People of the Book 101: Paul Goodman

With a new documentary film, Paul Goodman Changed My Life (www.paulgoodmanfilm.com), making the rounds of small movie theaters, we present this memoir of Goodman by Jules Chametzky.

by Jules Chametzky

Peter Rose, a long-time professor of sociology at Smith College, and I spent a good hour walking the streets of Northampton on a bitter cold winter evening in the late 1960s with Paul Goodman, who had spoken earlier at the college. A slight figure, he was wearing what we used to call a “pupke” hat — woolen, with a small ball of wool on top — pulled over his ears. He was hunched over against the cold, his nose running a little, until we ended up talking for hours at a scruffy old-time diner.

What I remember most is his comparing New York Puerto Ricans with the city’s Blacks. A frequent player of playground handball, that grand city game, he noted that when a ball went astray the Puerto Rican kids would stop it and return it to the players; the Black kids simply let it go by them. As an occasional volunteer worker in the city hospitals, he also observed that Black patients were often alone, occasionally visited by one family member. The Puerto Ricans were usually surrounded by family, bearing food, drinks, flowers; if one of them opened a bodega or other small business, in the city or in its suburbs, family and friends rallied around, at least for a while, as customers or supporters.

Goodman worried about what he perceived as a breakdown in the African American family and in community coherence and pride — a kind of social pathology made famous or infamous by Moynihan and Glazer. One can challenge these generalizations, and the reliability of such a small and idiosyncratic sampling. Forty years on, one cannot romanticize Puerto Rican solidarity and community values, so visibly in disarray in the communities of Holyoke, Springfield, and parts of New York, where their socio-economic condition remains very low, for the most part, and seemingly intractable. Black life has certainly picked up on many fronts — the election and presidency of Barack Obama is a major cause for hope — but the inner cities are still what they are, if not worse than forty years ago, as The Wire, that fine television series on HBO, and much other testimony would have us believe.

Goodman had a sharp eye about so much of American reality.

No one can deny his prescience about the failures in American education, chronicled by him in Growing Up Absurd (1960) and Compulsory Mis-Education (1964). He anticipated and spoke for the ‘60’s youth critique and rebellion. He has sometimes been called “the philosopher of the New Left,” especially after the paperback version of his Making Do (1963) was so widely read and influential. Prior to these significant books, in a story called “A Memorial Synagogue” (begun in 1935, completed in 1947, and reprinted in 2001 in Jewish American Literature: a Norton Anthology), he memorialized in original and arresting fashion the disasters of the Jewish people — and all other peoples — years before the full dimension of the Shoah became known. His extraordinary trilogy, The Empire City (1942,1946,1950), with its hero named Horatio Alger negotiating New York City through the 1940s, remains a great read. Funny and/or shocking to some, wise to others, he shows how Horatio learns math, geography, history in the subway system, and how anarchist communes fail because they don’t solve the problem of who takes out the garbage. Horatio participates in progressive, Dewey/Reichian-inspired pre-schools, in which stark-naked children paddle across the floor and each other. And more.

Dead in 1972 at 60, his health perhaps affected terribly by the death, shortly before, of a beloved son in a mountain-climbing accident, his productivity in a variety of fields and forms was enormous. Philosophical anarchist, free spirit, bi-sexual (which got him canned from several colleges before mores changed and became more forgiving), he published some forty books of verse, drama, stories, essays on architecture — Communitas with his brother Percival Goodman — and a pioneering work on Gestalt psychology with Fritz Perls. He even earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago with an Aristotelian dissertation on form in literature (which I have read). His books are still available through alternative presses, but he is too little known and honored these days, though assuredly he should be.

Norman Podhoretz brags about his liberal bona fides, as prelude to his seeing the light and turning away from those misguided ideas of his youth, towards neo-condom, when in his first days as Editor of Commentary in the early ‘60’s, he published the seemingly outrageous and radical work of Paul Goodman and Norman Mailer. And see where he and his journal ended up when they stopped all that.

Jules Chametzky is an emeritus professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and editor emeritus of the The Massachusetts Review. His books include Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (co-editor, 2000) and From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan and Our Decentralized Literature.