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Title: Voltairine De Cleyre Author: Emma Goldman Date: 1932 Language: en Topics: art, biography, feminist, Voltairine De Cleyre Source: Retrieved on March 15th, 2009 from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Essays/voltairine.html][sunsite.berkeley.edu]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=651, retrieved on July 5, 2020. Notes: Published privately by The Oriole Press, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, 1932. Edition limited to two-hundred copies of which fifty are printed on Nuremberg deckle-edge paper for private distribution with the compliments of the publisher.
Written In Red
Bear it aloft, O roaring flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the world! our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name—
Manhood — we battle to set men free.
Voltairine De Cleyre
The first time I met her — this most gifted and brilliant anarchist
woman America ever produced — was in Philadelphia, in August 1893. I had
come to that city to address the unemployed during the great crisis of
that year, and I was eager to visit Voltairine of whose exceptional
ability as a lecturer I had heard while in New York. I found her ill in
bed, her head packed in ice, her face drawn with pain. I learned that
this experience repeated itself with Voltairine after her every public
appearance: she would be bed-ridden for days, in constant agony from
some disease of the nervous system which she had developed in early
childhood and which continued to grow worse with the years. I did not
remain long on this first visit, owing to the evident suffering of my
hostess, though she was bravely trying to hide her pain from me. But
fate plays strange pranks. In the evening of the same day, Voltairine de
Cleyre was called upon to drag her frail, suffering body to a densely
packed, stuffy hall, to speak in my stead. At the request of the New
York authorities, the protectors of law and disorder in Philadelphia
captured me as I was about to enter the Hall and led me off to the
Police Station of the City of Brotherly Love.
The next time I saw Voltairine was at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary.
She had come to New York to deliver her masterly address, In Defense of
Emma Goldman and Free Speech, and she visited me in prison. From that
time until her end our lives and work were frequently thrown together,
often meeting harmoniously and sometimes drifting apart, but always with
Voltairine standing out in my eyes as a forceful personality, a
brilliant mind, a fervent idealist, an unflinching fighter, a devoted
and loyal comrade. But her strongest characteristic was her
extraordinary capacity to conquer physical disability — a trait which
won for her the respect even of her enemies and the love and admiration
of her friends. A key to this power in so frail a body is to be found in
Voltairine’s illuminating essay, The Dominant Idea.
“In everything that lives,” she writes there, “if one looks searchingly,
is limned to the shadow-line of an idea — an idea, dead or living,
sometimes stronger when dead, with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the
living embodiment with stern, immobile, cast of the non-living. Daily we
move among these unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than
granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing
bodies, with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet also, living souls
dominating dying bodies — living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do
not imagine that I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or
of shifting Will is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of
earth, as in the gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over
our heads in the free world of air.”
As an illustration of persistent Will, Voltairine relates the story of
the morning-glory vines that trellised over the window of her room, and
“every-day they blew and curled in the wind, their white, purple-dashed
faces winking at the sun, radiant with climbing life. Then, all at once,
some mischance happened, — some cut-worm or some mischievous child tore
one vine off below, the finest and most ambitious one, of course. In a
few hours, the leaves hung limp, the sappy stem wilted and began to
wither, in a day it was dead, — all but the top, which still clung
longingly to its support, with bright head lifted. I mourned a little
for the buds that could never open now, and pitied that proud vine whose
work in the world was lost. But the next night there was a storm, a
heavy, driving storm, with beating rain and blinding lightning. I rose
to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of the world! In the blackness
of the mid-night, in the fury of wind and rain, the dead vine had
flowered. Five white, moon-faced blossoms blew gayly round the skeleton
vine, shining back triumphant at the red lightning... But every day, for
three days, the dead vine bloomed; and even a week after, when every
leaf was dry and brown ... one last bud, dwarfed, weak, a very baby of a
blossom, but still white and delicate, with five purple flecks, like
those on the live vine beside it, opened and waved at the stars, and
waited for the early sun. Over death and decay, the Dominant Idea
smiled; the vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white trumpet
blossoms, dashed with purple; and it held its will beyond death.”
