BOOKS
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for the assiduous housekeeping of a librarian at the University, who regularly
salvaged Dewey's discards, smoothed out the crumpled bits of paper, and
tucked them safely away in the Columbia archives. There they moldered for
over half a century until the Dewey manuscript collection was given to the
John Dewey Foundation, at Southern Illinois University, in 1970. WhenJo
Ann Boydston, a Dewey specialist, came upon the poems several years
later, she set out to determine, by studying typewriter-key faces and paper
watermarks, when they had been written - in 1917 and 1918 - and, even
more intriguing, to whom. With the help of Lewis Feuer, another Dewey
scholar, Boydston discovered that two of Dewey's love poems had been
folded verbatim into two ofYezierska's fictional accounts of the affair, and the
long-buried story began to emerge.
Two recent books - a work of cultural history by Mary Dearborn and
a novel by Norma Rosen - attempt, in very different ways, to unravel the
mystery of this strange romance. Each book begins with the fact that many
years ago, or once upon a time, a famous philosopher and a penniless writer
came together from opposite ends ofAmerican society. Most of what really
happened is unknown or unclear. Mary Dearborn has pursued the truth as
fur as the available facts can take her, and then attempts to place the affair of
John Dewey and Anzia Yezierska in a somewhat stilted context ofAmerican
history - the uneasy and often tragic relations between immigrants and na–
tive-born Americans. In the course of her exhaustive research, she has also
been able to pry loose the actuality of Yezierska's life from the incessant
myths she kept writing and rewriting.
The novelist Norma Rosen, also fascinated by this curious romance,
approaches it from a different perspective. Though most of the characters in
John and Anzia
are actual persons, what they do and say and feel in the
novel is derived almost entirely, as Rosen says, "from traveling imagination's
road." She asks: "What drew them together? What drove them apart? And
what took place in between?" For Rosen, these are questions that "only fic–
tion can answer."
Is it so? Mary McCarthy pointed out years ago that facts, information,
even statistics are the bedrock of the novel. In recent years many novelists
have woven real names and real people and true facts into the artifice of
their fiction. When E.
L.
Doctorow brought Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan
and Emma Goldman onstage in
Ragtime,
it impressed some critics as an
ingenious stroke. Yet it was also lazy and tendentious; Doctorow's real peo–
ple did not become characters in the story, but simple-minded ideological
signposts. A writer can justify his use of historical persons in an invented
story only by investing them with fictional reality as well; they must be
dreamed into being and can't just be stuck onto a novel like raisins on a cake.
Yet they must also be integral with actuality. In choosing to engage the real
