Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman / Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life
Falk, Candace & Wexler, Alice
Djilas himself says, "The ruling Communist bureaucracy cannot even conceive of such far-reaching reforms." It is much easier for a military dictator than a Marxist-Leninist to relinquish power....
...Wexler too peeps into Goldman's head: "It was almost as if Goldman, who had felt deeply unloved and unwanted as a child, could not as an adult believe that she really deserved to be loved or that anyone could possibly love her," one typical specimen, betrays a professional restraint overcome by easy Freudianizing...
...When Berkman contemptuously dismissed Reitman, Goldman again flared up, attacking Berkman as "a zealot" who "judge[all human quality by your criterion of one's value to the Cause . . . . " Far from forcing him to surrender his desire to be an instrument of history, Berkman's jail term enabled him to continue brandishing wooden formulas that Goldman, with her vibrant life, had found sterile...
...But the letters Falk found made their relationship much more vivid...
...too often, Falk's text only loosely stitches together the letters she quotes...
...Feminists have been increasingly concerned with the links between private and public life, or, as they more often put it, between the personal and the political...
...What counts today...
...he loses his identity--admitting by his act that the ideology which shored up his privileged existence was a lie...
...Hers is a bizarre tale...
...That sense of betrayal can help explain the amazing zeal with which Goldman assaulted Soviet atrocities years before others on the left were willing to budge...
...Do they have seborrhea...
...From Yugoslavia, then, we can expect closer ties with Moscow...
...Astonishingly, though, she doesn't even begin to develop an account of what the links are between the personal and the political...
...The famous, it seems, are no different from you and me--only they have more fame...
...Yet Goldman, in her own way, prostrated herself before anarchism...
...That Goldman loved anarchism, that she was prone to sighing and swooning over its glorious beauty, is, I would argue, the key to understanding her career...
...Goldman learned that she could wound Reitman with a well-chosen word...
...What could possibly count as evidence for or against that claim...
...What counted as legitimate political activity in early twentieth-century America...
...Falk suggests that Living My Life isn't self-critical...
...Instead of freedom and spontaneity, Goldman found regimentation and consolidation of power in the demonic hands of Lenin...
...Such questions are manifestly different from those about toenails and seborrhea...
...But if a Marxist-Leninist relinquishes power, what can he become...
...One would think that historians were taught that objectivity precludes making arguments about the points of their stories...
...Military men can set up a mechanism for free elections and then retire to their old job as sotdiersutheir only worry the possibility of being arrested by the new civilian government...
...She may have tried consummating a relationship with a prostitute drawn to her, but lesbian relationships, she decided, were not for her...
...Journalists (real and so-called) aren't the only ones who can pander to our interest in these matters...
...Her beloved anarchism was also too pure ever to be implicated in any undesirable results...
...he organized her lecture tours, worked at Mother Earth, her journal, and was abundantly unfaithful to her...
...Do they fight with their spouses and have affairs...
...We still need a first-rate biography of Goldman...
...Is anarchism a defensible political theory...
...Even the grand old curmudgeon himself, H.U Mencken, surely no political ally, made a place for her in the American Mercury, and himself saluted her and Berkman in the twenties...
...Despite her book's titillating subtitle--the marketing ploy of some fiend at the publisher's?-Wexler disciplines her use of the correspondence...
...In 1975, Candace Falk, then a graduate student in history, stumbled on the sort of find every young historian dreams about: a collection of unpublished and apparently important letters from Emma Goldman to Ben Reitman, self-styled hobo, medical doctor, and sociologist...
...Magically in love again toward the very end of her life, Goldman was even told by her last lover that he was somehow compulsively attracted to overweight women...
...Goldman managed to equate the personal and the political in another and decidedly unattractive way...
...We pay them to read other people's mail, an enterprise placing not only them in a morally dubious posiDon Herzog is assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of the new book, Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory (Cornell University Press...
...In part, they revealed just how steamy a sexual relationship this was: Goldman assured Reitman that no other man had ever given her such pleasure, and the two exchanged concretely erotic fantasies in their longing absences...
...She says, for example, that after ~6 Berkman's suicide, Nothing short of an actual war could bring Emma out of the depths of mourning...
...Instead historians seek out figures who can profoundly illuminate their days-and, they often hope, our own...
...Both were talented and resourceful individuals bent on making themselves the tools of their own political ends...
...Falk has left no archival stone unturned in documenting that suffering...
...and no one is served by dragging out the story of human suffering until it is dull...
...If you are going to rush out and buy two books on Emma Goldman this should be one of them...
...They seek out figures like Emma Goldman, the notorious anarchist blamed for everything from labor strikes to the death of President McKinley, the indefatigable firebrand who pushed birth control in America, vainly argued with Lenin for freedom in fledgling Soviet Russia, and hauled off to Spain in her sixties to help the doomed anarchists of the civil war...
...It's not that her affairs reflected her anarchist principles...
...Still, Wexler's book is much better than Falk's, even if it could be more theoretical...
...When historians write biographies, though, they devote themselves to giving us more than a revealing glimpse...