The Dominant Idea was the Leitmotif throughout Voltairine de Cleyre’s
remarkable life. Though she was constantly harassed by ill-health, which
held her body captive and killed her at the end, the Dominant Idea
energized Voltairine to ever greater intellectual efforts raised her to
the supreme heights of an exalted ideal, and steeled her Will to conquer
every handicap and obstacle in her tortured life. Again and again, in
days of excruciating physical torment, in periods of despair and
spiritual doubt, the Dominant Idea gave wings to the spirit of this
woman — wings to rise above the immediate, to behold a radiant vision of
humanity and to dedicate herself to it with all the fervor of her
intense soul. The suffering and misery that were hers during the whole
of her life we can glimpse from her writings, particularly in her
haunting story, The Sorrows of the Body:
“I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have,” she
relates, “a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times,
with nothing to do but to slip the blades through my fingers, and look
as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green
and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt
crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long
stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool
ground, and time to taste its sweetness, and time to rest after tasting;
sleep when it came, and stillness, that the sleep might leave me when it
would, not sooner ... This is what I wanted, — this, and free contact
with my fellows ... not to love and lie, and be ashamed, but to love and
say I love, and be glad of it; to feel the currents of ten thousand
years of passion flooding me, body to body, as the wild things meet. I
have asked no more.
But I have not received. Over me there sits that pitiless tyrant, the
Soul; and I am nothing. It has driven me to the city, where the air is
fever and fire, and said, ‘breathe this’; — I would learn; I cannot
learn in the empty fields; temples are here, — stay.’ And when my poor,
stifled lungs have panted till it seemed my chest must burst, the soul
has said, ‘I will allow you then, an hour or two; we will ride, and I
will take my book and read meanwhile.’
And when my eyes have cried out the tears of pain for the brief vision
of freedom drifting by, only for leave to look at the great green [and]
blue an hour, after the long, dull-red horror of walls, the soul has
said, ‘I cannot waste the time altogether; I must know! read.’ And when
my ears have plead for the singing of the crickets and the music of the
night, the soul has answered, ‘No, gongs and whistles and shrieks are
unpleasant if you listen; but school yourself to hearken to the
spiritual voice, and it will not matter ...’
When I have looked upon my kind, and longed to embrace them, hungered
wildly for the press of arms and lips, the soul has commanded sternly,
‘cease, [vile] creature of fleshly lusts! Eternal reproach! Will you for
ever shame me with your beastliness?’
And I have always yielded, mute, joyless, fettered, I have trod the
world of the soul’s choosing ... Now I am broken before my time,
bloodless, sleepless, breathless, — half blind, racked at every joint,
trembling with every leaf.”
Yet though racked and wrecked, her life empty of the music, the glory of
sky and sun, and her body rose in daily revolt against the tyrannical
master, it was Voltairine’s soul that conquered — the Dominant Idea
which gave her strength to go on and on to the last.
Voltairine de Cleyre was born in Nov. 17, 1866, in the town of Leslie,
Michigan. Her ancestry on her father’s side was French-American, on her
mother’s Puritan stock. She came to her revolutionary tendencies by
inheritance, both her grand-father and father having been imbued with
the ideas of the Revolution of 1848. But while her grand-father remained
true to the early influences, even in late life helping in the
underground railroad for fugitive slaves, her father, August de Cleyre,
who had begun as a freethinker and Communist, in later life, returned to
the fold of the Catholic Church and became as passionate a devotee of
it, as he had been against it in his younger days. So great had been his
free thought zeal that when his daughter was born he named her
Voltairine, in honor of the revered Voltaire. But when he recanted, he
became obsessed by the notion that his daughter must become a nun. A
contributory factor may also have been the poverty of the de Cleyres, as
the result of which the early years of little Voltairine were anything
but happy. But even in her childhood she showed little concern in
external things, being almost entirely absorbed in her own fancies.
School held a great fascination for her and when refused admission
because of her extreme youth, she wept bitter tears.
However, she soon had her way, and at the age of twelve she graduated
from the Grammar School with honors and would very likely have
outstripped most women of her time in scholarship and learning, had not
the first great tragedy come into her life, a tragedy which broke her
body and left a lasting scar upon her soul. She was placed in a
monastery, much against the will of her mother who, as a member of the
Presbyterian Church, fought — in vain — against her husband’s decision.
At the Convent of Our Lady of Lake Huron, at Sarnia, Ontario, Canada,
began the four-years’ calvary of the future rebel against religious
superstition. In her essay on The Making of an Anarchist she vividly
describes the terrible ordeal of those years:
“How I pity myself now, when I remember it, poor lonesome little soul,
battling solitary in the murk of religious superstition, unable to
believe and yet in hourly fear of damnation, hot, savage, and eternal,
if I do not instantly confess and profess; how well I recall the bitter
energy with which I repelled my teacher’s enjoinder, when I told her I
did not wish to apologize for an adjudged fault as I could not see that
I had been wrong and would not feel my words. ‘It is not necessary,’
said she, ‘that we should feel what we say, but it is always necessary
that we obey our superiors.’ ‘I will not lie,’ I answered hotly, and at
the same time trembled, lest my disobedience had finally consigned me to
torment ... it had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and
there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt
me with their hell fire in those stifling days. Am I blasphemous? It is
their word, not mine. Beside that battle of my young days all others
have been easy, for whatever was without, within my own Will was
supreme. It has owed no allegiance, and never shall; it has moved
steadily in one direction, the knowledge and the assertion of its own
liberty, with all the responsibility falling thereon.”
