The latest Commentary has a great piece by Joseph Epstein about a guy I'd never heard of, Isaac Rosenfeld, a critic/writer in the New York Intellectual set who was supposed to be Saul Bellow's peer as a talent and who died young, at 38, in 1956, with indifferent literary leavins. (One fault in the longish piece is that Epstein doesn't tell how Rosenfeld died, or I didn't see it anyway; Epstein, enlighten me.) The headline is "Isaac, with Love and Squalor," which is very nice.
The unconscious theme of the piece is that Bellow's rivalry with Rosenfeld did Rosenfeld in. This is tragic. Rosenfeld went around comparing himself to Bellow all the time, and imagining that Bellow envied his talent, and hoping, as Bellow saw transparently, that Bellow would fall on his face.
The rivalry may be why Bellow uttered (to Philip Roth) a great wisdom about New York writers, that he avoided the New York literary scene because "I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there," a wisdom anticipated by Hemingway's devastating line in Green Hills of Africa that New York writers are "angleworms in a bottle," starved, competitive, malformed.
Related to this wisdom is the best line in the Epstein piece, from A.J. Liebling, the New Yorker food/boxing/war correspondent. (The piece is not online, so I'm quoting from my subscription copy.) Liebling's wife Jean Stafford suggested that they go to a party of the New York Intellectuals and he said, "I don't want to go. There'll be sheenies who are meanies." Not that all the NY Ints were Jewish, Epstein says, but most were.
There are a few reasons this is the best line in the piece. One reason is that Commentary knows it, and doesn't try to promptly spank Liebling with anti-Semitism charges, the way that Dershowitz does in Chutzpah, where he derides everyone from Mark Twain to Hemingway for being "diseased" by anti-Semitism.
And if you don't spank Liebling, you can hear the wisdom in it, which echoes Bellow's wisdom. That wisdom is that in Jewish urban culture there is a lot of open rivalry that can be debilitating; whereas in Liebling's gentlemanly WASP culture that sort of competition is looked down upon. I'm not saying that WASP culture is better, hon; it has its points, and so does mine, Jewish culture. But I reflect that Israel is hurt by this competitive culture. A Jewish academic friend, a big deal at a state university, who went over to Israel on academic business some years ago told me that he found the academic culture there dispiriting. Every lunch or every dinner, he first had to hear all about who he had had lunch with the day before, and what a schmuck that person was, and then who he was having lunch with the next day, and what a schmuck they were, etc etc. Everyone was gossiping to everyone else, and putting the knife in.
I say this is one of the great things about the Diaspora, that this sort of brilliant viciousness is tempered by the presence of the Other. Which leaves two residual issues: For all the "genius" Jews there, Israel has not produced a writer anywhere on the scale of the Jewish greats here, and there's a reason for that. And 2, I wonder whether the legendary New York Intellectual scene wasn't a little hyped, and the smart ones escaped, Roth and Bellow, while Rosenfeld succumbed.
