The believers, the pursuers bought enough of it to
stuff a sofa.
