Prior to the publication of Candace Falk's biography, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman, a portion of the manuscript was exerpted by 'Mother Jones' (AugJSept 1984). In the period between the excerpt and the publication of the book, I interviewed her while doing research at the Emma Goldman Papers Project I was interested in Falk's responses to the controversy generated by the M.J. article, her decision to focus on the relationship between Emma Goldman's public and private self and her thoughts on the role of idealism in personal life.

In their article introducing falk's forthcoming biography, the editors selected the part of her biography that introduced and analyzed the most erotic and tormented of the letters between Emma Goldman and Ben Reit-man. "Amorous Anarchist" drew strong and immediate responses that both questioned the journal's introduction to the new biography and the relevance of the biography itself, whose subject was the private and intimate life of a political figure.

"Amorous Anarchist" angered many 'M./.' readers. Some felt that Emma Goldman's erotic and sexually explicit letters belong in the 'National Enquirer' or 'Playboy,' their publication in 'M.J.' only served to tarnish the journal's political reputation. Critical of the article's threadbare context, others argued that "Amorous Anarchist" cheapened and demeaned Emma Goldman's personal and political struggles, reducing her commitment to anarchism and free love to an obsession with sex. Underlying the responses critical of 'M.J. 's' publication of an article containing the sexually explicit letters of Emma Goldman were doubts concerning the merits of the forthcoming biography.

For the majority of 'M.J.' readers, "Amorous Anarchist" was their first exposure to Emma Goldman's complex relationship to Ben Reitman. For others it represented their introduction to the life of Emma Goldman. Having knowledge of their complex relationship, I was not shocked by the letters, rather I was concerned with the magazine's emphasis. One that I felt left out the deeper issues and meaning Emma Goldman's struggle with her personal life reflected. Having since read Falk's biography I find the gap between 'M.J.'s emphasis and Falk's respectful development and analysis of Emma Goldman's life even more glaring.

Falk makes a strong contribution to the literature on Emma Goldman's life. I feel thai her work represents a breakthrough, because she doesn't present Emma Goldman as an idealized figure but as a complex woman struggling with a vision she was unable to attain in her personal life. I was moved by Falk's ability to capture this untold story of Emma Goldman's idealism. From her book I have gained deeper insight into the conflicts I have experienced in applying my political beliefs to my personal and intimate life.

— Sal Salerno

SS Last night, while i was in a used book store, I overheard a conversation

between two men who had read the portion of your book excerpted in Mother clones, "Did you see that article on the new Emma Goldman biography?", one of them asked. "Yes," the other answered, "I thought it bordered on soft pornography. Do we really need to know all the intimate details of Emma Goldman's love life?" I'm sure this is not the first time that you have been confronted with this response to your biography. Do you feel that Mother Jones, in choosing to excerpt this portion of your biography has distorted the emphasis of your work?

CF On the one hand, I feel very pleased that an excerpt of the book was published and distributed to as many people as it was in Mother Jones. it's material that i would like the left to read and know about But, on the other hand, whenever you publish anything in a major periodica!, you're subject to being sensationalized. The material itself is sensational 1 have had to deal with the embarrassment of some people thinking that 1 wrote an exclusively erotic book about Emma Goldman, but, in my heart of hearts, i don't think that is what the book really is about.

In Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, ! built up to the sexual themes very carefully and respectfully. 1 addressed the issues of the relationship between Emma Goldman's very personal life and her public life. One of the major themes of Emma Goldman's public work was to speak directly to the heart of people's alienation and their longing for love in the world, not only in the private sense but in the public sense of community as well. In a very repressive time, she spoke about birth control before it was widely available. She spoke about free love; she dared to go to the heart of people's disappointments in life and then politicize those issues to make people feel the connection between their personal experiences and the experience of the whole society and culture. I

think that more than other political figures of her time, Emma Goldman addressed both public and private issues. She expected to find a kind of perfection in her private life or a kind of passion and caring that was sustaining that was completely consistent with her public vision. Many biographies of other political figures have a glowing public vision, but never attempt to exact the same standard in their personal lives. EC's life was very much the opposite. She felt very strongly that she wanted her private life to live up to .her public vision and when it didn't, to quote from one of Emma's letters, she feit "condemned before the bar of (her] own reason."

