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PARTISAN REVIEW
is held. At times the author cannot help but step out of character and
add his bit; who can blame him?-if he held on to his notion it might
impede his development. While other intellectuals like to talk about
"putting things into question," with Goodman questions
and answers
keep turning into each other to form a kind of biological increment.
The Empire City
is a teaching of our times in New York City–
a tremendous project. Especially if one begins not with the etiquette
of a social class or under the enchantment of social ambition or snob–
bery but as a sidewalk primitive, a Gidean orphan, with an animal's
shrewdness and all learning to pick from. "What he really wants is
to use the City as a school. Back to Socrates." Not a school for the
paltry picturesque, street-scene violence or newcomers'
schmalz,
but
for the large idea of man and nature. For to Goodman, the metropolis
is the city-dweller's "nature"; the rocky skin and bones of the Empire
City belong to Mother Earth herself, the same female he sees stretched
out in her original voluptuousness in the sunset up the Hudson. She
is to be studied by touching, and the re-Iearning of her body by the
city man is Goodman's
scienza nuoua.
Horatio Alger, protagonist of
The Empire City,
starts his education
by quitting school. His street-corner curriculum corresponds to the ruses
of reality. "He knew the physics of the bounds and rebounds of the
Spaulding High-Bouncer from a wooden wall and a cement floor. He
knew the chemistry of substitute and preserved foods, which could be
read directly on the labels by Federal law. He knew the biology of
washrooms.... In linguistics he knew how to pretend that he came from
Brooklyn or the Bronx." These things are only learned in being told–
until he started to explain, "he [Horatio] never realized what a lot he
knew."
It
is upon the communication of such knowledge that a city
culture must be built. To me, the first merit of Goodman is his totally
unself-conscious acceptance of the facts of our time and place, any of
them-a machine standing in an empty lot, a Jewish boys' camp-as
ranking with those of all times and places as objects of intellectual and
esthetic interest. He has rejected patriotism to become the citizen of
his moment.
Horatio's instruction opens in the Depression, when everyone was
the ward of Eliphaz, the capitalist, who "wanted to change all use value
into exchange value."
The Grand Piano,
book of the paupers' luxury,
is followed by
The State Of Nature,
in which Eliphaz becomes a memory
and his dependents are "weeded in" to the War either as soldiers or as
pacifists. The setting loose of the beasts gives way to the postwar blues
of
The Dead Of Spring,
which interprets the poisoned atmosphere of
New York in those days as an emanation of the forgotten corpses of
