Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time, by Paul Goodman
Dennison, George
FivE YEARS: Thoughts During a Useless Time, by Paul Goodman. Preface by Harold Rosenberg. New York: Brussel & Brussel. 257 pp. $5. Paul Goodman now has 21 books in print and we can expect...
...This act of synthesizing is certainly one source of the remarkable incisiveness of these short paragraphs...
...rather, it states the relations in the soul between how I am in the world and what I command myself to do...
...In this respect, Homer reads just like a Border Ballad...
...Everything—the waves, the sun—has a rudimentary will of its own...
...One must rather ask: what is imperfect about Chris tians' faith (and what is the neurosis) that they must represent reality in a book and spread a Gospel as a story...
...a good deal panned out...
...The effect is of a philosophic mind in the service of yearning...
...as Kafka said, "Man kann nicht Erloesung schreiben, nur leben...
...We find episodes where Goodman wants to be treated simultaneously as a patriarch and a little child, and others in which he reads the Riot Act of Natural Sex to persons quite capable of a good time if only he himself were not so busy spoiling things...
...Taken as a whole, such episodes fill out a life spectrum of enormous range, one which proposes several mysteries, first among them the relation of Goodman's prodigious literary creativity to the character traits he describes...
...and the totality of that function was the reality...
...Nineteenth-century rationalism in France was an ideology of the establishment, peculiarly without revolu...
...These 21 are variously short stories, dramas, poetry, literary and social criticism, works on psychotherapy, community planning, and education...
...which is not to say that there are no Quixotic moments...
...And what if I were Robinson Crusoe...
...There are many...
...when the bout is all over and gone, I lust...
...By short stages of association—"moor" "lonely moor"—I think of the verses, "God be my help and stay secure, I'll think of the leech-gatherer...
...again, it appears as a sense of loss which makes him seem like a disembodied spirit trying to learn the laws of fleshly existence...
...But I think that Auerbach unwittingly proves the very contrary of what the theologians want to prove...
...The schoolteacher and the priest were rival figures of comedy...
...This experience of isolation, the being "set apart"—which takes so many forms—runs like a substratum through these thoughts...
...I spoke well, absorbed and spontaneous...
...It is as if he lived terribly close to the void, which rather than ignore he attempts to fill with real things...
...But that was yesterday: what is their reaction now that I am gone...
...One's first impression is of an intimate conversation ranging over a great many subjects and events...
...He was 45 years old when he commenced the thoughts...
...But I could happily spend all my days with him if I dared . . . in the evening I was in the great new aeroplane flying West, and I was abashed and made small by that machine, society with a big S...
...No life left but in a "subjective moment...
...Paul Goodman now has 21 books in print and we can expect two more within the year...
...On the same page: I go up to the lonely moor behind the dune, where no one ever goes but me, and no one can see me...
...The positivists are in error...
...In these entries the author proposes tasks, duties, and loyalties to himself...
...This co-opting and alliance was nauseating, so that French exist entialism has been driven to the most Wild West extreme-situations in order to escape Reason and God...
...There is a return of the forgotten and the landscape is peopled with its gods...
...Both Empire City and Growing Up Absurd were published during these years, yet by and large the author experienced them as a kind of coda to a still longer period of isolation and neglect...
...Here, in any event, are some excerpts...
...The experience of isolation appears too—and profoundly, I think—in those aspects of the book in which we see the shaping of a life (and even, to some extent, the shaping of a self...
...As Arnold said, Literature is the criticism of life, but it is not easy to know what it is saying...
...If it is achieved, something is wrong, since ethics and faith are in present motion...
...The speech of Adam in the garden is Jes person's non-analytic syntax and song...
...At the heart of the book we find a very personal malaise...
...I have gradually been refining from my behaviour," he writes, "the bluff, the false dignity, the evasive maneuvers, the actions performed to make good the bluff...
...New York: Brussel & Brussel...
...For in general, as these notes make clear, the life that Goodman speaks of so bleakly was unusually active and filled with persons: family, friends, admirers, colleagues of several kinds, and patients in psychotherapy...
...All my deep advisers say the same thing, but I only shake my head, while the sobs rise in my breast...
