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A Spokesman for About Half of His Generation
Paul Goodmans Newly-Reissued Classic 'Growing Up Absurd' Suffers From the Authors Pervasive Misogyny
* GROWING UP ABSURD: PROBLEMS OF YOUTH IN AN ORGANIZED SOCIETY
By Paul Goodman
Foreword by Casey Nelson Blake
New York Review Books, Classic
Series, 312 pages, $17.95
Reading Paul Goodman's reissued 1960s classic "Growing Up Absurd" may make you nostalgic for a past you never lived. The author's uncomplicated idealism evokes an earlier decade of American history, as well as your own carefree youth. Remember when you were in your 20s and all your friends lived in the West Village? You stayed up too late talking; no one had to go to work in the morning; everyone smoked a lot of cigarettes, drank too much coffee and talked about how they could save the U.S. from corporate greed and spiritual desolation. The talking was not hushed, polite or tentative. Nothing mattered but ideas. This is the world of Paul Goodman.
It sounds like fun, except "GUA" has always had a fatal flaw: Goodman insists that only males confront the emptiness and desolation of their culture. Because for females "hav[ing] children is absolutely self-justifying," Goodman believed that they were safe from the sickness ripening in males. Even Susan Sontag's eulogy for Goodman (included in this new edition) tells us "that Paul Goodman really didn't like women as people."
Before 1960, Goodman had already published three well-received books: "Communitas," on city planning, still used in classrooms; one on Gestalt therapy (for which he was one of three authors), and what is considered by literary critics to be his best...