There is an anniversary today, and I thought somebody should write something about it.  One hundred years ago, Paul Goodman was born.  During his 60 years, Goodman was known as a sociologist, therapist, educational psychologist, political theorest, activist, urban planner, critic, and queer theorist (long before there was such a concept).  He wrote poetry, short stories, plays, and a novel.  I don’t think there has ever been any American intellectual quite like him for the breadth of his interests and contributions.

I am hesitant to post a diary on Goodman since there is so much of his work with which I am unfamiliar.  But perhaps most of Goodman’s readers are in that category.  Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that “only the dead know Brooklyn,” since Brooklyn was too vast and diverse for anyone to know it in a single lifetime.  I think the same can be said for Paul Goodman.
A few of his books remain in print.  From time to time, collections of his essays appear and are eagerly read by small audiences.  It’s not quite fair to say that Goodman has been forgotten.  But he’s been largely forgotten.  Goodman himself perceived the limits of his own fame when he whimsically imagined his obituary:

Were I still more industrious,
and didn’t get so sick and tired,
instead of half a column,
my obituary in the Times would run a column,
with an anecdote,
and a quotation from Growing Up Absurd

(I’ll be quoting from Goodman’s poems in this diary, but since I lent out my copy of his collected poems some time ago, and the book was never returned, the quotations are from memory and are likely not totally accurate.)

Growing Up Absurd was Goodman’s “big” book, and I don’t know how many people read it anymore.  The issue was how education is supposed to prepare us for life, and that’s hardly an issue that has lost its relevance.  But try to enter the book today, and you are caught off your guard, and likely repelled, by an expression which no one would use today, or for the last 35 years or so.  Goodman’s thesis is that society does not offer roles that are challenging, that require the full use of one’s talents to do something useful.  In other words, or, more specifically, in Goodman’s words, America at mid-century had ceased to provide the opportunity for “man’s work.”

It wasn’t until years after I read the book that I began to think that perhaps the expression “man’s work” was something other than an unfortunate anachronism.  Goodman the social critic was merging here with Goodman the psychologist (and his deepest contributions have probably been in the field of psychology, in being one of the developers of gestalt therapy).  And it was Goodman the psychologist who saw that overlaid on the more general social dilemma, there was the particular problem that men found the workplace to be emasculating. When Goodman writes about a jobs program in New York state to channel undereducated youth into productive activities (and out of criminal activities), and why such a program was doomed to failure, you come to realize that the choice of words “man’s work” was exact.

Goodman is not an easy author to read.  One gets the sense that he was constantly generating ideas.  Before he had succeeded in writing down one idea, other ones were popping into his head and struggling to get out, and the result is often disjointed and nonlinear.

In the last years of his life (he died in 1972), Paul Goodman was a major figure in the anti-war movement.  But the movement often exasperated him.  He faulted its leaders for intellectual laziness, and for distorting (or ignoring) the historical record.

He had his heroes in politics, among them Hugo Black and Adlai Stevenson, and I’d like to leave with poems he wrote about them shortly after their deaths.   Of Hugo Black, he wrote,

Thanks to a couple of rational decisions by the Court,
that struck down censorship and (brrrrr) its chilling effects,
I receive by mail a gentle stream of booklets of poetry,
by young men,
in love with each other,
good news I read with pleasure,
though, naturally, wistfully.

I used to write the same myself, a hundred years ago,
(my muse is hard to chill!)
but publishers and lin-o-typers
wouldn’t touch it with a tongs,
much less the post office.

Hugo Black it was,
the champion of Cupid.
Now he is dead and gone,
and cannot be replaced.

And of Stevenson, whose last post was as ambassador to the UN, where he had to defend the Johnson Administration’s Vietnam policies.

We told the old ambassador to quit.
“These brutal lies they make you tell defame us and you.”
“No, I am on the team,” he said,
and was unhappy saying it.
Now he has dropped down on a London street,
and everyone is weeping over him.
He said, “It’s not the way we play the game,
to quit to make a point.”

The flag is at half mast in Springfield.
A bombadier loudly reasons for us in Asia.
Our sons will be commanded to the senseless war
but many will not go.
This does not change, generation after generation.
This has been no worse, but there may be no more.

————-

I’ll add one more poem, because I like it and because it shows Goodman’s whimsical side, and because it memorializes my hometown, and we are so happy not to be ignored that we revel even in putdowns:

“Man, I’m shook to see you in a commercial.
I thought you was opposed to advertising.”
“This isn’t advertising, this is newscasting, dammit.
These are good.
National Biscuits Triscuits
(crunch crunch)
Not so good as nooky or Vivaldi
(crunch crunch)
But better than Ingmar Bergman or any academic friends that I
(crunch crunch crunch crunch)
ever made in Milwaukee”

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