592
PAUL GOODMAN
A REPLY
I meant to say simply that what is on the front page is not
usually history. Marx even said that human history had not yet begun,
but I think several interesting changes have occurred since neolithic
times. (Nothing to do with eternity or Athens.) And it is of course a
commonplace, and true, that the art-act is more in touch with history
than the journalistic report. When Gorky, in Harold Rosenberg's phrase,
which he fails to repeat in his letter, was "content to comb the beaches
where passion and esthetic memories meet," he did, according to Harold,
his best painting and he was, according to me, most in history. I tend
to think that Gorky's "historical consciousness" in the thirties was about
on the level of A. MacLeish's or the editors' of PRo The proliferation
of news media has created a fast amount of such "consciousness."
If
our
present statesmen destroy us all, the historical interest of that event will
not be the shambles but the secular development of human folly to such
a climax and, even more grippingly, the secular development of the
catatonic rigidity with which we are now not preventing it.
I agree immensely with Harold about the relevance of "Action"
and the "gesture to evoke the new." Let me explore what this implies
in writing a book review.
(I
was not painting a picture, nor writing a
biography of Gorky who-Harold is right-was not my dish of tea.)
Action is a motion not in isolation but into the immediate future, and
for literary articles the "immediate" means a framework of thoughts
to work with tomorrow. (The immediate of tonight is hopefully not
literary, or at least it is poetry not articles.) So my task, in our stuck
world, is to open the possibility of "sage answers," of practical good
sense that might prove itself and become real history. Naturally my
products might be
merely
mythological, that's the risk I take. As Harold
knows, I am weak on "problems," on the thorny conditions of life, not
because I am unaware of them; I have been as balked and disgusted
as the average. But when these problematic conditions are posed, as
almost universally nowadays, to add up to a proof that Nothing Can
Be Done, then they bore me and my pen begins to scratch blanks.
Rather, I assert solutions
anyway,
as you slap a drunk with a towel;
you do not describe his state and how he got that way. What is our
attitude when our friends act as stupidly as Harold's Current History?
To be sure, this mentality of mine would make me a poor biographer of
Gorky, but Harold was the biographer; I was reviewing Harold, who
is bright.
