Paul Goodman Reader

Paul Goodman, Taylor Stoehr

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781604865271
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable. "

Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.

Fiction

Iddings Clark

Lo! on every visage a Black Veil!

—Hawthorne

1

In the assembly-room of the Northport High School they were celebrating the day before Christmas. All the children were present in the seats and a crowd of parents in the rear, and many graduates—some of whom were parents and some collegians home on vacation. The greatest hilarity and yet decorum prevailed, as always (so that many held that “the best part of the holiday season is the High School celebration”). This year was given a pageant of the Nativity, but only half-reverent, for at intervals a great burlesque Santa Claus rolled in, did tumble-saults, and so forth, while two end-men bandied jokes. All this was invented and directed by Mr. Iddings Clark, M. A., a teacher of English, a mind so spirited and original, with modern notions of Art (considering the community); and these masques have since been collected and printed. He was also in charge of the singing. To see him high on the platform, waving his arms, lifted everybody to enthusiasm; ordinarily a shy, almost reserved man, on such occasions he was red with pleasure and crowned with joy. Recent students of his, home from college, crowded beneath him to the platform. The song rang through the hall:

Jingle bells! jingle bells!

Jingle all the way!

—when suddenly, in the midst of a note, the conductor fainted away, and fell from the platform on his face. A cry of horror rang through the hall. The young men who had been at his feet now bore him up; they laid him on the platform and loosened his collar—he was pale—and dashed a glass of water in his face. His eyes fluttered open and he came to. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I see you all clearly. I am so happy having around me my friends so bright and close. Everything is exactly as it was.”

The fact is that at the moment he was about to faint—perhaps because the blood rushed from his head, or that the electric light faltered, or for someother reason—at that moment he beheld over everything a cast of darkness. He saw on each face a veil. It was the Black Veil in the harrowing story of Hawthorne (from which I have taken the motto for this story). At one instant all faces were lit up—the lights overhead ablaze and the falling snow outside—and all printed with an indulgent smile at the well-known song; the next instant, though their mouths were open wide, the sinister shadow was everywhere apparent! A teacher of literature, Iddings Clark was only too well acquainted with Hawthorne’s unnatural romance; twice a year for eight years he had read through with his classes the tale of the Minister’s Black Veil. But although each time he came to that awful outburst “Why do you tremble at me alone? tremble also at each other!” he was so moved that the sweat appeared on his brow, he hardly thought that it would come to this. As if we experience works of art with impunity! The next instant he fainted away.

He sank in the dead faint and the light came and went. Then there was no more light and his soul was profoundly torn—accompanied by violent trembling and shaking in all his limbs, so that the students among whom he had fallen felt the body quiver in their hands. Thus quietened, he began to rise again through the zones of light, and he had a dream: that he was walking on Hooker Street in the snow and he saw, with a sense of appalling loneliness, that all the passers-by wore half-masks like highwaymen; then he entered the school and stark naked stood before his class. With a cry, he awoke.

2

That night, Christmas Eve, Iddings Clark went to the home of Otto, an instructor in chemistry, to trim the tree for his five-year-old daughter. To spend the night thus had become almost a custom. “Yet soon,” said Otto, “she will be beyond the age for Christmas-trees.”

“I am all right,” said the English teacher in a strained voice. “Anyway there is a compensation for everything! How well Emerson put it!”

He was famous as a decorator of trees! For here also—as in the clever masques he composed—sparkled such fancy and originality, in the dramatic contrast of white lights and the deep boughs, not without a touch of wild wit, such as a jack-in-the-box in the heart of it. People dropped in at the house where he had decorated the tree.

“How strange your tree is tonight, Iddings!” cried the chemist. “It looks almost sinister; you can’t mean to leave it so. All the tinsel, the silver globes, the dolls, candy-canes, and lights are crowded down in one corner, pellmell, without beauty or order. The rest of the tree is black. Why have you cut out a little recess in the dark boughs, and there put, so lonely, the silver star thatis supposed to ride so brightly at the top? And around it four upright candles, one above, one below, on the left, and on the right, so rigidly?”

“We must snatch at least this much order from the riot.”

“But the star itself is not balanced; it leans to one side…. Why did you arrange the candles in a cross? It doesn’t fit Christmas.”

“They are four soldiers.”

Frau Otto looked attentively at the young man and said, “You are feverish—I can see by your eyes.”

“Remember this afternoon—” said Otto.

“I’ve been neglecting a cold; it’s nothing. Perhaps you could give me an aspirin tablet.”

She dosed him with two, and a cup of hot milk to wash them down. “You can’t go out now in a sweat,” she said. “We must put you up overnight.”

“Oh!”

“We’ll sit up just a few minutes.”

At the opportunity to stay and talk the English teacher was overjoyed. He smiled and at once started to talk about himself, saying, “I remember when I was a boy, I lived in Boston, and at night I used to walk on Washington Avenue, among the bright lights, and look in the faces of all the people! Dr. Otto, did you ever do anything like that? I mean, not necessarily in Boston …” He sped on in the same vein. After a few moments, Frau Otto rose and excused herself——though indeed there was nothing scandalous that he had to say; for what could a person so young and sober have to confess?

“You’re strange, Iddings!” said Otto, thinking of the uncanny tree, which, he felt, would frighten his child.

“Maybe I ought to call the doctor.”

“A different person exactly!” said Clark. “I don’t apologize for talking about myself because nothing is more important than that we understand one another.”

“I understand you less and less.”

Soon it was past midnight. The chemist began to foresee that the Christmas in his house was ruined; in the morning he would not be up to greet his daughter; and what a rude fright was in store for her when she saw the Christmas tree. He speculated on the possibility of putting his guest to bed and then stealing down to redecorate it. He could not foresee that this tree would be the merriest his daughter ever had; for throughout the morning, her newly-gotten toys—dolls, a house and furniture, a mechanical fire-engine—all lying neglected, she kept climbing a chair to right the lopsided star and then, dancing for joy, knocked it away again with paper balls aimed from across the room.

