112
PARTISAN REVIEW
of many different worlds: Ghandi's India, Soviet Russia, a Reichian sex
colony, and, in probably his strongest work of fiction, Greenwich Vil–
lage. He was still working on this manuscript at the time of his death.
Perhaps, on the verge of a breakthrough? Isaac himself recorded just
this in his journals. Nothing of the sort appears in the writings of his
friends. "Wunderkind grown to tubby sage," Irving Howe summed him
up at the time of his death.
A passage in Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge may help us
understand better his friends' reactions. With reference to Coleridge's tur–
bulent, sometimes dreadful, final decades, Holmes discusses the responses
of friends when the now-puffy, opium-addicted, but still brilliant writer
returned to England after his extended stay in the Mediterranean. Signif–
icantly, Coleridge still had many superb books ahead of him:
He was living out what many people experience, in the dark dis–
order of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface with aston–
ishing, even alarming candor that many of his friends found
unendurable, or simply ludicrous. Moreover, he continued to write
about it,
to
witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among
the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the under–
standing of these struggles not (like Wordsworth, perhaps) in their
solution. So, it was... in these first weeks back in England... that
he first glimpsed the crisis that would close round him in these mid–
dle years. With his peculiar mixture of comedy and pathos, he pro–
jected out of his private chaos an universal dilemma. He was only
thirty-four that October, but he felt that somewhere in the
Mediterranean he had imperceptibly crossed a shadowline into
darker waters.
Rosenfeld, too, seemed to have lavishly, and all-too-visibly squan–
dered an extraordinary opportunity. Years went by without a new novel;
his first book-written at a time when he was lauded as a new Kafka–
came to be seen as little more than a slim, predictable tale of a Jewish
adolescent's struggle with his father. Rosenfeld's marriage fell apart for
reasons that remained obscure to Rosenfeld himself. He wandered
between New York, Minnesota, and Chicago; he gave up a job at
The New Republic
to work on a barge; he experimented, often with
mixed results, with many different forms of writing; he threw himself
into Reichism, and he devoted himself, somberly, to free love. He bene–
fited little from his Reichian work, and, judging from his journals, he
gained little palpable pleasure from his sexua l experimentation.