from Jewish Social Studies Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2

The First Loves of Isaac Rosenfeld

Steven J. Zipperstein

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As a writer, Isaac Rosenfeld confronted with unusual honesty the limitations as well as the pleasures of a life spent with books. What derailed him was also what most inspired him: he devoted himself to exploring what most mattered in life, and he was unwilling, or unable, to pour all his considerable ambition into his written work. Still, a good part of his life was spent searching for a literary voice, and he garnered for himself some early successes: a reputation as the "golden boy" (in Irving Howe's words) of the New York intelligentsia; a coveted award from Partisan Review; a job at the New Republic; invitations from writers' colonies; and university teaching stints. He often distrusted his own critical abilities yet spent most of his life within easy reach of a fountain pen, thinking about books with as much subtlety as any critic of the time. He wrote, quite literally, until his last day. He was found dead--of a heart attack, at the age of 38, in 1956--beside a desk piled high with manuscripts.¹

Several of the descriptions of Rosenfeld written after his death (including novels, short stories, poems, the film "Bye, Bye Braverman," and memoiristic accounts in the recollections of most of the leading New York intellectuals) tend to leave an impression of a noble failure, an ersatz hippy who shunned success, who sought out only small magazines, who assumed that a life of integrity was also one of Grub Street squalor.² They capture little of his fiercely ambitious side, though it is true that he sought to hide this side from all but his dearest friends. He desperately wanted to be a well-paid, widely celebrated writer; he was, as he admitted, jealous of Saul Bellow's success with The Adventures of Augie March; and he was furious at the attention lavished on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, that popular and (in his mind) hopelessly lachrymose childhood saga that appeared in 1946, the same year as his own well-reviewed, unlucrative novel of a Chicago childhood, Passage From Home. He continued courting success: in the last year of his life he wrote for Mike Nichols' Compass Players, and one of his skits was optioned (alas, posthumously) for television. Rosenfeld lived in the garret, so to speak; he was too alert to his own talent, however, to permit himself to romanticize its dank, anonymous charms.

In his life story, as I came to see it, was as intimate, as complex a story about thinking and writing in twentieth-century America as I had encountered--a tale of intellectual isolation, camaraderie, fame, and oblivion, and a rare, intimate glimpse at the saga of intellectual labor. It was also a tale that invited a closer look at that line dividing literary success from failure. Rosenfeld emerged into the literary world alongside Bellow, his neighborhood friend. Their collective story--and they, for better or worse, saw their life-stories as intertwined--reveals something of the awful risks and, of course, of the rare, lavish prizes in a life spent with literature. Theirs were Jewish stories, too: culturally porous like most interesting American Jewish stories, shaped by many other factors, but no less Jewish as a result.

"It would end in disaster, I knew that already," writes British biographer Richard Holmes about his work on the life of Shelley:

But I suspended belief, knowing that the history of what the world calls failure is often more important, humanly speaking, than any other: for it tells those who come after what remains to be tried. It is, as I later found myself writing, more haunting than history: it is peculiarly alive and potent, like all those slumbering winged seeds and disembodied spirits and ambiguo's, shadowy monsters that fill the best of Shelley's poetry.³

Rosenfeld did not, of course, leave behind a "Prometheus Unbound." Premature and shocking as his death was, it occurred when he was eight years Shelley's senior, and with far less to show for himself. Nevertheless, my search for Rosenfeld yielded his many hundreds of letters in private hands, five unpublished novels, and numerous unpublished short stories as well as plays and articles. This truly was a voluminous haul for a writer who died young, who wrestled hard and long with the value of his intellectual labor, who had an unusually messy personal life, and who published but one novel.

And then there were Rosenfeld's many journals--fragments of which have been published in the past couple of decades--a vivid, sometimes excruciating self-portrait of his literary aspirations, his experiences with Reichian therapy, his often joyless sexual pursuits, the bleak emptiness of writer's block. What he wrestled with here, and with intensity and great honesty, was the desire to create a language about everyday things situated somewhere between lyricism and lament, to depict a sense of wonder about the world without metaphysics but with a keen admiration for its power to inspire. He explored in his journals what it meant to create a philosophical literature drawing on Dostoevsky, Conrad, Melville, and Kafka as well as on Babel and Sholem Aleichem. How, in other words, one might examine honestly the experiences of everyday people so full of life's hunger, miracles, and horrors.

I am persuaded that Rosenfeld's voice--that deeply reflective, sardonic, wildly hopeful voice--is important to revive. Thinking of Rosenfeld in terms of his voice or, for that matter, his conversation seems especially useful, since in his writing (much like in Bellow's), an intimate, crucial connection exists between voice and literary expression, conversation and composition. The two men emerged at much the same time, both part of a boisterous, talented group of northwest Chicago writers, cajoling, encouraging, and embarrassing one another. They set for themselves the goal of creating a cerebral, introspective, European-like American literature. Living in Chicago, in the middle of nowhere (as they saw it), inspired them to imagine a world that was much larger and more beautiful, to imagine, in fact, that the making of literature itself could help bring about the creation of such a world.

For both Rosenfeld and Bellow, these goals were closely connected to their Jewish interests--their subtle, comfortable command of Yiddish, their abilities to use the language as a literary medium. Rosenfeld's insightful ruminations, written in the mid-1940s, on the meaning of the destruction of European Jews in World War II impressed me deeply, as did his refusal to choose between the demands of the tribe and the attractions of a larger world. In this regard, too, his was a wise, prescient, lamentably lost voice.

