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PARTISAN REVIEW
written time and again about the crucial event of her life.
Did they or didn't they? The question is posed by both the historian
and the novelist, and their answers are as different as fact and fiction. No one
knows what really happened, but Mary Dearborn's conclusion must derive
from the findings of her research. Norma Rosen, as a novelist, is free to fol–
low the wide arc of the imagination.
What we know is that Dewey's love poems, though tender and ardent,
are cautiously ambiguous about sex. In Yezierska's obsessive and frenzied
recreations of the affair, a Dewey-like figure variously named John Morrow
or John Manning or Henry Scott, who is all head ("My cursed analytical
mind"), meets an immigrant girl named Fania or Hannah or Sonia, who is
all
heart ("You are fire and sunshine and desire"). But when sex comes into the
picture, Fania's fire and desire fizzle like a Roman candle in the rain. When
"Henry Scott," in the novel
All I Could Never Be,
makes his unmistakable
move and cries "Love me!" the rabbi's daughter, not as liberated as she likes
to think, is shocked and turns away. "Instead of a god, here was a man - too
close, too earthly. She wanted from him vision - revelation - not this - not
this." Taking Dewey to the Yiddish theater and introducing him to Yonah
Schimmel's knishes was as sexy as Anzia was willing to get. Yezierska fan–
cied herself an apostle of sexual freedom, "a passionate Russian J ewess - a
flame, a longing," but the flame gave off no heat, and as Mary Dearborn
dryly remarks, "she was never very good with the follow-through."
In Norma Rosen's novel the "loins of fire" are very hot indeed, and the
lovers are in an ecstasy of sexual rapture that probably never came any–
where close to happening. As a novelist Rosen wants to be free to exploit
actuality in order to heighten what she has imagined. Rosen nimbly accom–
plishes this by bringing one ofJohn Dewey's closest friends into her story -
Albert Barnes, the terrible-tempered inventor (ofArgyrol) and passionate
collector of Impressionist painting. Many of Dewey's friends were in fact
dismayed by this friendship: how could the kind and generous "common–
sense philosopher" be so devoted to the rude and vicious Barnes? For Sidney
Hook, who was Dewey's prize student at Columbia, the philosopher's
"fondness for Barnes was his most serious shortcoming . . . Every time
Barnes got into a scrape as a result of browbeating, insulting, or cheating
someone, he dragged Dewey into it."
As Norma Rosen conceives the figures in her real-and-unreal plot, it
was Barnes's sinister bullying and aggressive power that fascinated Dewey
as a counterpoint to his own decency and abstract intellectuality. In Rosen's
view, Barnes was Dewey's "last hope of wickedness," and she skillfully
evokes Barnes's savage opulence - "he looked like some powerful animal
dressed up like a man" - as he casts his malign shadow on the lovers, and
plots to destroy their stealthy idyll.
Most of Rosen's novel takes place in the summer of 1918 in Philadel-
