Arrested Development
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/017_04/6670
The incredible shrinking legacy of a 1960s culture hero
Kerry Howley
Dec/Jan 2011
Almost everything written about Paul Goodman refers to him as a "man
of letters," a designation interesting only in that it indicates a
terrific triumph of self-branding. Goodman very much enjoyed calling
himself a man of letters, or sometimes an "old-fashioned man of
letters," so stated with an air of declinist resignation, and could
be counted on to complain if described as anything less. He produced
essays with titles like "The Present Plight of a Man of Letters," the
gist of which was that the plight was rather taxing, and that they
don't make 'em like Paul Goodman anymore.
Perhaps they don't. Few today would call themselves playwright, poet,
novelist, urban planner, media critic, classicist, activist, and
primary-education expert, though it is Goodman's insistent sexuality
that places him so singularly in the 1960s. Too disruptive to be long
attached to any university or institution, Goodman is principally
remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd (1960) and as a
cantankerous Jewish intellectual of the New Left. There was a time
when he was everywhere, often as one among many in some literary
salon, occasionally playing the role of leading man. On a 1966
episode of Firing Line, a deadpan Bill Buckley introduced Goodman as
an "a bisexualist, a poverty cultist, an anarchist." Shrouded in
ribbons of pipe smoke, ruffled like a runaway child, he
objected衫ildly負o "poverty cultist" before proceeding to argue for
the abolition of public schools.
I saw that Firing Line bit in a trailer for a 2010 documentary called
Paul Goodman Changed My Life, produced by Jonathan Lee and populated
with reverent souls who feel he has been unjustly forgotten. The man
did, after all, hang around plenty of people胤orman Mailer, Mary
McCarthy, Grace Paley苑etter served by historical memory. Susan
Sontag called Goodman "our Sartre," though he was unfailingly rude to
her, civility never having been his strong point. The anarchist
Dwight Macdonald reports that at parties Goodman would scout the
crowd for "young fans" and "bathe in their na鴳e adulation," while
spurning the company of everyone his own age.
Gracious guest or otherwise, Goodman was someone you invited to your
party, just as you sought his presence at your protest and asked him
to speechify at your sit-in. To consort with the author of Growing Up
Absurd was to suggest that you, too, were your own person, beholden
to no convention, tied to no tired establishment consensus. Said to
be the only book regularly quoted by UC Berkeley protesters during
the free-speech movement, Growing Up Absurd inspired fierce gratitude
in university students of the '60s, who took the attack on the
"organized system" to be an intellectual defense of their rebellion.
To the charge that disaffected youth simply needed better
socialization, a fifty-year-old Goodman asked, "Socialization to
what?" To ten hours a day with a sloganeering team of corporate
puppets? To participation in the "world-wide demented enterprise"
known as the American military? Having failed to justify their ways
to young men, Goodman argued, grown-ups had cultivated the very
anomie they so loudly lamented.
Students eventually turned on Goodman, perhaps because they made the
mistake of actually reading, rather than simply quoting, Growing Up
Absurd and found its normative view of a meaningful life unduly
constrained. But what they initially saw, and quite rightly admired,
was a man who refused to accept life's choices as they were given.
Asked to choose between a war-addicted democratic establishment and
Soviet Communism, Goodman chose anarchism. Asked to choose between
men and women, he elected to marry twice趴hile continuing to
proposition attractive young men. Asked to give a talk to the
National Security Industrial Association in the State Department
auditorium, a forum in which even most antiwar types might begin with
some pretense of courtesy, Goodman chose to address his crowd as "you people":
You people are unfitted by your commitments, your experience, your
customary methods, your recruitment, and your moral disposition. You
are the military industrial of the United States, the most dangerous
body of men at the present in the world, for you not only implement
our disastrous policies but are an overwhelming lobby for them, and
you expand and rigidify the wrong use of brains, resources, and labor
so that change becomes difficult. Most likely the trends you
represent will be interrupted by a shambles of riots, alienation,
ecological catastrophes, wars, and revolutions, so that current
long-range planning, including this conference, is irrelevant.
