💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › robert-helms-paul-avrich-a-eulogy.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:39:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: ​Paul Avrich: A Eulogy Author: Robert Helms Date: October 27, 2006 Language: en Topics: eulogy, obituary Source: https://www.deadanarchists.org/paul-avrich.html Notes: For Paul Avrich's Memorial, held at the Martin Segal Theatre in the CUNY Graduate Centre, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York City, on October 27, 2006.
Good Afternoon.
My name is Bob Helms, and I had the privilege of knowing Paul Avrich
during the last several years of his life.
I wish to warn you of a quicksand that I have fallen into, which I will
call “the Paul Avrich Vortex.” This is where you may find yourself, as I
did, after reading his books and feeling compelled to uncover just one
more drop of information, and then another and another, beyond the ocean
that Paul discovered about thousands of anarchists, both living and
dead.
There are special things that I have found in Paul’s work that tell of
the way he gave back to us, the anarchists, our humanity. We were a
cadaver when he found us. Paul dove in like a surgeon and restored
strength to our bones, and breadth to our old lungs. Here is one example
of how he did this:
Once, when Paul visited my home in Philadelphia, he was delighted to
meet the four cats who lived with me, and pleased that three of them
(Cleyre, Sasha, and
) were named after dead anarchists. Much later, I stopped in at his
apartment in Manhattan, and the first thing he did was introduce me to
his cats. The reason I tell you this is that in his biography of
Voltairine de Cleyre, Paul went into very fine detail about her love of
animals, and especially the cats. Another researcher would have missed
this part of de Cleyre’s personality; another writer would have failed
to mention it. But this little thread has caused me to figure out why
that long-dead anarchist heroine gave one particular cat his name, just
as a million other details from Paul’s books have assigned me a
lifetime’s worth of homework. The cat’s name was Thomas Earle, after the
famous abolitionist lawyer of Pennsylvania and the grandfather of Laura
Earle, the master pianist who was one of Voltairine’s anarchist
comrades.
I believe that I would not have been drawn into this obsession for
history, had I not known Paul personally. He had such a love for the
anarchist people he knew, and for those he brought to life again from
their graves, that it just poured out of him as he spoke. I would ask
him something about some anarchist, many times over the years. If it was
an obscure name that had left little or no trace, he would just tell me
what he knew. But if I asked about an anarchist whose child or
grandchild he had met, his face would come alive, and he’d go on about
what kind of family life they had, why their good character (or bad
character) made its contribution to the cause whatever it was, back in
the time when they lived. The effect was that Paul added an anarchist’s
own personality to the theories and abstractions that had commanded the
whole discussion of the subject before he arrived.
Paul had a loyalty to the facts as he found them, and this sometimes
brought him sadness. In his heart, he wanted to always find enlightened,
gentle people, but when he found ugly souls, violent tendencies, or
dissipated lives, he recorded the truth. When I’d mention a name, Paul
might say, “Oh, I wish you could have met her–-she was so sweet!” Or, he
might say, “He was a louse!”
I find myself talking about a man after he has died, and I am still
among the living, just as Paul had the task of describing so many
anarchists who died before him. Paul wandered into life with both a
powerful brain and a profound instinct toward kindness and decency. I
first wrote to him with a question: “What ever finally happened to
Natasha Notkin?”--and I was very surprised that Paul, a distinguished
scholar, wrote back to me, a nobody, with a short note. By the way, we
still don’t know what happened to Notkin. He didn’t care whether or not
I had credentials. He was intensely interested in every tiny detail of
the story he was committed to tell, and I was asking him something that
was worth asking.
As time passed and we knew each other better, I would tell Paul what I
was finding among the dead comrades, and every so often, I would tell
him of some tiny error of fact in one of his books. About four people on
this wide Earth would know the difference. Paul would love this: he
would demand all the analyses and sources. But he would use the occasion
to encourage me, and I felt as though I was a student who he should have
had, but who had sort of drifted into his classroom by accident, through
the window.
Not in this anarchist life, nor in any other part of this world, have I
come across a finer person than Paul Avrich.
Thank you.