I have spent the past couple of years tracking Rosenfeld down. In the process, I met his widow, Vasiliki, who lives precariously, in dreadful health in Waikiki. Their son, George, now dead, a flamboyant, self-destructive, charismatic student radical leader, left behind in his Frogg's Neck apartment, near the Bronx, a large cache of material written by his father. The Rosenfelds' only remaining child, Eleni, is a Buddhist nun near St. Foy La Grand in the wine country in France's verdant southwest; she described to me the connections, as she saw them, between the Bohemian, sexually charged, Greenwich Village apartment in which she grew up and her route to the nunnery. Isaac's high school sweetheart, Freda Davis, shared with me his many love letters--poignant, clever, and often more than 20 pages in length--in a hotel lobby in Orange County. There are surviving friends, too, in Chicago, New York, and Boston, including his close high school friend, his lifelong buddy, and also his nemesis, Saul Bellow. A vivid, unsettling photograph of Rosenfeld supplied to me by one of these friends shows him looking grimmer than a sixteen-year-old ever should. He stands beside two other self-possessed Tuley High School friends, who all look intent on conquering the world. I have tacked it onto my study wall.

In stalking him, which is how this quest sometimes felt, I permitted myself considerable, sometimes jarring familiarity. And, indeed, my decision to write about him reflected a desire to achieve a heightened intimacy as a historian with the past. Rosenfeld and my father were both Chicago-born around the same time and into much the same sort of neighborhood. The tenor of Rosenfeld's family novel, Passage from Home, was almost too familiar. It was impossible for me to sequester it as a text because it served as a sort of intimate ethnography; it established connections spanning generations, linking apparent strangers.

Thinking about Rosenfeld, I lingered over aspects of family history that I would previously have casually ignored. I found myself calling him by his first name; I fell into a friendship with one of his cousins; I returned to Chicago repeatedly, to the neighborhoods where his--and also where my own--family had lived. I had stumbled, or so it sometimes felt, headlong into his life. Biographers must do this, but, perhaps, not always quite so emphatically as I found myself doing it.

In the writing of my book on Rosenfeld, then, was a degree of calculated recklessness, a sometimes uneasy, sometimes exhilarating attempt to tell about the life of a man who sought, with considerable courage, to reconfigure the relationship between what transpires inside and also beyond one's own library. Rosenfeld spent much his life exploring--on and off the written page--just this theme. It was in this spirit that I settled down to write his life.

The following is an excerpt from the beginning of my forthcoming study. I write here about his first sixteen years or so in an effort to recreate the preoccupations, the early literary efforts, the loves, and the friendships--which themselves were often akin to love--of a bookish boy taking his first steps. This is a study in American Jewish childhood, an exploration of the coming of age of a remarkable young man in a cerebral and also materialistic, radical, Russian (mostly, in fact, Lithuanian Jewish) milieu, one much shaped by the nexus between the immigrant streets and the rarefied preoccupations of its young, American-born offsprings.

* * *

"My grandfather was a famous Talmudist," writes Rosenfeld in an unpublished, pseudo-memoir. "My mother was an opera star. My father was a chess player. My mother died. 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 bathroom whenever she took a bath. My aunt is still a vegetarian virgin. I sleep all day."⁴

As an adolescent, perhaps earlier, Rosenfeld embroidered fantastic tales about the world around him. He informs his girlfriend, Freda, that

[Matzoh,] for your information, is an old Roman article of diet introduced into Roman life by POMPEIUS ATTILATICUS MANISHEWITZ in the year 57 b.c. The Romans used Matzoh for fuel, and built barricades and bridges out of it. Many of the bridges built by the early Romans out of Matzoh are still standing. Matzoh was also widely used as food and it formed the chief article of diet among invalids, prisoners, imbeciles, and Senators. The Roman Matrons of the Patrician Class found it indispensable to the instruction of their young daughters.⁵

Most of his stories centered around family: bombastic, grasping fathers; eccentric grandfathers; cold, provocative aunts; an exasperating menagerie that he savaged, celebrated, and reexamined endlessly. His father, Sam, he called by various, outrageous names--The General, or Commissar Osipovich, or Ozymandias "king of kings."⁶ His spinster aunts Dora and Rachel (Rae), he insisted with mock horror, ran a whorehouse. He reminds his girlfriend, in a letter written at the age of 15, that his uncle Dave, with whom he is vacationing at Schwartz's resort in Michigan, is the brothel's chief proprietor.⁷

Never would he speak in this way about his mother, Miriam, who died at the age of 21 when Isaac was barely a year and a half. In fact, he rarely talked about her at all. In Passage from Home, a portrait of a 14-year-old boy coming of age as an intellectual in the midst of a secretive, protective Chicago Jewish family, Rosenfeld writes: "The embarrassment that always came over me at the mention of my mother's name now made me think that I had perhaps been willing to use her as a term in a bargain. But it was guilt enough that I had forgotten her, and could speak of her coldly without having her image appear before me, without wondering who she was and what she was, and how life would have been different, had she lived, and how I should have been a different person."⁸

Miriam was a beautiful woman, with a round, full face, and, as Rosenfeld came to see it, her death created an absence too large or elusive to fill. It seems not fanciful to connect his restless, often joyless quest for sensual fulfillment with her absence from his life. It should not be surprising that he imagined his mother as an opera star.

In his fiction, he returns time and again to male characters who yearn--with neither much clarity nor conclusiveness--for something precious lost in childhood.⁹ He tends to revisit much the same protagonist, who spends his life in an anguished quest to rekindle childhood's promise. The extent to which he manages to recapture such moments is in the rapture of a new love. Each time such love is kindled, there is the same wild, fervent hope that it might prove redemptive. Of course, it never measures up, it fades quickly, and its deadening leaves him uncannily hopeful and searching anew.

Such men look back, with awe and bemusement, at their childhoods when they strained themselves mightily to dazzle everyone around them with their precocity and achievement. By the time they reach late adolescence they fade, they settle into a slothful routine, they aimlessly walk city streets in search of distraction, and they are drawn to bad friends, to loveless sex, to college dropouts like themselves, to unpublished writers, voyeurs, and sentimental, penniless philanthropists. Their hunger for love is unquenchable; it controls all aspects of their lives.