...Historians too get a shot...
...The allure of the question is obvious enough: We ingest great buckets of journalistic slop in our burning desire to find out what celebrities are really like...
...And in part, the letters revealed just how wrenching an emotional relationship this was: Goldman was Reitman's "blue-eyed Mommy," his supplicant lover, his angry teacher and pleading comrade, and through it all she felt helpless in her morbid dependency on him...
...Was there perhaps something wrong with revolution...
...Lenin and his henchmen betrayed the revolution...
...If dissent really does get out of control, the Party will probably look to the Soviet Union for economic and possibly even military aid...
...Berkman, "his eyes full of reproach," stood nearby, "and I checked myself...
...Falk did not set out to write a racy gossip column...
...I danced no more that evening...
...He hoped to have "neither personal interests nor desires above the necessities of the Cause," frankly embracing the loss of personal identity the pose suggests: "My own individuality is entirely in the background...
...a skimpy three pages close the book with some remarkably vague observations...
...I suffer, I suffer like Hell," Goldman wrote to Reitman in 1910...
...As it stands now, the Yugoslavs are dependent on the Soviet Union for almost half their oil, and the Soviet Union is their biggest trading partner...
...in most histories, we can find a revealing vignette chosen to explain, say, just how FDR could brashly claim that he didn't care about the economic implications of Social Security...
...On his release, he saluted the readers of Mother Earth by insisting that he would still "devote all my energies and whatever ability I may have to that noblest of all causes of a new, regenerated and free humanity...
...She tried to get one old friend and lover to leave what she saw as his sterile, conventional marriage for her, but he refused...
...Advised one night at a party that "it did not behoove an agitator to dance," she flared up, urging that the anarchist goal of absolute freedom could not mean "the denial of life and joy...
...Anarchism, that ghostly unknown, became the counterpoint to all that was sordid and disappointing in the actual world...
...Do they pick their toenails in private...
...Her compressed...
...There is a serious reason for charting every contour of Goldman's movingly sad private life...
...In the meantime, we have Goldman's autobiography, a wonderfully incisive book...
...he was devastated by what he took to be her dreadfully uncharitable account of their relationship in her autobiography, and wrote a string of pathetically plaintive letters bemoaning his poor lot, or threatening with transparent bravado that she would ride into history on his coattails...
...None of Goldman's affairs was particularly happy...
...Not just Reitman, but all of Goldman's other lovers--barring some new find--crowd the pages of this book...
...Later, though, she would not stop dancing...
...But Falk fails the reader, and one could pile up incidental objections...
...Reproduced letters simply swallow this book...
...but Goldman tells a trenchantly selfcritical story, one bursting with implications about personal and political life...
...Feminists are fond of saying that the personal is political, by which they mean that our daily relations are appropriate subjects of political criticism...
...What would a genuinely autonomous human life look like...
...they need active narrators...
...Like other old lovers, the two exchanged sometimes maudlin, more often petty and manipulative, letters...
...And though his fourteen years in prison tempered his fiercely abstract devotion to violence, he remained a self-styled tool of history...
...they besmirched the precious name of her beloved anarchism...
...Goldman's life is not only enticingly colorful...
...The best opening to that story is provided by Alexander Berkman...
...3 LOVE, ANARCHY, AND EMMA GOLDMAN: A BIOGRAPHY Candace Falk/Holt, Rinehart & Winston/g25.00 EMMA GOLDMAN: AN INTIMATE LIFE Alice Wexler/Pant heon/$19.95 Don Herzog What is being famous like...
...Her book is over 600 pages long, with over 500 pages of text, and she explores in tireless detail every thrust, parry, and turn of this sadly tormenting relationship...
...She insisted that it was her "beautiful ideal," and kept it on a pedestal...
...We may be moved by idle curiosity--it's nice to have something to read on the supermarket checkout line---but there are less commendable motives at work here, too...
...But here the end is abrupt and unexpected, "almost as if" Wexler ran out of steam...
...Goldman's public life is too tidy in Falk's hands...
...Do they hate puppies...
...they didn't...
...It's rather that she fell in love with anarchism...
...popular as he may be, his life doesn't illuminate much of anything...
...So when Goldman writes that most of her public life was "spent in chasing windmills, in trying to present to the world an ideal which to me contains all the beauty and wonder there is in life," her stance seems not so different from Berkman's after all...
...They want to provide us something quite different from the lurid headline, something less gossipy, more revealing, more illuminating...
...Falk too readily repeats puzzling anarchist formulations without critically probing them...
...Goldman was Reitman's lover for some ten years...
...Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist commences with a review of his decision to shoot Henry Clay Frick and so jolt fearful workers into revolutionary action...
...properly handled, it could speak to many contemporary concerns...
...The Soviet Union would help, but of course for a price--at the very least extensive use of Yugoslav ports for the Soviet navy...
...Its author will have to engage Goldman's theories head-on, and ask for example just what it would mean for men and women to meet "big and strong and free," why her anarchism was so explicitly elitist, and whether the "free unfoldment" of children offers an attractive or even viable educational program...
...U] 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985...
