"0 PARTISAN REVIEW
I have met two women-both vibrant and smart, and at least one
who was at the time desperately in love with Rosenfeld-who had plans
to see him on the day of his death. There may well have been a third.
This, it seems, is hardly the routine of a hermit.
But the identification of Rosenfeld with a sordid, anonymous room
has proven so resilient that in Brian Morton's remarkable recent novel
of New York literary life,
Starting Out in the Evening,
mention of
Rosenfeld's name immediately inspires reference to such a room. The
book's protagonist, an erudite, out-of-print novelist named Schiller,
explains
to
his young, eager would-be biographer his ambivalent rela–
tionship in the
1940S
and
'50S
with the work of D. H. Lawrence. He
tells her that what particularly upset him about Lawrence at the time
was his impact on the likes of Norman Mailer and Isaac Rosenfeld–
Jewish intellectuals like himself, he adds, whose attraction
to
the "wis–
dom of the blood" he deplored:
She wasn't happy about this answer. She had never heard of Isaac
Rosenfeld, and Mailer had never meant much
to
her....But it
wasn't that she wasn't interested in these people.
It
unsettled her to
hear Schiller putting himself in this context. When she thought of
Schiller as a writer, she liked
to
imagine him in the "one big room"
that E. M. Forster speaks of in
Aspects of the Novel-the
room in
which all novelists, past and present, are writing side by side. In her
mind Schiller's place was somewhere in eternity, next to Lawrence
or Melville, not in the
19 50S,
next
to
Isaac Rosenfeld.
So, on the one hand, there is Forster's room, a place of grand achieve–
ment, even immortality; many floors below-quite literally, in the
cellar-there is Rosenfeld's room, a grim place, a mid-century metaphor
for Grub Street, where the unread (like Rosenfeld), or the overrated
(like Mailer) go
to
die .
In concentrating attention on the room where Rosenfeld died, I'm
reminded of John Updike's challenge in a recent essay in
The New York
Review of Books,
"One Cheer for Literary Biography" : "The main
question concerning literary biography is, surely, why do we need it at
all?" Updike explains how such books aren't, as he sees it, utterly dis–
pensable, but they're not altogether essential either. He tends to tuck
away most of them in his barn, not on the more accessible shelves of
his house.
I offer Updike the following reply, which supports the argument that
biographical knowledge is revealing not only in terms of what it tells us
about the making of literature, but also in terms of the making of cul-
