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getting too wound up, Goodman simply interrupts with a short
speech, explaining or extending the drama, and all is well. It is a
pleasure to hear Goodman explain and extend meanings, or even
to hear
him
describe his own reactions to his inventions, with
his
ready tears, his sobs, his cries of joy, his wide-eyed wonder that
things can be as they are.
Goodman is at once so well-grounded in knowledge of things,
and cares so deeply about the hopes and failures of our society, that
it seems too bad he is not recognized as a major prophet. Yet he is
giddy and reckless in manner, too, with an old-fashioned
air
of New
Directions about
him
sometimes, and this puts people off. His own
air of surprise at the failure of the world to take him seriously,
charming and urgent as this may appear, is partly a weakness, too.
It gives him a tone of the false-naive. He has very little real feeling
for the things that hold us back, for the stubborn fallen nature of
man; the characters of his stories are always symbols, never flesh
and blood. And there is a kind of jumpy euphoria even in his re–
citals of our disasters, as when his Everyman says, "I don't know
the first things. What to teach my children, nor how to get them
to learn it
if
I knew. I don't know how to fix the machines I use
every day. They get me in wars, but how
in
hell should I know
what's it about?"
Goodman really does know these things, though, and when he
tells us, in what he calls his "usual impractical helpful manner," he
is an essayist of surpassing interest. Perhaps with his new book,
Growing
Up
Absurd,
to which most of the pieces in
Niagara
might
be marginalia or inter-leaves, he will reach the position he deserves;
certainly that long essay is far beyond the depth of such an ac–
claimed prophet as Galbraith. Goodman's big fantastic novel,
The
Empire City,
very nearly became a popular success--one hears that
the publishers were not, to say the least, helpful. Anyway, there is
much sense and much delight in these stories, fables, or whatever
they may be called, and this is so not least because they do not
try
to be one great unreasonably sustained charade of realistic persons,
landscapes, plots, fiction.
This
is not boredom with literature. The fact is that to read
novels or poems today actually requires something like the historical
sense we must bring to Greek drama Qr Elizabethan verse; few of