Nearly all of Rosenfeld's characters have lost mothers in infancy, or their mothers do not appear in the text with the restless man-child left alone with his father, that unhappily distant, awkward adult. Such sons prove unable, or unwilling, to transcend their loss, to which they return with an anguished, obsessive familiarity. They live, much like Rosenfeld, in homes that are dark and gloomy yet meticulously maintained, places whose cleanliness is a sign of desperation. Wandering about at odd hours, mostly on Sundays, are fathers who demand more than anyone, let alone a son, can provide. The sons flee such homes as soon as they can for dirty furnished rooms that they envision as splendid, whose disarray promises a sublime liberation that meshes with their political or social radicalism. Soon enough, they discover that filth is no guarantee of redemption. But neither, for that matter, is bourgeois respectability.

His protagonists--obsessive, verbose anti-heroes most of them--are paralyzed by the awareness that neither freedom nor convention can answer their quest. They know well the limitations of both: the edgy, aimless hankering of the bohemian, and the bland compromises of the bourgeois conformist. Armed with this sober wisdom, they retain the ability to achieve moments of great joy, but mostly such truth flattens them irreparably.

"Men want wives, families, and decent jobs, but Morris felt himself unequipped to make a satisfactory adjustment and he did not know what he would do with himself."¹⁰ Rosenfeld wrote these words in the New Republic as part of his first published review essay (of Walter Morris's American in Search of a Way), an uncannily self-aware performance for a young man who had, until then, produced mostly term papers and a few prize-winning university poems. He finished the article soon after he arrived in New York, a philosophy graduate student who, almost immediately in his early twenties, started writing regularly for the New Republic and Partisan Review. Bellow, still in Chicago, remembers thinking at the time that Rosenfeld had left him behind in the dust.¹¹ Even in those remarkable, hopeful days, however, Rosenfeld's insights were those of a motherless child.

* * *

Isaac Rosenfeld was born on March 10, 1918, in northwest Chicago, a short walk from rambling, picturesque Humboldt Park and just off of Division Street, the area's main thoroughfare. His neighborhood was made up mostly of Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Scandinavians, a heavily ethnic area where Jews lived as a visible, distinct minority. "Bungalows and Brick three-flats were the buildings. Back stairs and porches were made of crude gray lumber. The trees were cottonwood elms and ailanthus, the grass was crabgrass, the bushes lilacs, the flowers sunflowers and elephant-ears," writes Bellow, who grew up a few blocks from Rosenfeld.¹²

The Rosenfelds' apartment building was a large, two-story structure with a more solid look than most of the other buildings in its immediate vicinity. In it lived Sam's family, Isaac's aunts Dora and Rae, as well as his grandparents. In Passage from Home, Isaac tells of a different arrangement: the novel's 14-year-old protagonist's immediate family lives apart from aunts and uncles and across town from his Old World, West Side grandparents. This is a book about a boy who escapes--or, at least, attempts to escape--home, and it is not surprising that he fantasized about a greater physical distance from his family than was true in his life. As it happens, Isaac could barely enter the hallway of his building without running into an aunt, a grandparent, or, as was more often the case, his father, whose attention he would come to crave and also loathe.

Passage from Home provides a particularly vivid portrait of the few remembered pleasures--mostly, not surprisingly, the intrusions--of a life spent in close proximity to relatives. In passing, it captures the joy experienced by the rush of family activity, the press of bodies, the noise of simultaneous talk, and those rare moments when extended family sat together, satiated, peaceful, and quiet:

We would sit around the table drinking tea and eating honey-cakes and all of us would be talking at once. The children would run up and down the house, disregarding the cries, "Stop that now, people live downstairs!" A boy or two might be squalling, or, suppose some youngster would trip over the carpet and come up screaming. . . . We loved noise, loved the banging of doors, the sound of dishes in the kitchen, the swirling of water in the bathroom.¹³

This was a bookish family, leftist-leaning but not dogmatically so, with a keen interest in music, literature, and theater. Their inclinations were universalist, secular, and Jewishly engaged with a great interest in the Yiddish language. (When the State of Israel was established, Isaac admitted in a letter to Dora and Rae that he found the event a happy one, in contrast to their own abiding, anti-Zionist, leftwing skepticism about the nationalist enterprise.)¹⁴ His father spoke English with only the dimmest of accents and was more acculturated than the thickly East European fathers of Isaac's closest high school friends, Bellow and Oscar Tarcov. Sam Rosenfeld held a good, fairly lucrative position in downtown Chicago with a food wholesaling firm.¹⁵

Isaac knew that his father, his aunts, and much of the rest of his family circle believed him to be their genius, the one whose achievements might prove to vindicate the various disappointments in their lives. Isaac was, in Bellow's words, his father's "secret weapon."¹⁶ Sam had suffered a series of dreadful losses: after the death of his first wife, Sam married Chana, who herself succumbed to cancer but only after giving birth to a retarded daughter, Mildred. His third wife, Ida, Chana's sister, was much younger than Sam, she had been a communist in New York, and he distrusted her youth and her past. Their turbulent marriage nearly broke up several times. On top of this, Isaac suffered a series of near-fatal childhood illnesses; he was hospitalized as a child, he panted badly, and, when he ran (even as an adult), red blotches would often appear on his face. Sam could not help but fear that he might lose this brilliant boy, too.¹⁷

Isaac was aware of the heavy burden on him and, by all accounts, played lavishly the role of the prodigy. He shared freely with friends, for example, that he had an IQ of no less than 180. While Bellow's accounts of Rosenfeld (and he would write about him often) were, as Bellow himself has admitted, sometimes inspired by their mutual competitiveness, his descriptions of him as an adolescent are unabashedly warm. The two met when Rosenfeld, two years Bellow's junior, was 14, and friends recall how an excited Bellow then advertised widely that he had discovered, right there in Humboldt Park, perhaps the only boy in Chicago who had read all of Immanuel Kant.¹⁸ When later musing about this young, remarkable Isaac, Bellow reveals only longing and love:

