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Mention Isaac Rosenfeld’s name, even to people with literary interests, and they are likely to confuse it with that of Isaac Rosenberg, the English poet who died on the western front in France in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight and whose poem “Break of Day in the Trenches” some say is the greatest to come out of World War I. The other Isaac, Rosenfeld, was an American who died in 1956, at the age of thirty-eight, alone, in an apartment in Chicago, leaving a small body of all-too perishable work and a large feeling of promise unfulfilled.

While he was alive and for a brief time after his death, Isaac Rosenfeld enjoyed something like cult status among New York intellectuals. In certain circles—at Partisan Review and at Commentary, down in Greenwich Village—if you were simply to say “Isaac,” everyone would have known of whom you spoke. He was thought a golden boy, full of ideas and glitteringly fresh ways of expressing them. He had come from Chicago and was two years younger than his friend Saul Bellow, than whom he was, at the outset, thought to have had much greater prospects. “It should have been Isaac,” Bellow is supposed to have said upon learning that he had won the Nobel Prize.

Isaac Rosenfeld was an intellectual prodigy. He babbled not in numbers, as they used to say of the poets, but in ideas. Friends from his early Chicago days recall him discoursing on Schopenhauer while still in short pants. Bellow, who invented very little in his fiction, had an unfinished novel about Isaac Rosenfeld, a portion of which he published as a story called “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” in which he writes about the Rosenfeld figure: “He was wonderful. At fourteen, when we became friends, he had things already worked out and would willingly tell you how everything had come about.  .  .  . He was a clever kid. His bookishness pleased everyone.” In a story called “The World of the Ceiling,” Rosenfeld, in an obviously autobiographical reference, writes: “I was a very serious young man, interested only in philosophy and politics, with a way of wrinkling my face in thought which I had copied from a portrait of Hegel. I had no girl friends, no frivolities. I had a Weltanschauung.”

The sons of immigrant parents, Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow grew up in the same neighborhood, Humboldt Park, part of the old Chicago Jewish west side, which fed into Tuley High School. Along with a handful of others at Tuley, they formed an outside group specializing in inside information about politics, music, the avant garde, the great philosophical questions. The Depression was in full force, and for such boys books were their chief form of currency. In those bleak times there was little hope of career advancement, which, for young intellectuals, allowed the mind to concentrate on more serious things than merely getting ahead. “In my time,” Rosenfeld wrote in his journals, “the young looked upon life as an adventure. Today, they regard it as an investment.”

Intellectuals of the Depression generation have long since been replaced by that much narrower species known as public intellectuals, men and women who have columns or appear on television talk shows, affiliated with one of the two political parties, pushing one line or another. But the engagement with ideas possessed by intellectuals of Rosenfeld’s day was both wider and deeper. An intellectual was then little more than the stock of his ideas, and these ideas extended well beyond anything so pedestrian as national politics. Dwight Macdonald once said—and he was doubtless speaking for most New York Intellectuals at the time—that he considered the two major American political parties as little more than Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. To be of interest politics had to be international, carrying a whiff of revolution, as did art; other ideas, to capture the imagination, needed to be universal in scope.

The deep engagement with ideas of the generation of the New York Intellectuals was not without its drawbacks. The main question, of course, is not about the value of this engagement per se, but about the quality of the ideas themselves. Marxism in politics, Modernism in art used to be the unspoken banner under which the old and immensely influential Partisan Review set sail. Ideas—political, artistic, psychological—were in the air, like so many viruses, bringing down unlikely victims. Today one is still astonished by the degree of commitment to Freudianism, now that it has been so largely discredited, of a man as subtle and as pledged to the complicated rendition of life and literature as Lionel Trilling, but deeply committed to it Trilling was.

