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PARTISAN REVIEW
I had practiced my absurd little talk in the taxi, explaining that I was
a Stanford professor writing a book about someone who had once lived
in this apartment. An article of mine about Rosenfeld had, as it hap–
pens, appeared that weekend in a New York newspaper. I carried it with
me, prepared to wave it as proof. I expected to be shouted at, to be
chased away, or, at least, ignored. Instead, the voice told me that he had
just emerged from the shower, and asked me to wait.
A few minutes later I was buzzed in. In the notes I took later that day,
"His face appears from behind the apartment door, which is just to the
right of the entrance to the narrow apartment building. He is about
5'8", he had light brown hair, somewhat curly, full lips, a wide smile,
sympathetic eyes. He looks much like Isaac."
I was too unsettled at the time to write down his name, but I remem–
ber his telling me that he had just moved from Maine after finishing uni–
versity. He had come to New York to be a writer. He was working at a
small publishing house, and he explained, eerily and much as Rosenfeld
himself would have said, that he desperately wanted to continue to trust
people, and for this reason had opened his apartment to a stranger. I
insisted that he must never do this again. I stayed there chatting with
him for half an hour, talking about his love for New York, his work,
about writing, its pleasures, and frustrations. I looked over the small
apartment, took measure of its rooms, noted how close the children's
room would have been to the living room with its wild, loud parties.
(Rosenfeld's only remaining child, Eleni, is now a Buddhist nun in the
south of France.) Its new resident promised to rush out later that day
and buy a copy of my article on Isaac. He was healthy, he was unpub–
lished, untested, still hopeful, and I felt extraordinarily pleased that it
was he who now lived in Isaac's place.
What I recognized later, as I thought about this encounter-an
encounter with, perhaps, one of the world's more benign, gentle
dyb–
buks-was
that I wanted most for my book to capture something essen–
tial about a life spent with books. Isaac Rosenfeld confronted this with
unusual honesty, both in terms of its limitations and joys. What derailed
him was also what most inspired him: he was devoted to exploring what
most mattered in life, and he was unwilling, or unable, to pour all his
considerable ambition into his written work. Still, he was found dead
beside a desk piled high with manuscripts, in a room surrounded
by books.
"To read as if for life," says David Copperfield. This line now seemed
to promise so many different, discordant things. In writing about
Rosenfeld's life I sought to clarify these, to nuance them, to say some-
