An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (review)

272 biography Vol. 4, No. 3 works, purports to be pure biography, Dowling's approach may prove disturbing to some. Throughout the study, the author seems aware of possible objections against his reading biography as a self-contained literary world, "making no reference to any 'real' Boswell, [or] any 'real' Johnson" (p. 90). The Life of Johnson, he asserts, is a big book. It can be read in as many ways as there are methods to approach it. Thus, his own "argument about the role of the hero in Boswell" should "be judged in its own terms, and these are just the terms in which an interpretation of King Lear or Bleak House would be judged sound or unsound " (pp. 187-88). To support this approach, Dowling appeals to Aristotle's "universality of literary meaning," the idea that poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history (p. 188). It should be, noted, however, that poetry will be more universal than history precisely because the poet is not, like the historian—or the modern biographer , I might add—constrained by the facts. In evoking the bios form, Dowling may perhaps have buttressed his argument by drawing on another classical tradition that sees the biographer as moralist first, historian second and holds that the biographer-as-moralist may take liberties with the facts to get at the meaning behind them. This tradition, however, would not help with Boswell, who frequently commends the accuracy of his own scientific method. As the Life of Johnson attests, the modern biographer can certainly employ literary patterns to shape a life history. But there is a point at which the biographer (unlike the poet) must stop, or his work ceases to be biography and becomes something else. Engaging as it is at times, Dowling's attempt to read biography as fiction tends to blur the important distinctions between the two, distinctions that make biography the unique genre it is. We would not ask "Pray tell me, Sir, where in Westminster Abbey do we find Lear?" We would ask this about Johnson. And in even the most "literary" of approaches to the Life, the "real" Samuel Johnson—as elusive a figure as he is—must be taken into account. Christopher Fox Wilkes College Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 266 pp. $16.50. Voltairine de Cleyre was one of that rare breed, an indigenous American anarchist. Though much loved by her comrades, she was little known outside that small circle of friends; her advocacy of and work reviews 273 for the principles of anarchy generated no mass following among her contemporaries of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Not surprisingly , her work has been largely ignored by historians. Paul Avrich's biography of Cleyre is therefore the first scholarly attempt to understand this woman's fascinating life. Avrich seeks not only to illuminate the "rich drama" of her career, but hopes to indicate how she helped influence the character of the American anarchist movement. He recognizes that Cleyre was only a "distinguished minor member" ofthat select club of radicals, yet suggests that an examination of her life can make the movement itself more comprehensible. Alas, Avrich is not altogether successful in these endeavors. Born in Michigan in 1866, Voltairine de Cleyre lived but forty-five years. Despite the brevity of her life, she spanned the Golden Age of American anarchy, as her friendship and association with Emma Goldman , Alexander Berkman, Benjamin Tucker, Dyer Lum and others attests . She shared with these men and women many of the intellectual dilemmas and emotional experiences that shaped the anarchist perspective . Like many of her colleagues, Cleyre slowly moved towards a form of ecumenical anarchism ("anarchy without adjectives"), one devoid of rigid economic and political dogma. Her vacillation on the issue of the use of violence to overthrow a repressive state was characteristic of the movement generally; only near the end of her life was she inclined to accept the need for force. Another aspect of Cleyre's career involves the role of women in American culture. She and others objected not simply to America's political framework but...