THE WAYS WE LIVE NOW

...Goodman is more leisurely in his flights and he alights frequently to crawl carefully over ideas and artifacts that have captured his fancy...

...The generalization is simply too broad...

...One of his essays, "What's 'American' About America," comes close to being a summary statement of his ideas and it is, to my mind, a seminal piece, one of those rare, realistic works that are capable of coloring forever one's view of the nation...

...In any case, his practical proposals have the effect of opening vistas which his middlebrow confreres lack the daring to spread before us...

...A year ago, the novelist Philip Roth wrote that "the American writer in the middle of the Twentieth Century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality...

...Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (Random House, $5) ranges from a study of pornography to essays on avant-garde writing, to a discussion of psychological advantages of a good seating plan, to a quite brilliant plan for banning cars from Manhattan Island...

...One must examine art objects one by one if discussion is to be carried on at a level above that of the faculties...

...He's happy, I'm happy, and I defy anyone to make a generalization out of our varied modes of spending the Lord's Day...

...His thesis is quite the opposite of Lobsenz, who is horrified by our hedonism...

...How important this matter of specification is...

...His title clearly states his theme and, in its cuteness, his technique...

...Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren...

...In A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, the poet proves that he is culturally superior to nearly everyone...

...For example, he places a high value on spontaneity...

...Indeed, his flights of criticism actually mar a book that might have been a pleasant bit of familiar humor for the Reader's Digest crowd...

...For reasons of economy B directors are allowed fewer takes than are the makers of high-budget films...

...The latter zooms over our landscape at high altitude and speed, recording a general impression...

...I know that I shall never see a Chaplin comedy, or a crime or western movie, an Arthur Miller or Clifford Odets play, or even read The New Yorker in quite the same way after having read Warshow...

...Traditional art forms are dissolving, cries this alarmed voice from Acade-mia, and the irrepressible need of our communications machine for raw material forces us to create original works that can be adapted from medium to medium and to pay inordinate attention to pseudo-events and pseudo-celebrities, that is, objects not created by the natural interplay of people, events, and ideas, but manufactured purely to serve the big machine...

...You see, says the iron-willed Lobsenz, you can't do anything for these goof-offs...

...For instance, I am writing these lines on a Sunday, I feel I have earned a day of rest, outside my window the whole world is at play...

...Just because he says it, this is not necessarily so, and my guess is that there are plenty of people who have fun, are happy, and feel good about their leisure-time activities...

...an extremely positive statement, the purport of which can be summarized in a phrase: "America is process...

...But he was never deadly about them or about any of the objects of mass culture which he so intelligently analyzed...

...His chief interest was the movies, although this book devotes at least as much space to pieces on such diverse subjects as the Rosenbergs, the death of Warshow's father, and the comic strips...

...That is that it attains social value and literary merit only when it is written by men who are unafraid...

...They share a problem with the novelists— to find objective correlatives to illustrate their vision of our society— and they tend to solve it by dealing with a mythical average man, a construct of statistics and observed vulgarities...

...I am suggesting, however, that the man like Boorstin, who withdraws self-protectively from "the immediate experience" of our culture, wrapping the values of the past tightly about him, is useless as a critic of our life's peculiar quality...

...Roy Cohn and David Schine...

...Two books dealing with pleasure, Norman M. Lobsenz' Is Anybody Happy...

...I single this out merely to indicate the originality of Warshow's mind and the depth of my sorrow that he died, at thirty-seven, his definitive book on films unfinished...

...John A. Kouwenhoven's range, in The Beer Can by the Highway (Dou-bleday, $4.50), is narrower than Goodman's...

...As a corollary, the title essay offers a reassuring view of the nature—and uses—of our society's much-discussed wastefulness, noting that it is less a scandal than a natural expresion of character as it has been formed by the American experience...

...His essay on Kipling, for instance, is first-rate, and so is a piece in which he analyzes one of his own poems, The Woman at the Washington Zoo—which proves, I suppose, that a writer should write about what he knows and that what Jarrell really knows is literature, not the world of affairs...

...We do not in our most typical works reach for the classical unities or the neat, if often thunderous, climax of European art...

...More important, he takes seriously the need for "practical proposals...

...He thinks we don't read as much or as well as we might, that the barbarians of science and commerce are about to render his art, perhaps his very presence, somewhat ridiculous...

...the variety of his interests (and his competence) is staggering...

...There is only one complaint to raise...

...The best social critics solve the problem by being specific, by finding, as it were, our world in such grains of sand as an old movie, a television script, an incident of recent history...

...His writing, along with that of Goodman and Kouwenhoven, suggests to me a tentative generalization about the writing of social commentary...

...Attitudes merely prevent one from bringing his total sensibility to bear on experience...

...As the serious novel has become more and more an exercise in semi-private communication, this new discipline (which, of course had illustrious, but isolated, precursors) has become a favored mode for the writer who wishes to address himself directly to the problems—and the peculiar works—of his world...

...Of films, War-show wrote, "in some way I take all that nonsense seriously," which is true...

...From these he has written his book...

...It should be sent as a special supplement to the bemused readers of Vance Packard's last cheap-jack book...

