SPRING BOOKS

Crazy Young Allies

By DAN JACOBSON

OCities stink; our politicians lie; our military men send hydrogen bombs flying round and round the world. our teachers resign to get better-paid jobs. Garage mechanics cheat

us, policemen bully us; movie stars inflame us; advertisers deprave us. . . But why go on?

Anybody can draw up his own list; and many

People seem to spend their time doing practically nothing else. And the scanning of every list deepens our conviction that the mess is so big that none of us can ever hope to do anything about it.

But here's an American, Mr. Paul Goodman, who feels that it isn't too late to try; and who offers us, as his contribution to the cleansing campaign, a book about the problems of 'Youth in the Organised Society,' Growing Up Absurd.' Mr. Goodman's book has, one gathers, caused 'something of a stir in American intellectual circles, and comes here with the approval of Mr. Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the influential New York monthly Commentary, and of Pro- fessor J. K. Galbraith, who needs, as they say. no introduction. On this side of the Atlantic an older generation of radicals, represented some- what dismayingly by Mr. A. S. Neill and Sir Herbert Read, have added their applause. I wish I could say that I felt impelled to join in.

I would htve liked to be enthusiastic about the book for many reasons, the first being simply that one is prepared to welcome any book which is directed explicitly against our prevailing social apathy and cynicism. But there are more specific reasons why we should be willing to give Mr. Goodman our attention. Though he is writ- ing only of conditions in the United States, many of his remarks have a direct relevance to con- ditions in this country. Mr. Goodman is earnest; he is indignant; and he is willing to take a chance, even in the strategy of his book. He does not discuss how best we can get our youth to 'adjust' to our society; rather, he asks us quite bluntly why they should adjust to it, the society being as corrupt and effete as he believes it to be.

Most of the book is given over to. illustrating the proposition that 'our abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most ele= nlentary objective opportunities and worth-while goals that could make growing up possible.' The author begins by discussing the meaninglessness of the jobs that are open to young people today, whether they work with their hands in a local garage or with their heads in some bureaucratic corporation. He then discusses the class-structure of the United States, and points out that while poverty among the unskilled workers continues to exist, the affluence of the other sectors of the economy makes it more difficult than ever to be decently poor.' This is perhaps the most telling chapter in the book. Successive chapters analyse Gollancz, 21s. the experiences of those young people who do try to 'adjust' to the society; and of those who try to opt out of the society, and attempt to con- struct meaningful communities among them- selves. Juvenile delinquents and the Beat Genera- tion come in for particularly close examination under the last heading. Finally, Mr. Goodman puts forward his positive aims or suggestions; he believes that the ills he has diagnosed are 'by no means inherent in modern technological condi- tions, nor in the American Constitution as such: •

Hut they have followed from the betrayal and

neglect of the old radical-liberal program and Other changes proposed to keep up with the advancing technology, the growth of population, and the revolution in morals. Important reforms .. did not occur when they were ripe, and we have inherited the consequences: a wilderness of un- finished situations, unequal developments and inconsistent standards, as well as new business.

Apd now, sometimes the remedy must be

stoically to go hack and carry through the old

programs (as we are having to do with racial

integration). . . And sometimes, finally, we have to invent really new devices—e.g., how to make the industrial technology humanly im- portant for its workmen, how to use leisure nobly, or even how, in a rich society, to be decently poor if, one so chooses.

In view of the way I have written about it so' far, 1 must emphasise that Growing Up Absurd is not intended to be a theoretical' work of social criticism. On the contrary: it is presented as a direct report on the author's own experience and that of others—felt, pondered over, and under- stdod. And it is precisely for this reason that it does not seem to me 'frivolous or 'literary' to say that Growing Up Absurd fails because it is so very badly written. (1 am not talking here of minor ineptitudes and inelegances of expres- sion, though these can be counted in their scores.) Mr. Goodman tries hard to be earthy, slangy, brisk, and intimate with the experience he is. concerned to describe; but over almost everything in the book there hangs a fog of re- moteness and abstraction, which conceals and smothers whatever life is supposed to be beneath it. Even in the quotation given above it seems to me that there are too many useless abstractions; and I did not choose it to enforce this point. I could do much better elsewhere. For instance, in a single paragraph Mr. Goodman can present us with 'pragmatism, instrumentalism, and

technologism . . . academic culture, caste morals and formal religion, unsocial greed . . . abundant production, social harmony, practical virtues and more honest perception and feel- ing . . . efficient abundant production, social harmony and one popular culture . . . an ab- stract and inhuman physical environment, a use- less economy, a caste system, a clangorous con- formity, a trivial and sensational leisure.'

