108
PARTISAN REVIEW
Meanwhile, the bottle has grown cold. Shall he ring for another?
He shifts the bottle, kneads it between his knees. "And thou
Ii
ke a
young hart upon the mountains of spices." Look forward, look
back, to darkness, at the light, both ways blind. He raises the bot–
tle to his breast: it does not warm him. He gropes for the cord, and
while his hand reaches, he thinks, as he has thought so many times,
there is a time and a season for everything, a time to be born and a
time to die. Is it time now? They will lay him out, washed,
anointed, shrouded. They will fold his arms across his chest, with
the palms turned in, completing the figure. Now his own hands will
lie pressed
to
his breast, and he will sleep with his fathers.
That dreadful room and his isolation are given prominence in the
most widely cited text about Rosenfeld's death-Saul Bellow's obituary
in the October
1956
issue of
Partisan Review.
It appeared in the pages
of the magazine where the two-dubbed the "Chicago Oosto–
evskyians"-vied most visibly for primacy. Their longstanding, intense
friendship, their vitality, their lavish talent, their penchant for literature,
not politics-all this made them stand out. It also rendered their com–
petition all the more intriguing. Here, in his obituary, Bellow had the
last word.
Bellow admits elsewhere that theirs was a sometimes uneasy rela–
tionship: "I loved him, but we were rivals, and I was peculiarly touchy,
vulnerable, hard to deal with-at times, as 1 can now see, insufferable."
The obituary is touching, and vivid. Its chilling conclusion is what is
most often cited:
He endured boredom and deadness, despair, even madness. This is
the truth about the reign of the fat gods.
It
is not merely dull and
harmless.
It
destroys and consumes everything, it covers the human
image with deadly films, it undermines all quality with its secret
rage, it subverts everything good and exalts lies, and on its rotten
head it wears a crown of normalcy. Most do not fight but make
their peace with it. Isaac fought.
He won. He changed himself. He enlarged his power to love.
Many loved him. He was an extraordinary and significant man.
He died in a seedy, furnished room on Walton Street, alone–
a bitter death to his children, his wife, his lovers, his father.
