AN AUTUMNAL LOVE OF EMMA GOLDMAN

...Forbidden to enter the U.S., she reminded him "how foolish it would be for either of us to entertain much hope of coming closer than we have been so far...

...She blamed him for the fact that it all ended badly: "I can now understand it was largely due to your business and schemes obsession which had so jarred on my nerves...

...England was better, for she was allowed to lecture on Ibsen and other dramatic rabble-rousers, but her opposition to the Bolsheviks alienated many British radicals...

...She taunted him: "Has my Leon loved me 25 years only because I seemed unattainable...

...Love her, take care of her...

...Readmission to the U.S...

...After all, she had rejected a similar proposal...

...As a thinker attuned to the exploitation of women, she must have understood what it meant to call herself anarchism's wife...

...She asked, "What will come of our autumnal love, a love of greater sweep and elemental force than any love of spring...

...As I have already written you, I always carried you in my heart as a dear comrade, a loving friend...

...They met in 1897 when anarchism was still alive in immigrant America and this Albany shopkeeper was one of the "young enthusiastic comrades" eager to aid the cause...

...He appears only twice, as her "romantic admirer" during the 1915 speaking tour, and in 1919 as "my troubadour of many years" who sent a pink rambler rose plant to the Missouri Penitentiary where she was serving time for conspiring to violate the Draft Act...

...His energy was remarkable, but Goldman took it for granted, treating him like a foot soldier in the anarchist ranks, upbraiding him occasionally...

...GOLDMAN NEEDED a comrade as well as a lover, and Maimed was that, too...

...Her cry of liberty was not an abstract ideal for him, and when she called him a beautiful soul trapped by the daily grind of moneymaking and family chores, he acted...

...You'll have to share me with the platform, it is your only rival," she warned Leon, but when he would come to visit, she promised, "for 1 whole week I will be a strict monogamist...

...Dearest Leon, life is strange and cruel [she wrote him in '34...

...GIVEN THE IMPORTANCE of Maimed in Goldman's life, it's curious that she is so silent about him in her memoirs...

...She came to Leon with the same desires, even the same veiled, Victorian love talk she had shared with Ben: "1 am longing for the fountain of life, I want to drink from it to the last drop...

...What about their earlier search for an apartment...

...One in my desperate position can not be satisfied only with the knowledge that friends think of one, one must have the living contact or die...

...He is her "savage boy," "my wild boy...

...Her private tone is reminiscent of sentimental novels of the Romantic era...

...If he had a troublesome spouse, she had a difficult husband of sorts...

...Oh my lover, my own child, every nerve in me crys [sic] out for you," she exclaimed...

...But the idea of you being my father is even more ridiculous," she wrote him in '15...

...And what career soldier brings a spouse to the world's battlefields...

...Should the worst come to the worst, and I am prevented from seeing you again before I am deported," she wrote Maimed, "I know we will meet in our beloved Matushka [dear mother], Russia...

...Do you think it is a test of a great love if a man goes without sexual gratification for 3 weeks...

...Faithful he remained, to her and her version of the creed...

...If Maimed lacked Goldman's relentless dedication to principles, he had a quality she lacked: trusting optimism, which read victory in anarchism's decline...

...If Emma's views seem less radical now, he told an Albany newspaper, it's because the world has changed, not she...

...was impossible, lectures in Canada could not support her...

...I have not heard from a living soul in such a warm, beautiful tone as your letter carried to me...

...So in 1926 she decided to try a Canadian lecture tour...

...He was not discouraged when Goldman permitted to return to the States for a brief visit in '34—was greeted as a curiosity from the past...

...often think the price is far beyond the reward or even satisfaction one derives from complete consecration to the ideal...

...Surely it was with pride and devotion that he brought her to Albany to lecture, as he had done years before...

...Maimed was Goldman's twilight love, not just because their sexual relationship began when she was 57 and he 45, but because it rose as anarchism declined, the personal substituting for the political...

...I am so glad that my visit awakened your old spirit which for so long had been paralysed [sic] by the humdrum of business," she wrote him...

...At least my life always pulls me away when I long most for warmth and affection...

...She begged to be told she was still needed, loved...

...In her autobiography Living My Life Goldman projected the image of the tough, independent woman she wanted to be: the person who looked forward to prison as a place to rest and catch up on reading...

...But there is one star on the horizon, it is my newly born love for you...

...In the autumn of anarchism, Goldman was drawn to a man who could offer her some consolation, but perhaps she unconsciously chose one who would not make a permanent home with her...

...Her warmth took the form of advice...

...But never did I think of you in any other sense until the week you were here...

...It was like the old, old days when you were always so responsive and so devoted...

...Upon arriving in Montreal she saw that Yiddish and English anarchist meetings were poorly attended...

...And once, "Your Maidele who is your mother...

...In Leon she had more than a lover and comrade, she had a son...

...It is a luxury, she admitted, but "I have always found that only extravagant and 'crazy' people know the meaning and mystery of life and love...

