Body and Spirit

...To the extent that Goodman is a conservative radical, as he in fact defines himself, I am generally in agreement with him and rarely can remember reading any of his essays or articles without learning something useful or, what is more important, without engaging in argument with him over some matter that was significant and valuable...

...But now Goodman has published a more intimate book, a journal entitled Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time (Brussel and Brussel...

...It is in this sense that he is a classical writer, for, as Valery said, a romantic writer becomes a classical one when he learns his trade...

...We give our lives into their impersonal hands...

...Goodman does not want to hear about that, and his work, like Rousseau's, is a return to the cult of nature...

...This has many advantages...

...One can be idiosyncratic as part of the big society, yet approved in the appropriate sub-society that he gravitates to...

...The description that Goodman offers of the relation between the body and the spirit is wrong, untrue, lopsided...

...A spectator sport...

...It is not true to say that Goodman has given up on the idea that the body and its instincts are naturally good, that their appeals must be heeded, that a good society is measured by the degree in which these appeals are permitted free development and expression...

...When long ago I threw in my lot with Cain and Ishmael because they were able to get to talk to God, I little realized that I was dooming myself to become a pillar of humane culture...

...The difficulty, however, is communication...

...Even more moving is the self-analysis that touches something real and intense in Goodman: "My social existence is absurd...

...He grew up here, knows the city from the ground up, from the cellars of his childhood to the alcoves of City College and, in his adult phase, the queer bars of 'affluent.' postwar Village life...

...A married homosexual, pushing 50, Goodman shows himself to us on the prowl...

...We are animals in a sick society, true enough, but what distinguishes us from animals is that we do not find our purpose in ourselves and our beings...

...Rosenberg likes to see other people active and acting, much in the same way that sidewalk gawkers watch a building going up...

...The sub-groups seem to communicate because of their use of common instruments, but they do not really understand one another or profitably agree and disagree...

...Harold Rosenberg, in his preface to this book, sees him as working through the last bastions of his ideology of love and hunger...

...I refer to at least two books of short stories, The Break-Up of Our Camp and The Facts of Life, his play, Jonah, his volume of criticism, The Structure of Literature, and his volume of collected verse, The Lordly Hudson...

...He is not only forced to "make do" but to make it all up—from scratch...

...This, of course, is what every important modern writer has done, but Goodman has made a career out of being surprised by what others, more cynical or less curious, take for granted...

...A lovely feeling for our New York vernacular, for its clipped, lilting, thoughtful tones, combines in his stories with a lyricism of personal longing in a context of social defeat that is unique in our literature...

...and his greatest complaint is that society as it is now, with all of its stupidities and blockages, does not buoy him up or provide him with the materials or moments for the masterpiece he feels it in him to write...

...In God's creation I'm a kind of juvenile delinquent, a little Manfred...

...New York's literary equivalent of Jean Cocteau: apparently spreading himself thin in a variety of fields, yet producing, out of his careless abundance, a number of breathtaking works that, given the low level of criticism and the oddness of the objects, have never received even their due...

...He is, to my mind...

...The language of poetry is supposed to communicate the common sentiment...

...It will be 'done to us.' " Or: "Our big society is a society of sub-societies, groups with varying mores but employing an identical technology...

...Some angel or devil whispered into Goodman's ear, he gave heed, wrote Growing Up Absurd, and the rest is history...

...Rosenberg speaks affirmatively of Goodman's lust and hunger, and yet it is here above all that I am unmoved and unconvinced...

...At the same time that Goodman regales us he also exposes his shortcomings and limitations...

...Chazal, believing that nature is made in man's image, still does not forget the weakness or viciousness that man can contribute to that image...

...The argument, of course, was always an imaginary one...

...Never was hunger so flatly described, or lust so lacking in sensuous feeling, as in the many sexual incidents which crop up in Goodman's journal...

...All this does nothing for me except to confuse me and use up my time...

...Refusing to take all this seriously, Goodman condemns himself to sounding like those very writers, particularly in the avant-garde, whose ideas or lack of ideas he deprecates...

