ALICIA OSTRIKER
287
Invited by McKeon to teach English at Chicago while earning a doctor–
ate, he was fired for homosexuality in 1940, just after completing his Aris–
totelian
Structure ofLiterature.
Later, Black Mountain would fue him for
the same reason . He had been, he said, bisexual since the age of twelve.
Eager to preach what he practised, he would always defend (see, for exam–
ple, the story "The Old Knight") the value of Eros in the teaching process.
For over twenty-five years, Paul lived with his common-law wife, Sally.
They had two daughters, Susan and Daisy, and a son, Matthew Ready,
(whose death mountain-climbing in 1967 was a grief from which he did not
recover; although he wrote, therapeutically, many poems of mourning).
"Until 1953 we lived in the lowest 10th-like Southern sharecroppers-at
$1500 to $2000 a year," he boasted. "Decent poverty is really an ideal en–
vironment for serious people. ' ,
Hanging around New York, among its intellectuals, political sub–
groups, literary and artistic cliques, or young street hoodlums; nosing
through City Hall or cruising bars, bicycling manuscripts to editors to save
postage (the bicycle was succeeded by a Lambretta, about which he has some
charming verses), he wrote like a force of nature: poems, plays, stories,
novels; essays in city planning, social criticism, psychology, education. In
the end, according to the author's count, there were forty books. The work
was admired by a fanatic few, but otherwise neglected or dismissed.
Growing Up Absurd,
after rejection by a dozen publishers, made Goodman
nationally famous at age forty-nine.
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals,
The Community of Scholars,
and
Compulsory Mis-Education, People or
Personnel,
the gloomy autobiographical
Five Years: Thoughts during a Use–
less Time,
the wry
New Reformation: Notes ofa Neolithic Conservative,
and
the return to literary theory in
Speaking and Language: Defense ofPoetry
,
were still to come. Meanwhile, like Thomas Hardy, Goodman thought him–
self primarily a poet, writing verse profuse and private-had to do it, like a
reflex-and since literary magazines rarely accepted it, he showed it round
to friends . Hardy's poetry was first published when he was fIfty-nine-his
own choice. Goodman was unable to publish a volume of poetry until he
was past fifty. This was
The Lordly Hudson
(Macmillan, 1962), followed by
Hawkweed
(Random House, 1967),
North Percy
(Black Sparrow, 1968),
Homespun ofOatmeal Grey
(Random House, 1970), and the verse of
Little
Prayers and Finite Experience
(Harper
&
Row, 1972). The
Collected Poems,
edited by Taylor Stoehr, and with a memoir by George Dennison, appeared
shortly after Goodman's death in 1973.
"I am a humanist, and everything I do has the same subject-the
organism and the environment. Anything I write is pragmatic-it aims to
accomplish something." One is tempted to say that Goodman's ideas, as