He was encouraged to be a little intellectual. So, in short pants, he was a junior Immanuel Kant. Musical (like Frederick the Great or the Esterhazys), witty (like Voltaire), a sentimental radical (like Rousseau), bereft of gods (like Nietzsche), devoted to the heart and to the law of love (like Tolstoy). He was earnest (the early shadow of his father's grimness), but he was playful, too. Not only did he study Hume and Kant but he discovered dada and surrealism as his voice was changing. The mischievous project of covering the great monuments of Paris in mattress ticking appealed to him. He talked about the importance of the ridiculous, the paradox of playful sublimity. Dostoevsky, he lectured me, had it right. The intellectual (petit bourgeois-plebian) was a megalomaniac. Living in a kennel, his thoughts embraced the universe. Hence the funny agonies. And remember Nietzsche, the gai savoir. And Heine and the "Aristophanes of Heaven." He was a learned adolescent, was Zetland.¹⁹

In pictures taken of him at the age of 10 or 11, Rosenfeld is an eager, stocky, short boy with light brown hair and a wide, rigid smile. He stands almost unnaturally straight in these photographs. Only later, in high school, did he learn to walk with an abstracted, bookish slouch, with something of that gray, sleepless look that was much favored (as he found in his late teens) at the University of Chicago.

His household was far more dour than those of most of his friends. Bellow recalls that his own family would, on occasion, gather at their neighbors, the Tarcovs (the families shared different floors of the same small building), sit around the piano, and join together in sing-alongs.²⁰ Such moments, if they transpired at all at the Rosenfelds, were very rare. In the Passover scene at the beginning of Passage from Home, a hillbilly relative through marriage attends the seder and sings American ballads, to which even the boy's pious, immigrant grandfather responds with warmth but that leave the father in a vindictive, vile mood.²¹

Perhaps in response to such pressures, Isaac tried all the harder to satisfy his father and the relatives hovering nearby. Beyond earshot, to be sure, he poked fun at them; he called them whoremongers, or worse. But in their presence, and with a sincerity that remained true despite his often biting jokes, he labored hard to make them happy, to satisfy their desire to see themselves shine in his precocious, learned shadow. He would continue much the same behavior throughout his life, attempting to make those around him happy even when this meant skirting the truth. And he would continue to carry with him a distinct sense of his specialness drawn from his childhood. He was, indeed, for his family and, later, for his closest friends something akin to royalty. For example, Bellow referred to him in drafts of stories as "Konig"; soon after Rosenfeld's death, Bellow may well have captured some of his mannerisms, his faith in primitive wisdom, his glorious, mostly unrealized aspirations, and their own frenzied, wildly verbal relationship in a depiction of that king, Dahfu, discovered by Henderson in deepest Africa, a beleaguered, grand, and tragic man.²²

In the midst of all this--pulled in various directions by the pressures at home, and embraced and, eventually in high school, admired by a band of bookish, sometimes rakish friends--Isaac strained at being the dutiful son. The enthusiasm with which he pursued his studies of Yiddish language and literature at a Sholem Aleichem afternoon school was quite possibly an expression of such desires. He so mastered the Yiddish language that he would later claim (with some exaggeration) he knew it better than English; his Yiddish was, in fact, superb, supple, and casual. Rosenfeld was a very good linguist, his German was excellent, and he seems to have taken great pride in acquiring a more literary Yiddish than that of his East European-born father. Probably a populist, Yiddishist snobbery played a role in whetting his appetite at mastering the language; a desire to please his father and to lighten the load of that unhappy man was at work, too. With his splendid Yiddish he would (together with Bellow) manage to claim it as his own and, in the process, to satirize the high cultural texts they sought to emulate, domesticate, and transcend.

Similar impulses may well have also influenced Rosenfeld's fervor for those remaining aspects of Judaism still on display in his mostly secular Jewish family. It was Passover, in particular--the most family-oriented of Jewish festivals--that left its imprint. Passage from Home opens with an affectionate description of the seder night: "Passover has always been my favorite holiday," says its narrator. Rosenfeld wrote often about Passover. In an unpublished short story, he imagined the breakup of a Greenwich Village marriage in the wake of a hilarious, disastrous Bohemian seder. At Passover, as he saw it, families were alternately bound together and torn asunder. In an unpublished piece entitled "Reflections on Pesach," he recalls that "even as an infant [I] was drawn [to] the sight of the [Passover] table":

I have little patience with symbols; the more recondite and referential a thing is, the more I want to grasp it as an immediate reality, for itself.And so the meaning of Passover is the matzoh, the Hebrew service which I do not understand, and the food and the wine which I understand only too well. In my grandfather's house the wine had its own special Passover decanter, of a brownish-rose glass, clusters of grapes blown in it. This, too, though obviously irrelevant, is part of the meaning of the rite and the event. Every grape had a way of catching the overhead light and reflecting them in rays of various color which, as the unsteady table trembled with movements of the people about it, would wink and flash.²³

Such Jewish enthusiasms were not much talked about among Rosenfeld's friends. Not one of his close friends joined Tuley High School's "Young Jewish League." Those who did were, or so it was assumed, the children of professional Jews, rabbis, or Zionists. Rarely would his friends speak among themselves about Jewish matters--until their late teens, that is, when Isaac and Saul produced Yiddish-language spoofs of masterpieces of English literature, including, most famously, their playful, sardonic translation of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Before then, talk of explicitly Jewish issues would have marked them as provincial, and this had to be avoided at all cost. It would have meant being left behind--physically or, far worse, intellectually--in old, ethnic enclaves, caught up in what Bellow would later describe, with a warmth and ambivalence he could then afford because he had escaped it, "the old system."²⁴

