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PARTISAN REVIEW
the finest written by an American in this century is the work of a writer
who is so distant from canonized memory that Pinsky himself can't
manage to identify him as the author of his own work. "Thereby," as
Holmes writes, "hangs a small but haunting mystery of biography."
Most useful biographies are shaped, in some fashion, by metaphors–
everyday life is simply too messy, too full, too unmediated by actuality,
if you will, to be stuffed into a book.
It
just doesn't fit. And so many
biographies since Boswell have been built, at least in their initial
moments, around the unsettling of older, supposedly tired, over-used, at
least less-than-useful metaphors.
Here is an example of posthumous mystification of Rosenfeld in
terms of the critical reactions to his novel
Passage From Home.
The
book's apparent lack of success, its tepid reception later was said to
have foreshadowed the remainder of his life. A perusal of its reviews,
however, reveals that, on the whole, it was vigorously celebrated at the
time of its release-by many of the same critics who would later dis–
parage it as a minor work.
Praise came from rather surprising quarters.
The Nation's
normally
acerbic reviewer, Diana Trilling, was especially suspicious of Jewish lit–
erature when written by an American Jew with ample opportunity, as
she saw it, to embrace a larger, more interesting world. True, Diana
Trilling's suspicions on this score were showcased in her review of
Rosenfeld's
Passage From Home,
where she proposed that despite the
book's "start as a Jewish genre novel," it "develops into a novel of pro–
found universal meanings." (Note the comparison between the small,
cloistered world of the Jews, and the large, expansive world beyond it.)
Yet Trilling compares Rosenfeld's sensibility to that of Henry James-a
sure sign of literary transcendence: "Its high estimation of the young
mind and spirit is ...not the only regard in which
Passage From Home
proposes a comparison with James.
In
its preoccupation with the moral
nature of the early educative process, Mr. Rosenfeld's novel recalls
Henry James's
What Maisie Knew
and
The Pupil."
The novel achieves,
as Trilling puts it, a full, persuasive exploration of what it meant to take
"life at so high a moral pitch."
Rosenfeld's book so overwhelmed the then-very-young Irving Howe
that, on his first reading, he was inspired to write both a fulsome review
and an autobiographical essay. The latter piece was, at one and the same
time, an extended reflection on the novel and a candid, painful analysis
of his own relationship with his father. He published both in
Commen–
tary-his
first articles in a national magazine. Howe then insisted that
the novel's portrait of relations between a father and a son were built