Are you still with me? The truth is, of course,

that no rigorous theoretical essay could possibly support such bumpy, lumpy, repetitive catalogues. How much less, then, can a book whose purpose it is, in the first place, to give us the very quality of modern life as people have inwardly. experi- enced it, and secondly to remind us of the values of—well, to draw a deep breath and to quote Mr. Goodman once again—'utility, quality, rational productivity, personal freedom, independent enterprise, human scale, manly vocation, or genuine culture.' Growing Up Absurd is alto- gether more depressing, and depressing in more ways, than the author intended it to be.

For even where Mr. Goodman does see cause for hope, and tries to give us the grounds of his hope, as in his discussion of the Beat Generation, his matter remains curiously thin and uncon- vincing. In fairness, it must be said that the chapter devoted to the Beat Generation is one of the better in the book. Mr. Goodman is quick to penetrate Beat pretensions; but he does so without malice or self-satisfaction. And he comes to the conclusion that the Beats have managed to achieve 'a simpler fraternity, animality and sexuality than we have had, at least in America, in a king, long time.' Now whatever one may think,- in the abstract, of this particular trio of abstractions, one would like to believe that Mr. Goodman is telling some kind of truth here. But he offers us so little evidence for his assertion, one just does not know how to take it. Indeed, the actual evidence all seems to go the other way. He describes Beat language, which, from his account of, it, is stiflingly narrow and restricted. He describes Beat art, which he calls 'a personal cultivation, not much different from finger- painting.' He describes Beat 'self-transcendence' (through drugs, Zen, or whatever), and says that

an awkward consequence of heightening experi- ence when one is inexperienced, of self-trans-

cendence when one has not much world to lose.

is that afterwards one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything.

Yet when it comes to talking about the positive values that Mr. Goodman perceives in Beat life, to the proffered sexuality, for example, we have, lamely, 'My impression is that . . Beat sexuality is in general pretty good . . . if inhibition is re- laxed and there is courage to seek for experience, there ought to be good natural satisfaction,' This is not really very persuasive or informative. And a similar lack of persuasive force characterises the author's descriptions of Beat fraternity. In this connection, Mr. Goodman tells one anec- dote which is worth transcribing—it is quite the liveliest passage in the book.

An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the 'previous' generation of long- proven integrity . . . but has achieved no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best 'Beat' writers, a genuine young :mist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets . . . Patchen asked for the names. The Beat poet reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into a pas- sion . . . So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk) and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid him any attention.

In discussing the juvenile delinquents. Mr Goodman has some acute. compassionate things to say : he points out, for example. that one of the compulsive motives for delinquency is the need to be caught and punished. However, once again Mr. Goodman is driven to assert that some vague, undefined, superior virtue is inherent in 'the fatalistic self-destruction of the kids,' though the evidence he offers for this assertion is even more tenuous than that offered on behalf of the virtues of Beat living. In fact, his definition of the virtue he has in mind, and his evidence for it, consist of nothing more than an obscure and un- satisfactory account of the works of lean Genet.

Mr. Goodman is not afraid to condemn almost entirely the 'successful doings' of his society; but he is, it is quite clear, afraid to condemn in the same wholesale way those whom he believes to be in rebellion against that society. Reading this book one cannot help feeling that the author is looking around desperately for some kind of community with which he can identify himself; and though the Beats and the delinquents appear weak and cramped to him, he nevertheless clings to them—for if 'these crazy young allies,' as he calls them, are not on his side, who is? But surely anybody who is really disturbed about the mess we are in, and who wants to do something about it, should be prepared to accept his own isolation with more stoicism. The critic of society must certainly try to find friends, colleagues and an audience; he must try to work through existing institutions or to establish new ones. But the search for 'allies is not his business

In its tone of irritation and disgust with Ameri. can life, Mr Goodman's book is characteristic o•. much of the writing we have had from America over the last few years. Some of the disgust—more perhaps than was commonly ad mitred—undoubtedly arose from the fact that for almost a decade the administration of the country was in the hands of people who did not merely ignore intellect, but made every effort to show that they held it in positive disesteem. President Kennedy is making an effort of a very different kind. Even before his election the notoriously intransigent Norman Mailer had hailed him as 'Superman conic to the Superman': and since the election Robert Lowell has commented, with simple relief, 'At last the Goths have left the White House.' It seems that we may expect the American intellectuals to begin speaking a little more cheerfully, now that they have a friend in high places. A friend, not an ally.