PARTISAN REVIEW
As a wise man, he had the same thoughts by impulse as by reflection,
in the dead of night as by daylight. The difference was that by impulse
and at night he thrilled with delight at the prospect of an abyss; by
day and on reflection he was prudent. It is as these feelings gradually
become one feeling of faith that a wise man grows into a sage.
With its "acting out" amid frustrations of the wonderful fulfillment
of desire, Goodman's fable of ideologies is also an epic of infantilism,
including in this term its New Testament meaning as a synonym for
resurrection. Children and animals snuggle against the tireless debaters
of this "romance of spontaneous joy, freedom and fraternity"-I am
reminded of a photo in The Lion House in Salt Lake City of Brigham
Young, a comparable miracle maker, lost in a mob of his offspring
and wives.
The Empire City
is written in the perspective of nature's
newcomers, who take nothing for granted and to whom the race of
adults is simply a breed of larger animals that behave like lunatics.
The chapter, "On The Shore" in Book Three, in which a baby girl
plays in the surf, is the high point of writing in the work; its low is
Horatio's comic-book argot-"ourn," "gee you're green," "'cause"-as
the boy philosopher of Book One.
Dramatically speaking, the sage is a bore. Whether as scout leader
or sanctified messenger from Moscow, Rome or the Dark Mothers, he
can draw lessons from events only at the risk of emptying them of
in–
terest. Most novelists try to reduce this risk through devices for "letting
the facts speak for themselves"; Goodman multiplies it by making every
character into a sage. Above his metropolis hovers the Buddha, Christ,
Zarathustra, in a ring of disciples. As a basic image, this is not very
agreeable: it leads to phrases like "they drew back from
him . . .
his
eyes flooded with tears and he got up and went." The knower, with his
Reichean pantomime of suffering, fury, defiance, supplies the reverse
of conscious farce in
The Empire City.
The novelist is a different kind of writer from the fabulist-his
talent includes listening to his audience while it listens to him, and
yielding to it for the sake of the story. The novelist is the most com–
pliant among the artists; no meaning
in
his tale stands higher for him
than its power to catch him hearers. Goodman is eager to be listened
to too, but on his own terms, not at any cost. It is not from the novelists
that he has derived the measure of his ingratiation. His affinities are
with philosophers and poets, particularly the seekers of the absolute and
of intoxication: Rilke, Kafka, Cocteau, Mallarme.
The Empire City
i~
not a good novel but it is a great book, as one
might say of Melville's
Mardi
that it is a great book though by no
means always a pleasure. Goodman has the humor, high and low, of a