On the verge of adolescence, then, Rosenfeld was a good, witty, earnest boy, a devoted son and nephew, a sardonic, brilliant bookworm, and a more than nominally preoccupied secular Jew. He was also, apparently, because of his precocious erudition, something of a neighborhood phenomenon in a city packed with clever Jewish boys and girls. He was quite lonely. Bookish children often are. Still, he had already distinguished himself among school friends and family as a prodigious reader, a mimic, a skillful storyteller, a child-philosopher. His antics were funny, often hilarious, sometimes with more than a touch of anguish, it seems. A prodigy at the age of 13, he wrote in the middle-school autograph book of his friend and neighbor, Lester Seligman, the following lines from Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, a passage juxtaposing the prospect of happy, humble contentment with a life of material riches and sorrow:

'tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perk'd in glistering grief,
And wear a golden sorrow.

He signed the book "Isaac Rosenfeld, Captain 8A Patrol."²⁵

He had some good childhood friends, in particular Oscar Tarcov, Bellow's neighbor, a gentle, bright boy with literary aspirations. With Tarcov, and a few others, he felt less isolated, less unhappy with his poor performance at most sports (though he was a good swimmer and played some tennis), and less self-conscious about his clumsiness around girls.

By the time he entered high school, his prodigious learning, which had previously isolated him, began to attract wide attention. Fellow students began to talk about him, to seek him out, and to value him for his erudition. He managed to attract some of Tuley High's more popular, bookish boys. Here was a place where bookishness did not preclude popularity. The circle that welcomed Rosenfeld was boisterous, vibrant, highly literate, pompous, and keenly attractive, and it included the school's most practiced "cocksman," Sam Freifeld--who, it was said, was rarely seen without a book in his arms. Included in it, too, was the track runner Saul (then Sol) Bellow.

At Tuley, these boys were not the true insiders, nor did they wish to be. They attended few of its clubs, but for at least a year or two they controlled its newspaper, the Tuley Review, and they also participated, on occasion, in its Bibliophile Club, Liberal Club (which was, in effect, the school's socialist club), Debating Club (it was here that Bellow first spotted Rosenfeld), Scribbler's Club, and French Club. An Anti-War Club formed, in April 1934, with its "provisional committee" made up exclusively of Jewish students.

This was, in many respects, an intensely literary place. On the eve of the 1934 annual homecoming, the literary section of the Tuley Review featured a playful, clever cartoon of Irish-looking characters clustered around a barn under the title "As James Joyce Might View a Tuley Annual Homecoming Reunion." (Ulysses had been admitted legally into the United States only a few weeks earlier.) A literary magazine, sponsored by the Scribbler's Club, was launched in 1934. The school's Jewish Youth League announced its intention of starting a magazine of its own. Sidney Harris, the newly named editor of the school's newspaper (and later a well-known journalist), wrote in the fall of 1933 that "Tuley should set the pace for Chicago, and the nation's high school students." Under the logo of the paper he put the bold claim, "Chicago's Finest High School Newspaper." In an editorial, he asserted that the newspaper "aspires to be not only an organ of the school but a prime factor in establishing a relationship between student and parent in the home. . . . Take the paper home. Invite criticism on the part of your elders. Acquaint them with the surroundings which you temporarily replace for your home. Establish a bond between your school and your home."²⁶

By late 1933, when the Tuley Review was controlled by Rosenfeld's best friends, he was appointed a contributing editor and his byline often appeared on its literary pages. Bellow, who by then had graduated, was named a sports writer. Freifeld (using the pen name S. D. Farefield) wrote a column that examined, sometimes in surprising detail, Tuley High literary talent: "[W]e find poetry at a high stage of development at Tuley. . . . Some of the major voices have been I. L. Rosenfeld, S. J. Harris, Gilbert Podolner and S. D. Farefield. Someday I intend to disc'ss these."²⁷

Rosenfeld would remain extraordinarily close to this group. They would celebrate him, and they encouraged his belief that to live fully one must replicate--in Chicago or, for that matter, anywhere--the Tolstoyan aspirations of the radical, late imperial intelligentsia. Much like his family, they placed on Rosenfeld's shoulders stupendous expectations.

His most self-confident, published work in these years was his poetry, which appeared often in the school paper. This was mostly lyrical poetry, influenced by the Romantic poets that he and his friends read assiduously. ("On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars. Chicago was nowhere," writes Bellow in his fictionalized sketch of Rosenfeld, "Zetland: By a Character Witness.")²⁸ In a poem entitled "Bacchanal," Rosenfeld writes:

There is a depth in feeling
which only he who feels can fathom:
we are symphonies of sight and colors
and twisted mists of tenal iridescence
sparkling as the dance of candles
caught in goblets of claret.²⁹

His poetry inspired a literary battle in his senior year, in 1934, a dispute showcased in the newspaper. It pitted Rosenfeld--Tuley's most uncompromising lyricist--against a socialist realist, Gilbert Podolner. Podolner's poem had set out to demolish the lyricists:

oh you abstract poets,
oh you vacillating cowards
who seek to run away
from grim and hideous
and beautiful reality,
you who seek a world
that is far away from strife,--
what have you done
to create this new life?³⁰

Rosenfeld's "The Answer (To Gilbert Podolner)," which ends with the lines "We abstract poets / we say that life is short," is a sardonic, impressive performance, which also, rather eerily, highlights themes that would preoccupy him always:

life, you say, is real
well enough . . .
though no more real
than fancy's stimulating drink
no more profound
than subtle half transparent shapes
my words may trace upon the wind
there is less beauty in the painted face
than in the form of a dream devices.

. . .