The New York Intellectuals, that group of forty or so regular contributors to a small number of magazines—“intellectual marines,” Auden wrote, “landing in little magazines”—chiefly interested themselves in ideas expressed through the form of literary criticism and essays. Although the collectivity called New York Intellectuals has by now been the subject of many books, and come to be viewed as an influential movement in American intellectual life, rather like the Transcendentalists in early 19th-century New England, many of the main figures among them are now sliding out of memory. Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Lionel Abel, Paul Goodman, Robert Warshow, Meyer Schapiro, Leslie Fiedler, Harold Rosenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick, Diana Trilling—these are names now known only to people of a certain age or of specialized interests.

Yet at the peak of their influence, during the decades after the Second World War, the New York Intellectuals had great power. Small though the circulation of their magazines was, these magazines were read with great care by the editors of Time, Life, Newsweek, the New York Times, and other organs of wide circulation. Susan Sontag could publish an article in Partisan Review on the subject of Camp, the homosexual style of deliberately comic, exaggerated vulgarity, and soon the word began popping up in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In Commentary in 1958, Dwight Macdonald wrote a scorching attack on James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed from which Cozzens’s reputation, to this day, has never revived. In letters to his friend Theodore Solotaroff, Philip Roth reported that he found it difficult to write his first novel because he was besieged by worry about what Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin might think of it (not all that much, it turned out).

If the New York Intellectuals could be daunting to those outside their magic circle, they could be positively vicious to one another. Norman Podhoretz, himself a junior because younger member of the group, referred to them as the Family. They were a family, though, more in the pejorative than in the approbative sense: envious, disputatious, always sniping at and cutting one another down. I once told Saul Bellow that Irving Howe and Philip Rahv were conducting a dispute on the nature of revolution in the letters columns of the New York Review of Books. “Two old Jews arguing in the back of the synagogue,” he replied. “And what do they turn out to be arguing about: Lady Astor’s horse.” In his journals, Isaac Rosenfeld recounts Harold Rosenberg saying to Lionel Abel that, over a long friendship, they rarely talked about anything personal. Given the go-ahead to do so, Abel said: “I think you’re wasting your time writing nonsense and marginal stuff. You’ve never written anything central or important. And how can you stand Mae [Rosenberg’s wife]. If you ask me, I think you should divorce her.” In my one meeting with Alfred Kazin, every time he opened his mouth to speak of a fellow writer, a black toad came out. Jean Stafford, who was a peripheral member of the New York Intellectuals, once suggested to her husband A. J. Liebling that they attend a party of the group. “I don’t want to go,” said Liebling. “There’ll be sheenies who are meanies.”

Not that the New York Intellectuals were all Jewish, though Edmund Wilson used to call Partisan Review the “Partisansky Review.” Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, James Baldwin were not Jewish; and even the Jews among them weren’t all that Jewish: Philip Rahv and William Phillips and Irving Howe changed their names from, respectively, Greenberg, Litvinsky, and Horenstein. Bellow and Rosenfeld had more Yiddishkeit than most. Bellow’s translation from the Yiddish of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” had a lot to do with putting Singer’s work before an American audience; and Rosenfeld and Bellow together translated a parody version, in Yiddish, of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I grow old, I grow old, and my belly-button grows cold.”

Bellow and Rosenfeld were further distinguished from the New York Intellectuals in their aspirations to be artists. Delmore Schwartz, who began as a poet of great but eventually unfulfilled promise, was the only other central figure among the New York Intellectuals not to think of himself as primarily a critic.

Where Rosenfeld and Bellow meshed with the New York Intellectuals is in the importance they placed on ideas. The red thread of a handful of ideas can be traced through Saul Bellow’s career, most of them futile if not ridiculous, but which he evidently required, as they say, to function. Bellow’s early life was given over to Trotskyism; then came the wild sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich, with its apparatus of the orgone box, literally a box (wood on the outside, lined with metal, called an Orgone Energy Accumulator) in which one sat to contemplate the cosmos and gather sexual energy; this was followed by the airy anthroposophical notions of Rudolf Steiner; and Bellow’s career ended with a vague neo-Platonism learned at the feet of Allan Bloom, with souls mingling and meeting in the beyond. What helped redeem Bellow from this roiling pot of message was the recognition, set out to comic effect in his novels, of how preposterous so much of it could be. Intellectual among novelists and novelist of the intellectuals though Bellow was, no figures are more foolish in his novels than are intellectuals themselves, not least those who strikingly resemble their author, whose ideas are often badly buffeted by the world’s harsh reality.