Her endurance at an end, Voltairine made an attempt to escape from the
hateful place. She crossed the river to Port Huron and tramped seventeen
miles, but her home was still far away. Hungry and exhausted, she had to
turn back to seek refuge in a house of an acquaintance of the family.
These sent for her father who took the girl back to the Convent.
Voltairine never spoke of the penance meted out to her, but it must have
been harrowing, because as a result of her monastic life her health
broke down completely when she had hardly reached the age of sixteen.
But she remained in the Convent school to finish her studies: rigid
self-discipline and perseverance, which so strongly characterised her
personality, were already dominant in Voltairine’s girlhood. But when
she finally graduated from her ghastly prison, she was changed not only
physically, but spiritually as well. “I struggled my way out at last,”
she writes, “and was a free-thinker when I left the institution, though
I had never seen a book or heard a word to help me in my loneliness.”
Once out of her living tomb she buried her false god. In her fine poem,
The Burial of my Dead Past, she sings:
“And now, Humanity, I turn to you;
I consecrate my service to the world!
Perish the old love, welcome to the new —
Broad as the space-aisles where the stars are whirled!”
Hungrily she devoted herself to the study of free-thought literature,
her alert mind absorbing everything with ease. Presently she joined the
secular movement and became one of its outstanding figures. Her
lectures, always carefully prepared, (Voltairine scorned extemporaneous
speaking) were richly studded with original thought and were brilliant
in form and presentation. Her address on Thomas Paine, for instance,
excelled similar efforts of Robert Ingersoll in all his flowery oratory.
During a Paine memorial convention, in some town in Pennsylvania,
Voltairine de Cleyre chanced to hear Clarence Darrow on Socialism. It
was the first time the economic side of life and the Socialist scheme of
a future society were presented to her. That there is injustice in the
world she knew, of course, from her own experience. But here was one who
could analyse in such masterly manner the causes of economic slavery,
with all its degrading effects upon the masses; moreover, one who could
also clearly delineate a definite plan of reconstruction. Darrow’s
lecture was manna to the spiritually famished young girl. “I ran to it”
she wrote later, “as one who has been turning about in darkness runs to
the light, I smile now at how quickly I adopted the label ‘Socialism’
and how quickly I casted aside.”
She cast it aside, because she realised how little she knew of the
historic and economic back-ground of Socialism. Her intellectual
integrity led her to stop lecturing on the subject and to begin delving
into the mysteries of sociology and political economy. But, as the
earnest study of Socialism inevitably brings one to the more advanced
ideas of Anarchism, Voltairine’s inherent love of liberty could not make
peace with State-ridden notions of Socialism. She discovered, she wrote
at this time, that “Liberty is not the daughter but the mother of
order.”
During a period of several years she believed to have found an answer to
her quest for liberty in the Individualist-Anarchist school represented
by Benjamin R. Tucker’s publication Liberty, and the works of Proudhon,
Herbert Spencer, and other social thinkers. But later she dropped all
economic labels, calling herself simply an Anarchist, because she felt
that “Liberty and experiment alone can determine the best economic forms
of Society.”
The first impulse towards Anarchism was awakened in Voltairine de Cleyre
by the tragic event in Chicago, on the 11^(th) of November, 1887. In
sending the Anarchists to the gallows, the State of Illinois stupidly
boasted that it had also killed the ideal for which the men died. What a
senseless mistake, constantly repeated by those who sit on the thrones
of the mighty! The bodies of Parsons, Spies, Fisher, Engel and Lingg
were barely cold when already new life was born to proclaim their
ideals.
Voltairine, like the majority of the people of America, poisoned by the
perversion of facts in the press of the time, at first joined in the
cry, “They ought to be hanged!” But hers was a searching mind, not of
the kind that could long be content with mere surface appearances. She
soon came to regret her haste. In her first address, on the occasion of
the anniversary of the 11^(th) of November 1887, Voltairine, always
scrupulously honest with herself, publicly declared how deeply she
regretted having joined in the cry of “They ought to be hanged!” which,
coming from one who at that time no longer believed in capital
punishment, seemed doubly cruel.
“For that ignorant, outrageous, blood-thirsty sentence I shall never
forgive myself,” she said, “though I know the dead men would have
forgiven me. But my own voice, as it sounded that night, will sound so
in my ears till I die, — a bitter reproach and shame.”
Out of the heroic death in Chicago a heroic life emerged, a life
consecrated to the ideas for which the men were put to death. From that
day until her end, Voltairine de Cleyre used her powerful pen and her
great mastery of speech in behalf of the ideal which had come to mean to
her the only raison d’ˆtre of her life.
