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Rosenfeld's Lives
Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
By Steven J. Zipperstein Yale University Press
Copyright © 2009 Steven J. Zipperstein
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-12649-5
Chapter One
Home
There will be a "Chicago School." But the point is that, no matter how we've changed and drifted, and no matter how many accidents have befallen us, that youthful idealism of ours, when we dreamed about writing and literature, has grown ahead, quietly working itself out. That's the biggest hope, and I say it for myself-for although my self-confidence, at the moment, is very low, I know that we all set ourselves right at the beginning, which is enough to provide for the end. -Isaac Rosenfeld letter to Oscar Tarcov
ROSENFELD'S WAS A MISERABLE CHILDHOOD. AS A writer he saw childhood as containing life's best moments, yet his own memories were mostly dark, cramped, and unhappy. His father, Sam, was a closed man, easily bruised, with a vast capacity for recollecting hurts and slights. Hungry for love, he married three times (the third time to the younger sister of his second wife). Sam spoke English fluently and was well-off working as a buyer for a downtown fancy food store, but money he guarded. The Rosenfeld household was full of both the intrusions and the assurances of family. In the same apartment buildinglived Sam's two unmarried sisters, Isaac's fiercely loyal aunts-Rachel (or Rae) and Dora-who served as surrogate mothers and who figure, mostly grotesquely, in Rosenfeld's early fiction.
Not much spoken about but ever present, looming as a formative influence for all that was wanting, was Isaac's mother, Miriam, dead of influenza at twenty-one when he was barely a year and a half old. Her photograph, with gorgeous, haunting Jewish eyes, is embossed, Russian-style, on her Chicago grave site. Rosenfeld's earliest writing-arguably, much of what he wrote for the rest of his life-was about her. "It must have been that when my mother died," he wrote in a journal in his twenties, "I was left in a state of suspended animation, the result of shock; which, except for intervals, has been my predominant state all through my life-under a clamp, fearful, deeply hidden in feeling. The little boy with the pale face and the large dark circles under his eyes, and probably underweight; who gives way to the stout adolescent always in a wide sweat under the arms." A few months after Miriam's death, a friend of Sam Rosenfeld visited the family apartment. Isaac was making noise and Sam yelled at him. Isaac turned to his father and said, in a mixture of Yiddish and English, "fun a bissel tummel [from a little bit of noise] the world comes an end."
Rosenfeld wrote his first published short story in Yiddish at the age of fourteen. It was about a boy trapped for the summer amid a seemingly benign but actually terrifying, destructive family. "A Rich Boy's Autobiography" tells of a lonely, brooding child, his parents far away in South America. He yearns to join them but his aunts refuse-for reasons of their own-to let him go. "What-Henry, in South America!" The notion is too preposterous to consider, its declaration ample evidence of its absurdity. They seem, and perhaps really are, concerned for his welfare. Yet they're "cold as ice ... with half of yesterday's smile." They intrude on him, they organize him: he resents them more and more. The "hotter he got, the cooler his aunts became, cooler, colder, stranger. And it seemed to him that they were becoming larger, larger, and they began to sprout horns! Their devilish smiles pierced him like (sharp) horns! They are now altogether devils."
Finally, redemption seems at hand. A car mysteriously appears, ready to spirit him away. "They didn't let me have any fun. You didn't let me go to South America and you interrupted all my plans. I have no freedom." He can't stay at home, where love suffocates, but he still hopes to be a good boy and reminds his aunts in a farewell note that nothing that happened was, in fact, their fault. And then, as soon as he grasps at freedom, it proves elusive: He enters "the wide world," never seems to locate his parents-who aren't again mentioned-but finds himself hungry, penniless, robbed of his belongings, longing to return. "Henry had already had enough fun."
The story, startlingly mature and allusive, has Henry seem to want fun, to seek it desperately, at least for a while. What lures Henry most powerfully and without the prospect of resolution is his desire to join himself with a woman, silent, herself synonymous with the Moon: "Night-All is quiet. Sha, no one sees but the moon. She sees all. She knows all. She sees and is silent. She sees and smiles quietly. She, the Queen of the Night, the guardian of the quiet, God's witness. She sees how a piece of paper lies on a table. She sees how an empty bed lies alone. She sees how someone is going, all alone. A night wanderer? A nocturnal trip, alone in the darkness?"
