MORRIS DICKSTEIN
515
in its rush toward modernization and profit. Like the Victorians
Goodman emphasizes the paradoxes of "progress," the loss of human
scale in our physical and social environment, "the present waste of
human resources, " the devaluation of both work and leisure.
But Goodman is no machine breaker at war with modernity and
efficiency . As a good anarchist he can easily demonstrate the in–
efficiency of a quack modernism mindlessly attached to bigness and
waste. "There is probably a point of complexity at which, cut off
from the country, the city ceases to advance beyond country back–
wardness ; it becomes impractical and begins to induce its own kind of
stupefaction and ineptness." He goes on to list ten or twelve ways the
city has changed since his youth, with some practical alternatives.
No Jeremiah prophesying ruin, Goodman earns his nostalgia and
indignation by being ·concrete. His is practical optimism that values
the subject over the product and puts "animal ardor" and a messy
vitality above the illogical wisdom of the machine and the social con–
glomerate.
All this is conveyed in Goodman's style, which like Words–
worth's is artful in its moral and emotive simplicities; at its best it
achieves a uniquely plebeian kind of eloquence, a populist rhetoric
of' 'plain talk" behind which the avant-garde artist is almost effaced.
Norman Mailer was one of those who were famously unimpressed by
this style (at least after Goodman had attacked
him);
in
The Armies
of the Night
he labels it merely pedestrian, but also admits that his
antipathy to Goodman is more personal and sexual than literary.
They are rival' 'sexologues," he explains, and he accuses Goodman of
holding a hygienic, permissive view of homosexuality (and "onan–
ism"), while he, Mailer, knows that all sex is fraught with guilt and
sin, and some kinds are simply wrong, soul-destroying. It's also rather
obvious in
Armies
that Mailer envies Goodman's youthful New Left
legions, just as he confesses his jealousy of Robert Lowell's name,
fame and literary eminence . The book is a complex bid for both
political leadership
and
literary standing, and it very nearly succeeds.
Politically, too, their differences were important; during the
Kennedy years, Goodman, an advocate of decentralization and
"community control," attacked Mailer's Carlylean attraction to the
Great Leader. But this was preceded by their sexual quarrel, which
goes back to "The White Negro" and
Growing
Up
Absurd-goes