Voltairine de Cleyre was unusually gifted: as poet, writer, lecturer and
linguist, she could have easily gained for herself a high position in
her country and the renown it implies. But she was not one to market her
talents for the flesh-pots of Egypt. She would not even accept the
simplest comforts from her activities in the various social movements
she had devoted herself to during her life. She insisted on arranging
her life consistently with her ideas, on living among the people whom
she sought to teach and inspire with human worth, with a passionate
longing for freedom and a strength to strive for it. This revolutionary
vestal lived as the poorest of the poor, amongst dreary and wretched
surroundings, taxing her body to the utmost, ignoring externals,
sustained only by the Dominant Idea which led her on.
As a teacher of languages in the ghettoes of Philadelphia, New York and
Chicago, Voltairine eked out a miserable existence, yet out of her
meagre earnings she supported her mother, managed to buy a piano on the
installment plan (she loved music passionately and was an artist of no
small measure) and to help others more able physically than she was. How
she ever did it not even her nearest friends could explain. Neither
could anyone fathom the miracle of energy which enabled her, in spite of
a weakened condition and constant physical torture, to give lessons for
14 hours, seven days of the week, contribute to numerous magazines and
papers, write poetry and sketches, prepare and deliver lectures which
for lucidity and beauty were master-pieces. A short tour through England
and Scotland in 1897, was the only relief from her daily drudgery. It is
certain that she could not have survived such an ordeal for so many
years but for the Dominant Idea that steeled her persistent Will.
In 1902, a demented youth who had once been Voltairine’s pupil and who
somehow developed the peculiar aberration that she was an anti-Semite
(she who had devoted most of her life to the education of Jews!) waylaid
her while she was returning from a music lesson. As she approached him,
unaware of impending danger, he fired several bullets into her body.
Voltairine’s life was saved, but the effects of the shock and her wounds
marked the beginning of a frightful physical purgatory. She became
afflicted with a maddening, ever-present din in her ears. She used to
say that the most awful noises in New York were harmony compared to the
deafening pounding in her ears. Advised by her physicians that a change
of climate might help her, she went to Norway. She returned apparently
improved, but not for long. Illness led her from hospital to hospital,
involving several operations, without bringing relief. It must have been
in one of these moments of despair that Voltairine de Cleyre
contemplated suicide. Among her letters, a young friend of hers in
Chicago found, long after her death, a short note in Voltairine’s
hand-writing, addressed to no one in particular, containing the
desperate resolve:
“I am going to do tonight that which I have always intended to do should
those circumstances arise which have now arisen in my life. I grieve
only that in my spiritual weakness I failed to act on my personal
convictions long ago, and allowed myself to be advised, and misadvised
by others. It would have saved me a year of unintermittant suffering and
my friends a burden which, however kindly they have borne it, was still
a useless one.
In accordance with my beliefs concerning life and its objects, I hold it
to be the simple duty of anyone afflicted with an incurable disease to
cut his agonies short. Had any of my physicians told me when I asked
them the truth of the matter, a long and hopeless tragedy might have
been saved. But, obeying what they call ‘medical ethics,’ they chose to
promise the impossible (recovery), in order to keep me on the rack of
life. Such action let them account for themselves, for I hold it to be
one of the chief crimes of the medical profession that they tell these
lies.
That no one be unjustly charged, I wish it understood that my disease is
chronic catarrh of the head, afflicting my ears with incessant sound for
a year past. It has nothing whatever to do with the shooting of two
years ago, and no one is in any way to blame.
I wish my body to be given to the Hahnemann College to be used for
dissection; I hope Dr. H. L. Northrop will take it in charge. I want no
ceremonies, nor speeches over it. I die, as I have lived, a free spirit,
an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly. Though
I sorrow for the work I wished to do, which time and loss of health
prevented, I am glad I lived no useless life (save this one last year)
and hope that the work I did will live and grow with my pupils’ lives
and by them be passed on to others, even as I passed on what I had
received. If my comrades wish to do aught for my memory, let them print
my poems, the MSS. of which is in possession of N. N., to whom I leave
this last task of carrying out my few wishes.
My dying thoughts are on the vision of a free world, without poverty and
its pain, ever ascending to sublimer knowledge.
Voltairine De Cleyre”
There is no indication anywhere, why Voltairine, usually so determined,
failed to carry out her intention. No doubt it was again the Dominant
Idea; her Will to life was too strong.
