Living my Life by Emma Goldman is Nothing like Ragtime

"I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic deaths” (10)

 

I first heard the famous anarchist Emma Goldman in the spring of 2016. This particular icon was no reanimated corpse, but a red-haired sophomore named Grace Greene with a beautiful soprano voice. She was only a bit player in Ragtime, the Ahrens and Flaherty musical my family and I had come to see, but her presence illuminated the show. In the gorgeous song “The Night that Goldman Spoke at Union Square,” she almost convinced me—as she did the character Mother’s Younger Brother—to throw my bourgeois, adolescent soul on the altar of modern-day anarchism.

*

My impression of her that night convinced me to pick up Goldman’s memoir, Living my Life, more than four years later. In Ragtime, Goldman was the word firebrand in human form. I wondered: what charm did her original incarnation hold?

Surprisingly little, as it turns out. While Living my Life is a fairly snappy read for a 550-page memoir, all credit should go to Miriam Brody—the abridger. Goldman’s original edition, published in 1921, was over 1000 pages long. It begins in 1886, the year of the Haymarket Square bombing, and follows her across America and into Russian exile as she fights against capitalism and the patriarchy, taking lovers and giving lectures (including about the strike Lawrence, Massachusetts) along the way. Goldman was allegedly a brilliant public speaker*, as both Living my Life and Ragtime insist, but in this longform medium her words slop all over the page. Take this lament from the interminable Chapter LII, during which Goldman witnesses life in the soon-to-be USSR:

“My dreams crushed, my faith broken, my heart like a stone. Matushka Rossiya bleeding from a thousand wounds, her soil strewn with the dead” (527)

Perhaps this melodramatic style was effective in the early 20th century, but now it feels cliché and imprecise. It’s certainly no fun to read. And when Goldman isn’t indulging in overwrought prose, she’s recounting the financial details of her various itineraries or analyzing the various inadequacies of her numerous paramours (not that she’s not allowed to have lovers, but after the third or fourth ideological breakup they begin to blur together). Real insight or interesting anecdotes—like when Goldman tries to fund the assassination of Henry Clay Frick by walking the streets—are few and far between.

The main reason I picked Living my Life was to learn more about how Emma Goldman saw the world, and I suppose this book achieves that. Goldman occasionally dispenses witty opinions on various 20th-century celebrities; Jack London is “the creative spirit to whom freedom is the breath of life (273), while Eugene Debs is “so genial and charming as a human being that one did not mind [his] lack of political clarity” (136). Many of these figures were her friends, and it is thanks to their efforts and those of more anonymous comrades that Goldman manages to survive and spread her message for so long. The best anecdotes detail the friendships between her and the people she inspires, such as when she is in danger of exile and “several comrades” offer her a visa by marriage.

I appreciate that Goldman is humble enough to see herself not as a maverick individual but the as icon of a larger movement. If you belong that movement, you might enjoy Living my Life. I don’t and I didn’t.

I want to say that Living my Life has enlightened me. I want to say that reading it has taught me more about the labor movement in the early twentieth century, or the foundations of anarchism. I want to say that despite its flaws, this memoir is a worthy, inspiring book.

But now I am old enough to know that a single brilliant experience in a crowded theater should probably not map out one’s whole ideology—unlike Mother’s Younger Brother.

That song is still great, though.

* Not from my high school, but from Texas State University.

** I need to write an essay on the stylistic influence of Goldman and Debs on 20th-century American Leftist Rhetoric.