...Popular culture seems to do this but in fact does just the opposite: it is so devised that differing groups 'share' in it by projecting onto it each one its own fantasy, and what they are really sharing is the common technology...

...I read the same book that Rosenberg did and, except in a few of the author's despairing complaints, I failed to discover the particular edification Rosenberg indicates...

...In conveying [his] distressing practice of his cult and his painful rejection of it, this is a book of edification that should be studied by all who believe in the sexual 'ground' theory of intellectual potency...

...Unlike Cocteau, however, Goodman has never written a play as exciting as Intimate Relations or a novel as perfect as The Holy Terrors...

...It is here that my quarrel with Goodman originates...

...he prepared for it...

...257 pp., $5.00) which takes us behind the scenes of his thought and life so abruptly and deeply that my inner, imaginary debate with him can quite naturally assume a public form...

...So I cut quite a respectable figure, though on the pious and boring side...

...His analysis leaves all of the foundation stones of Goodman's ideology intact, however, as indeed Goodman himself quite consciously does...

...As usual, he finds Goodman battling through self-imposed ideologies and, in the long run, winning the battle...

...Goodman, with his taste for paradox, calls himself a provincial writer, with New York as his special province...

...At present, culture is really shared mainly when there are heated arguments about censorship, comprehensibility, and so forth...

...The only possible art is advance-guard art, which unfortunately is not the best art since it is so busy being advance-guard...

...When the Devil quotes Scripture, it's not, really, to deceive, but simply that the masses are so ignorant of the theology that somebody has to teach them the elementary texts before he can seduce them...

...But I move in a society so devoid of ordinary reality that I am continually stopping to teach good sense, to give support, to help out, as a young gangster might help an old lady across the street on his way to the stick-up...

...He may have shifted these ideas around a trifle, but the underlying and basic notion remains intact...

...In this important sense, he is the gravest victim of his (and their) ideology, and this book simply spreads his personal defeat at its hands on the record...

...Weil knows that the body is heavy and the spirit is light...

...With P. G., Eros turns into a vengeful Jehovah who condemned him to a law of hunger and flight...

...And though this journal was written in a sore, depressed, listless mood, its pages are spangled with acute observations: "Waiting in the railroad station is again like checking in at the hospital for an operation...

...WRITERS WRITING Body and Spirit By Raymond Rosenthal When Paul Goodman gave up wit and launched into the labyrinth of social disorder, American letters lost a fine short story writer and, perhaps, an eventually great novelist...

...The game he is playing has very definite ground rules, and if he manages now and then to pull off a masterstroke—as in the beautiful sequence of stories in The Break-Up of Our Camp or the play Jonah—it never hits him as a surprise...

...It is the memoir of a victim of ideology, of a man who wrecks his comfort and his sense of seemliness for the sake of an idea...

...The spirit stands fast when the body trembles, weakens, gives way...

...As such, it lacks depth, a valid idea of man's fate and condition in the world, and on this count alone becomes so idiosyncratic and perverse that it can barely serve Goodman's purposes, not to speak of society's and culture's...

...Goodman has lifted the complaint, the complaint of a conscious person against established society and the human relations it entails, to the level of a literary art...

...not," Rosenberg says, "like a backyard torn but a gentle housecat stepping softly and a little lost...

...There is something dreadfully mechanical about all of them, as though Goodman's very idea of human nature and of sex could only lead to this depressed, mechanical, droopy stuff that hardly has the verve and energy to get itself on paper...

...Overnight a difficult writer with high classical standards became a public-spirited adviser to the depressed and injured (I include myself in those categories), laying it on the line over a wide area of vexed and importunate subjects: education, war and peace, juvenile delinquency, power, profit and the ways in which power and profit blast our lives and our happiness...

...Like Cocteau, again, he knows exactly where he is and what he is doing...

...It is perhaps because Goodman takes the occasions and objects of our lives so seriously, so intensely, that many of our critics, who consider the familiar beneath notice and with contempt, have passed him up for more exotic fare...

...In contrast, I recall Simone Weil's description of love—and whether she ever loved carnally is doubtful—or Malcolm de Chazal's marvelous aphorisms of the sensual life...