In the note revealing her decision of ending her life, Voltairine
asserts that her malady had nothing to do with the shooting which
occurred two years prior. She was moved to exonerate her assailant by
her boundless human compassion, as she was moved by it, when she
appealed to her comrades for funds to help the youth and when she
refused to have him prosecuted by “due process of law.” She knew better
than the judges the cause and effect of crime and punishment. And she
knew that in any event the boy was irresponsible. But the chariot of law
rolled on. The assailant was sentenced to seven years prison, where soon
he lost his mind altogether, dying in an insane asylum two years later.
Voltairine’s attitude towards criminals and her view of the barbarous
futility of punishment are incorporated in her brilliant treatise on
Crime and Punishment. After a penetrating analysis of the causes of
crime, she asked:
“Have you ever watched it coming in, — the sea? When the wind comes
roaring out of the mist and a great bellowing thunders up from the
water? Have you watched the white lions chasing each other towards the
walls, and leaping up with foaming anger, as they strike, and turn and
chase each other along the black bars of their cage in rage to devour
each other? And tear back? And leap in again? Have you ever wondered in
the midst of it all, which particular drops of water would strike the
wall? If one could know all the facts one might calculate even that. But
who can know them all? Of one thing only we are sure; some must strike
it.
They are the criminals, those drops of water pitching against that silly
wall and broken. Just why it was those particular ones we cannot know;
but some had to go. Do not curse them; you have cursed them enough ...”
She closes her wonderful expos‚ of criminology with this appeal: “Let us
have done with this savage idea of punishment, which is without wisdom.
Let us work for the freedom of man from the oppression which makes
criminals, and for the enlightened treatment of the sick.”
Voltairine de Cleyre began her public career as a pacifist, and for many
years she sternly set her face against revolutionary methods. But the
events in Europe during the latter years of her life, the Russian
Revolution of 1905, the rapid development of Capitalism in her own
country, with all its resultant cruelty, violence and injustice, and
particularly the Mexican Revolution changed her view of methods. As
always when, after an inner struggle, Voltairine saw cause for change,
her large nature would compel her to admit error freely and bravely
stand up for the new. She did so in her able essays on Direct Action and
The Mexican Revolution. She did more; she fervently took up the fight of
the Mexican people who threw off their yoke; she wrote, she lectured,
she collected funds for the Mexican cause. She even grew impatient with
some of her comrades because they saw in the events across the American
border only one phase of the social struggle and not the all-absorbing
issue to which everything else should be subordinated. I was among the
severely criticised and so was Mother Earth, a magazine I published. But
I had often been censured by Voltairine for my “waste” of effort to
reach the American intelligentzia rather than to consecrate all my
efforts to the workers, as she did so ardently. But, knowing her deep
sincerity, the religious zeal which stamped everything she did, no one
minded her censorship: we went on loving and admiring her just the same.
How deeply she felt the wrongs of Mexico can best be seen from the fact
that she began to study Spanish and had actually planned to go to Mexico
to live and work among the Yaqui Indians and to become an active force
in the Revolution. In 1910, Voltairine de Cleyre moved from Philadelphia
to Chicago, where she again took up teaching of immigrants; at the same
time she lectured, worked on a history of the so-called Haymarket Riot,
translated from French the life of Louise Michel, the priestess of pity
and vengeance, as W. T. Stead had named the French Anarchist, and other
works dealing with Anarchism by foreign writers. Constantly in the
throes of her terrible affliction, she knew but too well that the
disease would speedily bring her to the grave. But she endured her pain
stoically, without letting her friends know the inroads her illness was
making upon her constitution. Bravely she fought for life with infinite
patience and pains, but in vain. The infection gradually penetrated
deeper and, finally, there developed a mastoid which necessitated an
immediate operation. She might have recovered from it had not the poison
spread to the brain. The first operation impaired her memory; she could
recollect no names, even of the closest friends who watched over her. It
was reasonably certain that a second operation, if she could have
survived it, would have left her without the capacity for speech. Soon
grim Death made all scientific experiment on the much-tortured body of
Voltairine de Cleyre unnecessary. She died on June 6^(th), 1912. In
Waldheim cemetery, near the grave of the Chicago Anarchists, lies at
rest Voltairine de Cleyre, and every year large masses journey there to
pay homage to the memory of America’s first Anarchist martyrs, and they
lovingly remember Voltairine de Cleyre.
The bare physical facts in the life of this unique woman are not
difficult to record. But they are not enough to clarify the traits that
combined in her character, the contradictions in her soul, the emotional
tragedies in her life. For, unlike other great social rebels,
Voltairine’s public career was not very rich in events. True, she had
some conflicts with the powers that be, she was forcibly removed from
the platform on several occasions, she was arrested and tried on others,
but never convicted. On the whole, her activities went on comparatively
smoothly and undisturbed. Her struggles were of psychologic nature, her
bitter disappointments having their roots in her own strange being. To
understand the tragedy of her life, one must try to trace its inherent
causes. Voltairine herself has given us the key to her nature and inner
conflicts. In several of her essays and, specifically, in her
autobiographical sketches. In The Making of an Anarchist we learn, for
instance, that if she were to attempt to explain her Anarchism by the
ancestral vein of rebellion, she would be, even though at bottom
convictions are temperamental, “a bewildering error in logic; for, by
early influences and education I should have been a nun, and spent my
life glorifying Authority in its most concentrated form.”