...Instead, Goldman decided that "the Russian Revolution and the communist state are as far apart as the poles...
...her book, while only about half as long as Falk's, contains more...
...But her terrifically high hopes were frustrated...
...There is a problem with false advertising: Reitman is too prominent, and Alexander Berkman, Goldman's lifelong comrade, far too subordinate, for this to be simply a biography...
...Goldman's treatment of the relationship in her autobiography makes it clear that she always found Reitman irresistibly attractive and often found him a nuisance and a threat...
...Much of her autobiography is devoted to her struggle to figure out whether the USSR was heaven or hell, but here she THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 37 effortlessly turns against the new observations and arguments are far too regime in a mere nine pages...
...In her hands, the people surrounding Goldman are more richly alive, the swirl of events more densely textured, the life more believable...
...Goldman did eventually wrest free of Reitman's compelling hold, but he continues to surface in this book long after their breakup...
...Readers of all political stripes have found something compelling about Goldman's life...
...At a recent conference of high Party officials--Yugoslav Communists, it seems, are addicted to conferences--a leading Party spokesman said that "despite very severe criticism of and even pronounced dissatisfaction with the situation in the Party and in society in general, the value of our [1941-1945] revolution" has been confirmed...
...Falk takes too many psychological peeps into Goldman's head...
...aye, I am not conscious of any personality in matters pertaining to the Cause...
...According to one observer, the current economic crisis coupled with nationalist agitation may result in a mass uprising in the ndar future...
...The book is too long for what it is: Goldman's plight is first moving, then pathetic, then tiresome, and finally dull...
...Most Yugoslav Communists would prefer not to move closer to Moscow, but if they want to stay in power they have nowhere else to turn...
...Curiously, Wexler's tale comes to an end with Goldman's 1919 deportation to Russia...
...Finding out that great stars also suffer soothes any sullen resentment we might have about our anonymous lot...
...Given her politics, she found her deportation to the USSR exhilarating: She was, like so many joyous pilgrims before her, fleeing to the new world...
...Wexler has some powerful insights, but she is oddly guarded about developing and defending them...
...Goldman was initially fired by Berkman's brand of radicalism, but she quickly came to distance herself...
...Fights, reconciliations, brief and elusive periods of harmony, and more fights: The cycle is relentless...
...That stance, i need hardly note, is not unique to leftists...
...It may be only a story, but it makes a much better story than Falk's book does...
...The other is Goldman's Living My Life, still, as I suppose all her devotees and commentators would agree, the best guide to her life--and theoretically the most provocative...
...What are the travails of a spurned and detested radical...
...Wexler's prose is economical and precise...
...Falk wants to puzzle over the apparent gap between a woman who publicly insisted on free love and human autonomy, but who privately and despairingly submitted to a series of destructive relationships...
...yet it is, in a phrase she adopted from Nietzsche, "human, all too human...
...So historians do not publish biographies of the likes of Michael Jackson...
...They're no better off than we are, after all...
...All these flaws would be excusable if Falk had some argument to make...
...tion...
...Instead she has presented a lengthy and bleak account of one woman's suffering...
...Typically, historians provide a quick glimpse of the personalities and then move back to their somber narratives...
...Alice Wexler's biography is also flawed...
...Do they worry about dying...
...Their interest explains why we have two new biographies of Goldman: Candace Falk's Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography, and Alice Wexler's Emma Goldmarc An intimate Life...
...revolution was to usher in anarchism, and so it had to be good...
...Goldman, in a word, was in love with anarchism: That is the implicit point of her autobiography...
...No doubt it is possible to write a good biography without covering the whole life: Albert Jay Nock's jefferson is perfectly serviceable, and Nock diligently avoided dwelling on anything we already knew about Jefferson...
...Moreover, he not only loses power...
...And its author will need to develop an argument about the significance of her life...
...Goldman's refusal to offer any blueprints of an anarchist society--we ought not "fetter the future," she held, and besides we are so mystified that "our most vivid imagination can not foresee the potentialities of a race set free from external restraints"--gave anarchism all the extra titillation of mystery...
...One's loved one is always good...
...And she too repeats anarchist slogans and ideas as though they were crystal clear...
...The inability of the Party to move towards genuine democratization bodes ill for Yugoslavia's future...
...Apparently without I I III use your American l.ihra~' Association library irony or detachment, Berkman writes" "Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause...
...It's better too, for that matter, than Richard Drinnon's 1961 biography of Goldman, Rebel in Paradise...
...These letters became the centerpiece of Falk's study of Goldman...
...Stories, though, don't tell themselves...
...Serious people read biographies, and not just because they'd be embarrassed to be caught with some sleazy tabloid...
...Goldman's anarchist friends endured Reitm~in, some making little secret of their contempt for him...
...And if they are to be illuminating, they need more of a structure than simple chronology offers...
...By proceeding this way, Falk hasn't deepened our insight into any theoretical question surrounding anarchism or feminism...
...For the melancholy truth is that Communist regimes can only be changed--changed significantly, that is--through revolution...
Vol. 18 • August 1985 • No. 8