Isaac was a "rigid ... nervous, fastidious" boy. He yearned by his early teens to get away, but he stayed on as the good, obedient, and brilliant son, a balm to his father, who wore the many blows he had suffered all too conspicuously. "A white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear.... Among friends, his son had various names for him. The General, the Commissar, Osipovich, Ozymandias, he often called him," Saul Bellow wrote. After Miriam's death, Sam married Chana, who gave birth to a brain-damaged child named Mildred. Chana eventually died of cancer, Mildred was institutionalized, and Sam married Chana's younger sister, Ida, a Communist with a past who had lived on her own in New York. Sam suspected Ida of indiscretions, they had terrible rows, and he left her time and again. Isaac (his father's "secret weapon," in Bellow's words) tried hard to be good. In the graduation picture taken at the Sholem Aleichem school, whose yearbook published "A Rich Boy's Autobiography," the young Rosenfeld sits ramrod straight, a fixed, wide smile on his face, his hair slicked back with care; the ceremony was graced by the Jewish socialist Yiddish luminary Chaim Zhitlovsky. Rosenfeld was, by all accounts, studious, rigorous, and, at least publicly, happy. In a poem he sent his aunts-as a young adolescent, or earlier-he demonstrated a deep preoccupation with Jews and their fate. Only a fragment remains:
We are exiled, not from Italy But from history; Even a man With a lesser jaw And cleaner hands ...
An unpublished manuscript of his sketched the hidden life of a boy of thirteen, isolated, precociously bright, and afraid of the chaos, the unpredictability of life. Like Passage from Home's Bernard, he spends nearly all his time alone in his room. When compelled to leave it, he goes to the public library, and once there, he hides in the toilets, mostly vacant and blissfully cool rooms (the story, again like Passage from Home, takes place in the Chicago summer). For these excursions, he prepares himself with meticulous care: "This trip to the library, necessitating an early breakfast, a clear knowledge of the subject to which he would confine his research and the necessary and important books that had dealt with it, a sharpened pencil in case his pen ran dry, a note book; all this had to be assembled without haste and yet without delay. The trip itself, on foot if the weather permitted, followed by a consultation of the card catalogue, the wait at the desk, and the explanations with [sic] the librarian, whenever it happened-and it did quite frequently-that the books were out. Then a seat at the right table, in relation to light, drafts, and other people using the library. This was an exhausting ritual, especially to one who took it quite seriously, as the student did."
The grinding terror of daily life ate at the young Rosenfeld, it seems, although he gave the impression at the time of a self-absorbed boy, too earnest, capable of being sardonic and quite funny, but mostly quiet, self-reflective, and hardworking. The fears he held at bay were, while apparently invisible, considerable: "My grandfather was a famous Talmudist," he wrote in a Dada-like pseudomemoir included in his journals. "My mother was an opera star. My mother died. My father was a chess player. My father began to play pinochle. I used to take clocks apart and they thought I was going to be an engineer. My father beat me, until I developed a love for stray cats; since then I have never broken a milk bottle ... I have grown up and I owe everything to my aunt who used to invite me into the bedroom whenever she took a bath. My aunt is still a vegetarian virgin. I sleep all day."
His childhood writings-and later his journal-with their jaunty, off-handed references to incestuous relations with his aunts, refer, it seems, to the absence of certain crucial boundaries in his home. His father's dark moods were imposed on everyone around him-this would figure into the central themes of Passage from Home. His aunts' love was no less intrusive, and Isaac often felt it to be more an extension of their own hunger to be loved than an expression of their feelings for him. Nowhere, not even in the bath tub, could he escape them. Insatiable, pervasive emotions figured among the facets of family life that he would circle time and again, seeking to understand on and off the page.
Emotional hunger incapable of being sated would form the core of Rosenfeld's imaginative terrain. He remained convinced that, despite its pressures, childhood offered a potential purity-perhaps most especially at the cusp of adolescence. He was certain that he had never experienced the pleasurable abandon nor the wholeness that he associated with childhood. He bemoaned the loss and longed to live it, perhaps later in life. He reflected often on the end of childhood, the time before the anguish and distractions of sex gave way to consummation. As he saw it, spiritual aspirations were the sharpest then, just before the onset of lust. "Sex repression is bad-so let's have freedom. No more Sturm und Drang, no more starved, embittered adolescence." Rosenfeld wrote, years later, in his journal that friends of his who spoke of the pleasure of such freedom forget "the value repression must have had in their own lives, the intensity and eagerness it produced, the over-evaluation of knowledge-the political activity, recklessness-in a word, idealism. The best, the purest, the freest moments.... Surely, as we look on our 'wasted youth,' our experience must tell us to be grateful."
If asked where in literature these ideas were best contained, Rosenfeld would immediately have identified the Russian classics, which he devoured even as a child. The exploration of shame in Dostoevsky, the sense of something essential irretrievably lost that pervades so much of Chekhov-these were, as he saw it, the most persuasive explications of the domestic life around him. Rosenfeld later spoke with mock solemnity of how Chekhov had really written in Yiddish, a fact concealed by his translator in an effort to save his reputation as a world writer. Bellow wrote of Rosenfeld's household: "[His] bullheaded father and two maiden aunts who were 'practical nurses' with household patients (dying, usually) read Russian novels, Yiddish poetry, and were mad about culture. He was encouraged to be a little intellectual."