...He had lived for the most part in poverty...
...Baudelaire's Intimate Jour nal has much in it that is extreme, but his plight was desperate, he could not make good his resolves, and we see a tragic picture of fitful hopes and a crumbling life...
...If such things as I have just described are the heart of the book, and perhaps, too, its veins and arteries, they are not its body...
...Five Years, which is neither a diary nor a journal, but a collection of "thoughts," not only touches on all these interests but adds linguistic analysis, travels in Europe, and in a more personal vein problems of home and friends and of the streets of various cities, seen frequently under the difficult light of looking for love...
...I downed my misgivings and asked for what I wanted and somewhat got it...
...So-called complex words, poems and orations, that develop into feeling and action—akin to the songful polysyllabic concretions of primitive speech, as Jes persen reconstructs it—are the prem...
...Why would I obey the command un less it engaged me as I am...
...Poems and rhetoric give us these premises in a synthetic form...
...Everything is referred immediately to the central touchstone of his own experience...
...it is neither abstract or value-neutral, nor does it state "values...
...His average day tended to have it in such quantities of encounters as would have surfeited or delighted another man...
...This is reflected in the fact that the act of witnessing has assumed such prominence among the aims of art that the entire period has been characterized by the monumentalization of the lyric form...
...Such is the State of Nature...
...Yet if his privations and disappointments had been only of this kind, Five Years would not be the fascinating document that it is...
...The observations come through to us, as they do to the author, as kinds of imperatives...
...Its subtitle, thoughts during a useless time, refers to the years between 1955 and 1960...
...The book is remarkable for the quality and range of its thought, and for the life-experience it records...
...One need not name the crises here but say only that the shaping of the life has fallen so heavily to the individual that the greater part of our analytical literature does little but describe our various failures...
...This is as much as to say that no real needs were operating, and that the failures of the life were merely those of ideational errors...
...We sense it even in the more formal entries, the philosophical, ethical, religious, esthetic, and psychological observations which make up the greater part of the book...
...He had written some 20 books and they had been largely ignored...
...In view of the fascination and profundity of this, taken even as spectacle, Harold Rosenberg's interpretive preface is sadly misleading...
...I can think of no other journal or diary in which the existential necessities of a single life are so openly and deeply revealed...
...One would not say to life, but true as life and therefore true as art, distinct from the "merely literary...
...Genesis and the Gospel...
...Harold Rosenberg, in his preface, cites the dissatisfactions attendant upon these dilemmas as aspects of the author's "hunger...
...For the Greeks, poetry had quite other aims, of dream, recreation, or community worship...
...I would collect kinds of insects and shellfish, whatever has a will of its own...
...It is a source, too, of their centrality of argument, since no man suffers uniquely...
...There are many entries of this kind, revealing the solitude at the heart of busy occasions...
...Thus, when he speaks of "anomie" and cites the sociologies, we still hear the voice of a disappointed lover, just as we hear the voice of a poet when he marshalls the insights of linguistic analysis...
...Had he asked it, he would have seen that the Greeks would never have thought of representing "reality," which is something that must be lived...
...Giving up my planless and fruitless search for company, I go far off on the empty beach...
...But this is a dangerous course, for soon I come to see that the whole is false en bloc, it is 'not myself.' " Yet, no matter what happens, whether it is or is not "himself," he extracts from it, or builds upon it, various forms of art (such as the thoughts themselves), and these are always authentic, always ring true...
...Homer anil Sophocles vs...
...ises in ethics...
...With P.G., Eros turned into a vengeful Jehovah who condemned him to a law of hunger and flight...
...The French Revolution fell apart into two fragments, its rationality that "succeeded" and was taken over by the new establishment, and its fraternity that failed, and now the world is inanimate...
...Simplicity or precision is not to be hoped for...
...It is a memoir," he writes, "of a victim of ideology, of a man who wrecks his comfort and his sense of seemliness for the sake of an idea...
...Goodman writes with impressive learning, but in such a way that the necessarily artificial boundaries observed by specialists — the boundaries which delimit "fields of interests"— are broken down, or simply not observed...
...But there is no help for it...
