STEVEN
J.
ZIPPERSTEIN
113
Friends watched perplexed and, perhaps, at times fearful that they,
too, might similarly stumble-that the various messy details of their
everyday lives might also come crashing in. Many of them did fail, as
they themselves saw it, in one way or another. William Phillips,
Partisan
Review
editor, insisted late in life that he had "pissed his time away in
talk." Rahv, Phillip's co-editor, fell into terrible, prolonged depressions,
and he never managed, despite his much-lauded brilliance, to complete
a single, full-length work. William Barrett recalls running into Rahv, in
the late fifties, and while walking around Gramercy Park, Rahv "began
ticking off one by one some of the people we had known and their ini–
tial hopes, ending always with the refrain,
'It
wasn't in the cards .'" Even
Kazin never produced a book of comparable stature to
On Native
Grounds,
which he published in his twenties. He would revisit this sin–
gular moment time and time again, in memoir after memoir, throughout
the remainder of his life.
These were, on the whole, self-made men, essentially self-taught, with
their learning picked up in prodigious fits of reading at the local library,
or during long, dull stints in the army. (Howe claims to have started
reading seriously only as a soldier.) They had little to fall back upon,
except for their willfulness, and their ambition. Mary McCarthy
describes Rahv in her
1949
novel,
The Oasis:
Facts of any kind, oddities, lore, local history intoxicated...this
realist, whose own experience had been strangely narrow-a half–
forgotten childhood in the Carpathian mountains, immigration,
city streets, the Movement, Bohemian women, the anti-Movement,
downtown bars, argument, discussion, subways, newstands, the
office. This was all he knew of the world; the rest was hearsay....
Practical jokes were anathema
to
him; they belonged
to
an order of
things which defied his power of anticipation, like children, birds,
cows, water, snakes, lightning, Gentiles, and automobiles.
"I now feel. ..that our little world was deficient in friendship and loy–
alty and that objectivity often has been a mask for competitiveness, mal–
ice, and polemical zeal-for banal evils," writes Phillips in his memoirs.
Rosenfeld's posthumous reputation may well have been a victim of this.
He was the first of this circle to die; he had many, visible meanderings
about which he talked far more openly than most of the others in this
milieu; and his faltering steps as a writer were all-too well known. Many
near him may well have lived with the fear that they, too, might fall prey
to similar demons. No one has captured just such demons better than
