PAUL GOODMAN, 1911-1972
Rosenberg, Harold
Many years ago Paul Goodman called me on the phone. "How are you?" I asked. "Right this minute," he replied, "I feel lousy. Underneath, though, I'm all right. Below that there is, of course, the...
...Not anything in particular, just everything...
...The topic given us was: "The Rebel, Is There a Place for Him in Our Society...
...for a time, other outsiders enclosed him, then he became outside to them too...
...A primitive with a Ph.D...
...If his behavior seemed to many outrageous— there was a period, before Growing Up Absurd made him famous, in which it was common to hear him reviled—it was less because of any harm he did than because his values did not fit theirs...
...In being the projection of a single person, utopias, no matter how far-fetched, are humanly more real than the schemes of ideologists...
...That there is nothing to prevent your way and their way from coalescing makes the position of autonomy all the more difficult...
...His genius lay in his range, a vertical span joining high and low...
...Theories of architecture, of community, of human nature, of energy (how to get "an extra ounce of strength"), plus flora and fauna of New York, his Empire City, including public officials, conceptualized plutocrats, grand pianos, Jewish jokes and Jewish "facts of life," the latter free of the usual garnishings of sour cream, dialect and pantomime, that is, free of "color" but with a respect for things as they are...
...In the impulse to remodel his environment to fit himself, the "autonomist" becomes a revolutionary...
...It is touching that his last work should be an attempt to explain himself to his students at the University of Hawaii, to tell them "how I am in the world...
...A young man who wants to practice medicine, he contended, ought to do his utmost to obtain a good medical education...
...For instance, Paul liked dogs, and it is the duty of a rebel to purge himself of trite sentiments...
...You either do it your way or "their" way...
...What favored him was that he saw all these as one, with which the living person was compelled to deal simultaneously...
...Paul followed up by offering as the alternative to the rebel his idea of autonomy...
...Breton, for example, deGlared it to be a scandal that Trotsky was a dog lover, and cited it as an illustration of uneven development...
...It tires me merely to count the fronts on which he kept himself engaged: the economic system, the moral system, the educational system, the sexual system, bureaucratic smugness, censorship, drug laws, the literary setup, the work setup...
...Theoretically, his desires were not inconsistent with the general good...
...Given his brilliance, he was certain to be a leader, but his superiority was equally certain to leave him disappointed...
...Phenomena and phrases lying in the gutter, which most writers pass by, were mixed by Paul into his gravest utterances (and he was not ashamed to be high-toned, to speak of the "lordly" Hudson, and to declaim "to us threadbare men of letters, heirs of humanism and the Enlightenment, it is again the entrenched system served by a priestly caste," and so on...
...It was his more obvious virtues, e.g., his ideal of community programs, that I found least to my taste...
...It was his hospitality to the familiar, to the unretouched datum too close to be noticed, as in "The Break-Up of Our Camp," that held me many years ago, though the first writing of his I admired, when we were both contributors to the Symposium in the early 1930s and Paul was about 23, was a brilliant criticism of functional architecture, which, in an approach that was to become characteristic, he demonstrated was not "functional" at all...
...But not a rabid one, for he is aware that his task is hopeless--even if he succeeded, success would come too late...
...You have to take on the classical task of knowing yourself and being true to it...
...Like Eugene McCarthy, Paul enraged his followers by refusing to imitate their fiction of him...
...The variety of Goodman's encounters amounted in effect to playing hide and seek with his entourage (in his case a more accurate word than "audience," since people who were close to him physically counted for more than the abstract presence of admiring readers...
...In the end, his "finite experience" became the experience of loneliness and fear of death...
...under present conditions, this effort is bound to put him into conflict with the medical school, not because he is a rebel but because he loves medicine...
...Everything is everybody's business...
...It entailed endless psychic shifting, from glorying in the Greeks, the Old Testament, tales of the Buddha, to cruising for rough trade, telling it to City Hall, and arguing with Chomsky about language...
...Paul's dog was an ugly mutt, large, shapeless, a barrel on legs, and to me a pain in the ass...
