Background
Rosenfeld was born in New York City into a German-Jewish family. he elder of two children and only son of German-Jewish parents. His father, Julius S. Rosenfeld, a prosperous manufacturer of braids, was a native of Germany; his mother, Clara (Liebmann) Rosenfeld, was the daughter of immigrants. They were cultured and idealistic; he was a devoted reader, she a talented pianist. The family lived in the prosperous brownstone neighborhood of Mount Morris Park near Harlem and often traveled to Europe. Rosenfeld's childhood was marred by the hysterias and depressions of his mother, related in his autobiographical novel, The Boy in the Sun (1928), which tells also of the painful anti-Semitism of neighbors. After his mother's death in 1900, his father went into an emotional decline, and Paul and his sister were taken in by their maternal grandmother.
Education
At thirteen Rosenfeld left the New York public schools for Riverview Military Academy in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Neither very military nor very academic, he edited and wrote for the school magazine, read with adolescent passion, and continued the piano lessons he had begun at six. His piano teacher and the local musicstore owner were, to him, oases in the cultural deserts of the world. His father died, impoverished and exhausted, in 1908. In his novel, Rosenfeld described how the ability of a boy to care for his dying father (aided by an inheritance from his mother's family) brought him to manhood and to a new sympathy with people and nature. Rosenfeld entered Yale in 1908, spent an unremarkable four years studying literature and writing some criticism for a student magazine and a local newspaper, and graduated with the B. A. in 1912. He next attended the Columbia School of Journalism, where he received his Litt. B. degree in 1913.
Career
For six months Rosenfeld was a reporter on the New York Press, but he found the work "morally distasteful. " With the security of a large personal inheritance, he determined to pursue his interests in music and art. After a European trip, he joined the New York circle that determined his career. The musician Leo Ornstein, the novelist Waldo Frank, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and particularly the brilliant social critic Randolph Bourne became his friends, and he shared in their projects to urge high culture and intellect upon a sluggish America. Rosenfeld's first publications, outspoken essays on the arts, appeared in 1916 in the New Republic and Seven Arts, a short-lived but influential journal. He served briefly in the army in 1918. In 1920 he became music critic of the Dial and published his first book, Musical Portraits, which to Edmund Wilson "seemed at the time absolutely dazzling" (Mellquist and Wiese, p. 3).
During the following decade, Rosenfeld wrote hundreds of articles for Vanity Fair, the Nation, Modern Music, and other journals, and six more collections of his essays appeared. In Port of New York (1924) he presents portraits of "fourteen American moderns, " including Bourne; Stieglitz; the composer Roger Sessions; the painters Albert P. Ryder, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur G. Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe; and the authors Van Wyck Brooks, William Carlos Williams, and Sherwood Anderson. To Rosenfeld they manifested in this country the great modern movement in the arts represented in Europe by Stravinsky, Picasso, and Joyce; and they made New York an exciting place in which to be.
As a critic, Rosenfeld used his knowledge of history, of musical performances, of museums and studios, of the cities of Europe; he knew enough of the techniques of music and painting and writing to understand what the artist had done to get his effects. He used the life, the looks, the personality of his subject, and felt free to employ psychoanalytic concepts. Yet these things were likely to be introductory or merely explanatory in his criticism. His real point was to say what the sounds or the forms or the words were like--that is, what extended analogy to them could be found in another realm of experience. Thus, in an essay on Stravinsky he explains the composer's "intellectual" music for Les Noces as a result of exile, which causes cerebral rather than emotional development; but most of the essay is taken up with metaphors like "the firm rich quality of white metals, nickel, silver, and steel, felt through the score. " Sherwood Anderson's words are a "gray driven throng" of drab people, but he freshens them, makes them starched and fragrant again. Ryder's paintings have dark areas in the foreground because that part of the canvas's torso represents the genitals, which Ryder dared not form. Rosenfeld's style has often been called overblown and eccentric.
He wrote in the exuberance of his period, sometimes with odd results: "Experienced once again was the spirit morning. " Yet most of his prose is clear and lively, and he could be funny. Van Wyck Brooks's Harvard photograph reveals "features of a slightly virginal jack-rabbit cast that manage somehow to adumbrate the distinguished head of the future stiff little colonel of literature. "
Interest in Rosenfeld's work has continued, as seen in reprintings; yet a critic who devotes himself to interpreting new art of his time cannot expect his own work to remain important when that art has become either familiar or forgotten. Few of those he championed are now regarded as the peers of their great European forebears, although they did, like Rosenfeld himself, do much to change the cultural climate of America.
Throughout the 1920's Rosenfeld kept a kind of salon, where at quiet evening parties poets read or musicians played. Among them might be Ornstein, Darius Milhaud, Edgard Varèse, e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, the Stieglitzes, and all their group. Rosenfeld was a quiet benefactor of young artists. American Caravan, which he founded in 1927 with Lewis Mumford and Alfred Kreymborg as an annual anthology, was particularly hospitable to new writers. Rosenfeld was a good cook; he never married but was fond of women, and it is said they responded to him.
The 1930's brought Rosenfeld severe reversals: he became diabetic, his income dwindled, American Caravan closed, the journals he had written for died or changed. He undertook a novel, an autobiography, and, aided by a Bollingen grant in 1943, a study of literary genres, all unfinished. During World War II he wrote for the Kenyon Review and other academic quarterlies then becoming cultural forces. He died of a heart attack in St. Vincent's Hospital, New York City, at the age of fifty-six.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Of Rosenfeld as a person, Edmund Wilson has testified, "With his fair reddish hair and mustache, his pink cheeks and his limpid brown eyes and his good clothes which always followed the Brooks-cut college model, his presence, short though he was, had a certain authority and distinction" .
