Living My Life - Emma Goldman [173]
Our friends in Portland begged us not to proceed to Seattle. Our comrades in Seattle, anxious for our safety, offered to call off the meetings. But I insisted on going through with our program. [ ... ]
On the Sunday of my first lecture a sealed note was left at my hotel for me. The anonymous writer warned me of a plot against my life: I was going to be shot when about to enter the hall, he assured me. Somehow I could give no credence to the story. [ ... ]
I was never more calm than as I walked leisurely from the hotel to the meeting-place. When within half a block of it I instinctively raised to my face the large bag I always carried. I got safely into the hall and walked towards the platform still holding the bag in front of my face. All through the lecture the thought persisted in my brain: “If I could only protect my face!” In the evening I repeated the same performance, holding my bag to my face all the way to the hall. The meetings went off well, without any sign of the plotters.
For days after, I tried to find some plausible explanation for my silly action with the bag. Why had I been more concerned about my face than about my chest or any other part of my body? Surely no man would think of his face under such circumstances. Yet I, in the presence of probable death, had been afraid to have my face disfigured! It was a shock to discover in myself such ordinary female vanity.
CHAPTER XXXIX
[ ... ] 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. Verity, 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.