STEVEN
J.
ZIPPERSTEIN
115
used as both clown and object lesson, as an unsettling, but also reas–
suring example of what they had managed to avoid, or so they hoped.
The room, then, in which Rosenfeld did not die, like the orgone box
that almost certainly did not trap him-these images, and the excessive
reliance on them in the texts produced about him after his death, teach
us something essential about his milieu.
It
shaped him, it helped launch
him, and eventually, it also played its role in consolidating his eventual
oblivion.
The book I am writing is built to a great extent on tissue letters–
letters saved by friends, treasured by lovers, hoarded by competitors,
savvy or optimistic literary investors, and others. Their discovery is
among the few actual, lived adventures in an otherwise mostly sedentary
scholarly life. For this book, I, too, have tracked down many, many hun–
dreds of letters; I have sat with them in a good many strange, even some–
what unsafe living rooms, thinking about and, at times, also rather
reenacting scenes out of Henry James. Such letters, as Janet Malcolm so
perceptively writes in
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,
"are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates
indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils
of feeling . . ..Everything else the biographer touches is stale, hashed
over, told and retold, dubious, inauthentic, suspect." No less pertinent
is a comment on this score in A. S. Byatt's novel,
Possession: A
Romance,
"Letters. ..are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome,
no closure. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to
line, where they are goi ng."
A biography must know, however, at least on some level, where it is
going. I end with an experience that helped me decide something essen–
tial about my book 's trajectory:
It
is a story about Isaac's rooms-his
rooms on Greenwich Village's Barrow Street, the flat mentioned by
Kazin in the citation at the beginning of this essay.
Sitting in an Upper West Side cafe a few years ago, I decided to try to
see the interior of Rosenfeld's apartment. I had visited the building, of
course; I had peeked into its windows; I had read much about the
place-its wild parties, Delmore Schwartz drunk on the floor, guests
climbing in and out of its first story windows, its dirt, its pets (dogs,
snakes, etc.), its smells, its eventual, unmistakable shoddiness. I took a
taxi to 85 Barrow Street, in the Village, something like a (now gentri–
fied) English working-class street with cobblestones running nearby,
eastward, a few blocks toward the Hudson River. About eleven o'clock
on a Sunday morning I rang the bell for apartment
IK
and a gruff male
voice answered.
