The Curse of Promise Unfulfilled

Isaac Rosenfeld: The highs not so high, the lows not so low





In "Enemies Of Promise," the British literary critic Cyril Connolly famously tried to account for his failure to live up to his own expectations of literary greatness and those of others. It was a merciless self-portrait, but it was meant to describe more than a single author's plight: There is a special precinct of literature reserved for those who never became the major writers that everyone expected them to be.

Enemies Of Promise - 820.9 C

Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-56) is surely one of this number. His 1946 novel, "Passage From Home," earned him accolades from the New York intellectuals, a crowd not given to accolades. It was written when Rosenfeld was 28, and it seemed to mark the coming-of-age of a writer who would sweep all before him. Certainly, at that moment, Rosenfeld had outstripped his friend Saul Bellow, whose "Dangling Man" seemed partly caught in the constricting embrace of its European models.
But Mr. Zipperstein's account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness -- nor did he entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth would have it. As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe faulted (not unfairly) "Passage From Home" for relying, weakly, more on rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off from early promise are in fact "a marvel of output," as Mark Schechner has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would later lament his "failure."

Why not unfairly, rather than, simply, fairly?

Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of Rosenfeld's life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of Rosenfeld's place in literary history too insistently, perhaps recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his death, half again as long as he lived.