If we devote our lives
(which are very short)
to the tracing of a single thread
among the myriad of interwoven threads
which form the fluttering veil of life
and find this thread is broken . . .
were it not better then, instead
to have the essence of the veil
to grasp the entire pattern
and wind it to the music of the larger loom?³¹

It is difficult to read this poem without thinking of what would later transpire: Rosenfeld's reference to that "single thread" seems like a strange, uncanny gesture at what would emerge as a central feature of his literary life. There is in the poem also a worldliness (or something that looks much like it), an apparent sureness of touch about how the world works.

His "Division Street Movement," as he and his friends sometimes referred to themselves,³² shared a belief that nothing but literature could explicate the unease, even the desperation, in their lives. On the whole, these were nominally middle-class boys, yet many had already faced dreadful losses--the early loss of mothers, long stints in orphanages or foster homes, violent fathers, potentially fatal illnesses, and, of course, like everyone else around them, the daily grind of the Depression. They read, much like the young Copperfield, "as if for life."

The Passin brothers, Sid and Herb (the latter did not attend Tuley but was, eventually, a participant in this circle), spent five years in an orphanage. Abe Kaufman, the son of a brutal father, came home from school one day when in 5th or 6th grade to find his mother had committed suicide, and it was Kaufman who had to cut her down from the kitchen ceiling. David Peltz, a high school dropout, was the son of a penniless, charming womanizer, and it was after Peltz that Bellow modeled, it seems, an Augie March carrying on his back the crippled, whoremongering Einhorn. Finally, Bellow himself had been deathly ill as a child, he lost his mother as an adolescent, and he was haunted by his father's disapproval and his dismissal of Saul's cultural interests, which he and his two older brothers saw as little more than self-absorption.

The friendship of these boys was made still closer by their active participation in the local branch of the Young People's Socialist League and, eventually, of Chicago's Trotskyist Club. As Trotskyists, they prided themselves on being part of a small, beleaguered vanguard, an intellectually superior minority shunned by the conformist Stalinists. Unlike their communist opponents, their mentor was a world-class intellectual (and a Jewish Bolshevik) in exile, much like them, but he would, they were certain, vanquish the dullards of the official left. They were not very active socialists in high school, but their political involvement would intensify later, especially for those who went to college; Rosenfeld would identify himself to friends as a Trotskyist organizer while a student in the late 1930s at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.³³

More important than politics, however, were the pleasures of being surrounded by books. Rosenfeld (and even Sid Harris, whose parents were very poor) had well-stocked, impressive personal libraries. They managed this mostly by shoplifting books, and they rehearsed together carefully the details of often elaborate thefts. They stole frequently and, by all accounts, remarkably well.

Sam Freifeld was known to give lessons on how to steal books. Lester Seligman, the head of Tuley High's Jewish League, remembers Sam taking him downtown and patiently teaching him how best to walk off with books. Those who managed this with the greatest skill--an act they described (loftily, humorously) as expropriation, not thievery--were accorded respect. Highest on the pecking order were those who carried out in full view as many as four or five books at a time. (More than half a century later, I was told about one of these boys who stole his books by slipping them into a coat with deep pockets. Rudolph Lapp, the Tuley High graduate who described the scene to me, still spoke of him with undisguised contempt.) Rosenfeld, who at least once was caught in the act, put his signature on a routine whereby he would walk slowly toward the exit of a bookstore with several books in his hands; he would appear lost in thought, as if he were reading from one or another of them; and, while turning them over in mock-earnestness, he would glide out of the store. The technique was much talked about and emulated.³⁴

The bookshop closest to them, and one where they rarely, if ever, stole, it seems, was Ceshinsky's, where most of the books were in Yiddish. Here their fathers came to argue, smoke, and debate literature and politics. Sid Passin remembers how, in the mid-1930s, when his working-class father had a difficult time holding down a job, his mother would often order Sid to fetch her husband from Ceshinksy's in the late afternoon. "Had we been Irish," Passin observed, "she might have said, 'Go get the bum out of the bar.' In the same tone of voice, she would say, 'Go get him out of Ceshinksy's.' " It was here that Sid, his brother, and their friends too, heard--sometimes for the first time and in the Yiddish language--talk of Eliot, Bakunin, and Tolstoy.³⁵

In an unpublished portrait of a 13-year-old, bookish Chicago boy, Rosenfeld drew on his life around the time he fell in with this crowd. The boy sketched here is painfully isolated, precociously bright, but terrified of the unpredictability, the chaos of daily life. He spends nearly all of his time alone in his room. When compelled to go outside, he gravitates to the local public library, where he finds a haven in its mostly vacant, blissfully cool (the story is set in the midst of a Chicago summer) men's restroom. There he discovers a solitude all the more precious because it is found in a building filled with other people. Perhaps the presence of men in a state of undress in the toilet excites him, too, but this is not made apparent in the fragment that survives.³⁶

The narrator describes here how the boy prepares for these rare, excruciating forays beyond his bedroom:

[T]he trip to the library, necessitating an early breakast, 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, and a note book; all this had to 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 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.³⁷

Careful planning is essential because the ritual, he hopes, will protect him from chaos: it "covered only so much of the experience, safeguarded it, prevented it from breaking into chaos--chaos, however, was always closing in."³⁸ This child-protagonist yearns to please his family and, at the same time, seeks desperately to escape its demands. His apparent agreeableness masks mighty furies. Here, in short, is that same emotional terrain Rosenfeld would mark off as his own in his fiction, in his essays, and, to one extent or another, in his life.

Once Rosenfeld and most of the others in the Division Street Movement burst onto the New York scene, which nearly all of the more talented of them eventually did, the fact that they came from Chicago was seen as peculiar, almost counterintuitive. They went to New York in their early twenties, searching for magazines in which to appear, for a larger, more vivid cultural life, for book publishers from which they hoped to extract advances; these "Chicago Dostoevskyians," as Rosenfeld and Bellow came to be called, inspired much comment. That a place so mercantile should produce such vivid intellectuals somehow seemed surprising.³⁹ The Chicagoans themselves seem to have encouraged the belief that theirs were, in comparison, rather wild, unfettered, untutored childhoods, and it is ironic that these products of mostly straitlaced, constrained homes managed to reinvent themselves in New York as noble savages. Indeed, this attests not only to the vigor of their imaginations but also to the provinciality that remains such a salient feature of Manhattan's cultural life.

