Artist in his Skin

Alpha and Omega.
by Isaac Rosenfeld.
Viking. 288 pp. $5.95.

Isaac Rosenfeld's death in 1956, at the age of thirty-eight, produced the same shock and sorrow as did the death of Franz Kline in 1962. It was not only that both men were loved and admired, but that these feelings in themselves were a response to an unusual kind of vitality, a vivacity and gentleness of spirit persisting at the heart of the artists' own concern with the anguish of the Extreme. The sense of loss was perhaps greater at the death of Rosenfeld. He was much younger than Kline, and as an artist had not yet reached his full development.

One's idea of what that development might have been was based in part on the extraordinary qualities of the essays Rosenfeld began writing at the age of twenty-three for such magazines as the New Republic, the Nation, Partisan Review, COMMENTARY, and which have been collected in An Age of Enormity, one of the finest American books of the last twenty years. His fiction appeared less frequently and attracted less attention. It was not as dazzling as his critical work, and then, too, the temper of the times—it was the Age of Criticism—was not congenial to fiction. One characteristic of that temper is worth mentioning here, since it has a direct bearing on the themes and forms of Rosenfeld's stories. I am referring to the quite common, quite spurious distinction that was made between writing dominated by feeling and writing dominated by intellect. The vanity of the distinction lay in its attempt to persuade us that thinking—ideation—could be equated with thought, and still worse with mind. Let me amplify this point by two quotations. “All the thinking in the world,” (the words are Goethe's), “will not bring us to thought. We must be right by nature; then thoughts present themselves to us like the children of God—they jump up and cry ‘Here we are!’” The other observation is Johann Merck's, expressed in a letter to Goethe. “Your efforts, your inevitable tendency, is to give poetic shape to reality; others seek to give reality to the so-called poetic, the imaginative, and that results in nothing but stupid trash.” (The same point is made by Wordsworth in the Preface.)

Rosenfeld understood thought in precisely this way. It was the wholeness, the harmony, of the man. This is why his essays are so filled with mind, and why we cannot separate thought, feeling, spirit, but must take everything together: wit, knowledge, severity, insight, affections, loyalties, desires. It is why, after reading the stories in Alpha and Omega, of which perhaps only four are wholly successful, one takes the book in its entirety very much to heart. Here is a brilliant mind, an earnest and lovely spirit grappling with the forces (we are too familiar with them as issues), which have all but defeated the life of modern man. Such conjunctions are rare in American writing. (Two notable—and neglected—exceptions come to mind: The Empire City of Paul Goodman, for its power, scope, and the perfection of its language; and Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, for its beauty, its wit, and its quality of love.)

The special bearing of these considerations on Rosenfeld's fiction is this: that while he understood the modern age as being politicalized and ridden by abstractions, he undertook to synthesize the fragmented elements of a whole life rather than accept intellect without mind or sensibility without tradition. From this effort, which is basic to his entire career, proceed two unique qualities. First, that his thought, far from being the concatenation of mere ideas, comes through to us in an experiential and necessitous form: it is primary, like sight and touch, and orders a universe of immediate relations. And second, that when he is most personal, most vivaciously himself, he is also most traditional, as in the beautifully humorous stories, “The Misfortunes of the Flapjacks” and “An Experiment With Tropical Fish,” which seem to consist only of wise and affectionate laughter yet drive home somber philosophic truths. These two stories, together with “The Colony” and “King Solomon,” seem likely to find a permanent place in American letters.

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“The Colony” is probably the most important story of the present collection, at least thematically. It is a long, deeply considered work, and for all its philosophic concern is a passionate one. It might be read as a companion-piece to the brilliant essay on Gandhi, first published in COMMENTARY (August 1950), and in An Age of Enormity.

In both of these works, Rosenfeld deals with what might very well be considered the coordinates of modern life, the points at which the ego-drives of the self and its instinctual bases intersect with morality, politics, and religion.

