The Discovery of Sex

Art and Social Nature.
By Paul Goodman.
New York, Vinco Publishing Co., 1946. 98 pp. $3.00.

The State of Nature.
By Paul Goodman.
New York, Vanguard, 1946. 227 pp. $2.50.

Paul Goodman must be granted two excellent qualities: breadth of interest and ready identity. He assumes simultaneously the roles of novelist, moralist, politician, literary critic, and amateur psychologist. In this respect he is superior to most contemporary writers, who are so patently eager to keep themselves within clearly marked fences, shutting out irksome intellectual responsibilities or cares. Goodman at least strives for totality, does not succumb to the American pattern of specialization. And when you read Goodman you know it is Goodman and nobody else in the whole world; you can't mistake his identity. Which is good.

But once having granted his breadth and identity, one can say little else. Goodman is more interesting as a symptom than for the content of his work. His political system, together with its psychological and philosophical baggage, is a conglomeration few people will be able to take seriously. To wit:

1. A crude version of Wilhelm Reich's revision of Freud, spiced with a touch of Rousseau. Reich saw the task of analysis as the mere release of inhibition, the mere return to orgastic potency. Goodman urges that we “allow and encourage the sexual satisfaction of the young . . . in order to free them from anxious submissiveness to authority.” While this sexual radicalism—so reminiscent of Ludwig Lewisohn's pre-Zionist psychoanalysis—may be compatible with Rousseau, it is certainly not compatible with Freud, who saw as civilization's task the imposition of organized restrictions on the id, and who had no illusions about man's primitive “state of nature.”

   Goodman simply does not attempt an examination of his central conception, the “state of nature,” which is the condition we reach when we allow a free flow of spontaneity. As a useful myth to recall the modem mechanized and atomized intellectual to his more basic primitive life-drives, this conception has some relevance; but when taken literally as a programmatic social goal, it involves the naive assumption that the problem of modem society is merely repression and the solution is merely free expression. Goodman is here open to attack on both sides: he ignores the possibilities, relationships, and probabilities of the society in which we live; and his implicit view of human life seems—like all similar Rousseauian views, right down to Dewey's educational theories—uniquely devoid of any recognition of tragic content. Only a writer as exuberantly reckless and irresponsible as Goodman would try to merge the approaches of Rousseau and Reich with that of Freud.

2. The anarchist or Utopian conception of “free communities,” little islands of libertarian cooperation in the capitalist world. This perspective does not consider what possibility of survival such groups have within the capitalist world; it does not consider whether they too would be subject to the laws of capitalist economy; and it does not consider how to meet the problems of an entire people even if satisfaction could be provided to a few libertarians in seclusion.
3. Cute rebelliousness and sure-to-shock proposals: “advocate a large number of precisely those acts and words for which persons are in fact thrown in jail.” No need to worry about raising bail for the author of this proposal: he simultaneously cautions prudence.
4. Tedious moralisms: we must “mutually analyze and purge our souls until we no longer regard as guilty . . . such illegal acts as spring from common human nature.”
5. Snobbish intellectual insensitivity: Goodman tells workers it is “treasonable” to work at a job that “exhausts your time of day in the usual work in office and factories, merely for wages.” (That “merely” is precious.) Does he believe that the mass of people have any choice, that they can avoid working “merely for wages” if they are to continue to exist?

From all this, we may readily accredit his sincerity but equally question his seriousness.

Goodman is unique in the contemporary intellectual world. He is quite without roots, quite cut off from any controlling tradition that might yield him richness and perspective. He is the Jewish intellectual alienated to the point of complete reduction, which is one reason why his thought is so eclectic, his prose is so crabbed, and his fiction gives out such a thin trickle of feeling.

Proof for these harsh statements is his novel, The State of Nature. Here we can test his assertions: a novel being a creative act, we can legitimately expect it to possess precisely those qualities, above all spontaneity, for which Goodman stumps.

A comparison is suggested. English novelists like Waugh and Huxley—appalled at both their consuming self-examinations and their total scepticism—turned with a desperate act of will to religious faith. The will to faith was there, the belief in faith as well—but, alas, the faith was not. And so it is with Goodman's novel. The urge to spontaneity is there, the call to arms in its behalf is shouted from every page; but the novel itself is totally unspontaneous, crabbed, and contrived. So constricting is its moral corset that only on a few occasions does the free flow of Goodman's emotion escape the barrier of his self-consciousness—and then we see the writer Goodman might have been.

It seems a cruel trick of fate that the apostle of spontaneity should in his demonstrative creative act so completely lack the qualities of spontaneity.

This failure might lead him to reexamine the values that cause his dilemma.