The Reader Critic
Emma Goldman, Los Angeles:
Readers have a legitimate interest in the truth of critical articles. We therefore believe they will welcome these comments by Miss Goldman on the article about herself. If Miss Goldman had been displeased, we should have printed her letter with equal frankness.
A Chicago friend sent me The Little Review for May, which contains your very excellent article on The Challenge of Emma Goldman. I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate what you have to say about my work and myself, not because of your sympathetic interpretation but because of your deep grasp of the purpose which is urging my work and permeating my life. I hope you will not mistake it as conceit on my part when I tell you that more has been written about me than perhaps about any other woman in this country, but that most of it has been trash. The only person who came near the fundamental urge in my personality was William Marion Reedy of The St. Louis Mirror, who wrote The Daughter of the Dream. I do not know whether you have ever seen it, but even his splendid write-up does not compare with yours, because it contains much more flattery than understanding. You can, therefore, imagine my joy in finding that it was a woman who demonstrated so much depth and appreciation of the cardinal principles in my work.
S. H. G., New York:
It’s getting banal for me to praise the magazine—I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. The thing has assumed the nervous importance to me of an emotional experience foreseen and inevitable. And now that I’ve finished reading the June issue I can truthfully say there isn’t a line in it I wouldn’t have been poorer without. That couldn’t be said of any other magazine ever published.
Your June “leader” is not only true and big, but absolutely timely. The essentially immoral thing should be the thing which does not contribute in some way, however obscure, to the main current. You call it “waste.” The reason vice is disgusting is because it turns human stuff off into an inescapable pocket. My idea is a sort of spiritual utilitarianism, you see. Yet without the flat associations of utilitarianism because it recognizes so many things as means to the end—joy and pain and rebellion, for instance.
Dr. Fosters’ article is superb! The fallacy of all ethical systems is that they set up an abstract word as a virtue under all conditions. “Unselfishness,” for instance. Sometimes a fine virtue—sometimes not, according to circumstances. We must decide, not the rigid word. Almost all present-day fallacies proceed from a failure to recognize the fact that the world is fluid. The individual is worthless except for his dynamic. The static (vice) leads to death; death is merely disorganization of the individual, so that life may be cast in new forms better fitted to proceed.
W. M., New York:
I am reading The Little Review month by month with much interest, and have found many things that gave me pleasure. I admire the intellectual standard. There is plenty of good, earnest thought in each issue. I should like, however, to see a little more of what, for want of a better word, I term “human.” The Review is still in the colder currents of intellectualism. I think it can stand a little more warm feeling, even if you get it in the way of a controversy.