...There are days when I feel about our love as I feel about our movement, both are too beautiful to take root in an ugly world," she despaired...

...Since spontaneity was a cornerstone of the anarchist creed, Goldman couldn't admit she had planned the tryst well...

...Exiled from America, she was inactive, that is, by her standards...

...In November she wrote Maimed from Montreal that she had gotten an apartment only for their reunion...

...She told Maimed that the change in her attitude was irrational, as love and lust are: "miracles take their own time and place when they descend on you and then all is blotted out...

...In Europe, the authorities deprived her of her natural medium, public speaking, and she was forced to engage in the solitary occupation of writing...

...The discovery of her letters by Malmed's wife gave Goldman an opportunity to vent deep rage...

...But few things that involved Red Emma escaped the U.S...

...though cannot respond to you the way you feel for me, you are nevertheless very very precious to me...

...When he had suggested that she accept his money and remain in Canada so he could visit her often, she had dismissed the idea: "I have been independent all my life...

...The story in these letters is not told in Living My Life...

...She signed her letters "Your Maidele," Yiddish for "little girl...

...She had had a following...

...Her pain expressed itself as anger...

...The end was in sight...

...Verily ideals are hard masters...

...He did not live up to her ideal of liberty he carried his family and financial anxieties with him...

...By '26 it was no longer a joke: "I feel like Sarah to whom a son came in old age...

...She blamed him for treating her like an institution, not a person...

...The lack of anarchists also distressed her...

...I am neither jealous nor envious, but it does seem strange to me that with all your great love you are so terrorized by your `home.' " Of course, she was both jealous and envious, but how hard it was for an ideological opponent of those emotions to admit to them...

...now at least she had a follower...

...Indeed, the solicitude with which he saved her letters suggests historical as well as romantic interest, but it must have been hard to forget that one's "Maidele" was the infamous Emma Goldman, especially when she found it so difficult to shed her public role...

...it was present in Emma's relationship to Leon early on...

...The high cost of this love was one reason it did not figure in Emma's memoirs...

...she had known much longer abstinence...

...In November 1920 Goldman sent Maimed a note from Petrograd, "I still feel that I know Russia too little for any profound estimate of what is going on in the country...

...I joked when I said I want to be your mother...

...Not because you are willing to assist me when I ask your help, but because of the spirit which permeates your letter...

...One pays so high for them...

...Galas to raise funds for Mother Earth lost money...

...You are in love with your love for me...

...Her reputation as a sexually liberated woman was secured by Doctorow's Ragtime, and Maureen Stapleton sold her in Reds as an early, prescient critic of the Soviet state...

...She was disturbed at the rise of communism and dismayed that her comrades in Canada knew and cared so little about her or her work...

...I told you at the depot you are in my heart for the rest of my life...

...honesty was a central quality of her public persona—but she set limits on it...

...Although her discomfort with sexuality in older women dates her, she was avant-garde enough to act despite inhibitions, and when she returned to Toronto in 1934, she became involved with another young admirer, Frank Heiner...

...For some in the women's movement, she's almost a cult figure...

...She told Leon she didn't write of their Canadian trysts because she didn't want to upset his wife, but undoubtedly she was guarding herself against scandal and sparing her own feelings as well...

...381 Love was not always compatible with work...

...However, the Russian Revolution picked up spirits and soon her trial for antidraft agitation overshadowed other concerns...

...I could not eredicate [sic] it if I tried...

...As a public figure she had to be especially careful, she chided him...

...To Maimed she wrote, "He helped to give me the most perfect weeks I have had in many years...

...In '39, back in Canada, she wrote to Leon, "The Anarchists here [in Canada] are as dead as a doornail," but that only made her work harder to save four Italians who were being tried for the possession of subversive literature...

...Enter Reds...

...She was relieved, she said, when she heard he suffered losses in the stockmarket crash because that might free him from his commercial chains...

...But for a woman who advocated freedom, Goldman was burdened and, ironically, anarchism was her trap: "Even in the work I am doing I find it sapping out all my energies and haven't the time to commune with myself...

...Later she con380 fessed she had not wanted to believe what the secret police was doing...

...She screamed at being caught up in a petty marital battle that might become a newspaper scandal...

...Her appearance reminds us that anarchism is a quintessentially 19th-century philosophy—in the age of Wagner it relied on the beneficent power of the unfettered individual...

...When he hesitated, her tone became harsh...

...The idea of his being a father to her is also not ridiculous now...

...No, he had never received them...

...I wish to thank Ian Ballantine and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College for permission to quote from unpublished material by Emma Goldman...

...One of her problems was that the movement to which she was married was ailing...

...In '21 she fled and prepared articles critical of the Soviet regime for the New York World...

...Well, it is too late to lament that, since our ideal and the need to serve it is so much in my blood...

...It was some of the better rhetoric of a professional propagandist who was arguing, not empathizing though she could have identified with the fear of boredom, of being cut off from friends and family, which Leon must have felt on considering emigration...