There is no doubt that the years in the Convent had not only undermined
her physique but had also a lasting effect upon her spirit; they killed
the mainsprings of joy and of gaiety in her. Yet there must have been an
inherent tendency to asceticism, because even four years in the living
tomb could not have laid such a crushing hand upon her entire life. Her
whole nature was that of an ascetic. Her approach to life and ideals was
that of the old-time saints who flagellated their bodies and tortured
their souls for the glory of God. Figuratively speaking, Voltairine also
flagellated herself, as if in penance for our Social Sins; her poor body
was covered with ungainly clothes and she denied herself even the
simplest joys, not only because of lack of means, but because to do
otherwise would have been against her principles.
Every social and ethical movement had had its ascetics, of course, the
difference between them and Voltairine was that they worshipped no other
gods and had no need of any, excepting their particular ideal. Not so
Voltairine. With all her devotion to her social ideals, she had another
god — the god of Beauty. Her life was a ceaseless struggle between the
two; the ascetic determinedly stifling her longing for beauty, but the
poet in her as determinedly yearning for it, worshipping it in utter
abandonment, only to be dragged back by the ascetic to the other deity,
her social ideal, her devotion to humanity. It was not given to
Voltairine to combine them both; hence the inner lacerating struggle.
Nature has been very generous towards Voltairine, endowing her with a
singularly brilliant mind, with a rich and sensitive soul. But physical
beauty and feminine attraction were witheld from her, their lack made
more apparent by ill-health and her abhorrence of artifice. No one felt
this more poignantly than she did herself. Anguish over her lack of
physical charm speak in her hauntingly autobiographic sketch, The Reward
of an Apostate:
“... Oh, that my god will none of me! That is an old sorrow! My god was
Beauty, and I am all unbeautiful, and ever was. There is no grace in
these harsh limbs of mine, nor was at any time. I, to whom the glory of
a lit eye was as the shining of stars in a deep well, have only dull and
faded eyes, and always had; the chiselled lip and chin whereover runs
the radiance of life in bubbling gleams, the cup of living wine was
never mine to taste or kiss. I am earth-colored and for my own ugliness
sit in the shadows, that the sunlight may not see me, nor the beloved of
my god. But, once, in my hidden corner, behind a curtain of shadows, I
blinked at the glory of the world, and had such joy of it as only the
ugly know, sitting silent and worshipping, forgetting themselves and
forgotten. Here in my brain it glowed, the shimmering of the dying sun
upon the shore, the long [gold] line between the sand and sea, where the
sliding foam caught fire and burned to death ...
Here in my brain, my silent unrevealing brain, were the eyes I loved,
the lips I dared not kiss, the sculptured head and tendrilled hair. They
were here always in my wonder-house, my house of Beauty. The temple of
my god. I shut the door on common life and worshipped here. And no
bright, living, flying thing in whose body beauty dwells as guest can
guess the ecstatic joy of a brown, silent creature, a toad-thing,
squatting on the shadowed ground, self-blotted, motionless, thrilling
with the presence of All-Beauty, though it has no part therein.”
This is complemented by a description of her other god, the god of
physical strength, the maker and breaker of things, the re-moulder of
the world. Now she followed him and would have run abreast because she
loved him so, —
“not with that still ecstasy of [flooding] joy wherewith my own god
filled me of old, but with impetuous, eager fires, that burned and beat
through all the blood-threads of me. ‘I love you, love me back,’ I
cried, and would have flung myself upon his neck. Then he turned on me
with a ruthless blow; and fled away over the world, leaving me crippled,
stricken, powerless, a fierce pain driving through my veins — gusts of
pain! — and I crept back into my [old] cavern, stumbling, blind and
deaf, only for the haunting vision of my shame and the rushing sound of
fevered blood ...”
I quoted at length because this sketch is symbolic of Voltairine’s
emotional tragedies and singularly self-revealing of the struggles
silently fought against the fates that gave her so little of what she
craved most. Yet, Voltairine had her own peculiar charm which showed
itself most pleasingly when she was roused over some wrong, or when her
pale face lit up with the inner fire of her ideal. But the men who came
into her life rarely felt it; they were too overawed by her intellectual
superiority, which held them for a time. But the famished soul of
Voltairine de Cleyre craved for more than mere admiration which the men
had either not the capacity or the grace to give. Each in his own way
“turned on her with a ruthless blow,” and left her desolate, solitary,
heart-hungry.
