Goodman Claims Modern Novelists Ignore Political Side of Characters

Seated nervously in a deep leather chair in the Adams House Junior Common Room, tie unfastened, jacket off, Paul Goodman, literary virtuoso, spoke yesterday as writer and critic to some 60 fascinated and sympathetic listeners.

The talk was informal and rambling. Goodman described a phenomenon of contemporary fiction; he recounted two chapters of a forthcoming novel; he criticized contemporary American society. The three turned out to be as inextricably intertwined as the lecturer's several roles of critic, author, and sociologist.

Men More Introspective

In the last several decades, Goodman explained, men have increasingly accepted a tragic view of their lives: men are the helpless products of social forces. And as this attitude has become popular, men have become more introspective, seeking meaning in extra-social activities.

To Goodman's dismay, literature has followed this same asocial pattern. Fictional characters either accept their social roles and concentrate on their personal lives (James Gould Cozzens), or they withdraw from society and lead the life of the beat, the hip, or the drugged.

Using Another Country as an example of this latter type of novel. Goodman complained that "Baldwin concentrates so hard on men making the scene that he ignores what they're not doing. The Negro characters are often sensitive, but not one of them has a political opinion. In this sense they are not alive. Nothing that these people do is as interesting as what your friends are doing. Few of Baldwin's characters even do anything for a living."

The characters in Goodman's forthcoming novel are very much alive. The many aspects of their lives are all intertwined.

To make his point clear, Goodman narrated two chapters of his anecdotal novel about life in Hoboken. The first describes a high school English teacher whose sex life, Ph.D. thesis, housing problems, and concern for juvenile delinquency are all of equal importance to him, and all interact.

The second chapter describes a man deeply frustrated by the personal and political problems of his community. Finding that he cannot cope with these problems on a personal level, he tapes a radio show asking that cars be banned from the streets of Manhattan "to give the streets back to the kids."

Men Make Society

Goodman's book is called Making Do. The title suggests the theme. Throughout the book men are involved in society; they do their best to make it, to change it. Social forces are not, in the last analysis, out of their hands.

To Goodmen the men who "make" society are not typical. But "they are the most interesting people around."

When challanged on his basic premise that men can make society, Goodman answered his critic with a simple question which seemed to summarize his philosophy: "What makes you want to feel that men don't make society," he asked. "It's the only world we're going to have.