Paul Goodman—The Beats

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[65] Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford,... Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed somewhat at them,......in these circumstances it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satisfaction. It is a culture communally shared, in small groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of it is communally improvised. We shall speak later about the limitations of this procedure and the weakness of its products; but the fact of it, of a culture that is communal

[66]

and tending toward the creative, is so capital that it must have a future, and it is worth while to study its grounding and economy.

...

[67] ...the writers on the Beat Generation are confused. For one thing, they have a false notion that the kind of artistic activity that proliferates among the Beats is art, and gives the justification of art as a vocation. It is not art but something else, and they do not behave as if they were justified by it.

[177] It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, "It's the greatest!" or, "Go, man, go!" don't give much security. The artist finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the reassurance that he needs, if he is diffident, is that he is a culture hero for the immortal world. ...

[e.g.] An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the "previous" generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much

[178]

still be added!) not yet clear. The point for our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best of the "Beat" writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets, to "give them a chance." This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoreity that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. But Patchen asked for the names. The Beat spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among whom he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid him any attention.

That is, the Beat audience, having resigned, is not in the world; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. But he too, then, doubts that he is in the world and has a vocation. As a Beat spokesman he receives notoreity and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system.

Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Beat himself, and quite

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conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Beat spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting "Don't listen to this crap! let's hear from X." His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist.

And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Beat spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it's childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming "I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!"

These illustrations and the analysis of Beat conversation bring out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.

Not Unprecedented

I'm of the opinion that music with supposed political content generally accomplishes less both as music and as political commentary than could be attained by pursuing these two endeavors separately. Extra-musical statements in general are tremendous burdens on composer and audience alike, but more importantly, I think it's high time to admit that making music is a poor substitute for political activism and community service.

Many an artist has fallen victim to that certain strain of bourgeois contentedness whereby they suddenly interpret something they would be doing anyway as also making some larger contribution, hence absolving themselves of the need to take any additional action. This is just another of the myriad forms that our uniquely American brand of political apathy is capable of taking. Everyone is trying to be Bob Dylan instead of Paul Wellstone. The problem is that there are too many intangibles involved in the creation and reception of art for each one of us to assume that we will be successful in accomplishing activist ends through those means.

There is a choice to be made here: we can become political artists and hope for success, or we can become artists who are also politically engaged citizens and know that we are making a difference. My feeling is that the latter path is the one that will facilitate the most immediate and vital contributions to both art and activism. Striking a balance between these two endeavors while keeping them largely separate means finding time in our "busy bee" artist schedules to step away from the canvas and inhabit the civilian world. It also means that when we return to the canvas, we are free to create in the most abstract and non-representational media we choose without any obligation whatsoever for our art to serve extra-artistic purposes or agendas.

I've stated some of these ideas here before, and am working on a much longer essay that goes into greater depth. I have revisited this topic only because I recently stumbled upon a precedent for this position (or something like it, as best I can tell).

Here is a link to an article I read in The Nation about American poet George Oppen (written by James Longenbach):

A Test of Poetry

Here is a link to a bio of Oppen from what appears to be a reasonably authoritative online source:

MAPS Bio of George Oppen

Here are some bits and pieces from the Nation article that jumped out at me:

"...[Oppen] considered the rhetorical excess of political poems–like the rhetorical excess of political meetings–to be 'merely excrutiating.'"


"...[Oppen] refused the notion that a poet could fulfill his social responsibilities by writing any kind of poem, and neither did this refusal engender any contempt for poetry."


"Especially for those readers who are prone to believe that writing itself constitutes political action...Oppen's remark that 'there are situations which cannot honorably be met by art' is problematic enough; more troubling is Oppen's sense that 'some ideas are not politically useful, or useful to the childhood of a daughter'–as if to say that since we'll never know the ultimate value of our work, writing poems is probably less important than being a good dad."

Finally, here's a fragment of a quote within the article from Oppen himself (I tripped over this passage a couple of times, so I've added some boldface to highlight what I assume is the point):

"...it can always be quite easily shown that political action is going to be valuable; it is difficult to ever prove that political action has been valuable. Whereas art is precisely the opposite case; it seems always impossible to prove that it is going to be valuable, and yet it is always quite clear that the art of the past has been of value to humanity."

I feel like something of a charlatan for riding these particular coattails considering that I myself am no great fan of poetry in the first place. I do think, however, that much of what is attributed to Oppen in the article has implications for many (if not all) of The Arts. Perhaps it is a consequence of my own ignorance that I remain unaware of any other prominent artists or intellectuals who hold or have held such views, but it is at least nice to have finally located one.