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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bellow. Near the beginning of his second novel,
The Victim,
published
in
1947,
his narrator muses:
He said occasionally to [his wife] Mary, revealing his deepest feel–
ings,
"I
was lucky.
I
got away with it." He meant that his bad start,
his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had some–
how combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that
part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful (he never for–
got that hotel on lower Broadway), the part that did not get away
with it-the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.
This is uncannily similar to how Rosenfeld came to be seen. Attached
to him were many of the more discordant, embarrassing moments of the
collective life of the writers best equipped to remember him. Bellow, as
well, had been a devotee of Wilhelm Reich, the wildly controversial,
once influential disciple of Freud. Bellow writes extensively about
Reich's influence on him in
Seize the Day
and in
Henderson and the
Rain King.
Still, in the memoirs of their mutual friends, such as Kazin
and Howe, one is left with the impression that this, too, was a singu–
larly mad enthusiasm of Rosenfeld. Kazin even asserts that Rosenfeld's
Reichianism contributed somehow to his early demise: "And everything
came back to the Isaac the prisoner in his cell the orgone box. He never
broke out." Whether the symbols are a grim, awful room, or that small,
silly box, Isaac in such accounts locks himself in, he suffocates his tal–
ent, his potential, his own life.
It
seems germane to add that Rosenfeld abandoned his orgone box,
too, a few years before his death, and not long after Bellow did. Both
had their orgone boxes built for them-by childhood friends from the
Humboldt Park neighborhood. Rosenfeld brought his box along with
him to the apartment where he died.
It
was folded up in a comer of the
room. By then, he poked fun at the Reichian movement; one of his
unpublished novels is a grim, anti-utopia set in a Reichian sex colony, a
place that rivals in its totalitarianism another unpublished novel based
in Soviet Russia.
In the end, Rosenfeld was made-and, arguably, also rather
undone-by much the same intellectual circle in which he lived much of
his life: left-wing, post-Trotskyist, Jewish, and competitive in almost
epic terms. Bellow remained fiercely loyal to him and his memory. But
for most, Rosenfeld was an errant genius whom they nurtured, adver–
tised, mythologized and, eventually, helped marginalize. He would be