...He was only living in the America he discovered and reporting on its mistakes and lacks...
...Successful cultural performers of our time—Marinetti, Breton, Sartre, Buckminster Fuller, Warhol, McLuhan— are keyed to a single emotional state, one that is in accord with their invented personae...
...For a time Paul could have been America's foremost Radical...
...Paul and I conducted a dual lecture at Wayne State University in Detroit...
...At bottom, however, I'm really fine...
...Against these, he raised the theological slogan of "patience and fortitude," and with the bravery of a true man of ideas fought back by writing a book...
...Paul Goodman preferred himself as is...
...On the other hand, it may be that the idea of doing everything one's own way comes from the consciousness of having too many inacceptable inclinations, so that unless one defiantly insisted on asserting oneself as a whole as a matter of principle, he would be obliged to extinguish the greater part of his personality...
...Paul considered himself a citizen and a patriot...
...With a degree of luck he could have lived well—"fortunately, I have low standards of what is excellent as happiness"—and in all probability he did do better than most...
...Paul recognized that he was oppressed not by any restraints put upon him but by the condition of being incommensurate...
...The "facts" also included beings inherited from literature and myth, e.g., angels, saints—when Goodman writes "Saints, of course, can keep going," he is acknowledging the existence of these exalted beings and apply ing them as a practical measure of what he, Goodman, can't do, since he's not a saint...
...One might agree with Paul's philosophy but have a self easier to deal with...
...It turned out that we were on the same side, but both of us against the rebel as a nuisance...
...This sentiment of an adolescent was expressed when Paul was sixty—evidence that though his desires were not extreme they remained unadjustable...
...He wished to be divested of it, to be released from the command...
...Autonomy is opposition in action...
...Nominally, this deprived him of the title Radical...
...How could a man conscious of so many layers of mood be a Type...
...If there was any playacting in his public identity, it was in his insistence on remaining the same Goodman, the kid off the streets, in a woolen pullover, with rumpled hair and no tie...
...I objected to the role, to some of the people who had assumed it in order to capture public attention, and to their failure to change anything...
...An actor on the public stage who plays himself is headed for trouble...
...the delinquencies he embraced were not of the kind to make him a menace or put him in danger of being locked up...
...The worst were merely bad enough to keep him in trouble with himself...
...What's to prevent it...
...The managers of the program had assumed that Paul and I would both be on the side of "the rebel" and tried without success to get a "conservative" to oppose us...
...and it is interesting that he should have called this essay "Finite Experience," in order to set himself off against abstractions...
...His struggles were directed not toward a new institutional condition but for what he came to call autonomy, the privilege of going about things in the best way one was capable of...
...Nothing less...
...An autonomous person disregards historical imperatives, takes his feelings as he finds them, and expresses them to suit himself...
...Perhaps it was his sense of being exiled from the world that made the idea of handiwork, of using tools and materials, so important to Paul —I never met anyone with less talent for handling a hammer...
...Below that there is, of course, the usual nagging...
...In sum, he conceived his uniqueness as a burden, as well as a duty in the sense of the Old Testament Jonah...
...It was inconceivable, however, that Paul would own a handsome terrier or a standard poodle or that he would transcend liking mutts...
...Who was set so intrinsically against more forms of socially expected behavior...
...Paul was no Marquis de Sade...
...His enthusiasm for group activity must also have been a means to over come isolation...
...For one who believes in self-affirmation, the kind of self one happens to have is of the utmost importance...
...My usual gripe has been," he wrote in "Finite Experience," "not that I am imprisoned, but that I am in exile or was born on the wrong planet...
...Hence his radicalism consists in urging the advantages of a society that would fit him, in contrast to the present society that fits nobody...
...Human interchange was his axiom, and among his few fixed ideas was the therapy of bursting into tears...
...But his ego, subtle, proud, complex, and fatally introverted, could not submit to his yearning to migrate to "the other planet" of people and things...
...He was the traditional outsider...
...Paul's creed was "the facts of life...
...in other circumstances they might even have been considered virtues...
Vol. 20 • January 1973 • No. 1
