The Philosopher and the Poet

...Eventually Barnes uses Anzia's possession of the painting to suggest to John that in one of his absences she has been unfaithful with the art collector himself...

...Barnes' role as the subtle manipulator who exploits his victims behind the screen of the good and the valued—"education" and "art"—is brilliantly developed...

...Most compellingly, she articulates the way Jewish immigrants brought spiritual vitality, idealism and new life to the old mainstream culture—especially to the Puritan strain in it that had become overly pragmatic and materialist...

...In the first the hero and heroine find each other at Columbia when Anzia audits John's lectures...

...Barnes turned his mansion in the Main Line Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, into a treasure-house of French painting (mostly Renoirs and Matisses) that is today the Barnes Foundation Museum...

...This story of an adulterous affair is the author's re-creation of the secret relationship between the American philosopher John Dewey and the Yiddish writer Anzia Yesierska that contemporary scholars have determined occurred in 1917-18...

...Early on Barnes and Marsh are auditors in Dewey's class along with Anzia...

...He is the tough materialist who uses art to disguise his basic vulgarity, justify his nastiness, and buy a place for his name in history...

...He uses everyone for his vanity and greed, spoiling love and art...

...With William James he had a substantial influence on philosophy in the United States...

...In a chapter entitled "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad Painting," the temptation of art that Barnes employs is made explicit: "Finally Barnes brought her to look at a tiny painting, no bigger than a hand, brilliant as a jewel under the light...

...Believing Barnes, he loses the "self-that-wished-to-become...

...Thus "Flames of my heart yearn toward you, / And my soul tears out of my breast in search of you" are Rosen-improved lines...

...Barnes' Renoirs were what made his collection famous during the period covered by John and Anzia...

...The historical fact is that Dewey's poems did survive in the Dewey archives and became one of the essential clues to this strange affair...

...Only now is she being acknowledged as more than a minor footnote in American literature...

...In the second section AlbertC...

...They will live in the City of Brotherly Love's community of poor Polish immigrants, non-Jews who have fled to this country before World War I, and will try to discover why these people appear to resist integration...

...We still see how they linger in 19thcentury sentimental imagery, a far cry from Rosen's own chapter, "White Chickens and a Red Wheelbarrow...

...A passionate poet and storyteller, she was struggling for publication even in the Yiddish press when she met Dewey...

...Later he would go to Paris to try to catch up on the modernist painting there...

...Popularly Dewey was perhaps best known for his writings about education and art...

...Rosen has Barnes conniving, with the help of an entirely fictional assistant, a thug named Harry Marsh, to cut Anzia out of John's life...

...She writes fittingly in the Afterword: "As to the country perennially renewed in hope by its newcomers, we are (as the fairytales say) living there still...

...They are, she says, "inventions, written by me, attempting to capture the techniques and tonality I found in the originals...

...in the latter part of the novel Barnes invites Dewey to spend the summer advising him on the creation of his museum...

...Barnes, the self-made millionaire and art-collector, dominates...

...He turns for solace to his wife Alice, who has arrived in Philadelphia—probably summoned by Barnes—and angrily breaks with Anzia...

...Now she contrives to make sure they are secretly preserved in the Columbia Umversity library...

...to heal"—at least for the duration of the narrative...

...want you to have this.' Barnes was scowling slightly, notlooking at her...

...Destiny threw the improbable pair together, and they stayed together, with almost no one being aware of it, for at least a year...

...But in writing her novel she has healed the "breach we long...

...Taken in its fullest aspect it has an almost absurd quality, for Dewey, who taught at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930, was one of the most famous men of his day...

...So that Anzia might be nearby, John arranges for a study to be conducted in Philadelphia at the same time...

...She is speaking of the deeply held social prejudices that were prevalent then and persist today...

...Yezierska's immigrant experience was very different...

...In the novel's denouement Anzia, the real teacher of the two, as well as the motherly nurturer, rescues the poems John had written from the wastebasket in his Philosophy Department office...

...Through Barnes another central theme in American life is explored...

...Such a liaison between an austere Yankee Puritan and a Jewish immigrant from Poland was, of course, extremely unlikely in America during the first quarter of this century...

...But Rosen tells us in the Afterword that although some things in the novel, such as Yezierska's review of Dewey's published work, are reproduced verbatim, the poems are not...

...If there is a plot somewhere in this loosely arranged novel, its climax is certainly the moment when Anzia accepts the sinister Barnes' offer of a valuable painting to keep in her room in the shabby Polishtown house he has secured for the researchers...

...Everything she does is for John—for her beloved John who, in his passion, had taken to writing poems she adored...

...He more or less discovered Chaim Soutine then, and bought as many of his paintings of slaughtered animals as he could on a short visit...

...Keep it in your room.' " Anzia wonders about Barnes' motives...

...The recognition she hoped for, moreover, did not come before her death in 1970...

...Since the floors are ordinary—not splattered with an artist's paint, as are the floors in Jackson Pollock's studio in East Hampton, where the same rule is enforced— the restriction in Merion seemed the extreme imposition of a man who gave and did not give simultaneously...

...In the light of the author's portrait of Barnes, his subsequent strong attraction to those works seems especially fitting...

...Reviewed by Helen A. Weinberg Professor of American Literature, Cleveland Institute of Art...

...For a long time one of them was that viewers had to take off their shoes and wear the provided paper slippers before they could walk the hallowed floors...

...She says in her Foreword: "We know better now but live with the legacy—old stock/ immigrant, aristocrat/ethnic, and dozens moreof these dualities whose breach we say we long to heal...

...Apparendy, Dewey's verse was so oldfashioned for the early modernist period in American art and literature that the author felt her story would lose credibility if she quoted it without changes...

...They become lovers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Anzia lives and writes in a little room away from her husband and child...

...If as lovers John and Anzia are the protagonists, uniting the best of American principles with the vigorous life-embracing impulses of Jewish immigrant existence, Barnes is their opposite number...

...As a fictionalized character in this American romance, he is the villain, the serpent in the Garden of Eden...

...author, "The New Novel in America" If it were not so realistically detailed and sensitively realized a tale of love in the New World, Norma Rosen's latest novel could be read as an allegory of American ideals...

...if she could learn something and then offer it to John...

...If she had the little painting...

...Visitors to his private museum know that his power and control extend beyond the grave...

...Previously she had attempted to have the poems published by translating them and taking them to a Yiddish newspaper, but to no avail...

...To see the collection one must make an appointment in advance, and observe a variety of rules upon entering this repository of art sacred to the memory of its founder...

...Besides the integral Foreword and Afterword, John and A nzia has two parts...

...John has been seized by an old malady that makes his neck and shoulders stiff with pain...

...A woman standing naked in a little bathtub, just raising her leg to step out, a tissue of toweling about her hips...

...That done, she goes on to grow into the writer she had wished to be, saying in her imagination to the actors in her life: "Don't worry—there's still me in the world to hold all of your selves together in my mind...

...Rosen's fourth work of fiction celebrates this peculiarly American meeting of minds and bodies...

...Reluctant to participate in the project because Barnes is to be a major sponsor, Anzia finally agrees to go along with three of Dewey's other students...

...Norma Rosen has written a magical novel, mixing fact and fiction in a kind of transcendental philosophical poem about the cross between a real early 20thcentury America and an always wishedfor land...

...But he was a leading proponent of pragmatism, a markedly American school of thought in its emphasis on ideas that work in a practical way and on experience as the ultimate teacher...

...She also considers her own reasons foraccepting...

...In the process she elucidates some significant themes of American culture...

...Orangegold light poured over the wet pearl of her skin...