In the essay, Rosenfeld observes that Gandhi repeated in politics the identical regimen through which he obtained mastery over his instinctual and egoistic drives. “It was an act of genius,” he writes, “to recognize that politics need be nothing more than the simple extension of psychic economy.” The politics worked. The mode was love: it was himself that Gandhi gave. Yet politics, too, was Gandhi's “defense against knowing himself.” How was it, then, that out of that crippling regimen, the denial of the instincts, there emerged not a cripple but a whole man of extraordinary powers? Rosenfeld quotes the words of Nehru: “[Gandhi] . . . is the very opposite of the Calvinistic priestly type. His smile is delightful, his laughter infectious, and he radiates light-heartedness. There is something childlike about him which is full of charm.” Toward solving this paradox, Rosenfeld suggests that Gandhi “performed a basic operation on life, converting everything natural to the ideal,” which was tantamount to drawing upon the resources of culture in such a way as to transform them once again into nature. “Can culture really become nature?” he asks. “How does a man go against life and return to it, distorted but whole, with the satisfactions that failed in the beginning marvelously restored? . . . I cannot explain it; the last step in the transaction between character and culture is missing, at least in my own understanding. What we cannot explain is a mystery. This, the living childlike smile, so unlike the smile of the Sphinx, and yet of the same enormous silence, is for me the mystery of Gandhi.”

“The Colony,” the imaginative work which parallels the essay, might be thought of as an attempt to draw nearer to this mystery, though in fact it was written first. It is not “set in India,” but using certain of the techniques of Kafka, abstracts from reality just those coordinates necessary to state its concerns. Its hero is a man like Nehru, come to power after the death of his leader. He is too sophisticated, too Western simply to adopt his leader's solutions as an act of faith. He must win his faith and repeat every step in the teeth of his own rational skepticism, for he is faced by the same unfinished non-violent war of liberation, the same lusts of the self, and the same need to unify the private and the public man. The story begins with a speech to his followers, which is followed by arrest, solitary confinement, and a hunger strike undertaken without any clear idea of a political motive. He keeps a diary during the days of his fast. “Regret nothing. It's not a religious impulse. I still have no faith, never will have. No faith, but fidelity. That, yes!” Though he has been fasting in complete isolation, he has become more dangerous to the state. The guards release him into the prison yard and he is set upon by the prisoners, former comrades who have been subjected, successfully, to “experiments.” The guards provoke and inflame their brutality. “. . . They rushed at Satya again and once more began to beat him. His pain and his pity were identical: ‘Pity them! Save them!’ The unexpressed thought remained in his consciousness as he lay under their blows. But now suffering alone constituted his hold on life.”

The story was written in 1945. If anything, its relevance has increased.

Yet for all the virtues of this story, its idiom is not wholly Rosenfeld's own. Its voice is not as distinct and as various as the voice which emerged in “The Misfortunes of The Flapjacks” and “An Experiment With Tropical Fish,” and which finally appeared full-blown the year of his death in “King Solomon.”

Again, in the last story, the underlying theme is one of wholeness, integrity, though the application is not so much political as interpersonal, a question of confrontation, and especially of presence. The King is transcendently real. Which is to say that he is so real that certain qualities of myth begin to attach to him.

Every year a certain number of girls. They come to him, lie down beside him, place their hands on his breast, and offer to become his slaves.

This goes on all the time. It is a simple transaction, a lovely thing: “I will be your slave,” say the girls, and no more need be said. But Solomon's men, his counselors, can't bear it—what is this power of his? Some maintain it is no power at all, he is merely the King. Oh yes, admit the rest, his being the King has something to do with it—but there have been other kings, so it can't be that.

And in fact no one can explain the King. There are no distinct attributes in which he excels, not even wisdom. He is simply marvelously in his skin, and therefore again and again transcends the ones who surround him. The Queen of Sheba sends her photograph and arrives in pomp. She impresses him, annoys him, wearies him; perhaps she even excites him, though she is past her prime, as is he. She departs with an uneasy sense of a great romance, and Solomon, as befits the occasion, stands in the tower and sees her off. He has acquired the lease to her oil lands.

The story is a delight. Its questioning, paradox-proposing tone is tuned halfway between gossip and high philosophy. I can think of nothing else quite like it.

There is not space here to discuss the relation of the early stories to the later ones, except to say that the development is organic and that this is one reason why the book is meaningful in its entirety and not merely by virtue of its best stories. In the same way that Solomon is in his skin, Rosenfeld is in his themes.