Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Berkman Alexander

he wanted to deliver it or not. We might well see the writing of this book as an attempt to make his comrades understand that he was merely human, with all the strengths and weaknesses that word entails, and not a mythical hero. There is some poignancy in us knowing he wouldn’t succeed.

From the middle of October 1912, Goldman began to give lectures on the book and on October 28 there was a banquet, held at New York’s Café Boulevard with a variety of speakers, to celebrate its publication. On its release, the book proved successful not only in the world of anarchism and radical politics but also in the wider, literary world. The New York Evening Post stressed how Berkman had succeeded in making the reader “live in his prison experiences,” while the New York Tribune compared Berkman’s work to “Dostoevsky and Andreyev.” The New York Times spoke of the book as “an arraignment of a system in which we have much to be bettered,” and went on to describe the work as “vivid, candid, honest.”15 Prison Memoirs would be reprinted many times, translated into numerous languages, and would be recognized as a classic of both prison literature and political memoir.

      When we read Prison Memoirs we would do well to realize that the book is a snapshot, a moment in time. It is a snapshot that could have changed every day as Berkman constantly revised his memories of prison, and consequently the text. It is likely his memories would have changed and coalesced for the rest of his life, leaving some kind of dissatisfaction with the written evidence created between 1910 and 1912. Be that as it may, one must acknowledge Berkman’s skill as a writer. Throughout the book he adopts various writing styles and techniques. Sometimes he can be clumsy, but more often he writes with a balance and poise that is quite remarkable when one considers the subject matter.

      His ear for dialogue and dialect is acute. As someone wanting to portray the realism of life behind prison walls, he tries, with some success, to copy the accents and cadence of the prisoners that were part of his life for all those years. Boston Red educates Berkman about man-boy love and the meaning of criminal slang; George discusses gay prison life with Berkman; and Wingie, who advises Berkman in his early days in the Penitentiary, introduces him to prison slang. Less successful to the modern reader—though perhaps of its time—is his representation of black prisoners. These and other vignettes throughout the book coalesce into an aural experience that provides a sense of reality, drawing us into a world we know little of. Often scenes with characters are near monologues, with Berkman playing the role of the young innocent, and obviously these scenes are conveying a message to us as well as to him. His use of dialogue ensures that ideas and information are conveyed to us without didacticism. Some of these characters did exist, and it’s quite likely that others—George and Boston Red for instance—didn’t. Of course people who were like them, did. It is unlikely, however, that they had these conversations with Berkman at one time as presented in the book, or even at all. It might be better to see them as characters providing us with information and attitudes that Berkman picked up and came to terms with over his fourteen-year sentence. These characters are just as likely vehicles for the thoughts he must have had in those long, lonely years of isolation and basket cell punishment—a mapping out of conversations with himself that helped him understand the culture of criminals and prison before he could write about them for us. Berkman may have exaggerated his naiveté at times but it was still real and palpable. Locked up as he was, inside the world of his political beliefs, the book reflects how he had to re-consider what he knew and come to terms with what he didn’t. At times, his unease and the unsettled retreat into himself as that process takes place is also evident.

      Sometimes Berkman becomes the sociological reporter in order to illustrate the casual de-humanization of prison life. The parade of the sick who are unsympathetically treated by medical staff and the casual contempt and cruelty of the prison guards to prisoners is carefully documented. Prisoners die because of this casualness and it is just as deadly as the “clubbing squad.” His walks along the cell block range as the coffee boy allows him to present us with pen portraits of the prisoners. All of them are portrayed as individuals. All of them, as far as he is concerned, are victims. Waiting to pounce is the sheer horror of madness. His friend Wingie will go mad, eventually unable to recognize Berkman. He shows us the young black man reduced to madness and living in filth—not allowed to go home after serving his sentence. We see others who just give up or live in a fantasy world. Berkman documents it all remorselessly and the effect is all the more powerful for its frank realism. His description of the poignancy of New Year’s Eve in prison stays with us for a long time after we have put the book down. Who deserves to live like this? What is anyone gaining from this experience?

Ironically, though, Berkman did gain something, and it may have been writing this book that made him understand what that was. Before prison, Berkman could see himself as “one who has emancipated himself from being merely human.”16 He was instead the revolutionary, acting in the name of the people but not like them. He was the living embodiment of Rakhmetov and the ideal revolutionist echoed in Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary. He was like the heroes and heroines of the Russian revolutionary movement, dedicated to the emancipation of the people. It was all inside his head. He entered Western State Penitentiary as someone who, for all his bravery and political certainty, suffered from a lack of engagement with the world. He was as emotionally distant from it as it was possible to be. Certainly, that fact helped at times. The picture of himself he carried kept him alive when others might have gone under—“As a pioneer of the cause, I must live and struggle”17—but it would also cause confusion and intellectual chaos as his certainties were re-arranged and re-constructed. In his circumstances, learning was never straightforward and linear. He read whatever books the prison library had, from romance novels to obscure philosophical texts. He listened to the prisoners, spoke with them and learned from them. There was no such thing as a “political prisoner” in America. He was in the mainstream prison population and it was a revelation. “I marvel at the inadequacy of my previous notions of ‘the criminal,’”18 he mused.

The process of writing his book also clarified something else in Berkman’s mind: a change of direction with regard to where anarchist propaganda should be aimed. In a letter to Goldman, written on March 13, 1905, he had argued that it is “of more real and lasting influence in the long run, to win for our ideas Americans of the intelligent middle-class, rather than the masses.”19 We can see his point. After all, there may well have been no Prison Memoirs if the intelligent middle-class had not donated money for its publication and, more importantly, his beloved Russian revolutionists had been drawn primarily from that class. They would be the ones who would go to the people and help bring about revolutionary change. As he struggled to create his book, however, a new direction in his public writing becomes more and more discernible—a direction that would lead to more tension between himself and Goldman.20

When Berkman left the Penitentiary in 1905 to finish his sentence at the Allegheny workhouse, over two hundred prisoners asked that he be allowed to go through the cell block ranges and say goodbye to them. The request was refused. Two things strike us about that request. Berkman wasn’t acting for the people anymore—he was one of them in their eyes, and in his eyes, they were as much victims of capitalism as he was. Secondly Berkman’s anarchism had become much richer and more complex as a result of his prison time and his interaction with these prisoners. More and more, after the publication of the book, Berkman attempted to master a simple writing style—one that could express difficult ideas in a clear and straightforward way.21 It was writing that would be aimed at these two hundred friends and the millions like them as much as towards anyone else. How could he forget them? What good was anarchism if there was no room for them in it? His memories of his fellow prisoners, however tormented at times, would ensure that his anarchism would be a rich and inclusive one, and if his writings would offer pathways into appreciating anarchism’s possibilities so too would his actions. He would make his own script.

      Jessica Moran and Barry Pateman,

       Kate Sharpley Library

      1 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, see p. 219 of this volume.

      2 See for example, John William Ward’s introduction to the New York Review of Books edition, 1999.