It was as an adolescent, around the age of sixteen, that Rosenfeld first met Bellow. A genial, guarded young man two years older than Isaac, Sol was popular, a track runner, ambitious even at that age as a writer but discreet about his aspirations. He was strikingly good-looking in contrast to the round, unkempt Isaac, who was known to be oblivious to all but books. ("I remember myself behind the counter in Hillman's; selling salami and talking it up above the voice of the crowds, by shouting the Waste-Land at the customers," Rosenfeld portrayed himself in his journal.) His hair was sandy, his complexion odd, yellowish; he seemed physically uncoordinated. He soon started smoking, a lifelong habit. The school newspaper described Rosenfeld as a "short barber pole with glasses." Friends spoke of him as sallow-faced, often breathless, with red marks on his cheeks (which disappeared by his adulthood). As he later summed himself up: "I had no girl friends, no frivolities. I had a Weltanschauung. This pleased my father, but he kept his pleasure to himself." Rumor had it that his IQ was 180. He was a skilled musician (he played the flute beautifully) and he was reputed to know an immense amount about nearly everything.
Never before had Bellow encountered someone so consumed by ideas, so thoroughly at home with what he-less certain of his own intellectual ability-hoped for himself. Frequently, Bellow would insist that Rosenfeld was the more gifted of the two. Herbert Passin, one of their Trotskyist friends and later a Japan scholar, remembered that when Bellow first mentioned Rosenfeld to him, he said that he was a brilliant flute player and that he had read all of Immanuel Kant. With obvious unease many decades later, Bellow would remember hearing Sam Rosenfeld tell him, "Isaac will outshine you." Bellow's description of his first impressions of Rosenfeld is as loving a portrait of another man as Bellow could ever bring himself to write. He wrote in "Charm and Death," where Rosenfeld is barely disguised Zetland:
Yes, I knew the guy. We were boys in Chicago. He was wonderful. At fourteen, when we became friends, he had already worked out and would willingly tell you how everything had come about. It went like this: First the earth was molten elements and glowed in space. Then hot rains fell. Steaming seas were formed. For half of the earth's history, the seas were azoic, and then life began. In other words, first there was astronomy, and then geology, and by and by there was biology, and biology was followed by evolution. Next came prehistory and then history-epics and epic heroes, great ages, great men, then smaller ages with smaller men, then classical antiquity, the Hebrews, Rome, feudalism, papacy, renaissance, rationalism, the industrial revolution, science, democracy, and so on. All this Zetland got out of books in the late twenties, in the Midwest. He was a clever kid.
Bellow introduced him to a lively group of talented boys, ribald and book-smart, none quite as smart as Rosenfeld-which probably pleased him-but more experienced in the ways of the world, much easier around girls. ("Weak boys, too undeveloped for whorehouses or gambling, sheltered by our fathers, we didn't have to worry about the Depression. Our only freedom was in thought," wrote Bellow in a draft of Herzog.) These boys edited the school's newspaper, Tuley Review, which they sought-earnestly, foolishly-to turn into a major, local publication. (Soon out of school, the same group launched an ambitious, short-lived magazine, The Beacon, which they touted as "Chicago's Liberal Magazine.") Tuley Review carried cartoonlike maps of the terrain of James Joyce's Ulysses within days of the book's legal publication in the United States. Reading the famed Shakespeare and Company pirated edition provided these aspiring writers, or so several later claimed, with their first glimpse of how everyday reality could be transmuted into literature. They read vociferously, buying and stealing books: Rosenfeld's technique involved wearing bulky overcoats. They read their writings to one another and sketched brief, pointed biographical portraits of those around them: "Sam [Freifeld] who, in youth, flashed at us, through his eyes, smile, temple, his energy, high esteem of himself, inviting all to share in his being. Poet, revolutionary, lover, adventurer, a Knight of Division Street," Rosenfeld later described one of the group.
Crucial to both Bellow and Rosenfeld, perhaps their dearest and most loyal friend, was Oscar Tarcov, a gentle, empathetic boy with intense literary ambitions that never came close to being realized and a gift for friendship deeper than either of theirs. He mediated bad moments between the other two, playing the peacekeeper, perhaps to his own detriment. Both confided in him, often in him alone, and their letters to him were among their most candid and unrestrained. He was a good, thoughtful man, a steadfast friend, and would later be a loyal husband and father, and a fluent but unsuccessful writer. (Tarcov certainly tried hard to be a writer, but he made a living doing Jewish communal work and produced an array of American Jewish tales, at least one play, and a novel, Bravo, My Monster, an obscure meditation on the horrors of Nazi Europe.) Bellow, Rosenfeld, and Tarcov saw themselves as a trio: "In a way your enthusiasm reminds me that I have always been a sort of combination vanguard and experimental rabbit in the trio that includes both of us and Isaac," Bellow wrote to Tarcov in the early 1940s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rosenfeld's Lives by Steven J. Zipperstein Copyright © 2009 by Steven J. Zipperstein. Excerpted by permission.
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