Isaac Rosenfeld was, if anything, even more committed to ideas than Bellow. How deeply committed he was we now know with a certainty, owing to the publication of an earnest book about Rosenfeld by Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford. Zipperstein’s is a sad, in many ways an unremittingly depressing book. How could it be otherwise? His subject is a writer who died so early in his life, with so much left undone. The story is one of a genuine talent that didn’t develop, of passion misplaced and misplayed, of a life lived in great squalor, both intellectual and domestic.

“A secondary talent of the highest order” is the way a character in Wallace Markfield’s roman à clef To an Early Grave describes Leslie Braverman, the character in the novel unmistakably based on Isaac Rosenfeld. “A secondary talent of the highest order” is, alas, an accurate assessment as far as it goes, but it doesn’t quite capture what was essential in Isaac Rosenfeld. Although nothing he wrote is completely satisfying, everything had a touch of splendor about it. What remained after his death was a novel, Passage from Home (1946), published when he was twenty-eight; a book of stories, Alpha and Omega (1966), published posthumously; and two different collections of reviews and stories: The Age of Enormity (1962, edited by Theodore Solotaroff ) and Preserving the Hunger (1988, edited by Mark Shechner).

Rosenfeld, as Zipperstein’s book makes clear, was more than the sum of his writings. No one who encountered him seems to have been untouched by the meeting. A small man, pudgy, bespectacled, striking a distinct note of schlepperosity in his clothes and grooming, he nonetheless captured attention wherever he went. Everyone who met him came away with an Isaac story. “I’ll turn your insults into anecdotes,” says the narrator of To an Early Grave, “your mishugass into myth.”

In his memoirs, Irving Howe remembered Rosenfeld as a “Wunderkind grown into tubby sage. . . . Owlish and jovial but with sudden lifts of dignity, loving jokes even more than arguments, he had a mind strong at unsystematic reflection, though he never quite found the medium, in either fiction or essay, to release his gift.” Rosenfeld made Howe feel “the world was spacious,” and he “envied his staggering freedom.” Yet, Howe concluded, “little remains of this flawed, noble spirit: a minor first novel, some fine critical miniatures, and a legend of charm and waste, a comic intelligence spent upon itself.”

Alfred Kazin, in his memoir New York Jew, recalled Rosenfeld’s mad restlessness. “He lived not like a writer but like a character in search of a plot. Every day, he woke up determined to be a new man, to recast everything, to try a new role, to be attractive, promiscuous, and wise.” Kazin remembers Isaac sitting in his Reichian orgone box “as if he were waiting for a telephone call that was not coming through.” Rosenfeld was a Reichian all his adult life.

Steven Zipperstein’s is a more complex view. He feels that more is entailed in Isaac Rosenfeld’s life than the story of early genius flaming out and ending in dismal failure, which is the standard view. He finds that Rosenfeld’s talent was growing stronger as his life neared its end, that he may have begun to get his life in order and to live up to his promise. He thinks that the real meaning of Rosenfeld’s life is to be found in his attempts to resolve the conflict between head and heart that should be at the center of everyone who sets out to live the life of the mind. “I came to see,” Zipperstein writes, “that [the subject of this book] was more a reflection on a writer’s sense of what it meant to be immersed in, and also deeply suspicious of, a life given over to books.”

