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"Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases:
Portrait of a Humanist Man of Letters"
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Abstract –
The death of Paul Rosenfeld has left me not only shocked at the unexpected loss of a friend, but with a feeling of dismay and disgust at the waste of talent in the United States. Paul, when I first knew him—in 1922, I think—was one of the most exciting critics of the “American Renaissance.” I had read, while in the army in France, an essay on Sibelius in the New Republic, which had upon me the exhilarating effect that wartime reading sometimes does, and later, when I was back in New York, a longer study of Richard Strauss, the great musical hero of the time, which brought into the writing itself something of the Straussian brilliance but probed with a very sure hand what was specious and vulgar in this composer. It was the first really searching criticism that I had ever seen of Strauss, and both these essays amazed me. They had a kind of fullness of tone, a richness of vocabulary and imagery, and a freedom of the cultural world that were quite different from the schoolmasterish criticism that had become the norm in the United States.
Musical Portraits, in 1920, the first book that collected these pieces, seemed at the time absolutely dazzling. Paul told me, when I knew him later, that the point at which he had felt his maturity had been the moment when he realized with pride that he could turn out as good an article as Huneker; but actually he was better than Huneker, who, useful though he was in his role, always remained a rather harried journalist, trying to produce a maximum of copy in order to get money to go abroad. Paul was a serious writer who was working from New York as a base. One had always had the impression that Huneker came in through the back door at Scribner's in a day when the arts were compelled to give precedence to money and respectability, and that there had been something in Bernard Shaw's prophecy that, if he stayed in the United States, he would never be anything but a “clever slummocker”; and one now heard depressing reports that he was old, poor, and ill in Brooklyn.
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