To return to the sensational part, the reaction of the people in the bookstore that you opened this interview with is interesting to me. 1 know that many people have cringed at the exposure of Emma Goldman's darker side, not only anarchists who hold Emma Goldman as a representative figure for the movement, but also feminists and people on the left in general, and anybody who has been sparked by the earlier image of Emma Goldman as someone who is undauntedly political and optimistic. What a shock to see that in her personal life she was so tormented and disappointed, while she was so uniformly courageous in her public life. And yet, if anyone with a vision of a better world is honest with themselves, there is always a clash between one's vision and one's reality, some dilemma about these issues of public and personal life must be resolved: Emma Goldman's experience in this personal arena is as instructive as her contributions to political thought and action, and remarkably contemporary in nature, and, ! might add, were among the many parts of her life experience that she wanted to share with future generations.

I'll back track a little and talk about my initial reaction to the letters, because when 1 found them, their eroticism and torment sparked a reaction in me similar to the reaction of those people in the bookstore, t thought, for Emma's sake, "hide these letters!" And only after looking through hundreds of similar letters did I begin to discern a pattern, and an underlying message from Emma Goldman to a broader public than the recipients of her passionate outpourings and musings about the meaning of love and politics. Emma Goldman felt herself to be in the transition stage between the nuclear family and a family of all individuals bonded by a feeling of community and an ideal. Her letters articulated the loneliness of the transition stage, particularly for women, and an acute sense of isolation that accompanied her role as the harbinger of a better world.

So, unlike the other biographical accounts of Emma Goldman's life, yours attempts to address the correspondences between her politics and her emotional life.

Yes, and 1 tried to analyze these issues and weave them into the fabric of her very rich and colorful life, like an historical novel, so that the reader can experience the ebb and flow of her life and fee! that they are privy to Emma Goldman's inner world. There are very few people who have written as many, and as intimate, letters as Emma Goldman did. After I collected and organized the letters, I didn't have to intuit what she was feeling, because she seems to have written down almost every nuance of her inner feeling. Her autobiography was highly selective, and although a masterpiece in its own right, certainly doesn't tell the whole story.

My book. Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, traces these issues of Emma Goldman's inner and outer worlds, throughout her life, and yet it is not meant to be a full political biography which analyzes every aspect of her public life, every issue, detail and person. My book complements Richard Drinnon's biography which was more exclusively a political biography. In writing about Emma Goldman's inner life, 1 hope that a reader who might never have heard of Emma Goldman or even thought that they could do public work themselves, might see in her frustrations and her fears that perhaps what she was doing wasn't going any place or that her vision was all for naught, their own reflection, the common feelings of anyone who attempts to affect the larger world, feelings which cast doubts but still don't hinder the movement from intention to action. What led you to the letters and interest in telling Emma's life story? After reading Emma Goldman's autobiography in the late 60's and early 1970's, I was inspired by Emma Goldman's daring spirit, and her insistence on passion m politics and her personal life. Whimsically, I named my dog, "Red Emma Goldman." She was an Irish Setter-Golden retriever who accompanied me on a trip through Chicago where 1 passed a guitar shop where 1 had a friend who fixed and made guitars. I went to visit him on an impulse, and left my dog Emma at the door. True to her anarchist spirit, she didn't respond to my command to stay at the door. She bounded in, and my friend began to pet her and said, "What a lovely dog, what's her name?" 1 said, "Emma"—"Red Emma Goldman" very proudly. My friend scratched his own head and said, very slowly, "That's funny, five years ago in the back of the shop I think I saw some letters of hers." Frankly the significance of that moment had not yet dawned on me. He went to the back of the shop and looked on the top shelf, and on a

bottom shelf, and finally found an enormous shoe box—a boot box —of Emma Goldman's letters.

Although the return address on the envelope bore the name, "£. Goldman," when I opened the letters they were not at all like the E.G. 1 had read about, or named my dog for. These were depressed letters; they were tormented and to my surprise, they were signed, "Mommy." I thought perhaps they weren't from Emma Goldman, although as 1 read them, it became dear that they were actual letters to Ben Reitman who had been her lover and manager for ten years and was himself ten years younger than she. Her double-edged salutation as "Mommy" seemed to play a part in their flirtation, challengingjhe passionate incest taboo with

the mother—a story in itself. 1 went off and xeroxed the letters until 1 came to one of the last ietters which said, "if anyone ever saw these letters I'd feel naked before the world." At this point I felt like Emma herself had spoken to me from the grave, and said "don't publish these letters!" So, 1 actually stopped xeroxing, wrapped the letters 1 had in a Chiago Maroon, the University of Chicago newspaper, and promptly returned the box of letters. Upon my return West, f deposited the copies of the letters on a shelf in my seashore apartment in Santa Cruz where 1 was doing graduate work at the University. During this time, my curiosity was aroused to find out how it could be that this public figure who seemed so incredibly honest in her autobiography about her intimate life, who portrayed herself as a woman who never compromised, could have lived in so tormented a state and so much in conflict with her own

values.