As a libertarian in unlibertarian times, Goodman feared war,
bureaucracy, and what he called "acquiescence to the social machine."
Process is a verb one comes across frequently in Goodman's writing.
Governments process full-bodied humans into soldiers; corporations
process them into personnel. Public schools process children into
obedient cogs. Individual initiative, he believed, was nearly always
wasted, and technocracy threatened to waste it ever more
expeditiously in the service of the state. The town meeting
championed by Thomas Jefferson and the kind of mutual exchange
championed by Adam Smith were, in his view, beautiful instances of
human flourishing, but both the market and the government had become
so complex that individuals were lost, squandered, processed.
Everything, Goodman was fond of saying, had sprawled beyond "human scale."
Goodman had a lot of ideas, dozens and dozens of books full of ideas,
about how to reclaim human life from the haze of bureaucratic
abstraction. Many of these verged on the crackpot負hough when Goodman
gave up prescribing and stuck merely to describing, he could
articulate a clear-eyed vision of a life well lived. Somewhere he
describes a decent community as one in which a crazy old lady can
wander the neighborhood without fear of being put away, which is as
good a description as I have read. He longed to replace process with
emotion: more fistfights, more orgasms, more draft cards lit afire in
a show of public rage. Most everyone, he thought, could benefit from
more casual sex, especially adolescents, who suffered from "excessive
stimulation and inadequate discharge."
In service of this point, he regularly seduced his male students and
proudly admitted as much. He would, as the composer Ned Rorem tells
it in the film, make "passes at literally everybody. I mean
everybody衫en and women and people's mothers and the president of the
university." The essay "Being Queer" is, if anything, more subversive
today than it was in 1969 when Goodman wrote it, declaring that the
teacher-student relationship is inherently erotic in character and
that anonymous sex is a healthy pursuit. "Although I wish I could
have had my parties with less apprehension and more unhurriedly," he
writes, "yet it has been an advantage to learn that the ends of
docks, the backs of trucks, back alleys, behind the stairs, abandoned
bunkers on the beach, and the washrooms of trains are all adequate
samples of all the space there is. For both bad and good, homosexual
life retains some of the alarm and excitement of childish sexuality.
It is damaging for societies to check any spontaneous vitality.
Sometimes it is necessary, but rarely; and certainly not homosexual
acts which, so far as I have heard, have never done any harm to anybody."
The anarchist-friendly publisher PM Press has reissued a number of
books authored by Goodman苔n indiscretion that his fans have long
feared. "Certainly," wrote critic Kingsley Widmer in his 1980 book on
Goodman, "a complete collected works could only be an embarrassing
exposure before entombing." Either more or less kindly, Mailer
compared "the literary experience of encountering Goodman's style" to
"the journeys one undertook in the company of a laundry bag." Judging
by New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (1970), Drawing
the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings, and The Paul
Goodman Reader, plodding through Goodman is considerably less fun
than that. When he comes across an interestingly subversive thought,
he takes it prisoner, interrogates it endlessly, and tortures the joy
out of its expression, leaving it so disfigured as to be
unrecognizable to all but the most patient reader. Out of concern
less for Goodman's reputation than for the future of American
letters苑ad prose is catching背 cannot recommend cracking a single
spine from among these works, which include plodding, bafflingly
structured essays, tin-eared poetry, and didactic plays. Better to
read others on Goodman訃arely in history has such a long list of
luminaries come together to apologize for a single body of work.
"Though he was not often graceful as a writer," Sontag observed in
tribute, "his writing and his mind were touched with grace."
