Living My Life - Emma Goldman [309]
My meetings with Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter stood out as the fulfillment of a wish cherished for a quarter of a century. Not that I learned to know them better through our fleeting personal contact than I had through their works. I saw Ellis for a bare half-hour in his London apartment and we were both rather tongue-tied. But if I had lived near him for years, I should not have realized better the oneness of the man with his life’s labours, so expressive of his unique personality and lofty vision was every line that had spoken to me out of the pages of his liberating work.
My visit with Edward Carpenter lasted the greater part of an afternoon in his modest cottage at Guildford. [ ...] I attempted to tell him how much his books had meant to me—Towards Democracy, Angel Wings, Walt Whitman. He stopped me, gently putting his hand over mine. Instead I should rather tell him about Alexander Berkman, he said. He had read his Prison Memoirs, “a profound study of man’s inhumanity and prison psychology, and of his own martyrdom, portrayed with extraordinary simplicity.” He had always wanted to know Sasha and “the Girl” in the book....
A friend had once said jokingly that I was like a cat; “drop her out of a sixth-story window and she’ll land on her paws.” [ ... ] Two things brought me on my paws again. One was my plan of a volume on “The Origin and Development of the Russian Drama”; the other, a tour through Canada. The anarchists there had invited me to come, and a New York comrade promised to raise my expenses. I would go to some little place in France and devote the summer to writing and would leave for Canada in the fall. The two ventures, I hoped, might secure me for a year or two to live and be active in England. I made sure of my going to Canada by immediately reserving my passage.
The incentive to devote the next four months to writing had come from C. W. Daniel, my patron publisher. He had taken the keenest interest in my lectures on the Russian dramatists. [ ... ]
I was about to leave London when the general strike was declared. I could not think of running away from an event of such overwhelming importance. Workers and helpers would be needed and I must remain and offer my services. John Turner was the most likely man to get me in touch with the people in charge of the strike. I explained to him that I was willing to do any kind of work to aid the great struggle: look after the relief of the strikers’ families, organize the care of their children, or take charge of feeding-stations. I wanted to help the rank and file. John was delighted. It would dispel the prejudice my anti-Soviet stand had created in trade-union circles and would demonstrate that anarchists not merely theorized, but were capable of practical work and were ready for any emergency. He would take my message to the strike committee and put them in direct touch with me. I waited for two days, but no word came either from trade-union headquarters or from John. On the third day I again made the long trip on foot to see John and to inquire about the matter. He had been told that all help in the strike situation was drawn from trade-union ranks, and that no outside aid was needed. The excuse was flimsy; clearly the leaders feared it would leak out that the anarchist Emma Goldman had some connexion with the general strike. John was loath to admit my interpretation, nor could he deny that I might be right. It was the old story: the centralized machinery in every walk of British