LETTERS: Three letters to Gilbert Seldes.
“Alexander Berkman’s Life And Mine
Cannot Be Called ‘Ordinary’”—
Goldman Reacts To Her Friend’s Suicide
Goldman, Emma. Three letters from Emma Goldman to Gilbert Seldes, 1932 -1936; together with a typed statement by Seldes concerning his family’s friendship with Goldman, circa 1919, and a 1936 typed letter to Seldes about Goldman by Stella Ballantine, Goldman’s niece and co-worker.
Seven leaves, most standard size (8 1/2 x 11”); one (the August 1936 St. Tropez letter, a mimeographed leaf) a few inches longer; all folded for mailing; edges lightly worn. Housed together in a folding cloth slipcase.
A small archive of material concerning Goldman and fellow leftist Gilbert Seldes. A successful critic, writer, and translator—his adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata ran on Broadway for three years—Seldes was a consistent financial supporter of Goldman throughout the 1930s. In the most touching item in the collection, a mimeographed letter signed “Emma Goldman” and sent from St. Tropez on 25 August 1936, a confused and disjointed Goldman attempts to convey the extent of her feelings about the death of Alexander Berkman, her collaborator and one-time lover. Berkman died in June of 1936; this letter—no doubt circulated among her many admirers—may well constitute Goldman’s earliest public statement about her colleague’s death. It sheds light on the depression that overtook Goldman when she learned of his suicide. In part:
...You may have read of the death of Alexander Berkman, my life-long friend and co-worker in the battle for our ideal. The last message he left speaks more forcibly than I can do about his end. It reads: ‘I don’t want to live a sick man. Dependent. Forgive me, Emmie darling....’
My departed comrade had always said he would go by his own hand, if overtaken by illness that would prevent his working for his ideal...He kept his word. After two most painful operations, after months in a French hospital, where modern ways of caring for the sick are still lacking, and after a very acute attack–one of several–on the evening of June 27th, he decided to take the final plunge. He shot himself. But his agony went on for another sixteen hours. He passed away at 4 p.m. on June 28th.
....Forty-seven years in the life of two ordinary people is no small matter. The shock to the one who remains behind must needs be very painful indeed. Alexander Berkman’s life and mine cannot be called ‘ordinary.’ For it developed into a friendship rare in our time. A friendship that never wavered, a friendship of the same dreams, the same ideals, and, not the least, the same struggle for the ideal...The more staggering the blow death has dealt me. The more difficult to string together the broken threads of so wonderful a comradeship as ours...
Yet I will, I must, go on. I have an all-absorbing mission: to give to the world the personality and spirit that was Alexander Berkman, and that he had been too shy and reticent to give himself....The force that always used to pull me back to Europe is no more. Alexander Berkman is at rest. My struggle goes on...
With an accompanying letter sent to Seldes, dated October 7, 1936, from Stella Ballantine, Goldman’s co-worker and niece. In part:
Since writing the enclosed letter [of 25 August, quoted above] Emma Goldman has joined her comrades of the FAI and CNT in Barcelona to help them in their heroic battle against the Fascist forces in Spain. She writes me from Barcelona on September 19th as follows:
‘After three days in Barcelona I can only say that I have come into my own, to my brave and heroic comrades who are battling on so many fronts. Their most impressive achievement to me is the order which prevails everywhere....There is no sign of the life and death struggle of only a few weeks ago–this by the maligned Anarchists who are supposed to have no program and whose philosophy is said to spell destruction and ruin. Can you imagine what this means to me? It is wort
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