Living My Life, Vol. 2

DOVER BOOKS ON HISTORY, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

SIX-GUNS AND SADDLE LEATHER: A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS ON WESTERN OUTLAWS AND GUNMEN, Ramon F. Adams. (40035-2)

THE GIFT TO BE SIMPLE, Edward D. Andrews. (20022-1)

THE PEOPLE CALLED SHAKERS, Edward D. Andrews. (21081-2)

THE MEDIEVAL BUILDER AND HIS METHODS, Francis B. Andrews. (40672-5)

GOD AND THE STATE, Michael Bakunin. (22483-X)

THE STORY OF MAPS, Lloyd A. Brown. (23873-3)

THE DWELLERS ON THE NILE, E. A. Wallis Budge. (23501-7)

THE BOOK OF THE SWORD, Sir Richard F. Burton. (25434-8)

HISTORY OF THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE, John B. Bury. (20398-0, 20399-9) Two-volume set.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE TOMB OF TUTANKHAMEN, Howard Carter and A. C. Mace. (23500-9)

ESSENTIAL WORKS OF LENIN, Henry M. Christman (ed.). (25333-3)

THE MEDIAEVAL TOURNAMENT, R. Coltman Clephan. (28620-7)

BUFFALO BILL’S LIFE STORY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, W. F. Cody. (40038-7)

THE WORLD’S GREAT SPEECHES (Fourth Enlarged Edition), Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, and Stephen J. McKenna. (40903-1)

THE MEDIEVAL VILLAGE, G. G. Coulton. (26002-X)

THE EXERCISE OF ARMES: All 117 Engravings from the Classic 17th-Century Military Manual, Jacob De Gheyn. (40442-0)

MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM, Frederick Douglass. (22457-0)

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BATTLES, David Eggenberger (ed.). (24913-1)

LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT, Adolf Erman. (22632-8)

GREAT NEWS PHOTOS AND THE STORIES BEHIND THEM, John Faber. (23667-6)

THE ARMOURER AND HIS CRAFT, Charles ffoulkes. (25851-3)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH, Mohandas K. Gandhi. (Available in U.S. only.) (24593-4)

WOODROW WILSON AND COLONEL HOUSE: A Personality Study, Alexander L. and Juliette L. George. (21144-4)

ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS, Emma Goldman. (22484-8)

LIVING MY LIFE, Emma Goldman. (22543-7, 22544-5) Two-volume set.

THE DESCRIPTION OF ENGLAND, William Harrison. (28275-9)

HEAVENS ON EARTH, Mark Holloway. (21593-8)

THE COMMON LAW, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (26746-6)

THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES, Johan Huizinga. (Available in U.S. only.) (40443-9)

THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE, H. Montgomery Hyde. (20216-X)

NOSTRADAMUS AND HIS PROPHECIES, Edgar Leoni. (41468-X)

THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, David Lowe (ed.). (23771-0)

THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER UPON HISTORY, 1660-1783, A. T. Mahan. (25509-3)

RENAISSANCE DIPLOMACY, Garrett Mattingly. (25570-0)

LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR, Henry Mayhew. (Vol. III: 21936-4)

THE PRIVATE MANUFACTURE OF ARMAMENTS, Phillip Noel-Baker. (22736-7)

THE COMMUNISTIC SOCIETIES OF THE UNITED STATES, Charles Nordhoff. (21580-6)

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF WEAPONS: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry, R. Ewart Oakeshott. (Available in U.S. only.) (29288-6)

THE BOOK OF THE CROSSBOW, Ralph Payne-Gallwey. (28720-3)

THE NAVAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR, Admiral David D. Porter. (40176-6)

THE EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER AND ITS CANYONS, J. W. Powell. (20094-9)

THE GEOGRAPHY, Claudius Ptolemy. (26896-9)

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES: STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS OF NEW YORK, Jacob Riis. (22012-5)

THE GREAT DIRIGIBLES, John Toland. (21397-8)

THE WANDERING SCHOLARS OF THE MIDDLE AGES, Helen Waddell. (41436-1)

ANCIENT EGYPT: ITS CULTURE AND HISTORY, J. E. Manchip White. (22548-8)

THE STORY OF THE TITANIC AS TOLD By ITS SURVIVORS, Jack Winocour (ed.). (20610-6)

Paperbound unless otherwise indicated. Available at your book dealer, online at www.doverpublications.com, or by writing to Dept. 23, Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, NY 11501. For current price information or for free catalogs (please indicate field of interest), write to Dover Publications or log on to www.doverpublications.com and see every Dover book in print. Each year Dover publishes over 500 books on fine art, music, crafts and needlework, antiques, languages, literature, children’s books, chess, cookery, nature, anthropology, science, mathematics, and other areas.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

EMMA GOLDMAN IN 1912

This Dover edition, first published in 1970, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 1931 by Alfred Knopf, Inc., New York.