Rosenfeld’s Lives is not, strictly speaking, a biography, but instead something closer to a study, with such biographical detail supplied as is required to understand its subject. Sometimes one longs for more in the way of detail; we learn, for example, that Isaac Rosenfeld left what sounds like a good job on the New Republic, but are not told why he left; late in his brief life, we are told that Rosenfeld was tooling around Chicago in a red convertible, but the year or make of the car isn’t supplied. Still, Zipperstein’s broad brushstrokes do render a strong portrait of Isaac Rosenfeld of a kind that, with a little imagination, allows one to fill in much that has been left out.

Saul Bellow is more than a supporting character in Zipperstein’s account. Bellow and Rosenfeld, who “as always, each measured success with reference to the other,” though ostensibly friends, were also natural competitors. For Zipperstein the problem is “how to write about failure, particularly played out against the backdrop of Bellow—one of the century’s most fertile writers—and his achievements?” A tack that Zipperstein does not quite follow is to ask why these two writers, with such similar backgrounds, went on to such wildly different careers. What qualities did Bellow have, outside pure literary talent, that Rosenfeld lacked?

The first difference between Rosenfeld and Bellow is that Rosenfeld was the more passionate personality. He lived more freely, took more chances, was wilder in every way. Rosenfeld was a true bohemian, in spirit and in fact. “I have an idea,” Bellow wrote, “that he found good, middle-class order devitalizing—a sign of meanness, stinginess, malice, and anality.” (“Anality,” a character in a Kingsley Amis novel exclaims, “my ass.”) Bohemianism, in Rosenfeld’s case, meant endless parties, around-the-clock disorder, talking the nights away, untrained dogs, neglected children, relentless gossip, domestic squalor of a very high order. Rosenfeld became a Greenwich Village character, ran with Paul Goodman and such tertiary and now forgotten writers as Milton Klonsky and Willie and Herb Poster. Jews have not been known to do well as bohemians; Modigliani, one recalls, living the bohemian life in Paris, died at thirty-five.

Bellow, on the other hand, was an imperfect petit bourgeois, always setting up house. How else account for his expensive hobby of marriage, an act he committed no fewer than five times, hope ever winning out for him over experience? Ever the guilty parent, the inadequate husband, Bellow, such was his yearning for a settled domestic life, was always ready, as the song goes, to pick himself up, dust himself off, and start all over again.

Rosenfeld married once, to a beautiful Greek-American named Vasiliki Sarantakis, who was quite as bohemian-scruffy in her instincts as he. They had two children together, a boy and a girl, and appear to have early settled into an easy promiscuity (Vasiliki, according to Zipperstein, at least once with Bellow) that appears to have brought both much misery. Artists not infrequently marry women or men who help stabilize their lives; in Rosenfeld’s case, something closer to the reverse obtained. Ever the player, he used to speak of marriage as a “base of operations.”

If Rosenfeld did anything to advance his career, his biographer hasn’t been able to find it. He left jobs—on the New Republic, the New Leader—that might have helped promote and ultimately elevate his own reputation. He abandoned numerous novels; carried away by intellectual enthusiasms, he set out to write books on Tolstoy and on Gandhi, also never finished. All these projects joined, in Zipperstein’s phrase, the “small mountain of incomplete manuscripts” that he couldn’t sustain.

Bellow, meanwhile, was an immensely careful caretaker of his career. Perhaps the most famous phrase Isaac Rosenfeld ever wrote was his description of the young hero of Passage from Home as “sensitive as a burn.” When it came to his own work, Bellow was touchier than ten burns, all on the face. Every less than ecstatic review of his novels was remembered. He discovered insults that were never launched. When John Updike corrected his grammar in a review, he chalked it up to anti-Semitism. In the mid-1970s, he told me that, by keeping his own counsel, he was defeating Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell in the literary PR wars. On another occasion, when someone accused him of being a less than ideal father, he told me that his novels consumed all the energy he had, with nothing left over for anything or anyone else, though this didn’t stop him from acquiring more wives and more children.

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