...This is not an adequate analysis, yet some such idea is necessary to explain the fact that Goodman's sense of isolation is not cured by his own activity or by the presence of other persons, just as his sexual yearning is not stilled by bouts of sex...
...There is something essential about Goodman in this remark, coming as it does after a description of rather interesting and rewarding events...
...Similarly, belief is expressed in puzzling scriptures that require rabbinical exegesis...
...It is an extraordinary demonstration of the shaping will...
...He fails to ask, "In what conditions does a man write a book...
...He explains the book as if it were A Sample of Our Culture rather than the life of a man...
...It appears sometimes as the problem of not living in "a reasonable world," sometimes as an arrogance which alienates him from the lives of others, sometimes as a humility which sets him apart from the conceits of mass society's symbolic materialism, a humanity which ripens frequently into religious obedience...
...I am again faced with an empty day...
...Rather, the ethical proposition is the moving po etry, which engages us, and so we move of our own initiative...
...The foreground he presents is sharp and clear because the background is quiet, without neurosis or problem of community function...
...The dilemmas which are extreme in Five Years are answered by extraordinary powers, and the underlying process is a life-creating dialectic of need and response, disease and health, failure and success...
...In the afternoon I was with the beautiful wild boy who plays by the river, sexy, amiable, and on the loose so that he will come to nothing...
...I ask myself if I can resign from this Purgatory, and I at once think of Rabbi Tarfon's sentence, "It is not incumbent on you to finish, neither are you free to leave it off...
...To the end of the old pier reaching into the river, where you have to pick your way in order not to fall between the broken planks, come (1) adventurous boys, (2) queers following the boys, (3) hung-over winos to sleep it off undisturbed, (4) persons in distress or elation, often weeping women, seeking calm from the sight of the water or meditating jumping in, (5) old men to sun-bathe, (6) philosophic gentlemen puffing on pipes, (7) fishers of the deep...
...This justifies the vague and seemingly pompous carryings-on in the literary reviews...
...The courage that sustains it can hardly be overpraised...
...he examines his behavior and wonders about alternatives...
...ethics does not consist of prescriptive commands and the sentences deduced from them...
...One wonders, too, if our deeper needs are much met by comfort...
...They may indicate roughly a quality that can best be described as resonance, for though the book is not long, it is endlessly relevant and fertile, centered squarely in the experiences which have proven to be crucial for our time...
...Soon the nature of things becomes a Thou for me...
...Rosenberg's interpretation denies the very aspects of the book that are most interesting and most deserving of praise, those I have referred to as dialectical, in which we see intellect, will, courage, and religious obedience fashioning a life in dialogue with many ills, some of which are the author's own and others the well-known maladies of the modern world...
...I am again faced with an empty day, yet I have less impulse to throw myself into the wild and its fears...
...Finally, at night I was at the conference, leading a company of my peers who seemed to accord me attention and respect, and even (as it turned out) interesting sex...
...What elsewhere would be a bold practical use of the intellect, in France seems to be an extreme situation, simply because it makes sense, as if to say, "This could make a difference, therefore it must be an extreme situation...
...One might say that before the fact Goodman's thought is disinterested and yields speculations, but that after the fact it announces articles of engagement...
...Only direct quotation can do justice to this aspect of Five Years, though even a dozen quotes would give a poor idea of the book's variety...
...Christian theologians have been drawing ammunition for the reality of their faith from Auerbach's stylestudy showing that the Greeks could not represent reality...
...The significance of all this lies in the fact that he does not, and cannot, take for granted the ordinary bases of life, but examines everything, analyzing and reassembling according to the necessities he himself considers most profound...
...When the experience is of solitude itself, another aspect of the author's life comes to light...
...tionary threat...
...the implications must be drawn out by criticism...
...This company of the chosen solitude, or resigned solitude—it comes to the same thing—is what I really want, but I am so impatient...
...Except on some such view as this, it is impossible to understand how ethical propositions can be motivating...
...For there is much in the life that is not authentic...
...Conversely, it is not the "proposition" that God created War-Horse and Leviathan that is convincing to Job—at best this could lead him to servile identification with his powerful conqueror...
Vol. 14 • July 1967 • No. 4
