The Endurance of Paul Goodman’s Thought, Often in Spite of His Writing
Most readers have probably never heard of him, but Paul Goodman’s impact on the sixties’ counterculture, and thus on our own time — was profound. He called himself a “Man of Letters” in the manner of Samuel Johnson. Accordingly, he “was an artist first,” as Taylor Stoehr, his literary executor, writes, and “a political thinker only because the times demanded it of him.”
The times were the thirties up to his death in the early seventies. On display in The Paul Goodman Reader are some of his most representative works from those four decades. They comprise essays on topics ranging from Kafka to urban planning, education to pacifist film, and excerpts of his fiction and poetry. At his best, Goodman is moving and spirited; at his worst, which is to say at his most elitist and libertarian, he is insufferable.
Goodman earned a PhD at the University of Chicago and spent his life writing constantly and working sporadically. His anti-authority stance and his bisexuality — but primarily the latter — resulted in his firing from various teaching positions. But he was never willing to compromise his political, social, or artistic principles for money, or anything else. The problem lay not with him but with a society that failed its people and inundated them with pointless rules.