...She was especially needy at this time, for she knew before she set sail that "there is no movement in America now...

...Her next letter opens with "My beloved...

...Later she described the transition: "something elemental broke loose in my soul, eraced [sic] all that went before and kindled a tire and wild passion I have not known in years...

...The maternal theme was prominent in Goldman's former love affairs, as Alice Wexler argues in her forthcoming book, Emma Goldman: A Radical in America...

...She tempted him with erotic visions of their life together, describing "dreams about mad delights I want to give you in every nerve and the fountain of life would rise to the very sky...

...I never had the devotion which would delight in doing things for me, for me the woman and not merely the public person," she said poignantly...

...American citizenship was denied him—he too paid for anarchist beliefs, and for this romance...

...What did she want to hide...

...When he didn't contribute to the fund for her autobiography, she wrote him, "It is funny, the two men who have not responded are the men who have been most in my life, Ben Reitman and Leon Maimed...

...In '36, predictably enough, she was in Barcelona with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War...

...But if letters were not enough for him, they did not fulfill her either...

...But the film Anarchism in America contains a 1934 newsreel with a different Emma: a Victorian, but without a corset...

...Yet what kept him going was attraction to this severe, dynamic woman as much as devotion to an ideology...

...She was not impressed by Leon's faithfulness to her during her trip to Toronto...

...She died of a stroke in 1940, the eternal warrior...

...She suggested that he end the constant conflicts with his wife by moving out...

...Her friendliness to Leon was partially based on identification with his situation...

...Soon came the sexual reproaches ("With you the physical response is nothing at all when you care for a person...

...Did Leon too reproach her for these reasons, is that why he hadn't answered her letters, she inquired from Berlin...

...An involvement in a banal triangle, her dependence on a married, provincial businessman, one Leon Maimed, a curly-haired RussianJewish emigre 12 years her junior...

...I just could not do it...

...Even during the general strike I could find no one who would help me with a manifesto," she complained...

...One cannot serve two Gods, she reminded him, and "I am wedded to a God that holds me tight and will not let me go...

...What she wanted was for Maimed to leave his business (now real estate), wife and children, and to come with her to Europe to help her fill the void she faced there...

...She cajoled, imploring him to throw off his financial obligations, "the terrible vulgarity that pierces your sensitive spirit...

...A box of Goldman's letters recently given to Radcliffe College confirms that anarchism's last international spokeswoman, if avant-garde, was not quite "modern...

...The next day she concluded, "Under such conditions a great love cannot thrive...

...In the book she called him Leon Bass so as not to hurt his application for citizenship...

...382 THE REUNION between Leon and Emma in '34 was not a happy one...

...The frankness of her memoirs was partly a pose...

...Your letter was like a ray of light from a dark sky...

...He joined Goldman and her lover Ben Reitman on a crosscountry lecture tour in 1915, over the protests of his wife...

...It was then that Emma confronted this young man's ardor: in Los Angeles, he asked, and she refused...

...AT THIS POINT BEGAN what was perhaps Emma Goldman's hardest period...

...On her earlier trip across North America, there had been Reitman, but this time she had no constant companion...

...What was he to do on the continent...

...With the split in libertarian ranks caused by the defection of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin to the Allied war effort, her opposition to World War I as an imperialist venture became more controversial...

...Later, turning to him for money, she wrote, "I do hope, dear Leon, you'll not think I am taking advantage of your affections...

...they alienated both those anarchists who remained sanguine about bolshevism and those who disapproved of publishing in the mainstream press...

...Finally he fell into the class of former lovers...

...In a measure you and I are in the same misery, you have been tied by a store, I by the office, it's time we both got free," she observed...

...Lonely in Berlin in '23, she responded with new passion to Leon's old affection...

...In the first decade of the new century, she had him distribute her journal Mother Earth and arrange her lectures in upstate New York which he did while running a deli with his wife, a woman with no anarchist sympathies and considerable jealousy about his relationship with Red Emma...

...she asked, pointedly...

...Goldman squelched any idea of a continuation of the romance upon her return to Canada, for by then she'd be sixty, "conscious of my age and the ever present thought that I am likely to make a fool of myself...

...By late March, however, she asserted, "I find that business on your side and propaganda struggle on mine do not tend to keep up the fires of love, they sap one out completely...

...Even if he could afford to keep her, which she doubted, "I cannot imagine anything more humiliating and insulting...

...The Knickerbocker Press reported innocently, "Among the committee members of the Albany Radical Club, sponsoring the event, was Leon Maimed, Broadway store proprietor, who has been a friend of Miss Goldman for the last three decades...

...In fact it seems to be easy even if you do not care for the woman much"), familiar signals of the death of an affair...

...In February 1928 she set off for France...

...Not with me," she stated accusingly...

...government and Maimed was reminded of his gift in naturalization court...

...Yes, my heart is sad and heavy, the future blacker than ever...