9780486157948

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-105452

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Table of Contents

DOVER BOOKS ON HISTORY, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Title Page

Copyright Page

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER XLIV

CHAPTER XLV

CHAPTER XLVI

CHAPTER XLVII

CHAPTER XLVIII

CHAPTER XLIX

CHAPTER L

CHAPTER LI

CHAPTER LII

CHAPTER LIII

CHAPTER LIV

CHAPTER LV

CHAPTER LVI

INDEX

A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

CHAPTER XXXIX

ON MY RETURN EAST I LEARNED OF THE DEATH OF VOLTAIRINE DE Cleyre. Her end affected me very deeply; her whole life had been a continuous chain of suffering. Death had come after an operation for an abcess on the brain which had impaired her memory. A second operation, her friends had been informed, would have deprived her of the power of speech. Voltairine, always stoical in pain, preferred death. Her end, on June 19, was a great loss to our movement and to those who valued her strong personality and unusual talents.

In compliance with her last request Voltairine was buried in Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of our Chicago comrades. Their martyrdom had awakened Voltairine’s soul as it had so many other fine spirits. But few had so completely consecrated themselves to their cause as she, and fewer still had her genius to serve the ideal with singleness of purpose.

Arrived in Chicago, I went out to Waldheim with Annie Livshis, a dear common friend. Voltairine had made her home with Annie and Jake Livshis, and she had been tenderly nursed by our devoted comrades to the very last. I went to the cemetery with red carnations in my arms, while Annie carried red geraniums to be added to those she had already planted on the fresh grave. These were the only monument Voltairine had ever wanted.

Voltairine de Cleyre was born of a Quaker mother and a French father. The latter, in his youth an admirer of Voltaire, had named his daughter after the great philosopher. Later her father, having turned conservative, had placed her in a Catholic convent school, from which Voltairine subsequently escaped, rebelling against the authority of both. She was exceptionally gifted as poet, writer, and lecturer. She would have gained high position and renown had she been one to market her talents, but she would not accept even the simplest comforts for her activities in the various social movements. She shared the fate of the lowly whom she sought to teach and inspire. Revolutionary vestal, she lived as the poorest of the poor in dreary and wretched surroundings, taxing her body to the utmost, sustained only by her ideal.

Voltairine began her public career as a pacifist, and for many years she sternly set her face against revolutionary methods. But greater familiarity with European developments, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the rapid growth of capitalism in her own country, with all its resultant violence and injustice, and particularly the Mexican Revolution, subsequently changed her attitude. After an inner struggle, Voltairine’s intellectual integrity compelled her to admit her error frankly and to stand up bravely for the new vision. She did so in a number of essays and especially when she took up work for the Mexican Revolution, which she considered of most vital consequence. She devoted herself entirely to it, writing, lecturing, and collecting funds. In her the movement for liberty and humanism, especially the anarchist cause, lost one of its most gifted and tireless workers.

As I stood beside Voltairine’s grave, in the shadow of the monument dedicated to the memory of our comrades, I felt that another martyr had been added to them. She was the prototype of the sculptured Waldheim figure, beautiful in her spiritual defiance and filled with the revolt of a flaming ideal.

The year 1912, rich with varied experiences, closed with three important events: the appearance of Sasha’s book, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the eleventh of November, and the seventieth birthday of Peter Kropotkin.

Sasha was reading the final proofs of his Prison Memoirs. In renewed agony he was living through again every detail of the fourteen years, and experiencing harrowing doubt as to whether he had succeeded in making them real in his work. He kept revising until our bill for author’s corrections mounted to four hundred and fifty dollars. He was worried and exhausted, yet he hung on, going over his proofs again and again. The final chapters had to be taken from him almost by force to save him from the curse of his tormenting anxiety.

And now the book was ready at last. Verily, not a book, but a life suffered in the solitude of interminable prison days and nights, with all their pain and grief, their disillusionments, despair, and hope. Tears of joy sprang to my eyes as I held the precious volume in my hands. I felt it my triumph as well as Sasha’s — our fulfilment of twenty years, giving the promise of Sasha’s real resurrection from his prison nightmare, and my own release from the gnawing regret of not having shared his fate.

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist was widely reviewed and acclaimed a work of art and a deeply moving human document. A story of prison life by an author who spent fourteen years behind the bars gathering his material ought to have value as a human document, commented the New York Tribune. When the writer, furthermore, wields his pen in the manner of the Slavic realists and is compared by critics with such men as Dostoyevsky and Andreieff, his work must possess a tremendous fascination as well as a social value.

