BOOKS: ‘It should have been Isaac’
WASHINGTON TIMES | Friday, April 24, 2009
FAME, OBLIVION, AND THE FURIES OF WRITING
By Steven J. Zipperstein
Yale University Press, $27.50, 288 pages, illus.
Reviewed by Martin Rubin
. . . “And so we come to Isaac Rosenfeld, who was unlucky enough to suffer the slings and arrows of both fortune and misfortune, success and failure, making him perhaps the most promising of American writers who came to, well, if not nothing, the following, as Steven J. Zipperstein writes in this profoundly empathetic study:
“‘His life was reduced to a cautionary tale: all the promise, the sincere expectation engulfing him (all the more striking in a circle known for anything but selflessness), tended to be put aside. What remained was a story of waste. Time and again, it has been related in much the same terms: directionless charm, genius unachieved. “Charm and Death” is what Saul Bellow titled his unpublished novel about Rosenfeld.'” . . .
“Even his funeral achieved a kind of immortality in his friend Wallace Markfield’s novel ‘To an Early Grave’ and in the beguiling cult classic movie based on it, ‘Bye, Bye Braverman.’
“‘Charm and Death,’ that roman-a-clef about Mr. Rosenfeld, was never published, but Mr. Zipperstein tells us that ‘Bellow readily admitted that Rosenfeld is pictured throughout the ribald “Henderson the Rain King,” published in 1959, where he permitted himself his wildest, most fanciful reconstruction of his childhood friend.’ . . .
“When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976, Mr. Bellow reportedly said, ‘It should have been Isaac.’ It is a testament to Mr. Rosenfeld that, despite everything he did not manage to do in life and in art, such esteem never wavered.”
For Martin’s full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.