...It results, again, in some seminal pieces...

...For this piece is far enough removed from my daily round to be amusing to write— and refreshing...

...Randall Jarrell, the poet, also adopts a personal tone, but he is to Smith what Vogue is to True Romances...

...He has been engaged for some years now in a search for a true American cultural style, one which springs naturally out of our industrial tradition...

...In that great work Boorstin's anguished yelp is no aid at all...

...With gloomy satisfaction he quotes statistics proving that the average citizen, should he be given two more hours of leisure per day, would spend them loafing...

...I dwell on this point only because it is typical of a large number of errors of which Boorstin is guilty...

...Nearly always they retreat, calling for a return to the "old" democratic virtues and values...

...But that is a quibble...

...What his slender volume amounts to is a series of diatribes about how the sump pump in the garden doesn't work, how dishonest the man at the hardware store is, and so on...

...The difference between Goodman and Boor-stin is summed up in a metaphor...

...Thus his essays, though they are always written from the viewpoint of a radical reconstructionist, have much specific gravity...

...Do we really need to be told again how sad and bad is the lot of the old-fashioned literary intellectual...

...The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist...

...Boorstin seems to feel that in the Nineteenth Century we were better off, as individuals, for having a more direct relationship with the physical world and the worlds of culture and affairs...

...I am not sure they have been a blessing to Boorstin, to me, or to other members of "We Happy Few," but to the great mass of people they have been part of the tremendous material progress we have made in the past century...

...The quality of his fantasies about what he thinks he is seeing is more elegant and more erudite than Smith's—but he remains a fantasist...

...The result is narrowness and a kind of cultural blindness...

...Pleasure, he tells us, need not always improve the mind or the body or the society in general...

...Unlike his fellow critics, Goodman, who is a psychologist, firmly believes that diagnosis is not an end in itself...

...The problem, if we are given time to solve it, is to rationalize this vast technocracy we have created...

...He is undoubtedly right, but the point has been made over and over again for years now...

...What is needed is the nerve to open oneself to experiences which the cultural traditionalist is bound to reject...

...Boorstin never once deigns to analyze closely any book, film, or television program...

...It is always harder to be specific than it is to generalize, and there is no better group of examples of taking the easy way out than three otherwise diverse volumes of the year: The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream by Daniel Boorstin (Atheneum, $5), Crank by Robert Paul Smith (Norton, $3.50), and A Sad Heart at the Supermarket by Randall Jarrell (Atheneum, $4.50...

...Kouwenhoven is an intelligent, learned, and relaxed observer of the passing scene...

...Dwight David Eisenhower...

...Boorstin is less interested in bringing us a helpful understanding of these processes than he is in hungering after the halcyon days in which they were set in motion...

...What is more important is the depth of War-show's analysis...

...But, if I read him right, Lobsenz is anti-pleasure...

...Kouwenhoven is convinced that the loose, adaptable, infinitely extendable essence of our style is to create a framework for growth, then to work wondrous variations—jazz-like riffs— on it...

...I am not calling here for empty bravura...

...I suppose so, but I think he would do well to emphasize a little more our Puritan heritage, which brooks larger in the American mind that do the writings of John Stuart Mill...

...This leads him to condemn movie-makers for making many takes of a scene in order to piece together from them the best possible final print...

...I don't urge this form of masochism on mankind in general, but neither do I feel superior to the fellow who is sipping a beer and reading the paper in the garden below me...

...The former is the work of a free-lance magazine writer who has assembled a number of clippings on the subject of how we attempt to amuse ourselves and how, despite the manifold distractions our society offers, we still aren't having much fun...

...This, despite my previous strictures, is a good generalization, solidly grounded in close analysis of a dozen of our artifacts and art objects...

...Try as he will, he can't seem to get beyond the troubles one has these days in trying to cultivate his own garden...

...His generalizations are crude, sometimes attractively homely, but mostly routine complaints...

...Kerr thinks we are not hedonistic enough...

...He is as personal as Boorstin is abstract, but he has no talent for moving from the particular to the general, though he tries hard...

...From essentially the same data he argues that we work far too hard at our pleasure and that it therefore lacks the purity which would make it genuinely refreshing...

...It is a relief, at last, to turn from our generalizers to three collections of essays about specific phenomena of our time...

...The same may be said, doubled and re-doubled, about The Immediate Experience (Doubleday |4.50), a posthumous collection of essays by Robert Warshow...

...The most "American" American works could be extended endlessly, for their climaxes, like those of Whitman's poetry, are purely arbitrary...

...This may have been true for the elite, but for most people, mass communications have proved a blessing, not a hardship...

...Nor does he know the first thing about the process of creating for the mass media...

...The point is never proved because it cannot be...

...Nevertheless, I am content...

...The result is essentially open-ended...

...It requires nerve to go without attitudes to a movie, a play, a television set, a popular novel...

...He insists that we are in thrall to the Nineteenth Century philosophy of Utilitarianism and that we ought to free ourselves...

...To begin with, he assumes that the traditional art forms are intrinsically superior to the newer ones or to the older ones as they survive in our time...

