Living My Life - Emma Goldman [19]
The mainstream press in the United States received the work with predictable favor, but again some former comrades were vituperative. The IWW’s “Big Bill” Haywood who escaped imprisonment in America by fleeing to Russia and Communist William Foster suggested she was in the pay of the U.S. government (Morton 123). A reviewer for The Nation wrote that Goldman’s responses to Russia were not to be trusted, rising out of her “deep-seated antagonism” for Marxism. “Violent inner conflicts are not the soil out of which sprout unbiased opinion,” the reviewer wrote (18 Feb. 1925, 189-90). The Nation wryly suggested Goldman was being disingenuous in traveling to Russia, as if anticipating the Promised Land of “a cooperative decentralized Anarchist commonwealth” (ibid., 189). “They are Marxists,” reminded The Nation, “at the opposite pole from Anarchists.” Goldman anticipated the criticism: “Just because I am a revolutionist,” she wrote in her preface, “I refuse to side with the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party” (My Further Disillusionment, xix).
7. LIVING MY LIFE AND AFTER
When the reviews of her autobiography came out in 1931, the praise from the mainstream press may have made Emma Goldman feel somewhat uncomfortable. Used to being caricatured as demonic, bomb-throwing, and foreign, Goldman found herself the author of “one of the finest autobiographies of its kind,” according to the reviewer in The New York Times, although at the same time the review suggested that the kind referred to was memoirs of ages so safely bygone that their authors may be considered to have already been embalmed (R. L. Duffus, 10/25/31). Reviewers from the left-wing press were less generous. Goldman had written frankly and lengthily about her lovers, some romances fleeting and others long-standing, and the candor disturbed some of her friends, who wondered why they needed to be subjected to such intimate confessions. Goldman’s friend Mollie Steimer, also unhappy with the revelations about Reitman when they were published, complained to Goldman that she had tipped the scales heavily in favor of romance, rather than describing her life in such a way that the cause of anarchism itself would be served (Falk, Love, Anarchy, xvi-xvii). It seemed to many that Goldman’s emotionally wrought narrative must reinforce the popular conception of the anarchist as a political enthusiast, an irrational and intemperate zealot.
But no reader, sympathetic or not, could have denied how intensely readable Goldman’s autobiography was. In it she describes her great service to anarchism as less an intellectual exercise in which principles are tested against practical realities and more as an affective state of discovery, commitment, and, perhaps, martyrdom. In this sense the autobiography that Goldman completed in 1931 took on the shape of a heroic journey, a quest for social justice in the service of the “beautiful ideal” she discovered as a girl when the Haymarket martyrs died in Chicago, an ideal she carried through the fire of America’s prisons and Lenin’s Russia, and whose flame she tended alone and solitary in exile in Europe. She imagined her work as a missionary, writing, “Perhaps it will help the young generations to see that no life is worth anything which does not contain a great ideal” (Falk 9). No one who had attended her lectures on anarchism, literary criticism, or birth control should have been surprised by the persona that Goldman crafted in her autobiography. The