In Diogenes' Bathtub

...Writings have been dedicated to Isaac by the young...

...He could have given Edmund Wilson a run for his money...

...And the teasing question is posed: Who will, in the final sum, win the hog butcher's city, the Romans or the Goths...

...Isaac's non-fiction was the result, I believe, of three prime causes: 1) Ambidextrous, he yet wrote it with his left hand, for meal-tickets, keeping his right hand free for less lucrative, slow-to-mature fiction...

...In the end, hard customer though I was, he won me over, in heart if not in mind...

...Little did we, the class, know then how closely he would make us pry into Raskolnikov's motives and Gogol's manias, Oblomov's hesitations and Anna Karenina's passion...

...that is, he was hopelessly ensnared in the plexus of his own many talents...

...In both, he sounded a new and surer voice, more personal and individualized...

...2) he was basically a rationalist philosopher charmed with the irrational, not a literary journalist, and his reviews and essays are all cut from the philosopher's stone for the magazines that befriended him (including The New Leader...

...Discussions of Stendhal ("Above all, not to be a dupe...

...But although An Age of Enormity would do credit to any critic in any age, Isaac Rosenfeld was not just a critic...

...later adding, rather sadly, "I loved him, but we were rivals...

...For the next two terms Isaac and I were thrown together in a fluke course that left us all to ourselves one hour each week...

...To be remorseless, not only to one's enemies, but to one's loves, ultimately, to oneself...

...Theodore Solotaroff, who selected the pieces that make up this collection, confesses, in a long introduction, to having felt himself drawn to Isaac through his writing, although he never met him...

...It was impossible not to be attracted by the good nature of his face," Saul Bellow says of him, in a touching foreword to An Age of Enormity...

...He was the most genuinely social of writers (not cocktail to cocktail, but knee to knee) and the least alienated, until his last years when the enemy, that human destroyer, alienation, finally found him...

...I doubt that any other American writer stirred up such warm respect in the young people he knew as did Isaac...

...His University of Chicago speech on "the dark night of the soul" (unfortunately not included here) was addressed to students who had invited him to speak, to affirm the role of the writer in our society who is neither a Youngblood Hawke nor a Faulkner or Hemingway...

...Isaac Rosenfeld was a good writer, an intelligent writer, an important writer...

...Our class was so informal that Isaac once whipped out a notebook to catch the overflow of his own rich thoughts, continuing to talk even as he wrote while the rest of us, stirred by the sight of a teacher actually thinking before our eyes, spurred him on like a fast horse...

...the project aborted when their money ran out in uncut page proofs...

...Besides his interests in painting, music, photography, philosophy and psychology, the man wrote three novels (two as yet unpublished), a prize-winning novella (on colonialism), and enough published short stories to equal, page for page, An Age of Enormity...

...Soon, we are into the "Lake culture" and its components: the University, the Near North Side, the barbarian hordes...

...Yet, deep as his commitment was, it did not estrange him from others...

...Schooled in philosophy, he came to literature with less of a young man's ambition to pursue the illusions of success than with a little of old Diogenes, shlepping his bathtub behind, plus a certain small dignity of belonging because he belonged...

...Kenneth Burke, Gide, Kafka, Henry Green and other literary topics belong more properly to critical canon, and they are indicative of a remarkable, highpowered talent...

...One would have thought we were in Vienna, and psychoanalysis was being born...

...Had Isaac chosen to be a critic, he would have been one, and one of the best...

...Two of his students at the University of Minnesota tried to publish a collection of his stories...

...We met in a Russian lit class, all of six students...

...The "beachhead" held by the culture-continuing elements is defined, as is their overwhelming counterforce, the anti-cultural elements, with their threatening "revolt of the masses, in Ortega's sense, the execration of quality and things of the mind...

...To borrow a phrase Isaac once used expertly, he was, sad to say, "hoist by his own petard...

...The pieces themselves are just that, pieces: book reviews and essays, but they add up, in toto, to a lot of imaginatively toned reflections that are not without the human touch, as when Isaac tags Gandhi a "nudnik" in a quest for the man's essence that is, essentially, warm with admiration...

...Isaac taught me by giving, feeling, understanding, reaching, being, despite the fact that I often resisted and denied him...

...But Isaac was a man with 17 Chinese fortunes in his pocket...

...But more than this, he was a great human being, and of such a complex sort that we may say he was a rare butterfly who simply cannot be pinned down, in this book or any other...

...Reviewed by ALFRED SUNDEL Contributor, "Western Review," "Perspective," "Retort" It is now six years since Isaac Rosenfeld died, at the age of 38, in Chicago, the city of his birth...

...Isaac (he had no wish to be called other than by his first name) wrote out of a calm but deep-seated commitment to the cultural values he believed in, the "roots" to which he, as an intellectual, adhered...

...It was my good fortune to know Isaac as one of his students at New York University, where he spooned me Freud and Dostoyevsky and played pal instead of teacher, teaching...

...nothing was over his head...

...Fiction was his elusive first love, to whom—alas—he should have addressed himself with more Latin ardor...

...Isaac entered much like a seventh, playful, slouching, a Jacksonian Democrat in dress, who, in the absence of authority, assumed the teacher's chair, announcing his prank with a grin...

...Hemingway ("Catherine and Frederic tinkle at each other, 'Didn't we have a lovely time, darling?' there is chatter, eating, drinking, and a lonely lying together...

...Best of all is the remnant of a never-completed book on Chicago, which opens: "All faces, coins, and questions have two sides, there is concave and convex, and what man isn't a Janus-head...

...he was incapable of forming a position of entrenched snobbery...

...He had logic, clarity, originality, breadth, wit and the human touch...

...It can only be hoped that the unpublished work that remains (among which are journals) will, at some future date, see light...

...He had too much of a philosophical mind, which was his storyteller's weakness, but it was also his strength, and this was the schizoid nature of his fiction-writing problem...

...He forgave me my rebelliousness, my young fear of seeing him as a teacher I had to refute in order to be original...

...Nor will we see his likes again soon...

...3) he was also something of a true man of letters, more engaged in frontline evaluations than the sacred purple cows of U.S...

...In his last years, he was achieving a breakthrough, best expressed in his posthumously published story "Wolfie," with its unrequited lover hero, and his sexprobing third novel, which bores deep into adolescent love...

...criticism, more in contact than them, more human...

...and he did this not with bleeding-heart sympathy or mild contentiousness, but on the square, as equals...

...A question far larger than Chicago...