512
PARTISAN REVIEW
fascists, and robber barons. Instead, Goodman's contribution was a
list of practical suggestions, some so practical as to be radical and un–
adoptable, but no doubt sufficient to provoke hours of heated talk.
Goodman behaved the same way with audiences that were pre–
pared to idolize him. The teamsman's pep-talk was alien to him. He
was incapable of flattery, though he could be gratuitously brutal. He
tended to hector his audiences, to galvanize them within their im–
mediate situation. He always spoke
to
them, not out of some private
dazzling soliloquy of his own. The first time I saw this happen was at
Columbia in 1960 or 1961, when some of us connected with the
undergraduate paper tried to organize a series of speakers. We had
no money to offer; everyone was busy, busy-all our culture heroes
turned us down. All but Paul Goodman, of course. The talk he gave
seemed based on no more than impromptu jottings scribbled on the
subway, but it was about us, about where we were, especially about
Columbia and the poor citizenship, the civic irresponsibility it had
always displayed toward its immediate community and toward his
beloved city. In short, Goodman gave a complete analysis of the
Columbia student uprising-seven years before it occurred! It wasn't
carping, it wasn't rhetorical, it wasn't even eloquent; it was simply
practical, but also utopian, since it was based on a grand vision of the
role a university could play in a great urban scene, and on his sadness
and anger that it did not choose to play that role.
A few years later I watched him do the same thing for three days
nonstop at a conference of graduate students somewhere in western
Massachusetts. Even when he was not lecturing officially he was sur–
rounded by people, and he gave himself to them completely; as a
continuous Socratic performance it was so impressive it was scary.
I myself was disappointed that I couldn't get him more interested
in some of the clever and brilliant things I was saying. My bright–
young-man's ego was bruised. I wasn't used to it. Later when he
published his journal
Five Years,
to show the world that he was not a
good man but one driven and debased by sexual hungers and
humiliations, I was able to guess at what had happened: I simply
hadn't turned him on. Sex and pedagogy were intertwined for
Goodman, along with citizenship, abstract ideas, family and religious
feelings, and so on, as they were for the Greeks. He could turn people
on when he too was turned on; he needed to take as well as give.
