'Challenge' to the Beat Generation:
GOODMAN, PAUL
'Challenge' to the Beat Generation Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor. By James A. Wechsler. Random House. 245 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Paul Goodman Author "Empire City"; contributory...
...He is devastatingly subject to the pattern "Yes, but...
...I am quoting only from a couple of pages...
...In my opinion, we ought to stop building thruways and put the money into schools...
...It makes it impossible to come to new definitions, undercutting the concession...
...These, it seems to me, are the interesting questions for a young fellow, and we find nothing of them in this book...
...Why is none of this on the Post editorial page...
...but Jimmy, it seems to me, merely gripes and consoles himself with symbols...
...to be a conscientious objector...
...I bet I could find 50 examples in the book...
...contributory "Commentary" THIS BOOK'S EXPLICIT intention is "to challenge" the beat and apolitical young people to get their shoulders to the wheel, specifically Americans for Democratic Action...
...The philosophical and literary effect of this pattern of concession is to avoid tough wrestling with any idea...
...namely, what is considered "newsworthy" in the American press, but a book is not a mass-circulation daily...
...Now what are the present labor issues...
...The trouble with their anarchism is not that it is apolitical, but that they don't know anything, technologically or culturally: Therefore, they are unimaginative...
...This is what he calls politics...
...We anarchists have always urged that the right method is to create little islands of freedom and nature, and some of these kids are trying to...
...It quite misses the point, for by and large the beatniks are not apolitical...
...For a workman, the direct problem is not which candidate wants a summit conference, but that he is working in the bomb factory...
...What the devil does he mean by "primitivism...
...Consider public money...
...to picket with his fellows in the same plight and be forced into every step under protest...
...Isn't it shameful, then, that he doesn't assert that the simple fraternity and miscegenation of his beatniks is similar strong medicine, especially because it is human and unideological...
...Public money for what...
...He does not reckon that there are lots of people who are constitutionally incapable of such duplicity without freezing...
...Rather lightly, it seems to me, our author speaks of the necessary two-facedness of even his favorite politicians like Hubert Humphrey, just as he sympathizes far too readily with the junior executive and professional fathers of families who play it safe to protect their suburban homes...
...He points out that the draft law is a foolish and wicked thing...
...It ought to be abolished...
...If they had such a candidate, I'd be surprised if they didn't find many beatnik canvassers saying, "Crazy, man...
...and they are using the most relevant means to combat such a structure, namely non-violent direct action: "I won't do that...
...But what happens when they come after the kid in his individual life, right now...
...It is not my desire to minimize (the American achievement), but...
...In one chapter he gives us a kind of litany beginning with the words, "I despair of those—who create vast underground shelters, who clamor for economic aid to Franco, etc...
...An Angry Middle-Aged Editor is precisely not an angry middle-aged man...
...The question is what are the issues...
...True...
...therefore, some of them lapse into drink and drugs and trivial music and poetry...
...But in such a crisis, a man ought to be driven to serious life-decisions—being beat is such a decision, though, to my heart, a poor one...
...why is none of it in Walter Reuther's mouth...
...I will do this...
...he writes as if he were running for office...
...He uses the form of it, "I do not intend to seem content (with the old battle-cries of liberalism), but...
...I trust I have avoided suggesting (a simplistic view of life), but...
...to go to jail...
...He ought not to do what is foolish and wicked: Ought he then to dodge...
...We need old-fashioned progressive schools with emotional and sexual expression, community service on real projects, etc...
...but even this won't do any good if the schools are what James Bryant Conant and Edward Teller envisage, cold war apprenticeships...
...Not to strengthen the CIO, but to balk at manufacturing more GM and Ford cars when the workers know—so Harvey Swados tells us—that the cars are a social evil...
...It guarantees continuing to discuss issues in the currently accepted terms...
...Now "despair" is a strong word and indeed it is not inappropriate for a person who has strong convictions, as Jimmy has, that much of our life is intolerably foolish and base, and nevertheless is powerless to stand against it in concrete day-to-day behavior...
...Finally, as a man of letters, let me say a word about our author's style...
...Speaking of the '30s, Wechsler says, "In the primitivism of industrial conflict, unions brought dignity to thousands of individual lives...
...If he means physical involvement, with risk of job and safety, doesn't he see that this was why the labor movement brought dignity...
...Wechsler says, for example, that in the face of the sit-ins of Negro youth in the South, the shenanigans of Lyndon Johnson don't matter so much...
...They are programmatically defecting from the major state-structure of our times: the Organization of semi-monopolies, the Pentagon, the FBI, Communications, Personnel, etc...
...No doubt many of the ADA (including Jimmy) "approve of" this, but I have not heard that they have put up a candidate with the program: No more new roads, no more bombs...
...all public money for progressive schools and housing with a real community plan...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 25