Voltairine’s emotional defeat is not an exceptional case; it is the
tragedy of many intellectual women. Physical attraction always has been,
and no doubt always will be, a decisive factor in the love-life of two
persons. Sex-relationship among modern peoples has certainly lost much
of its former crudeness and vulgarity. Yet it remains a fact today, as
it has been for ages, that men are chiefly attracted not by a woman’s
brain or talents, but by her physical charm. That does not necessarily
imply that they prefer woman to be stupid. It does imply, however, most
men prefer beauty to brains, perhaps because in true male fashion they
flatter themselves that they have no need of the former in their own
physical make-up and that they have sufficient of the latter not to seek
for it in their wives. At any rate, therein has been the tragedy of many
intellectual women.
There was one man in Voltairine’s life who cherished her for the beauty
of her spirit and the quality of her mind, and who remained a vital
force in her life until his own sad end. This man was Dyer D. Lum, the
comrade of Albert Parsons and his co-editor on The Alarm — the Anarchist
paper published in Chicago before the death of Parsons. How much their
friendship meant to Voltairine we learn from her beautiful tribute to
Dyer D. Lum in her poem In Memoriam from which I quote the last stanza:
“Oh, Life, I love you for the love of him
Who showed me all your glory and your pain!
‘Into Nirvana’ — so the deep tones sing —
And there — and there — we shall — be — one — again.”
Measured by the ordinary yard-stick, Voltairine de Cleyre was anything
but normal in her feelings and reactions. Fortunately, the great of the
world cannot be weighed in numbers and scales; their worth lies in the
meaning and purpose they give to existence, and Voltairine has
undoubtedly enriched life with meaning and given sublime idealism as its
purpose. But, as a study of human complexities she offers rich material.
The woman who consecrated herself to the service of the submerged,
actually experiencing poignant agony at the sight of suffering, whether
of children or dumb animals (she was obsessed by love for the latter and
would give shelter and nourishment to every stray cat and dog, even to
the extent of breaking with a friend because she objected to her cats
invading every corner of the house), the woman who loved her mother
devotedly, maintaining her at the cost of her own needs, — this generous
comrade whose heart went out to all who were in pain or sorrow, was
almost entirely lacking in the mother instinct. Perhaps it never had a
chance to assert itself in an atmosphere of freedom and harmony. The one
child she brought into the world had not been wanted. Voltairine was
deathly ill the whole period of pregnancy, the birth of her child nearly
costing the mother’s life. Her situation was aggravated by the serious
rift that took place at this time in her relationship with the father of
this child. The stifling Puritan atmosphere in which the two lived did
not serve to improve matters. All of it resulted in the little one being
frequently changed from place to place and later even used by the father
as a bait to compel Voltairine to return to him. Subsequently, deprived
of opportunity to see her child, kept in ignorance even of its
whereabouts, she gradually grew away from him. Many years passed before
she saw the boy again and he was then seventeen years of age. Her
efforts to improve his much-neglected education met with failure. They
were strangers to each other. Quite naturally perhaps, her male child
felt like most men in her life; he, too, was overawed by her intellect,
repelled by her austere mode of living. He went his way. He is today
probably, one of the 100% Americans, commonplace and dull.
Yet Voltairine de Cleyre loved youth and understood it as few grown
people do. Characteristically, she wrote to a young friend who was deaf
and with whom it was difficult to converse orally:
“Why do you say you are drifting farther and farther from those dear to
you? I do not think your experience in that respect is due to your
deafness; but to the swell of life in you. All young creatures feel the
time come when a new surge of life overcomes them, drives them onward,
they know not where. And they lose hold on the cradles of life, and
parental love, and they almost suffocate with the pressure of forces in
themselves. And even if they hear they feel so vague, restless, looking
for some definite thing to come.
It seems to you it is your deafness; but while that is a terrible thing,
you mustn’t think it would solve the problem of loneliness if you could
hear. I know how your soul must fight against the inevitability of your
deprivation; I, too, could never be satisfied and resigned to the
‘inevitable.’ I fought it when there was no use and no hope. But the
main cause of loneliness is, as I say, the surge of life, which in time
will find its own expression.
Full well she knew “the surge of life,” and the tragedy of vain seeking
for an outlet, for in her it had been suppressed so long that she was
rarely able to give vent to it, except in her writings. She dreaded
“company” and crowds, though she was at home on the platform; proximity
she shrank from. Her reserve and isolation, her inability to break
through the wall raised by years of silence in the Convent and years of
illness are disclosed in a letter to her young correspondent:
“Most of the time I shrink away from people and talk — especially talk.