The literary critic of the New York Globe stated that nothing could exceed the uncanny spell exercised by this story. Berkman has succeeded in making you live his prison experiences with him, and his book is probably as complete a self-revelation as is humanly possible.

Such praise from the capitalist press helped to accentuate my disappointment over Jack London’s attitude towards Sasha’s book. Having been requested to write a preface for it, Jack had asked to see the manuscript. After he had read it, he wrote us in his impetuous way how tremendously he was impressed by it. But his preface turned out to be a lame apology for the fact that he, a socialist, was writing an introduction to the work of an anarchist. At the same time it was a condemnation of Sasha’s ideas. Jack London had not failed to see the human and the literary qualities of the book. What he wrote was even more laudatory than most of the reviews. But London insisted on using his preface for a long discussion of his own social theories versus anarchism. Inasmuch as Sasha’s book did not deal with theories, but with life, Jack’s attitude was absurd. His argument was summarized in his dictum: The man who can’t shoot straight can’t think straight. Evidently Jack assumed that the world’s best thinkers were also the best shots.

Sasha, who had gone to see Jack, pointed out that the great Danish critic Georg Brandes, though not an anarchist, had written a sympathetic preface to Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist without attempting to air his own theories. As artist and humanist Brandes had appreciated the big personality of Kropotkin.

Brandes was not writing in America, London replied. If he had been, he would most likely have displayed a different attitude.

Sasha understood; Jack London feared offending his publishers and incurring the censure of his party. The artist in Jack longed to soar, but the man in him kept his feet on the ground. His own best literary efforts, as he himself said, were buried in his trunk because his publishers wanted only works sure to bring financial results. And there were Glen Ellen and also other responsibilities to meet. Jack left no doubt on the matter, by remarking: I have a family to support. Perhaps he did not realize how self-condemnatory his justification was.

Sasha refused Jack’s preface. Instead we asked our friend Hutchins Hapgood to write an introduction to Prison Memoirs. He had never proclaimed himself an adherent of any ism, nor did he sign his letters: Yours for the revolution, as Jack London used to do. He was, however, enough of a literary rebel and social iconoclast to appreciate the spirit of Sasha’s book.

Jack London was not the only one who condemned while praising. There were others, even in our own ranks, among them S. Yanofsky, the editor of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme. He was one of the speakers at the banquet given to celebrate the appearance of Sasha’s book. He was the only one of the five hundred guests who interjected a discordant note into the otherwise beautifully harmonious evening. Yanofsky paid high tribute to Sasha’s Memoirs as the mature product of a mature mind, but he regretted the useless and futile act of a silly boy. I felt outraged by the man’s denouncing the Attentat on the occasion of the birth of Sasha’s book, a work conceived in that heroic moment of July 1892 and nourished by tears and blood throughout the dark and terrible years that followed. When I was called upon to speak, I turned upon the man who presumed to represent a great ideal and yet who was lacking in the least understanding of one so truly the idealist.

To you the impressionable youth of Alexander Berkman appears silly, I said, "and his Attentat futile. You are by no means the first to take such a stand towards the idealist whose humanity can tolerate no injustice and endure no wrong. From time immemorial the wise and practical have denounced every heroic spirit. Yet it has not been they who have influenced our lives. The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardour and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world. The one whose work we are here to celebrate happens to be such a futile visionary. His act was the protest of a sensitive spirit that would rather perish for his ideal than continue for a lifetime as a smug inhabitant of a complaisant and callous world. If our comrade did not perish, it was certainly not due to the mercy of those who had openly declared he should not survive his living grave. It was due entirely to the same traits that inspired Alexander Berkman’s act: his unwavering purpose, his indomitable will, and his faith in the ultimate triumph of his ideal. These elements have gone into the making of the ‘silly’ youth, into his act and into his martyrdom of fourteen years. It is these same elements that have inspired the creation of Prison Memoirs. Whatever greatness and humanity the book possesses, they are woven of these elements. There is no gap between the silly youth and the mature man. There is a continuous flow, a red thread that winds like a leitmotif throughout the entire life of Alexander Berkman."

November 11, 1887 — November 11, 1912! Twenty-five years, an infinitesimal fraction of time in the upward march of the race, but an eternity for him who dies many deaths in the course of his life. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chicago martyrdom intensified my feeling for the men I had never personally known, but who by their death had become the most decisive influence in my existence. The spirit of Parsons, Spies, Lingg, and their co-workers seemed to hover over me and give deeper meaning to the events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth.