Memoirs from Prison
Goodman, Paul
This article will appear as the Introduction to an edition of Alexander Berkman'sPrison Memoirs of an Anarchist, to be published this fall by Schocken Books, Inc. THE EXTRAORDINARY APPALLING...
...No novelist of the period could have accomplished it, but Berkman was able to remember a style from the high Romantic period of Robert Schumann and E. T. A. Hoffman, onrushing impetuosity luridly lit by flashes of childhood and early adolescent traumas from the unconscious, leading to an explosive act...
...Given any resources of physical health, moral conviction, or intellectual alertness, they make do in a shaking bad environment, without being personally destroyed...
...Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October...
...He does not mention any scenes of sexual brutality, however, though this also would be the nature of the case where men are not free...
...Jim Peck, who does not tend to poetry and rapture, seems in his prison to be enraptured by windows: "I used to go and gaze eagerly at the valley below and the hills beyond" or "After the sun dropped behind the prison building we waited for the orange and pink clouds to fade into gray...
...In one important respect, I think there is a notable difference between our contemporaries and the prison writers of a few generations back...
...For instance, unlike fifty years ago when it was common, there is almost never a plank in a radical platform on the subject of prisons at all...
...Far from protecting society, they create more and more serious crimes...
...It is, rather, the philosophical discoverythat wherever one is is a sample of all the reality that there is...
...People are so swamped by the conditions of modem life that they do not really believe that these evils are human artifacts and could be otherwise...
...His telling of the sexual scenes is especially notable...
...The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people...
...I think we have NOTEBOOK to say four different and contradictory things: If people had followed Berkman's way, there would be a better world...
...But the young man, sentenced to 14 years, is pacing the floor in agitation over the conversation with his fellow prisoners...
...The fact that they did not, and presumably could not, follow it, means that he was wrongheaded, he suffered from ideas...
...How is this...
...The tension of the day would ease as we stood by our windows...
...The bouncy resiliency is most exhibited, in this genre, when there is a project of escape, however far-fetched...
...Avrich, p. 233...
...I wonder whether, to a frank glance, the routine of most of us in New York does not seem very like jail, some with privileges, some in solitary...
...My guess is that such writing is, for its author, a catharsis of pity and fear, and he is afterwards in the world differently...
...His embarassed conversations are quite wonderful...
...The breath of yester day is dooming millions to death...
...the shadow of today hangs like a pall over the country...
...We drain men and women of the best that is in them, and then stand quietly by and see them end their last days in destitution and loneliness...
...it is so...
...it is rare that they are outraged or censorious like the do-good investigators...
...To my surprise, Coretta King did not ask for amnesty for Ray...
...Because of him, there is more value in the world than there would be otherwise...
...Did he find the tranquility, from time to time, in jail...
...In the web of history, Berkman's sacrifice is a bright one in the millions of strands...
...II "OFTEN I think that we revolutionists are like the capitalist system...
...B. ROBERTS t/E...
...We have been seeing political action in military jails...
...Rather, the jails, like the high schools, like the swollen cities, like the polluted rivers, like the congested traffic, like the TV, like slow or quick violence, are taken for granted as the nature of things...
...In our times, however, even thoughtful pacifists and libertarian socialists hardly mention the abolition of jails...
...THE EXTRAORDINARY APPALLING BEGINNING Of this extraordinary book—I can't conceive of any other way to make credible the attentat on Frick by the compassionate, sensitive, and intellectual young man, and the author succeeds in making it totally credible...
...Dictatorship is trampling the masses under foot...
...And our century, and maybe especially the coming generation, is producing more and more examples...
...And when in daily life people are harried, circumscribed, bored, and threatened anyway, the difference tends to diminish between being out of jail and in jail...
...Most of the prison writers treat homo sexuality with varying degrees of tolerance or NOTEBOOK matter-of-factness...
...Activists who like to devise obstructive tactics find also in prison the means for fun and games—in recent literature, this activity seems to take the place of the older intricate schemes of escape, which would tend to confirm my hunch that they judge inside and outside as fairly equivalent aspects of the same System...