In the afternoon, several visitors, teachers, dropped in at Dr. Otto’s—Messrs. Bell and Flint; Dr. Croydon, the dean; and Miss Cohalan, the registrar. Iddings Clark continued, in the same nervously intimate strain; his sleep had been only moderately feverish, enough to generate almost pleasant dreams—and these he now proceeded to expound in minute detail.

Otto took Dean Croydon aside. “He’s not well. I tried to keep him in bed but he won’t stay.”

“What is his temperature?”

“Normal.”

“You see,” cried Clark, “there is nothing we’re not capable of!”

“Nothing is more false!” said the Dean sharply. “Nothing is falser than when we think ourselves creatures of any chance fancy, not as we really are—just as, brutally frank with rage, we tell our friends what we think of them in a rage, not what we really think.”

The situation rapidly became strained; the social atmosphere spoilt. Each of the friends cast his eyes upon the ground to avoid looking at the others; only Iddings himself eagerly sought them out with his eyes.

“When all know too much, all are ashamed,” thought Otto.

“It’s lucky he’s taken ill during the holidays; he’ll be better by the start of school,” thought Dean Croydon.

3

On New Year’s Day, which fell on a Tuesday, Iddings Clark was scheduled to deliver the annual Hooker Lecture on Literature, in the auditorium of the High School. And this year an extraordinary audience had gathered, for not only was Clark always a treat as a lecturer, but every one remembered the dramatic incident that had befallen him the week before, his dead faint in the midst of the singing. Many children, as well as the grown-ups, came to stare at him in curiosity; the ushers were given orders to shunt those boys not with their parents up into the balcony—and there they sat, staring down, their lips pressed against the shiny rail.

Dean Croydon introduced the speaker as their “beloved friend who occasioned so much anxiety on the day before Christmas, but who has since quite recovered.” The subject of the lecture was “The Incentives of Poetry.”

When the English teacher stepped to the front, however, he seemed the opposite of quite recovered—thin, white, with somber eyes. Everywhere there was a leaning forward to see him better. He said in a strained voice, “I had intended to speak of poetry as objects and forms, and of the excitement of inventing something: for there is a pleasure in creating a new structure, or in elaborating a living plot, as if a man were Prometheus. But instead I shall speak of it as communication, and why it is that one person talks to another.

“But talking to you, as Meyer Liben said,” he cried suddenly, “is like talking to a wall!”

As he spoke the pink color mounted in his face, and his dark eyes burned. He made no gestures, but with white-knuckled fingers gripped the edges of the lectern, and his voice came forth over his hands. “Come alive Galatea! cried that famous sculptor, that I may talk to you! and he kissed a statue not yet free of the formless rock. What a sad pity that the centuries of evolution could not create a human friend for him!” People looked at each other.

“Very lonely,” said the lecturer. “Such exact symbols—but only poets pay close attention, and they adopt this language for their very own. The poets speak only to the poets. To talk to you is like talking to a wall!”

“Our friend Iddings,” whispered Miss Cohalan, seated behind the speaker, leaning across to Dean Croydon, “he seems beyond the bounds of order. His sentences come in gusts.”

“I have not heard more moving eloquence,” said the Dean sharply. (One would not have expected him to say this.)

“The French poet, Charles Baudelaire, wrote:

Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée accompagne en fausset la pen dule enrhumée, cependant qu’en un jeu plein de sales parfums, heritage fatale d’une vieille hydropique, le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique causent sinistrement de leurs arnours défunts—

‘in a game full of dirty perfumes, the handsome knave of hearts and the queen of spades, gossip sinisterly of their dead loves.’ Why did he say this? “And he wrote:

Et le printemps et la verdure ont tant humilié mon coeur que j’ai puni sur une fleur l’insolence de la nature—

‘the springtime and foliage humiliated me so, I took punishment on a flower for the insolence of nature.’ Why this?

‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans’—’I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old!’“

At this sentence many in the audience started. In the balcony the children began a whispered debate. “He says he is a thousand years old!”

“No. He says it was as if he was a thousand years old.”

“Mr. Clark is a thousand years old!”

“Quiet! quiet!” said the usher.

The afternoon growing late, the snow outside falling thicker—the hall became dim. Yet all, straining their eyes in the dusk, thought that they saw the speaker clearly.

“This is a common experience,” he said, “young people in love are unable, no matter how hard they try, to keep from talking about the person.

“But when they are out of love; still wounded, not yet healed, hopelessly hunting around in every direction for sympathy—then they still talk (making all ashamed).”

Suddenly—just as he had begun, and as he continued—he stopped. His voice no longer came in separate gusts across his white-knuckled hands. But the faint light that seemed to play on him on the platform persisted.

They began to clap and abruptly found themselves in pitch darkness. The applause grew loud. There was a hubbub of people trying to put on their coats and galoshes in the dark. At last the lights came ablaze. Blinded, the people took this opportunity to add to the infectious applause, but the speaker had slipped away during the darkness.

“Would the young man have us go around confessing each other?”

“No. It is only that we read poetry more sympathetically.”

“Come alive, Galatea! cried that famous sculptor.”

“How pale he looked at the beginning; then how flushed he became.”

“I thought that he was going to keel over again.”

“How was he at the end?”

“You couldn’t tell, it was so dark.”

4

The next day, it was a Wednesday, school reconvened....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Preface to Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
• Politics
• Technology and Planning
• Education
• Media and Culture
• Literature
• Psychology and Theology
• Fiction
• Poems
• Sources of Selections