Emma Goldman had a vision which embraced the whole individual and affirmed women's experience, not only in her own times, but in the 60's and early 70's as well. 1 had resolved to keep Emma Coldman's secret, although 1 was very curious about why she had hidden this more conflicted part of her life. I even wondered whether t would have named my dog Emma had I known about that part of her life. Would we have worn Emma's face upon our t-shirts with the same enthusiasm? I began to think that Emma was right to present her more crystal image to the public. In the course of that year, however, I thought about these issues and questioned the validity of the need for heroines and heroes and whether or not we had already come to a point in the development of the movement where a more subtle hero and heroine was needed.

Within a year the owner of the guitar shop called me and asked if I

wanted to buy the letters. At first, I believed that I should buy the ietters just to keep Emma's secret, a feeling similar to those expressed by the people in the bookstore who worried about sensationalizing the material. 1 believed that the letters should only be made public in the context of deep respect for Emma Goldman, and that I had a duty to do my best to muster up enough money to buy the ietters in order to keep them out of the public eye. An archivist in Chicago, who also wanted to buy the letters, called me with a frantic plea, "Please don't buy those letters, we have hundreds of others just like them in our library and why should any individual secret them away when they could complete an already public collection?" (reconsidered, with this new knowledge about the other letters in the Ben Reitman collection, and realized that the archivist was right. 1 should note that this was also the beginning of my appreciation for archival work and the preservation of historical documents. I decided not to buy them but the incident spurred me on to want to write about the dilemma the material itself revealed which added an important dimension to an understanding of Emma Goldman. The conflict between the public and the private, between the aspiration towards free love and the internal anguish of jealousy, between independence and dependence, did in fact deepen her as a woman, and as a model.

In the course of writing about Emma Goldman's relationship with Ben Reitman, I was approached by an editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston who was intrigued by the idea of following these familiar themes throughout Emma Goldman's life. I agreed to pursue the ideas as a full biography of these issues of love and anarchism without quite realizing at first what a massive undertaking, what a grand puzzle, it would be to recreate this aspect of Emma Goldman's inner life. It took seven years of going from library to library all across the world to Amsterdam, throughout the United States, to private collections, to people who knew Emma Coldman, to piece together the story of her intimate life and connect it in some meaningful way to what her public life was in order to give people another sense of who she was. My book is the product of many years of work and 1 think it is a new beginning of the discussion about the implications of certain political ideologies on one's personal life. I think most people are secretly anarchists in their personal life—in their underlying hopes for the limitless possibilities of love, so Emma's story is not so alien.

Could we return to the comments you began to make on the role of the heroine within political and cultural movements. I'm interested in your thoughts on the subject.

Well, one of the more obvious points is to know that to have a vision doesn't mean that there aren't moments of despair about that vision.

Perhaps it is an obvius point, however, it is one which has been excluded from many biographies and autobiographies of political figures, even Emma Goldman who was so forthright about her emotional ups and downs wrote an autobiography which was unshakable in its commitment to the principles of anarchism, and never gave a voice to the doubts which erupted from the despair she experienced in her personal life.

Emma Goldman was unusual in that she applied the same high standards to her personal life and relationships as she applied to her public life and activities. Often people are scared that their own political vision is in jeopardy from all corners of the society, so they are terrified to expose the doubts and failings of the few heroines or heros they have, and are extremely threatened when someone else dares to do so. Added to this political purism is an element of puritanism which rears its ugly head when the sexual dimension of a political heroine is exposed. And in fact there is some validity to these fears, what if people take the revelations of my books in the worst sense and think that here is proof that another political activist was merely acting out and compensating for what she didn't get in her early life, missing all the depth of her commitment to justice and freedom which was so necessary and important in her time. Or what if her story is dismissed because the teller did not share the exact political line of the reader, or if it touches on issues so painful, the underside of life which so many people wish to deny, that it only provokes anger, or is trivialized out of fear of facing what is deeply human. What if Emma Goldman's life commitment to a political ideal is so diminished by this newly discovered aspect of her being that it becomes a symbol of cynicism, an excuse to withdraw or never even attempt to life a life which attempts to have an impact on history, another excuse to turn away from politics.