Perhaps for some of these budding Chicago intellectuals there was a more acute anxiety than was true, say, of their counterparts in the Bronx or Brooklyn about being left to languish undiscovered, obscure, and eccentric. Bellow speaks often of such fears during his first, raw years as a writer in Chicago; there is no reason to disbelieve their intensity.⁴⁰ Still, it is surprising that Bellow's biographer, James Atlas, takes these statements at face value, insisting that as a young writer Bellow worked in almost total isolation, far greater isolation than that of any other major twentieth-century American writer:

William Faulkner emerged out of the somnolent town of Oxford, Mississippi; Hemingway was brought up in the bland suburb of Oak Park . . . , Sinclair Lewis was from Sauk Center, Minnesota. American writers were largely self-made. They "simply materialized," as Bellow put it; he, too, would have to invent himself. But even by the folkloristic standards of American literary childhood, this isolation was extreme. In Chicago, during the Depression, culture didn't matter.⁴¹

Atlas quotes Bellow: "What did, what could Chicago have to do with the mind and with art? . . . What Chicago gave to the world was goods--bread, bacon, overalls, gas ranges, radio sets, telephone directories, lightbulbs, tractors, steel rails, gasoline."⁴²

No doubt. But Bellow himself was an active participant, as he himself has always acknowledged, in a high school circle that saw itself at odds with this same sprawling, unpretty, industrial city. So intense was its influence that it would remain, in many respects, the yardstick against which he and his friends continued for many years to measure their values, their politics, their road to maturity, and much else.

This was their surrogate family, with its jealousies, its reconciliations, its loves. At the center of what they did was talk, the sort of talk that would later serve, for Rosenfeld as well as for Bellow, as the fulcrum of so much of their writing--long, self-absorbed monologues that started in their adolesence and that continued, on and off, for much of their lives. Rosenfeld later writes to Oscar Tarcov about life with Bellow, then his roommate at Madison:

We are together most of the time. We both have colds, and conversation flagging we talk of our colds and sniffle with common accord. Or we will argue, debate a debatable point, usually with reference to the abstract aspects of abstract art. He peppers me with anthropological references, and I counter with casuistries, nice logical however buts and ifs and whereases. If neither of us is driven to the wall he will say--"All right--granted! So where is the argument?" By this time of admission the argument is usually forgotten. The trick always works.⁴³

"His language was always elegant," writes Bellow. "Lord knows where his patrician style came from--Lord Bacon, perhaps, plus Hume and a certain amount of Santayana. He debated with his friends in the whitewashed cellar. His language was very pure and musical."⁴⁴ In a letter Rosenfeld writes in 1933 or 1934 to his girlfriend Freda (in the journal he would keep, on and off, for much of his life, he would often refer to their teenage excursions into Humboldt Park, their first moments of abandon, intense pleasure, and, alas, intense shame), he begins by poking fun at the flat, all-too-efficient language she used in her last letter to him. Both teenagers were away that summer in the countryside:

This morning I had an egg for breakfast. It sure was swell. Most of the time I eat only corn flakes but this morning the maid said, would you like an egg for breakfast? and I said--yes. Yesterday I cut my nails.⁴⁵

She writes him, he insists mockingly, in much the same colorless way that his stepmother, Ida, writes Sam: "and if this means nothing to you, let me add that they are married." Now begins his full, vigorous admonishment:

If Dido had once ventured to write thusly to Aeneas, if Penelope had submitted such an epistle to the wandering Ulysses, had Sappho listened listlessly to Beethoven instead of the lusting blood tumultuous in her temples, had Francesca dared tell Paolo that she was having a nice time and wish you were there--they would have forfeited their birthright of epic passion and found no solace. Can't you manage to feel yourself, even in the least, a tragic creature? O laundered Muse!⁴⁶

For much of the rest of his life Rosenfeld would continue to badger his lovers, his friends, eventually his wife, and always himself with much the same fervent, obsessive, self-mocking, and, of course, deadly serious set of questions. In this same letter to Freda--and with prose that is, oddly enough, livelier than in the novel he wrote ten years later, where he sought to capture the voice of a boy about the same age--he tests out for Freda how he might capture it if he were to write a novel about his time in the countryside. (He is staying with his father at an old Jewish farm, now a resort, in Benton Harbor, Michigan.) "I should like to write a novel about the country, about Benton Harbor, Union Pier, South Haven. I would call it The Last Resort":

A rambling random landscape flecked by flecked cows, running pigs and thin horses. Here and there a billboard, there and yon, a tree. Everywhere fat veinstreaked women supported on boneless gelatinous thighs, big in loose bandanas; their husbands awkward in undershirts playing catch on the lawn, kibbitzing at their wives' bridge games. Here and there little children, among them Mildred, hung out on the line to dry. Everything dissipated, sunbrowned, dusty. . . .

