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PARTISAN REVIEW
social critic and practical Utopian , were simply, usually right. At least, they
were always humane, having always in mind the single question of what can
be done
to
make American lives more whole, more free. Not systematically
theoretical (Goodman is not an
anginal
philosopher, but an absorber of
what feeds his cravings) , Goodman's thoughts branch from only a few large
boughs : the stress on eliminating bigness in favor of decentralization and
autonomy, the insistence that human beings need meaningful work they
can be proud of, the pleas for less ideology and more human-scale contact.
His root moral assumption is that happiness is good for people . "Hap–
piness, not merely a reward for virtue, is itself a virtue," he quotes Spinoza.
When people did not agree, he wrote like a bright and good child con–
fronted by the irrationality of human badness. Why do Americans want to
harm each other and themselves? Stubbornly, he does not see the point. He
himself is made perfectly happy by music, love, work, and handball; there–
fore why do these idiots make the ugly cities and the abominable wars? Why
don't they stop when he points out their silliness and a cheap remedy? His
irritation was Thoreau's : Is it necessary that we live so ill? His chief weak–
ness, of course, was that he really believed-World Wars notwithstanding–
in what used to be called' 'the basic goodness of human nature ." Although
the street-wise stance of his prose style disguises this, he could in fact make
no allowance for the
irreducibly
greedy, power-hungry, and destructive
components of human nature .
In the prose, we attend partly to Goodman's ideas, partly
to
the earnest
personal commitment behind them. In the poetry, we are not led
to
examine ideas as such, but to see in detail, what it felt like
to
be a man who
pounded away at "my poisoned one, my world" for those forty-odd years,
despite acknowledging that it would not, in public or private, much profit
him:
I am distraught with longing for Paradise
and convinced that it is unattainable for me.
Goodman liked to quote Goethe saying that the greatest verse was oc–
casional. Although he did write sometimes on themes outside of himself,
such as music, heroes, classical figures, or nature, the ovetwhelming bulk of
his poetry was situational and personal, chips struck from the wood.
He does not as a rule write about his recreations. A pity, since report
has it that he could play at life exuberantly. "Handball ," a little gem about
licking some Puerto Rican youths with calculated fast shots in the corners,
is relatively exceptional. He does write of his duties : "Foster excellence . If I
do not/ Who will do it?" he asks himself. Or: "Fucking Sally just to give