It is interesting that Emma Goldman herself perpetuated the myth of her own perfect image. Although in her autobiography she mentioned Reitman and her torment about their relationship, there is a way in which it is so minimized that you would never believe how much of her life was taken up with obsessions about Reitman and various other men and

even some women who were intimately involved with her. Most people think of Alexander Berkman as Emma's closest comrade, the staple and anchor of her life. He was, that's true, but there were other lovers who came in and out of her life and occupied a tremendous amount of her energy, passion and her longings. 1 don't think that they should be forgotten, or trivialized or looked upon as a less important part of her life. As feminists, we must not undervalue the personal dimension of life. Your book then, not only poses a different identity between the personal and political in Emma Goldman's life, but also questions the role of idealism in personal life.

There is an underlying critique in my book of some of the ways in which a politics of idealism translates into personal life. One of the things which was hard to say in the book, although, 1 think that after reading thousands of Emma's letters, following the flow of her life, and thinking deeply about this question, one feels that she colluded in her own unhap-piness and her overwhelming sense of disappointment. There are repetitions throughout her life of the same themes, with the high drama that was characteristic of Emma Goldman. Ultimately, I think she had a very glowing wish for a world of perfection in which feelings of jealousy, certain kinds of aggressive behavior and quests for power were intolerable. All of these negatives for Emma Goldman were the result of outside forces that corrupted the basic good of the individual, that the State was in many ways responsible for the internalization of what she termed negative or 'anti-sociai' characteristics in people. I think there was a way in which she personally was terribly afraid that those tendencies were very prevalent in her own personality and that she was tormented by the idea that she herself was jealous, or cruel or powerseeking. She felt that her jealousy of Ben Reitman's affairs was an inappropriate response for someone like herself, so committed to complete freedom; she wrote to Ben that her jealousy turned her into something foreign to herself. She was tremendously defensive about any kind of criticism of her own being and tended to attempt to live as the shining example which was of course part of her strenght and her almost herculean integrity. But there was something distorted about her thinking that all these negatives were external and as long as anyone rejects the negatives poles as an evil outside of themselves they also deny a basic part of the human fabric. This is not to say that a world which encouraged more cooperation and love wouldn't create a different kind of personality structure, but I'm not so certain that it is such a good idea to deny the negatives in one's self in

service of a purist notion that the negatives are oniy a creation of the outside powers that are corrupting the world. I think that if there is a critique in the book, it is a critique of the illusion of a kind of perfection. So, the question is, can you drop that illusion of exorcising the various different "bad" human characteristics and forces in the world and society, and still keep a vision of freedom and justice?

I'm not sure that Emma Goldman ever did drop her illusions. She did to some extent at the end of her life with the Spanish Civil War not turning out the way she wished it would, but knowing that it was still worth struggling for. But in terms of love, there was stiff the constant disappointment and alienation that people feel in their personal lives comes, in part, from not reckoning with the part of themselves that doesn't acknowledge these other 'negatives' as part of who they are as well, that it is not out in the external world, nor only in the other person, or the State, but part of the human condition.

While your biography creates a context through which the relationship between political ideals and inner experience can be examined, your analysis suggests a kind of failure within the radical community to come to terms with the personal contradictions that result in spite of ones commitment to political ideals-

I fee! that there is something basic to the anarchist political vision and to many of us one a personal level, anarchist or not, anyone with a vision, that you can live outside of these struggles, create your own realities. I was thinking of the appeal of the Paris 1968 cry "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible"—or the wall grafitti in Berkeley "Love Without Restraint, Live Without Dead Time." Anyone who is attracted to that, which includes me, needs to reckon with the flipside of the disappointment that that vision cannot be sustained; and the story of Emma Goldman's inner life is in many ways a poignant reckoning with the effects of attempting to 'be realistic, and demand the impossible.'