The opening essay in New Reformation takes as its subject the
perversion of scientific discovery by government, for example in the
Manhattan Project. By turns maddeningly vague and pointlessly
specific, the piece begins with a dry description of some then-recent
university protests, proceeds to the surprising observation that "for
three hundred years, science and scientific technology had an
unblemished and justified reputation as a wonderful adventure,"
identifies technology as a "branch of moral philosophy, not of
science," and goes on to demand that technologists get into the
business of telling people when to renounce their infatuation with
technology, as with the overabundance of cars. Space exploration is
encouraged ("It must be pursued"). "A complicated system," we learn,
"works most efficiently if its parts readjust themselves
decentrally"負hough then again, "usually there is an advantage in a
central clearinghouse of information about the gross total
situation." All told, "the most efficient use of Big Science
technology for the general health would be to have compulsory
biennial check-ups"負hough more tonsillitis cases, it is suggested,
should be treated in the home. Also: "A question of immense
importance for the immediate future is: Which functions should be
automated or organized to use business machines, and which should
not?" The remaining third of the essay draws a painful analogy to the
Protestant Reformation, with tangential references to the "dissident
young" and their inability to focus on "the underlying issues of modern times."
Goodman's most passionately held positions虐is distrust of the
"hidden government" composed of the CIA and FBI, his refusal to trust
any party when it came to waging war or safeguarding civil
liberties虐ave, in the abstract, held up very well. But in their
execution, his arguments are strangely mimetic of his greatest
anxiety負he dissolution of good will under conditions of unmanageable
complexity, the ever-growing distance between good intentions and
their consequences. The aforementioned essay wants to make a point
about the simple romance of human discovery and the way sclerotic
institutions pervert that romance. Instead of gently bringing life to
the idea, Goodman lurches forward and processes the thought out of
existence. He comes across a sun-burnished clementine, disappears
into his office, and emerges with a lukewarm glass of SunnyD.
New Reformation records Goodman's break with the student movement虐e
found college kids increasingly ignorant and ideologically brittle,
and they found him excessively bourgeois. But the views he expresses
in the book are little different from those he belabored a decade
before in Growing Up Absurd. He was never so much supporting
university students as psychologizing them, attempting to diagnose
what he took to be their monstrous alienation from modern life. In
various works, he describes Beat poetry as incompetent, On the Road
as artless, and hipsters as the detritus of a civilization bereft of
meaning. (If today's student population can learn anything from
reading Goodman, it's that hipster-hating precedes them by many
years.) In New Reformation, he refers to the students' music as
"terribly loud."
Is this the Goodman who mattered? That he was never the genius some
took him to be is obvious from a look at any one of these works. He
was a guy who wore a lot of tweed, smoked a corncob pipe, and played
the part of a serious man. His rumpled outline and earnest demeanor
met with some notion of how a public intellectual ought to look, how
he ought to behave, what dark soulful depths he ought to plumb while
staring meaningfully into the distance. And for a number of people,
several of them interviewed for the documentary, Goodman's thoughts
converged with their own vague misgivings and validated their refusal
to accept the world as it was given them. "I was living in a small
Texas town," says a Goodman admirer named Jerl Surratt as he recalls
his first encounter with the man's work. "And if I stayed in Texas it
just wasn't going to work for me, I had to break away. Paul Goodman
was someone who helped strengthen that resolve in me, that ambition."
By the time Goodman died, Surratt was already in New York: "I'd read
that there was going to be a memorial service. And to be sitting
there with his family and people who had also known him intimately,
who were men, was a very moving experience, and reinforced for me
that I'd made the right decision. I was in a city where these things
were possible. Where a life like this could be led."
The sentiment is not Surratt's alone. The most rewarding bit of
Drawing the Line Once Again turns out to be editor Taylor Stoehr's
introductory reminiscence. Stoehr relates how he found in Goodman a
man who had found "another way to live," a man whose refusal to
conform could shock a young mind back into its best instincts. Here
was "an attitude toward life and the world" that got "into your own
bones" and left you transformed. "As if in dialogue with Socrates,"
he writes, "you felt you were in touch with your own wisdom, like a
kind of memory, for the very first time."
Socrates, you will recall, never wrote anything down, while Goodman,
in lieu of electing a Plato from among his admirers, spent a lifetime
anxiously asserting himself as a writer first and an eccentric
second. It is no small thing to have been so consistently contrary to
the social and intellectual sweep of one's time. But if it is simply
as a man of letters that we must remember Goodman, we won't remember
him at all.
.
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