In the full sun stood I, friendless. At night they put me up on a strawtick. The last horse who ate that straw died, and they stuffed him into the tick. There was I sleeping on a dead horse a horse blanket thrown over me. Outside crickets, frogs, cows, dogs, hens, cicadas, wind, automobiles, laughter.⁴⁷

Return to the city, he insists to Freda. The countryside is a "lethal atmosphere," it is getting on his nerves, and, he suggests, it is ruining Freda's prose. "I need the city, I need the constant explosive nervous releases of city life. . . . The country with its healthful monotony would wear me down, and I believe has begun to wear you down, slyly. Your letters lack the sparkle of yesteryear, your eyes its old lustre, your affections the fire. . . . Come back, you too need the city." He signs the letter, "Yours, frothingly, Isaac."⁴⁸

Notes

This article is drawn from my forthcoming study of the life and work of Isaac Rosenfeld. It is based, in part, on several large collections of letters in private hands, and I thank Saul Bellow, Nathan Tarcov, and Freda Davis (Segel) for permitting me to photocopy these papers. I am also grateful to Alan Goodfried, the journalism teacher at Chicago's Clemente High School, the renamed Tuley High, for giving me access to his copies of the Tuley Review, perhaps the only existing run of the newspaper. This article was written while I was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, in the academic year 1997-98. I thank Mark Krupnick, Jody Myers, and Aron Rodrigue for their comments on early drafts, and also those who participated--including relatives and friends of Isaac Rosenfeld--in a seminar I gave on this topic in spring 1998 for the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Chicago.

1 The best biographical treatments to date are Theodore Solotaroff's introduction to Isaac Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties (Cleveland, 1962), 15-40, and Mark Shechner's introduction to Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader, ed. Mark Shechner (Detroit, 1988), 21-37. See also Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego, 1982), 133-34.

2 On Rosenfeld, see Wallace Markfield, To an Early Grave (New York, 1964); Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York, 1978); William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York, 1983); William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Garden City, N.Y., 1982); and Howe, A Margin of Hope.

3 Richard Holmes, Footsteps (New York, 1985), 135.

4 Isaac Rosenfeld Collection, Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Box 4, File 1.

5 Undated letter to Freda Davis (Segel), probably summer 1933 or 1934.

6 See Saul Bellow, "Zetland: By a Character Witness," in Him with His Foot in His Mouth (New York, 1985), 172. Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias" (1818): "Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkle lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; /And on the pedestal, these words appear: / My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

7 Undated letter to Freda Davis (Segel), probably summer 1933 or 1934.

8 Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home (New York, 1946), 132.

9 Much of Rosenfeld's published fiction is included in the posthumous Alpha and Omega (New York, 1966). A very large collection of his unpublished fiction--including five novels in manuscript form, and many short stories--may be found in the Isaac Rosenfeld Collection, Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

10 New Republic, Jan. 11, 1943; reprinted in Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity, 44.

11 Saul Bellow interview with the author, Feb. 12, 1998.

12 Bellow, "Zetland," 168.

13 Rosenfeld, Passage from Home, 3.

14 Isaac Rosenfeld Collection, Box 5, File 1.

15 Saul Bellow interview with the author, Feb. 12, 1998.

16 Bellow, "Zetland," 173.

17 For information on Rosenfeld's family, I relied primarily on interviews with relatives and friends, including his widow, Vasiliki (Sarant) White, his daughter, Eleni Rosenfeld Sarant, his cousin, Daniel Rosenfeld, his half-sister, Annette Hoffman, and his childhood friends, Freda Davis (Segel), Lester Seligman, and Saul Bellow.

18 Herb Passin interview with the author, Feb. 14, 1998.

19 Bellow, "Zetland," 168-69.

20 Saul Bellow interview with the author, Feb. 12, 1998.

21 Rosenfeld, Passage from Home, 18-21.

22 On Rosenfeld's influence on Bellow during the writing of Henderson the Rain King, and in the early stages of Humboldt's Gift, see Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, N.C., 1984), 115, 257-64. Fuchs quotes a letter in which Bellow writes, "All the while I was writing of Dahfu I had the ghost of Rosenfeld near at hand, my initiator into the Reichian mysteries" (115). Bellow has written to me, however, that "Dahfu is not Rosenfeld" (Saul Bellow letter to the author, Sept. 24, 1998).

23 Rosenfeld, Passage from Home, 17; Isaac Rosenfeld Collection, Box 1, Files 25 and 38.

24 Saul Bellow, Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (New York, 1971).

25 I thank Lester Seligman for supplying me with photocopies of his autograph book and for other information in a letter, dated Apr. 14, 1998.

26 Tuley Review, Apr. 18, 1934.

27 Ibid., Nov. 1, 1934.

28 Bellow, "Zetland," 169.

29 Tuley Review, Apr. 18, 1934.

30 Ibid., Nov. 1, 1934.

31 Ibid., Nov. 21, 1934.

32 My impressions of the "Division Street Movement" are based on conversations with Saul Bellow, Hyman Slate, Herbert and Sidney Passin, Ruth Passin, David Peltz, Freda Davis (Segel), Nathan Tarcov, Gregory Bellow, Rudolph Lapp, and Lester Seligman.

33 Albert Glotzer interview with the author, Oct. 30, 1997. On the Trotskyist politics of Rosenfeld and Bellow at Madison, I rely on Rosenfeld's letters to Oscar Tarcov (to which I was given access by his son, Nathan), especially those dated Sep. 19, 1937, Sep. 25, 1937, Feb. 24, 1938, Mar. 1, 1938, and Apr. 28, 1938. See also Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).

34 Rudolph Lapp interview with the author, Feb. 25, 1998; Saul Bellow interviews with the author, Jan. 5, 1996, and Feb. 12, 1998; Herbert and Sidney Passin interview with the author, Feb. 14, 1998; Freda Davis (Segel) interview with the author, Mar. 19, 1998.

35 Sidney Passin interview with the author, Oct. 27, 1997.

36 Isaac Rosenfeld Collection, Box 1, Folder 7.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 See, for example, Kazin, New York Jew, 47.

40 James Atlas, "Starting Out in Chicago," Granta 41 (Autumn 1992).

41 Ibid., 39-40.

42 Ibid., 40.

43 Letter from Rosenfeld to Oscar Tarcov, Sep. 25, 1937.

44 Bellow, "Zetland," 176.

45 Undated, typed letter from Rosenfeld to Davis, probably either summer 1933 or 1934.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.