...They are too sophisticated to personify this individual on their pages, but his ghostly presence haunts every page...

...The result, of course, is that B movies usually lack the very thing he values—spontaneity...

...it is a prelude to attempted cure...

...Doubleday, $4.50) and Walter Kerr's The Decline of Pleasure (Simon and Schuster, $5), provide further examples of the need for getting social commentary down to earth...

...Pleasure, in short, is just too broad and too personal a subject about which to write a meaningful book-Walter Kerr's book, The Decline of Pleasure, fails for the same reason, though Kerr is a good deal more humane and more learned, and his book is written gracefully and stylishly...

...I am convinced that one of the best—and least frequently explored— methods of social criticism is to write highly personally...

...Isn't it time, instead, that the boys stopped reveling in their isolation, stopped complaining about the rather obvious defects of mass civilization, and started to apply the minds they claim are so sensitive to practical solutions to the problems of literacy which they so tirelessly raise...

...But one must try...

...It is that through technology we have created an imitation reality more attractive than the real thing...

...He seems to feel that man is better off keeping his nose to the grindstone than he is with time on his hands...

...That alone is enough to recommend it, in an era in which social commentary is too often an exercise in thinly disguised contempt for our times and ideals...

...Our constant toiling after self-improvement adds, he thinks, an unwonted urgency—even tension—to our pleasures, robbing them, oddly enough, of their pleasure...

...This concerns the nature of reality...

...But is it relevant, or even interesting, to insist by implication that the good old days were infinitely superior to the present time...

...The result is a collection of folksy, lovably grumpy, foxy grandpa anecdotes...

...This can only result from rehearsals sufficient to make the actors so familiar with their material that they can at last quit worrying about lines and business and begin to approximate real-life naturalness...

...The movie gangster, for example, is seen here as a bitter parody of the success ethic, and Warshow brilliantly sees his ultimate destruction not as punishment for criminality but as punishment for daring to dream of material success which, in our society, is not possible without resort to aggression and therefore guilt...

...It is the nature of these media to hit below the belt...

...It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination...

...We can't go back, and we have arrived at the present crisis in communication through readily apprehendable historical processes...

...I have a feeling that Boorstin never goes to the movies, but if he should, he might notice the B picture on the bottom of the bill...

...is determinedly reportorial rather than philosophical in tone and its upshot is that our heritage, in which hard work is regarded as the greatest human virtue, prevents us from enjoying ourselves...

...But there is a still larger argument to be raised...

...Jarrell is at his best when he is engaged in literary rather than cultural analysis...

...So far, so cliched...

...His sadness is genteel, well-bred, fashionable among the college educated...

...The great thing about this work is that it is written in gentle love of his subject...

...It is—blessedly...

...Hence his interest in urban planning, for instance, stems not from a simple desire to mitigate physical ugliness, but from the knowledge that its effect on the individual must be to increase anti-social behavior...

...The Ways We Live Now by RICHARD SCHICKEL It has been argued that much of the immediate social relevance and creative vitality once enjoyed by the novel has been taken over, in postwar America, by the proliferating volumes of social commentary and criticism...

...I would contend that a handful of novelists (like Joseph Heller, Walker Percy, and Thomas Berger, whose important Reinhart in Love has just been published) have come close to inventing grotesques as amusing and significant as those Roth lists, but that our social commentators cop out when they come to dealing with this level—the level of our rich, day-to-day human comedy—and scurry back to safe and juiceless abstractions...

...Is Anybody Happy...

...His chief interest is the inanimate objects our technology produces and scatters all over the map...

...Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine...

...The real trouble with his book is that both his definitions and his solutions are too broad (and too lacking in psychological insight) to be applicable to specific individuals- He is dealing with pleasure as a theoretical construct, not as an infinitely varied thing which is sometimes a boon, sometimes a curse to the individual...

...It is most rewarding when it has no end beyond itself...

...He affects, perhaps for tactical reasons, a sometimes dull, sometimes jargon-laden academic diction which makes reading some of his pieces more of a chore than need be...

...But in these he has found an apt metaphor for comment on our society...

...Goodman, as a sometime novelist and poet, is capable of writing more gracefully than he does here...

...Daniel Boorstin is in the grip of a theory...

...For this reason I had high hopes for Robert Smith's Crank...

...Goodman nearly always calls for new values, new solutions, an abandonment of cliches...

...Goodman casts a wider net than any writer so far considered...

...My chief complaint, beyond the one already raised, is that he labors a simple and unexceptionable point far too long...

...It is especially favored by members of disaffected minorities as a means of getting things off their chests and, unfortunately, to prove their cultural and moral superiority to the less gifted, but perhaps more prosperous, majority...

...This new reality is a good deal trickier to deal with than our previous reality, and we have undoubtedly created new problems of education and value even as we solved some of the old ones...

...Only men like War-show, who walk unarmed—except by good sense—through the peanut shells of a movie balcony are capable of bringing the full range of their intelligences to bear on the pressing problems at hand...

...There is, of course, some truth in this idea, but a curious air of unreality lies over Boorstin's work...