All-American Anarchism

...But given her inclination to sexual as well as political romanticism, it was inevitable that something with a title like Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman should finally appear...

...She has not given us a complete life, instead stopping short at her subject's deportation from the United States in 1919 and thus omitting some of the sadder—and also more interesting—areas of Emma's experience, notably the disillusioning stay in revolutionary Russia...

...Despite this, sex enslaved her as much as it liberated her, and while Candace Falk's offering is less exploitative-ly sensational than its title might suggest it is saddening to read...

...Perhaps this is the first installment of a longer effort, but we are not told so...

...Emma was a woman of great courage, great devotion to her cause and her friends, great eloquence, and great energy, butall these virtues were intertwined with a consuming vanity...

...Indeed, impersonality would have been repugnant to Emma's principles, just as it was foreign to her nature...

...She was not an original mind...

...It is not easy to explain this special interest in Emma Goldman...

...Her verbose autobiography, Living My Life, was recently republished...

...She moved completely out of the immigrant anarchist tradition into a line of radical reform that was wholly " in the American grain," and her 1919 expulsion was a symbolic attempt by conservative America to cast out its rebellious other self...

...The beneficiaries of this reawakening have been not only the stars of the past, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and Pierre Proud-hon, but also lesser-known figures, such as Buenaventura Durutti, Gustav Land-auer and Louise Michel...

...Her whole outlook centered around the cultivation of personality, a fact her anarchist critics were not slow to reprove...

...Her style was no better than florid...

...Personal magnetism tended to disguise this in the flesh, yet it emerges clearly when you read the records of her public and private activity at a distance, particularly the most intimate of them, her letters...

...Her output is a hodgepodge of the ideas of Kropotkin, Max Stirner, Ibsen and other sources...

...Wexler's Emma is a politically firm and defiant person who privately is very much in need of romance...

...Numerous studies have chronicled the movement, reinterpreted its doctrine and retrieved the memory of its thinkers and activists from the oblivion it was consigned to between World War I and the 1950s...

...Nonetheless, Wexler helps us to understand Emma in the context of her anarchist milieu, and to read anarchist history through her activities...

...She was too individualistic to be an organizational leader, even in the limited sense that this was possible among anarchists...

...One comes to feel a rising sympathy toward Reitman, often portrayed—particularly by anarchists—as the unworthy bum the magnificent Emma wasted her love on...

...All the rest, including the volumes under review, first appeared in the United States...

...Wexler's title is doubly misleading, though...

...Candace Falk's half-willing rehabilitation of Reitman is perhaps the most interesting aspect of her book...

...Her important lecture tours brought together civil libertarians, feminists, free speech fighters, advocates of birth control, devotees of modern drama, and progressive writers ranging from Theodore Dreiser to Eugene O'Neill and Margaret Anderson—all of whom were her friends and admirers...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock The last quarter century has seen an extraordinary revival of interest in anarchism...

...To me her outer self is more relevant and revealing...

...A weak, dependent woman—tortured by her feelings, mawkishly self-indulgent and startlingly different from the challenging public orator known to the world—appears in the letters to Ben and the later objects of her passion...

...Alice Wexler and Candace Falk help explain why...

...It is, I think, an appreciation of Emma's significance in the general American progressive scene that has led to the recent profusion of books by and about her, and Wexler has caught this side of her career very well...

...In the 1890s and the early part of the present century, we learn, the forces Emma represented—and she herself even more— catalyzed the American Left...

...No anarchist theoretician or militant has received more attention than Emma Goldman, though...

...Her overt and practical search for sexual freedom was in fact an exception in the moralistic and rather puritanical anarchist hierarchy...

...in addition, there have been two collections of letters and speeches, to say nothing of at least seven books about her—one of them brought out in Bombay and a second in Madrid...

...never did she write "prose like a window pane," for her own voice intruded...

...Secondly, notwithstanding Wexler's use of hitherto unprinted personal correspondence, her study is far less "intimate" than Candace Falk's, since she is primarily concerned with delineating Emma Goldman's position in the anarchist and the wider radical ferment of the day...

...She has written the best biography to date, albeit incomplete, and I hope will eventually finish the story...

...Still, writers and readers continue to be drawn, almost half a century after her death, by the image of a driven, divided dynamo...

...She also supplements Alice Wexler by pursuing the political theme to the tragic exile...

...He seems to have been an amiable homme moyen sensuel: He was vain, a bit vulgar in his behavior, no anarchist theoretician, yet a decent chap willing to endure a good deal for a cause he did not fully believe in and for a lover he was loyal to if not conventionally faithful...

...Falk concentrates largely on Emma's powerful attachment to Ben Reitman, the hobo doctor who awakened her physically but always managed to evade her attempts to possess him...