MORRIS DICKSTEIN
513
Far from being a weakness in his work , this vulnerability and
naked need gives his work an emotional charge missing from most
social criticism ; it binds together his stories and poems with his essays
and critical writings into one unfolding personal statement . Whatever
their differences of texture and form, they all remain the testimony of
one spirited citizen and man of letters . At the end of
New Reforma–
tion
he was glad
to
find himself' 'thinking from where I breathe .' , To
this reader he always seems
to
be thinking from where he lives . No–
where is this more evident than in
Growing
Up
Absurd
(1960) , his
masterwork in social criticism and a book that did much
to
inform the
whole frame of mind of thinking people in the sixties .
The immediate subject of
Growing
Up
Absurd
is the young ,
mainly those who have dropped out into the Beat subculture and the
others whose delinquency has dropped them into the hands of the
law. Its real subject is the American of the Eisenhower age, a society
which in Goodman 's view gave its youth no world
to
grow up in. The
world seems' 'absurd ," meaningless ; it fails to provide satisfying roles
and models. Hence the young do not simply drop out ; rather, "they
act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in ·some
sense agrees with ." Goodman is here applying existential and
psychological concepts that are usually excluded from social analysis .
He aims
to
produce an account of youth and of society that is imper–
missibly inward, novelistic, even subjective . Since his concern, like
that of the nineteenth-century English culture critics, is more with the
quality
of life than with material well-being , he needs above all
to
convey the
feel
of contemporary experience both for himself and for
his youthful subjects.
In retrospect we can see how muchGoodman's personal situa–
tion contributed
to
this bold and moving analysis. His passionate
feeling for these young male outcasts no doubt is grounded as much
in his homosexuality as in his general humanity , especially since he
felt he was an outcast himself, a sexual nigger. He wrote in
New
Reformation:
"My homosexual acts have made me a nigger, subject
to arbitrary brutality and debased when my out-going impulse is not
taken for granted as a right ." The condition of the outsider, the reject
of the "organized system" with his " addiction
to
forbidden haunts
and vices," runs like a thread through the whole book, not only be–
cause of the author's sexual habits but also thanks
to
25 years of near