! still think that Emma Goldman could have been just as heroic had she acknowledged, maybe even switched her inner slogan to "wish for the impossible, but know what is possible within one's own limits as a human being." But Emma Goldman was terrified that if she didn't have that glowing vision, that messianic message which was the grand finale for every essay and speech from the platform, one day we'll reach the mountain top, that her work would be for naught, because she wanted more than anything else to sustain the transcendent moments of love as the beacon of life. Her vision was appealing and seductive, and in many

ways accounts for her tremendous popularity, then and now. She could articulate this longing for the perfectability. the possibility of a more glorious world to counter the dreariness and alienation which surrounded her I feel that we are at a time in history now, when we don't need to be blinded by a stellar vision, that we can acknowledge the complexity of making changes in ourselves and in the world with more patience and a sense of the dialectical nature of reality. Without giving up a vision, or becoming reformist in the worst sense, there i<- a balance which is not a compromise or a surrender, which will not weaken us, but instead will empower us because we will not be slain by our own chronic disappointment or misplaced fury.

From your perspective, the weight of Emma Goldman's vision, perhaps her legacy, lies in her struggle between her political ideals and inner experience of life- Her struggle to articulate a political vision, to project a public image consistent with her political beliefs, while living out with immense difficulty the negative characteristics she confronted within her personality is the untold story of her idealismand reflects the depth of her commitment to anarchism.

Yes. and I believe that we are at a point in history when we are ready to hear it.

Are we now, really more ready to hear and learn from the example of Emma Goldman's life? The alternative press emphasized the more sensational aspects of her experience. Sensationalism and the threat of political reprisals fortunately didn't prevent her from communicating to others the depth of her inner experience. Do you think she foresaw a time when this side of her life might be publicly known?

She said in many ofh er letters that she knew that someday her letters should become public. She wrote to Ben Reitman, "please do not publish these letters while I'm alive." There was always the implication in her letters that when she was dead, the world could and would know of her suffering and her love. Emma Goldman wrote her letters with the flair and drama of a public speech, perhaps in anticipation of their disclosure. She was not just writing to Ben Reitman, Leon Maimed, Almeda Sperry, of Frank Heiner, she was really addressing a much larger future audience. She kept and organized copies of her own letters, encouraged others to do the same. When the Emma Goldman Papers ate published, 20,000-40,000 documents on microfilm and a two volume selected book edition her wishes will be assured. The Emma Goldman Papers will outlive my book, because they are her own words, complete, unedited and in their

original form. And we are still collecting more each day. It will be the raw data that people will harken back to for generations, with a fresh spirit. This seems to speak to Emma Goldman's integrity and awareness that at that point in history the persona! and public self in relation to political activity had to be hidden. This seems to reveal a complex split within Emma Goldman, but one which she seems to have acknowledged and addressed openly among her intimate friends.

Her intimate friends had mixed feelings about her talking about these issues. Mollie Steimer, whom 1 met with in Cuemavaca in 1977, told me that she and Emma had a terrible fight about the autobiography, feeling that Emma had exposed too much of her personal life in the autobiography and didn't talk enough about the Cause. Emma evidently protested and said that Moilie never understood this issue of personal life as critical to what the anarchist movement was and very important to Emma's sense of herself. And yet she was right to be cautious then. \ agree with your point.

! think that people are now ready for this expose because in it are the issues of our time, the issues that plague us in this post 60's era. We are ready to examine the complexities of our own visions and myths, our longings and our disappointments, our vision and reality.

Some people will be shocked at the graphic sexual nature of the book and blame it on me. But it is Emma who wrote these letters, who had these experiences, who was brave enough in her own life to talk about them, to give herself to those feelings. I don't think she must be glorified, sainted or de-sexuaiized, to be appreciated. ! think people still exhibit a residue of sexual prudery whether they acknowledge it or not, which becomes part of their definition of a good academic or political biography —a feeling of "oh don't show me this." Emma herself wanted these letters and this part of herself to form a composite sense of her whole historical presence, and it is up to us to make some sense of this side of her personality in the context of the larger public figure and to make it relevant to our own generation, our own time.

In her own historical era, it was the humanity of her vision and her person which was most compelling, and yet in the discovery of the underside of her life, she challenges our own compassion and political intelligence, once again. Though sometimes gruelling, it has always been a profound experinece to grapple with and reassemble the many facets of Emma Goldman's life into the biography. Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman. It was a labor of love and it is really a thrill to share with you all now.