Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Berkman Alexander

1901, Berkman would again attempt to take his own life. Matters were eased with a shortening of his sentence and that, coupled with Berkman’s sheer strength of will, kept him going until that May morning in 1906 when he walked into the free air. Unlike his Russian comrades, who had an astonishingly high rate of attrition, Berkman had survived prison and planned to devote his life to anarchist thought and action. There wasn’t really a script for being a survivor. He was on his own.

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist was a central part of the battle, or a bridge even, between the lasting mental and emotional damage prison inflicted and the person he wanted to be. It is an important stage in freeing himself from “the hands of the enemy,”4 but we should be careful not to see it as an autobiography. Indeed Berkman’s diary for this period reveals that he rejected the word from his title suggesting that “autobiography” was too prescriptive, and he wanted something more comprehensive—hence the word “Memoirs.” It is not, then, the actual truth, either about his deeds before his arrest, or his time in prison. With the former, he had to lie to protect others who had been involved in planning the attack on Frick, and those who helped plan his escape. With the latter, there was so much in his head, both in terms of people and emotions that he could only cope by deciding to “select, combine types & incidents into typical representation.”5 Berkman also forgot people or their names, remembered situations wrongly (years blurred into fragments and made unlikely chronologies that were not in fact related) or, when he had to write of his time in the Penitentiary, found the whole question of re-visiting some parts of his time there too traumatizing to consider. “Memoirs” gave him the freedom to write and invent. He could create moods and atmospheres and experiment with writing styles that helped him trace his journey.

He began writing the book on June 3, 1910 and by September of that year had finished Part One, “The Awakening and Its Toll.” He could not write anything between mid-September and early November. It was Part Two of the book, “The Penitentiary” that caused this blockage. He deliberately immersed himself in the political and social world around him. Anything was better with dealing with and sorting the memories of those prison years. In early November, he began writing again with a desire to develop a psychology of himself, other prisoners, guards, and the wider society that sanctions the penal system. He wanted this central part of his book to reflect “the unspeakable injustice, uselessness and evil of the whole system of punishment.”6 He constantly worried that he had too much material to select from and whether or not what he chose was the right selection. Nearly a year later he was still struggling with this section and finding little resolution. Like many writers, he began to worry about whether or not his work was commonplace, and he discovered that he could only think about the book when he was sitting in front of a piece of paper with a pencil in his hand. By September 1911, the manuscript was almost complete, and Emma Goldman sent out a circular announcing its imminent completion and looking for financial assistance to get the book published. At that time it had the working title “Autobiography Of An Anarchist,” a title, as we have seen, Berkman rejected. He continued to drastically revise the manuscript, finding it impossible at times to match together words and experiences into any sort of satisfactory pattern but finally, in a letter to Rudolf Grossman on August 15, 1912, Goldman writes that Berkman is working on the book’s last chapter.7 It had taken him over two years of mental and emotional struggle to produce.

Jack London was asked by Emma Goldman to write the introduction to Prison Memoirs but produced one that was critical of anarchism in general and of Berkman’s action against Frick in particular. He wrote of the “silliness of his act” stating, “If my brother does a silly thing, a thing repugnant to my concepts, is he any the less of a brother?” His introduction did go on, however, to describe the book as a “great human document.”8 Even so, Berkman and Goldman rejected it in February 1912. Instead, their friend, the author Hutchins Hapgood was asked to write the introduction, and Goldman and others touted the manuscript to mainstream publishers such as Mitchell Kennerley. None of them accepted it. The only practical alternative was to publish the book through the Mother Earth Publishing Association. Gilbert Roe, Goldman’s friend who was a writer and a lawyer as well as a member of the Free Speech League, took the lead in raising funds for its publication. Helped by the journalist Lincoln Steffens and others, Roe arranged soirees where extracts of Berkman’s work-in-progress were read and money collected for its publication. It was eventually published in late September 1912.

Throughout the writing process, Berkman was helped and supported by Goldman. Their arguments and discussions focused his mind and added clarity to his writing. They also led him to wonder about just how much they were growing apart. Theirs was always a relationship of ebbs and flows, and her constant support for, and promotion of, the book was balanced by his sense that they saw anarchism, and how anarchy would be achieved, in different and perhaps contradictory ways. His other major support was Voltairine de Cleyre. She had corresponded with Berkman during his time at Western Penitentiary and maintained regular contact with him after his release. While in prison, Berkman learned English and extended his abilities in French, German, and Yiddish, but he was unsure of his fluency in written English. His letters to de Cleyre are full of questions about meaning and syntax as well as soliciting her thoughts on sections of the manuscript.9 She edited his work with regard to style and grammar, answering all of his questions—from the use of apostrophes (something Berkman never quite got the hang of!) to the correct use of prepositions—with care and thoroughness, and even offering some stringent critique at times. She felt, for instance, that people who read the first part of Prison Memoirs would believe Berkman was mad as he tried to explain why he tried to kill Frick.10 She also worried about a scene between Berkman and “Luba,” which she felt was too explicit, and Berkman eventually cut it from the manuscript.

As he was writing the book, Berkman’s emotional life was in turmoil. His relationships with the women he was seeing, sometimes two or three others besides his long-time companion Becky Edelsohn, were coming together, falling apart, or simply confusing him. He would discover in 1911 that Becky Edelsohn was pregnant by another man and Ben Reitman was to perform an abortion. Reitman, Goldman, and their circle all believed Berkman was the father and he didn’t appear to contradict them, but writhed inside at what Edelsohn had done. There can be no doubt his experience of prison had left him emotionally and sexually tangled. Goldman, writing in Living My Life, would explain that “for fourteen years he had been starved of what youth and love could give.… Sasha was two years younger than I, thirty-six, but he had not lived for fourteen years, and in regard to women he had remained as young and naïve as he had been at twenty-one.”11 While Goldman’s reading might be overly simplistic, it wasn’t until 1915 that he found his emotional stability with Margaret (“Fitzie”) Fitzgerald. The writing of his book, is a product, among other things, of the tension between his inner and external personal life and his inability to accept or control either one.

One area of his life that was firmly out of his control, was how others, especially anarchists, saw him. After Berkman’s attack on Frick, the anarchist and sex radical Ezra Heywood described his prison sentence as “relative vengeance such as slew Nat Turner and John Brown.”12 At the same time, Goldman and other anarchists regularly referred to Berkman as a “Brutus,” because he had attempted to slay the Caesar-like figure of Frick. This acclamation continued as Goldman regularly and warmly listed Berkman alongside other anarchist attentaters. “ The acts of Berkmann (sic), Caserio, Henry, Vaillant, Pallas and other heroes were but the heralds of the coming Social Revolution,”13 she argued in an 1895 London talk. The elevation to the pantheon of anarchist heroes would be capped by a letter Berkman and Goldman received after the publication of Prison Memoirs. It was from William Holmes, a close friend and confidante of Albert Parsons and some of the other Haymarket men. He writes that, after reading Berkman’s book, he was reminded of “that memorable day in November when Comrade Parsons tried my soul when he said to me, ‘Comrade. I couldn’t live a year in state prison under a life sentence. I should either commit suicide or go insane.’”14 The implication was there for Berkman to read and try to come to terms with. He had done what perhaps even Parsons could not do. As far as many of his comrades were concerned, he had taken the ultimate action against oppression, suffered for it, and returned as committed to the anarchist ideal as ever. He was less a person, more a living legend. Whenever he spoke, or wrote, his words would carry