514
PARTISAN REVIEW
poverty and neglect as a writer. Unlike Marcuse , Goodman was not
taken in by the myths of contemporary affluence . Well before
Michael Harrington's book
The Other America
he concentrated on
the marginal and the unemployed, the pockets of victimization; like
Harrington he had sometimes lived in them. Goodman considered
himself a prime reject of the organized system of literature, which
had little use for an all-purpose " man of letters" who couldn ' t settle
down. Thus like other ftfties intellectuals, like the epigoni of the
Frankfurt school, Goodman attacks the promoters and hucksters of
popular culture, and complains of "an organized system of reputa–
tions that is calculated statistically to minimize risk and eliminate the
unsafe ."
I don't mean to suggest that
Growing
Up
Absurd
is mainly a
personal gripe, only to explore how Goodman-without being in the
least " confessional" like many later sixties writers-brought his own
visceral feelings to bear on the social reality . He challenged the
period's sacrosanct myth of value-free objectivity in criticism and
social science, putting together a book that's part anecdote, part
philosophy , part griping, part sociology , and part visionary moral
statement , all set down in a deceptive manner of ungainly informality
that only
seems
casual. All this helped get the book rejected by a
dozen publishers, including the one who had commissioned it, before
Commentary
magazine picked it up to inaugurate its new leftish six–
ties regime . Today the book is still described (by friendly observers
like Henry Pachter) as "loosely written" and "poorly researched ,"
platitudes that miss the cunning and originality of its style .
Goodman's stance is a strange combination of the polymath
and the plain speaker who is just your ordinary informed citizen
raised to the
nth
power. It's directed against not only the false neu–
trality of the social scientist but also the hyper-cultivated Brahmin
tone of the literary intellectuals of the ftfties . For their air of ironic
sophistication and world-weariness Goodman substitutes straight
talk, honest indignation , little homilies and emotional outbursts , and
an appeal to corny values like nobility, honor , community, patriotism
and faith, each of which casts a subversive light on our current social
arrangements . Like the Victorian social critics , Goodman shows how
radical yet traditional it can be to hold an inhumane society to its own
professed values . To him this is a society that ignores the human cost
