Paul Goodman

At least 200 undergraduates in Burr B Wednesday night came prepared to love Paul Goodman. His reputation as political anarchist and sexual libertine had preceded him, and many came to watch him make things hot for Dr. Graham Blaine, who has by now become something of a resented symbol of the University's conservative sex policies.

In his talk, which opened the forum, and in the discussion period that followed, Mr. Goodman proved himself an ideal rallying point for antiauthoritarian sentiment. Gently chiding Blaine and Steve Jencks in his thick Bronx accent, making intimate asides to his wildly partisan audience, and speaking with alarming frankness of his own sexual license, Goodman offered himself to his sympathizers on an intensely personal level. Before the evening was over even his fatuous remarks drew enthusiastic applause; the issues at hand were rapidly obfuscated as the Liberal Union forum evolved into a triumphant flirtation between Goodman and his audience.

These listeners then, and not the speakers' failure to resolve the relationship of the College to individual morality proved the saddest disappointment of the evening. Goodman engaged them with his views, but manipulated them with his mannerisms. He flattered them with sincere intimacy, like a permissive father might his rakish son, and soon they were tittering at the mention of intercourse, snickering at each four-letter word like preppies at a locker-room joke.

Burr B, with its staid academic blackboards, was an ideal arena for Goodman's irreverence. He swore freely, in Manhattan monotone, and looked up in blank surprise at the reactions he evoked. What words are taboo among confidential friends? He opened himself to the audience, it seemed, confiding his bisexuality, his extra-marital philandering: "I am very sexy," he told us. He reassured the skeptics with benevolent ridicule: "So she gets pregnant," he conceded with a friendly grin. "So what's so terrible."

As the forum adjourned, a large group crowded around him and Goodman, smiling and earnest, suggested he and they go off somewhere and talk. As a lecturer Goodman is magnetic; sitting on the floor in a circle of twenty adulatory college students he is nearly irresistible. Within a half hour he was calling students by name; his voice, which had been familiar and accented over the mike in Burr B, here assumed the mellow intimacy of an all-night disc jockey. With the students in the living room, he was at home, scratching his head, wrinkling his brow, perpetually relighting his pipe; in his element. Interpersonal contact is Goodman's religion (it is, he asserts, his primary impetus in sexual activity with both men and women) and he has perfected the establishment of contact to a high degree of art. He maintains, correctly, that we live in a society starved of genuine communication.

But sadly, Goodman's contact is too quickly made, and partly for this reason, illusory. That is why be needs so much of it. He can woo and win an audience of students so readily because he himself seems to be undergoing an unhappily extended adolescence. His need to expose himself so utterly to young people reflects a kind of adolescent exhibitionism. By his candid confession, he is still wrestling with his own sexual unhappiness. Why then were these Harvard student such easy prey to Goodman's seductive approach?

Goodman is an immensely attractive personality. The extraordinary range of his knowledge makes immediate impact. The brilliant unorthodoxy of his social philosophy starties and charges. But his appeal Wednesday night to those fifty undergraduates who flocked about him, and followed him from the hall, was something more. They almost seemed to have discovered the parent of their dreams, at once both sophisticated and protective; a parent who would indulge their most impermissible desires, who would personally promote their initiation into the forbidden mysteries of sex.

Yet although Goodman was twice as good alone with the small group, the students who trailed after him were disappointed. The stripped down contact he had promised them in the forum, turned out to be a conventionally intellectualized Harvard discussion of history and personalities, communism and anarchy. To the student's dismay; Goodman was unenthusiastic about drugs; he called IFIF "an unpersuasive blend of Zen and Madison Avenue."

They were after something more personal, but no one could begin, no one could open himself as Goodman seemed to have done. And so Goodman answered their questions with wit and understanding, and one by one the students departed. It was not just another hang-up; the very concept of contact had been marred. For if not with Goodman, with whom? When the last bearded undergraduate had gone, Goodman sighed. "These Havahd students," he said. "What do you suppose they really wanted to ask me?"

Those who huzzahed Goodman because he appeared to condone unrestricted promiscuity or sexual irresponsibility had, in their giggly enthusias, missed the core of his ethical credo. He considers himself "a highly moral man," and interpersonal responsibility, for him, precedes all other considerations.

Yet Goodman has a curious conception of what responsibility entails. He told the Forum that one's choice of sexual objects and practices should be absolutely free "so long as one does not exploit another person." But can the seduction of a young male student be considered non-exploitative? Even if society's condemnation of bisexuality is sick and repressive, such an initiation exposes the student to inevitable emotional damage.

Goodman's willingness to embrace "the risk of opposing an intolerable society" does not entitle him to solicit youthful allies. Goodman, of all people, is aware of the patterns of transference which involve students with their teachers. A student's love is not directed simply at him, but also at his position. The teacher is responsible most for what it is in himself that a student responds to. That responsibility dictates that he must wait until the student has matured and both may see clearly what form their relationship will take. To rush immediately towards consummation is irresponsible.

Even if Goodman's wife forgives his extramarital relationships, don't these affairs (for he assures us they are affairs "of love") incur the risk of hurting the partner who becomes deeply committed to him?

For all his emphasis on non-exploitation, Goodman is astonishingly callous in his lack of concern for the plight of the unloved, illegitimate child and the unwed mother. Of course society is wrong to regard them as something dirty, but in his desire for social revolution Goodman loses compassion for those who must suffer in its wake. And in spite of his insistence on interpersonal values, he speakes as if his major responsibility in marriage is to inconvenience himself by "making it home in time for five thirty dinner every night."

Like Norman Mailer, Goodman has chosen to become a personality as well as a writer. Unlike Mailer, he has not concentrated on this sideline to the detriment of his creative work. Goodman continues to produce books of dissent which have enormous social value for America.

It is impossible for us to know what it costs Goodman, in a deeply personal sense, to advance the intellectual and social views that he holds. What support would sustain a man of his opinions, if he were denied his special brand of contact? If he is seductive or exploitative in many ways, so are the values against which he is fighting. "Life," as he told the forum, "gets you coming or going." Perhaps he is painfully aware of the elements in his own character that he condemns in others; his complexity is elusive. "I yield to no one in my cotempt for the young American male, with his need to make a conquest; to prove himself," Goodman says. Yet much of his own need for contact takes the form of personal conquest.

Perhaps his personal moves should be overlooked; this would be small compensation for the service he renders society, Still, he is a person whom young people might well wish to emulate. The galling quality of his speaking (and writing) is his supreme self-righteousness. So much of what he says is right, but then he seems to tell us that we must love him for saying it. This self-righteousness, too, is most characteristic of the society he rejects.

If Goodman becomes a lecturer famous for his perversities, patronized for his vulgarity and self-exposure, then his problematic personality is bound to overshadow his scholarship. Paul Goodman is too important a thinker to become another sideshow.