Private Communication
The Facts of Life.
by Paul Goodman.
New York, The Vanguard Press, 1945. 261 pp. $2.50.
A gifted, spoiled child has certain magnificent charms which are denied to all good children, just as he has certain horrors peculiarly his own. He is gay, mischievous, daring, outgoing, assured, and has a healthy hardness that enables him to take pleasure in a sorry world. At his wilful, arbitrary, tiresome worst, he drags us into endless games without telling their rules.
Paul Goodman, in his most brilliant pieces in his new book—“The Canoeist,” “The University in Exile,” and above all, the titlepiece, “The Facts of Life,”—has the good qualities in happy abundance; he is equally rich in the bad in such mystifying pieces as “A Statue of Nestor,” “Orpheus in the Underworld,” and the middle part of “A Goat for Azazel.” But good or bad, much of the writing in this volume suggests the self-indulgence of a spoiled child. I do not mean that it is undisciplined, but that the discipline is intensely private and special to itself and unconcerned with the interests and pleasures of others.
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Mr. Goodman is beset, as only a modem writer can be, by the problem of communication. At times his obsession causes him to intrude self-consciously into his story (“Hereupon Eurydice appeared; and if only I could make this narrative move slower and slower.”) At times he doubts whether he has made his point (“But I have failed especially, I know, to imitate the social peace and easy subtility of the day; perhaps what I have described seems even pedantic!”); the doubt is more elegantly expressed but no less irritating than a humbler story-teller’s compulsive interruptions of his tale to ask his hearer, “Do you know what I mean?” “The Detective Story” is a direct and despairing statement of the hopelessness of the writer’s effort to communicate: a simple story of crime detection—one, incidentally, that Richard Connell wrote as a short-short story twenty years ago—never gets written, because it grows to include so much, the question of knowledge itself finally, that it never can be written. “As soon as I put down a word, a world of experience was excluded forever; and, of course, the harder I tried, the more thronging memories came into my mind unwilling to be omitted.”
When Mr. Goodman considers communication as his own technical problem he is either eccentric or lugubrious—on occasion beautifully so, as in the last quotation. When he makes it his characters’ problem, which after all is from the reader’s point of view the “natural” setting for the matter, he is often perceptive and lucid, his style is easier—or seems to be: for what is an oddly solemn tone in discussing one’s own troubles is a just one for describing the troubles of others.
He treats with a particular happiness the desperate failure of aliens to communicate with the new world to which they have come and for whose love they yearn. The words which they speak to bring them closer to the world only alienate them from it the more, because whatever they say inevitably emphasizes their difference. It takes so little to make them wholly wrong. A French-Canadian canoeist upon arriving as a stranger at a Jewish camp is welcomed as if into his own home, but his first innocent question about the customs of the place is resented and starts an antipathy that in a day drives him out. The refugees of “The University in Exile,” eager to show their familiarity with the pattern of American speech, recognize in a story of unsuccessful flight from the Nazis only the rhythms of a Jewish joke and laugh madly at its climax of woe.
Children are the most unassimilable aliens; formally their speech is like our own, but the concepts behind it are so much theirs that they are forever beyond the aid of the adult world. The explanations made to little Marcia by her mother are always reasonable and progressive; to Marcia they are preposterous lies. Ultimately she must struggle all alone and with her own inadequate knowledge of biology to integrate into one system all of “The Facts of Life”—sex, being Jewish, painting like Picasso—which the smug intellectuality of adults has segregated into separate and unconnected compartments.
For all their charming childishness, Mr. Goodman’s children—Marcia especially—are so intensely aware of the world around them that they are its most intelligent observers and therefore the most dramatic characters in it. Their significance to the author and to us is that where so many of his elaborate devices fail, children are his most efficient means of opening our eyes to his own peculiar vision of things. What we see through them we see with the fresh excitement of a foreigner in a strange country.
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In Contrast with practically all of his other pieces, which have a vague unreality because of their generalized, abstracted, almost nonrepresentational setting or the intrusion of an extravagant symbol into an otherwise familiar scene, the three best stories deal with a “real” world, contemporary Jewish life, and use only local concrete details to create a faithful but always original likeness. They illustrate (but this is to select only one of their possible meanings—for they are as general in their meaning as they are specific in their means) various Jewish forms of the isolation and insecurity of modem life. The closed tight life of the Jewish camp, seemingly so safe in its homogeneity, is so unsure of itself that the mere presence of an alien, the canoeist, reminds it intolerably of its differences from that outside world to which it itself is alien. The upper middle-class Jews of “The Facts of Life” turn their uncertainty into a convenient eclecticism under which they are at times not at all Jewish and at other times violently so. When Jewish, they are not quite sure whether it is a virtue to be asserted or a fault to be concealed. In “The University in Exile” we have a harsh corrective to our comfortable doctrine that oppression always brings the oppressed together into a friendly, mutually helpful group; the refugees in this story have been made so insecure by oppression that they dare hate only each other and other Jews.
Mr. Goodman is not invariably successful with Jewish material. “Jonah—A Biblical Comedy with Jewish Jokes Culled Far and Wide” is very funny a good deal of the time; but the execution is never quite so fine as the author’s really inspired idea that “The essential situation, the Prophet whose prophecy proves false and who then says to God, ‘I told you so!’ is perfectly comic.” Some of the incidents are translated neatly into contemporary terms, particularly the bureaucracy necessary to put a whole empire into sackcloth and ashes. However, the colloquial speech of the modernized Nineveh occasionally degenerates into the overworked burlesque of having Biblical characters talk stale American slang; and a God’s own plenty of Jewish jokes—despite the author’s ingenious theory of the relevance of every one of them—turns out to be too much.
Jewish jokes, as Jonah explains, “. . . consist in happy little anecdotes founded on absolute despair. There is nothing so comic, and so consoling, as to realize that everything is worse than you could possibly imagine.” The old canned stories re-told in “Jonah” don’t come up to this rigorous definition. Mr. Goodman’s own gifted and talented work often does: its theme is frustration and hopeless failure, but it is full of the joy of contemplated life. His best stories (and many passages in the ambitious unsuccessful pieces in this volume) affirm the richness and beauty of life, as good art must, by being themselves rich and beautiful.