With the exception of a few — a very few people, I hate to sit in
people’s company. You see I have (for a number of reasons I cannot
explain to anybody) had to go away from the home and friends where I
lived for twenty years. And no matter how good other people are to me, I
never feel at home anywhere. I feel like a lost or wandering creature
that has no place, and cannot find anything to be at home with. And
that’s why I don’t talk much to you, nor to others (excepting the two or
three that I knew in the east). I am always far away. I cannot help it.
I am too old to learn to like new corners. Even at home I never talked
much, with but one or two persons. I’m sorry. It’s not because I want to
be morose, but I can’t bear company. Haven’t you noticed that I never
like to sit at table when there are strangers? And it gets worse all the
time. Don’t mind it.”
Only on rare occasions could Voltairine de Cleyre freely communicate
herself, give out of her rich soul to those who loved and understood
her. She was a keen observer of man and his ways, quickly detecting sham
and able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Her comments on such
occasions were full of penetration, interspersed with a quiet, rippling
humor. She used to tell an interesting anecdote about some detectives
who had come to arrest her. It was in 1907, in Philadelphia, when the
guardians of law descended upon her home. They were much surprised to
find that Voltairine did not look like the traditional newspaper
Anarchist. They seemed sorry to arrest her, but “them’s orders,” they
apologetically declared. They made a search of her apartment, scattering
her papers and books and, finally, discovering a copy of her
revolutionary poems entitled: The Worm Turns. With contempt they threw
it aside. “Hell, it’s only about worms,” they remarked.
They were rare moments when Voltairine could overcome her shyness and
reserve, and really feel at home with a few selected friends.
Ordinarily, her natural disposition, aggravated by constant physical
pain, and the deafening roar in her ears, made her taciturn and
extremely uncommunicative. She was sombre, the woes of the world
weighing heavily upon her. She saw life mostly in greys and blacks and
painted it accordingly. It is this which prevented Voltairine from
becoming one of the greatest writers of her time.
But no one who can appreciate literary quality and musical prose will
deny Voltairine de Cleyre’s greatness after reading the stories and
sketches already mentioned and the others contained in her collected
works.[1] Particularly, her Chain Gang, picturing the negro convicts
slaving on the highways of the south, is for beauty of style, feeling
and descriptive power, a literary gem that has few equals in English
literature. Her essays are most forceful, of extreme clarity of thought
and original expression. And even her poems, though somewhat
old-fashioned in form, rank higher than much that now passes for poetry.
However, Voltairine did not believe in “art for art’s sake.” To her art
was the means and the vehicle to voice life in its ebb and flow, in all
its stern aspects for those who toil and suffer, who dream of freedom
and dedicate their lives to its achievement. Yet more significant than
her art was Voltairine de Cleyre’s life itself, a supreme heroism moved
and urged on by her ever-present Dominant Idea.
The prophet is alien in his own land. Most alien is the American
prophet. Ask any 100-percenter what he knows of the truly great men and
women of his country, the superior souls that give life inspiration and
beauty, the teachers of new values. He will not be able to name them.
How, then, should he know of the wonderful spirit that was born in some
obscure town in the State of Michigan, and who lived in poverty all her
life, but who by sheer force of will pulled herself out of a living
grave, cleared her mind from the darkness of superstition, — turned her
face to the sun, perceived a great ideal and determinedly carried it to
every corner of her native land? The 100-percenters feel more
comfortable when there is no one to disturb their drabness. But the few
who themselves are souls in pain, who long for breadth and vision — they
need to know about Voltairine de Cleyre. They need to know that American
soil sometimes does bring forth exquisite plants. Such consciousness
will be encouraging. It is for them that this sketch is written, for
them that Voltairine de Cleyre, whose body lies in Waldheim, is being
spiritually resurrected — as it were — as the poet-rebel, the
liberty-loving artist, the greatest woman-Anarchist of America. But more
graphically than any description of mine, her own words in the closing
chapter of The Making of an Anarchist express the true personality of
Voltairine de Cleyre:
“Good-natured satirists often remark that ‘the best way to cure an
Anarchist is to give him a fortune.’ Substituting ‘corrupt’ for ‘cure,’
I would subscribe to this; and believing myself to be no better than the
rest of mortals, I earnestly hope that as so far it has been my [lot] to
work, and work hard, and for no fortune, so I may continue to the end;
for let me keep the integrity of my soul, with all the limitations of my
material conditions, rather than become the spine-less and ideal-less
creation of material needs. My reward is that I live with the young; I
keep step with my comrades; I shall die in the harness with my face to
the east — the East and the Light.”
[1] Selected Works by Voltairine de Cleyre, published by Mother Earth
Publishing Association, New York, 1914.