...Politically, to be sure, there is also another side to the story...
...It was the sad time when the surviving Russian anarchists, those who had not been slaughtered or imprisoned, were scattered in exile...
...But I doubt that our present radicals really are this stupid...
...I have seen a sign at a demonstration, "Free Such and Such...
...Debs said, "So long as one person is in prison, I am not free...
...A few years before, he had again been arrested in New York for violating the draft law...
...how cravenly small...
...The high pitch of this rhetoric—it was written for himself, not for publication—is not exaggerated, considering the magnitude of the events and the truth of his statements...
...Certainly Berkman or Debs would not have accepted such a notion of revolution...
...A cowardly overgrown boy, terrified at tomorrow's punishment for the prank he has played...
...I have decided to leave Russia...
...A single exception was Dave McReynolds, of the War Resisters League, running for Congress in 1968...
...Ten steps from one corner to another is already something," says Kropotkin...
...He passes a sleepless night...
...Being in prison is one of the conditions that most need fellow-feeling, but it is one of the worst conditions for it...
...Naturally, those who survive to write memoirs have already proved they have survivability...
...It puts the act beyond moral approval or condemnation...
...It is the promise that permits man to riseabove the specter of his own fallability andhas contributed so much to the heritage ofour great nation...
...and neither does the reader, for it is told with such frankness and irony...
...B. ROBERTS Major GeneralCommanding...
...Remarkably for his time, he seems to make no distinction at all in his mind between "political prisoners" and "common criminals," though in their paranoid treatment of him, the authorities continually keep making the distinction—to his disadvantage (their panic about his ideology is very American...
...He was deported from the United States in 1919...
...They cause immense unnecessary suffering, and the effect on the warders also is humanly disastrous...
...What to do with hard cases is a real question, but it is better to do nothing at all than to continue what does more harm than good...
...The need to make sense is the craving for freedom...
...In contemporary social-psychology, needless to say, we understandthat they are all political prisoners, which Berkman, as an anarchist, knew...
...I suspect that the truth is more terrible...
...It was Emma Goldman, the Girl in Berkman's book, who made this remark in 1933, a couple of years before Berkman killed himself...
...Their manner of pitying condescension is aggravating...
...In Berkman's book, when the escape plot begins, the abrupt reversal of the prose is almost comic, as if years of repression and dejection had had no effect at all...
...if I repeat them one hundred fifty times I shall have walked a verst...
...Not because the outside world is a prison, but because one is oneself not all there...
...This knowledge and your noble causecan sustain you in your most trying moments...
...For there is no collapse of spirit, but just a somber return to his more profound humane concerns that have also begun to make sense...
...In the best cases, like his, what seems to occur over the weeks and months and years is just the opposite of the dreary sentiment that I referred to above, that the outside world is nearly as much of a prison as the prison...
...It is how human beings are made of rubber and bounce...
...Prison literature is an old genre among human beings...
...The events of the day have stirred him to the very depths...
...This is why the writers write...
...but this does not apply if there is no state of nature...
...And apparently it is all right for Cuba to keep enemies of the Revolution in cages...
...As a writer, he obviously does not know whether to laugh or to cry at his own naivete...
...Now here on Easter in the year of ourLord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy wefind ourselves thousands of miles from our homeland engaged in a struggle to assist anation which has taken as its hallmark the worth of the individual and the dignity ofhis soul...
...I salute you on thisday and join you in the common hope that your faith will soon be realized...
...And writing it down was an overflow of strong feelings recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth defined poetry...
...One by one the embers of hope have died out...
...They write well, these pacifists, blacks, anarchists, free speakers, fighters for justice, whether in corporate liberal, fascist, or socialist countries...
...In prison, fork, shoelace, radiator-pipe, and clove of nutmeg become important objects of study and use...
...In Chapter Six he describes his dismay at the cowardice, venality, and ignorance of their own interests, of his fellow prisoners, the Negro, the Thief, and—alas!—the noble Homestead Workman...
...Black Panthers demand the right for black juries to NOTEBOOK put black people in black jails...
...And the last episode of prison books is getting out, when it turns outthat after all one has not come back to freedom...
