MORRIS DICKSTEIN
511
III
By comparison with Marcuse, Paul Goodman was a man who
seemed at home in America, a Jeffersonian rather than a Hegelian,
and one who especially emphasized the value of satisfying work–
though he himself lived a variegated life that fit Marx's description
rather neatly. Like Marcuse he was also something of a conservative;
he identified Coleridge and Arnold among his philosophical fore–
bears (in other words, the same tradition of Tory radicalism that had
influenced Trilling in America and Leavis, Hoggart, and Williams in
England). I find, however, that it's extremely difficult to talk of him
in these impersonal terms, though I knew
~im
only from a distance.
Like Allen Ginsberg, Goodman was more than a writer in the sixties;
he was a pervasive and inescapable
presence.
During the sixties, both
poetry and theory made a pact with the devil and descended into the
street, following Marx's admonition to change the world, not merely
to interpret it . Goodman was a fixture at all these public rituals-the
protest-meetings and teach-ins, the marches and demonstrations–
but not because he was a great orator or politician. My own impres–
sion on the few occasions I saw him in action was that he was above all
a great teacher, the most tireless and incandescent Socratic figure of
the age. This came out not only in his passion for the young, which
was fueled by his sexual need, but also in the relish with which he
took on alien audiences that were by no means ready to cheer his
gospel. As if haunted by unhappiness that made private life unbear–
able, he never seemed able to say no to any public occasion. At the
end of
NewRe/ormation,
his moving and bittersweet retrospective on
the sixties, written when he was already very tired, he asked himself:
"Why do I go? Ah, why do I go? It's not for the money and it's
not out of vanity. I go because they ask me . Since I used to gripe
bitterly when I was left out of the world, how can I gracelessly
decline when I am invited in?' ,
The occasion in question was a seminar at Dartmouth for' 'American
Telephone and Telegraph executives who were being groomed to be
vice-presidents ." Most Leftists, old or new, had they deigned to go at
all, might have seized the occasion to denounce them as exploiters,
