Living My Life - Emma Goldman [20]
As she discussed her autobiography before she began to write, she expressed concern to friends about the project before her. While she recognized that she was writing about “the life of EG, the public person, not the private individual,” she wished at the same time to be faithful to “the other side, the woman, the personality in quest for the unattainable” (ibid., 3). Her friend Frank Harris, who had included a short biography of her in his book Contemporary Portraits, had written an erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves, which Goldman admired and Harris suggested she imitate: “We want a woman’s view of life and freedom in sex matters, want it badly” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 146).
In the end, however, Goldman chose not to write graphically about her sexual intimacies. She had taken from Freud a sense that sexual feeling was important and legitimate, but she did not find the modernist style of detachment and abstraction sympathetic. “I do not consider the mere physical fact sufficient to convey the tremendous effect it has upon human emotions and sensations,” she wrote to Frank Harris (Nowhere at Home, 128). Instead, as Alice Wexler has noted, when Goldman described her love affairs, she did so in the sentimental and melodramatic vocabulary of popular romance novels and with the spiritualist and otherworldly principles of the nineteenth-century free-love movement (Emma Goldman in Exile, 147). Moreover, the commitment to write about her personal life was far more easily made than realized. She worried about disclosing the nature of her relationship with Ben Reitman, the “hobo” doctor who became the manager of her lecture tours, confiding to Berkman that “the world would stand aghast that I, Emma Goldman, the strong revolutionist, the daredevil ... should have been as helpless as a ship-wrecked crew on a foaming ocean” (Falk 4). Reitman, called a hobo for his work organizing the unemployed, is depicted as weak and foolish and Goldman in a continual state of summoning the resolve to cast him adrift, a resolve she ultimately achieves.
In fact Goldman may have been ungenerous to Reitman, who was devastated by her treatment of him when he read the autobiography. After parting from Goldman, Reitman published a well-respected work on prostitution and worked for the prevention and treatment of venereal disease, doing notable work promoting public health among prostitutes and the homeless in Chicago. While it is certain that this American maverick struck the lower Manhattan anarchist intelligentsia as a buffoon, Goldman was lavish in Mother Earth in her praise of Reitman’s business management of her lecture tours, praise that preceded the demise of their relationship. Another former friend, Johann Most, also fared poorly in Living My Life. Goldman regarded Most’s scornful denunciation of Alexander Berkman’s attentat against Frick as apostasy, although in fact Most had begun to withdraw his advocacy of sabotage and assassination years before Berkman acted. It was indeed Alexander Berkman who had always regarded Ben Reitman as a fool, and Berkman who registered angry incredulity at Most’s apparent defection in his prison memoir (Berkman 101).
Goldman’s work bears the imprimatur of her old “pal.” She had mailed her manuscript in chapters to Berkman while she was writing and received the pages back from him with red ink prominently in evidence. Berkman wrote of his editing, “the Mss., after I correct it, looks worse than an ordinary battle-field” (Wexler, Emma Goldman, xviii). Berkman gave Goldman reassurance while she wrote and praised the finished work as “one of the greatest autobiographies,” if also “very feminine” (ibid., 153, 135). Although she had omitted Berkman from her narrative essay My Disillusionment in Russia, when she wrote