...its spirit cries in the wilderness...
...In the older theology, we are all common criminals...
...Why can't they understand the motives that prompted his act...
...s/E...
...And human beings do not know any better process than this blundering and tormented process of history...
...The regimes of the world evidently cannot put up with some beautiful human spirits...
...One possible explanation is that our militants are so stupid that they take prison for an acceptable institution for their enemies...
...I do not know any novels of sixty years ago to equal them...
...the noble cause has been kept alive for another generation...
...The considerable gains of labor in the United States were due to such acts and lives, although the outcome toward a worthy society has been far short of, in some ways counter to, what he wanted...
...You can take great pride in your progress and know in your hearts that thisday denotes the fact that Christ's ownstruggle to obliterate evil in the world continues in your actions...
...It is a vivid poem of adolescent infatuation, seeking to repair the self and be a Man, as he says...
...The Revolution is dead...
...Men returned from the front lines do the same...
...But Berkman alone unsophisticatedly goes to the essence, the longing, being in love, and love, that would inevitably occur...
...Berkman's story, where the far-fetched plot to escape falls through, is especially instructive...
...In my opinion, the flood of excitement occurs just because there is a possibility of doing something that makes a modicum of sense, instead of the utter waste and endless senselessness in which one has been doing time, whether in jail or under a tyranny...
...His hero of yesterday, the hero of the glorious struggle of the People—how contemptible he has proved himself...
...Except in a few cases, jails do not reform...
...Political prisoners engage in political actions relevant to the local circumstances, sabotage, petitions, boycotts, hunger strikes, about segregation, maltreatment, lousy food...
...Men like Kropotkin, Berkman, and Debs were quite certain, both by their philosophy and the evidence of their senses, that the concept of punishment is worthless and the jails must be simply abolished...
...Yet the same disappointment is already fully explicit in the early days of the Prison Memoirs...
...In the winter of '67 and the spring of '68 we saw it among the youth of Czechoslovakia...
...But it is so whenever there is sudden hope, however far-fetched...
...Predictably, as an anarchist and a poet, Berkman devotes most of his pages to the characters and stories of men, his fellows: their loyalty and fortitude, their pettiness and duplicity, the brutality of the powerful, the suffering of the powerless...
...It is a useless question whether or not it is a good or adequate sample...
...Easter and the promise ofimmortality was exemplified by the resurrection of Jesus Christ nearly 2000 yearsago...
...But they were not...
...Big isolated jails do not even provide public revenge, and putting trouble out of sight heightens social anxiety rather than allays it...
...Bitterness and anger against the Homestead striker fill his heart...
...By the Workers' State that they had done much to bring into power...
...Most of them had been born since 1947 when the Russians took over, and on any sociological theory whatever, they should have been brainwashed and internally cowed, rather than just bowing to the inevitable and biding their time...
...III BUT THE MOST IMPRESSIVE news of Berkman's, as of other prison books, is not blundering and tormented at all...
...The Bastille is the essence of what is rotten and must be stormed first...
...No consciousness of the great mission of his class, no proud realization of the part he himself had acted in the noble struggle...
...Put District Attorney X. in jail...
...And the Girl is no longer all there...
...Hobbes had a salutary doctrine that a prisoner has a moral duty to escape, by force or fraud, and return to the "state of nature...
...I quote it from Paul Avrich's The Russian Anarchists...
...They always hinder rehabilitation...
...Gray are the passing days," wrote Berkman in his diary, after Lenin and Trotsky's slaughter of the libertarian sailors at Kronstadt in 1921 —after be and Emma Goldman had vainly tried to mediate...
...If every citizen would make occasional visits to prisons and mass insaneasylums, I think that, corrupt as we are, these institutions would not endure...
...DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY HEADQUARTERS 1ST CAVALRY DIVISION (AIRMOBILE) OFFICE OF THE GENERAL APO San Francisco 96490 EASTER MESSAGE EASTER is especially meaningful here inVietnam where every day on the battlefieldsyou come face-to-face with the realities oflife and death...
Vol. 17 • July 1970 • No. 4
