Volume 14, Number 10 · May 21, 1970
Good Man
By Robert Mazzocco
Hawkweed: Poems
by Paul Goodman
Random House, 185 pp., $1.65 (paper)
Five Years
by Paul Goodman
Vintage, 258 pp., $1.95 (paper)
At a particularly edgy moment between husband and wife in Paul Goodman's Five Years, a weighty journal of the lean Fifties when Goodman was already 'over the hill' and 'unwanted,' he shouts, 'bitterly': 'You write twenty books and get the reception that I've gotten. Do you think it's like putting on your hat?' During those dispiriting days, with at least two decades of social and literary activity behind him, spartanly supporting himself and his family on little more than a few thousand dollars a year, Goodman was shaken with the belittling thought that the most 'expressive relation' to an America of 'venality and folly,' 'to that stingy world,' he could possibly manage was 'to be spitefully Utopian, to bawl.' Still—and it is characteristic of his extraordinary career, characteristic of how we are swept in and out of fashion—lachrymose or not, wretched or not, he wrote. 'Who speaks of victory?' asks Rilke. 'Survival is all….'
Review, 2965 words
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