Philip Davis
CHARM AND DEATH
Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
By Steven J Zipperstein (Yale University Press 320pp £20)

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'Every life has a theme', wrote Isaac Rosenfeld in an essay on Gandhi. The theme of his own life, and of this biography, was failure. Rosenfeld was born in Chicago in 1918 and with the publication of his novel Passage from Home in 1946 was pronounced a golden boy of American letters. Yet almost nothing followed - critical essays, some short stories, true; but mainly page after page of unfinished manuscripts. Ever increasingly, Rosenfeld was overtaken by his Chicago friend-turned-rival Saul Bellow, who took his crown. Rosenfeld died of a heart attack in 1956, aged thirty-eight. Even the novel Bellow wrote about him, Charm and Death, remained unpublished, an excerpt 'Zetland: By a Character Witness' salvaged to appear as a short story. Even poor Delmore Schwartz did better, in that other Bellow novel of a friend's failure, Humboldt's Gift.

'Yes, I knew the guy. We were boys in Chicago. He was wonderful,' wrote Bellow of Rosenfeld's precociousness in 'Zetland':

At fourteen he had already worked out and would willingly tell you how everything had come about...

It went like this: First the earth was molten elements and glowed in space. The hot rains fell. Steaming seas were formed. For half of the earth's history, the seas were azoic, and then life began. In other words, first there was astronomy, and then geology, and by and by there was biology, and biology was followed by evolution. Next came prehistory and then history - epics and epic heroes, great ages, great men, then smaller ages with smaller men ...

But even by the time he came to write his Master's thesis, Rosenfeld felt that the great tide of evolutionary creation must turn back against him, a smaller man, like a force of destruction instead: 'Metaphysics is collapsed into epistemology and methodology, logic into biology, objects into knowledge of objects, truth into warrant.' In particular, it was with biology that he struggled, deliberately undoing himself, throwing himself into chaotic sexual encounters in order to challenge the family-bred defences of shame and guilt and embarrassment. 'I am convinced', wrote Bellow in the foreword to Rosenfeld's posthumous collection of writings, An Age of Enormity, 'that in his view the struggle for survival, in the absence of certain qualities of life, was not worth making.' Writer's block, sexual inhibition, an open marriage to a woman who claimed she was also 'naughty with Saul': Rosenfeld took them all on, in almost ascetic devotion to the bohemian messiness in which he lived his life. But his was not a simply heroic, idealistic enterprise. Near-sighted, fat, short and clumsy for all his intellectual attraction, Rosenfeld loved it, all too needily, when a woman noticed him before he noticed her. As he wrote to the woman in a short story, 'The Hand That Fed Me' (1944): 'Your flirting was not in response to an act of mine, but an overture, an opening entirely of your own. For this, all my gratitude. Because, at a moment when you did not exist for me, I already existed for you.' Perhaps the best sentences he ever wrote were in an essay on Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky:

Levinsky is a man who cannot feel at home with his desires. Because hunger is strong in him, he must always strive to relieve it; but precisely because it is strong, it has to be preserved.

Rosenfeld felt himself defined by the power of his hunger, which felt like all he had ever really had. Always seeking as much to return to his yearning as to escape it, he was, for all the words and the liaisons, essentially an unconsummated man in both life and writing.

And so Steven Zipperstein's fine biography has to struggle between the failure of the life and the failure of the writing, each undoing the other - the life too self-consciously literary, the writing too willed and determinedly abstract. For Rosenfeld, this in-betweenness was related to the secularised, disoriented energy of his Judaism. But the reader of this life cannot get through to the lost reality or know even if one existed. Again, it is Bellow who is brilliant here and it is no wonder Zipperstein confesses that he almost did not write the biography after reading Bellow's unpublished fiction. 'I think he liked the miserable failures in [Greenwich] Village better than the miserable successes Uptown,' wrote Bellow in his obituary of Rosenfeld, 'but I think that he understood that the failures had not failed enough but were fairly well satisfied with the mild form of social revolt which their incomplete ruin represented.'

It is not clear if Rosenfeld failed enough. Where Steven Zipperstein is both brilliant and unusual is in writing, intimately, about the task of composing the biography itself. Towards the end of the book, he writes, 'I linger here wishing for the story to be different, especially because it is clear to me from reading him carefully how desperately Rosenfeld himself sought, in the last year or so of his life, to alter his downward trajectory.' He rightly warns himself against taking Rosenfeld and his admirers too much at their word, as if the man of youthful promise could indeed have redeemed himself in time. Then Zipperstein writes this, rather beautifully, in saddened imagination of another ending:

He might have become like his writer-friends whom I interviewed for this book - aging badly, seeking to hide their envy without success, remaining ever aware of the better fortunes of others ... quite nearly everyone with a respectable publisher, tenure, or a closet with more than one or two good suits.

Sitting across from writers like these, in bars with tabs covered by my research fund, I've shifted uneasily in my chair, thinking that looking straight at me, speaking into my tape recorder, could have been an old, crafty, now immeasurably sadder Rosenfeld feeding me tall tales.

Philip Davis is the author of 'Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life' (OUP, 2007) and most recently, 'Why Victorian Literature Still Matters' (Blackwell, 2008). He is also editor of 'The Reader' magazine.