Conservative Anarchist

In one of his early plays, Jonah, Paul Goodman wrote a marvelous throw-away line. Doomed to preach to the masses that did not want to be saved, doomed to be cast away at sea and swallowed by leviathan, poor Jonah cries out to the heavens: "It should happen to a dog to be a prophet of the Lord of Hosts."

The combination of street humor and exaltation, of prophetic vision and rebellious despair was what made Goodman one of the most elusive and yet most challenging talents of his generation. Poet, psychologist, anarchist, teacher, novelist, propounder of extreme solutions to mundane problems, he could never see why conventional critics often dismissed him as a gadfly. "I am a humanist," he said, "and everything I do has exactly the same subject--the organism and the environment. Anything I write is pragmatic--it aims to accomplish something."

After years of relative obscurity ("Decent poverty is really an ideal environment for serious people," he said), Goodman became a kind of youthcult hero in 1960 with the publication of Growing Up Absurd, in which he argued that problem children were the fault of a society that offered them only dull jobs and squalid ideals. Two years later in The Community of Scholars, he attacked the colleges as bureaucratic machines that had proved unable to provide youth with genuine learning. "The ultimate rationale of administration," he wrote, "is that a school is a teaching machine, to train the young by predigested programs in order to get preordained marketable skills."

Such sentiments--which many educational reformers now share--made him, in his own words, "the Joan of Arc of the free-student movement." Indeed, Goodman early favored abandoning compulsory education for a system that would allow every child to choose the kind of schooling that suited his taste --or even none at all. He also argued in favor of dismantling the larger universities and making them into federations of small colleges with a student body of about 450 and a faculty of 50. Schools and overgrown universities, however, were only part of the problem. In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, he wrote: "People have a right to be crazy, stupid or arrogant. It is our specialty as human beings. Our mistake is to arm anybody with collective power. Anarchy is the only safe polity."

Young Rebel. Shortly after Goodman's birth in New York's Greenwich Village, his father deserted the family, a loss that Goodman later viewed as useful: "Remember, a good father can be difficult for a kid; he has nothing to revolt against." When the young rebel graduated from City College, in 1931, he was too poor to enroll in Columbia, so he bicycled there and sneaked into the lectures of Philosopher Richard McKeon. Later, he hitchhiked to free courses at Harvard.

Those days as an educational vagabond ended when McKeon, by then a dean at the University of Chicago, invited him to lecture on English literature. In 1940, however, Goodman was fired because of his freely admitted homosexuality, which later also cost him a teaching job at Black Mountain. "I don't think that people's sexual lives are any business of the state," he declared some years afterward. "To license sex is absurd." Indeed, although he and his wife Sally lived together for 30 years and had two children, they never formally married.

Goodman underwent psychotherapy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an experience that led him to become a lay psychotherapist. Nevertheless, the later 1950s were filled with despair. Even after publishing a dozen books and hundreds of articles, he wrote, "I am continually tormented by not being published ... I guess I'm the least-known author of my ability in America. This has made me bitter enough at times, yet I also take it as a good sign, that what I stand for is important and resisted.

"Most of my intellectual generation sold out," he mused, "first to the Communists and then to the organized system, so that there are very few independents around that a young man can accept as a hero." Goodman, however, provided the young with an indictment in Growing Up Absurd: "Our abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worthwhile goals that could make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough man's work ... in honest public speech ... in the opportunity to be useful. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles science. It dampens animal ardor. It dims the sense that there is a Creation."

Necessities of Life. Goodman's solutions were often visionary, even outlandish, but some were the forerunners of today's social programs. Long before some psychiatric reformers advocated closing down the old-style mental institutions, Goodman argued that the inmates should be allowed to roam the countryside as "local eccentrics or loonies." Years before Richard Nixon, among others, proposed a guaranteed minimum income, Goodman urged that the necessities of life--food, shelter, clothing, medical care--be provided free to everyone. The state would require that a citizen give six years of his life to producing those goods, then allow him to do what he wanted for the remainder. Despite these ideas Goodman never saw himself as a radical. "I've always thought tearing things up by the roots was senseless," he said. "I've always been a conservative anarchist."

In his most recently published article, Goodman asked only "that the children have bright eyes, the river be clean, food and sex be available, and nobody be pushed around" and, for himself, "that I can live on a little." He had suffered two heart attacks in the past year and refused his doctor's advice to stay in a hospital. Until his death last week at the age of 60, he insisted upon following a daily schedule of gardening on his farm in North Stratford, N.H., visiting with friends and writing--a book on religion and a collection of poems. "He wasn't a man to follow prescriptions," his doctor said. "He had too much to do."

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