identifying the narrator with the author, Goodman does not make much effort to conceal the autobiographical nature of much of his fiction. On the contrary, Goodman often addresses the reader in asides that prevent the normal suspension of disbelief. “This is no book/ Who touches this touches a man,” boasted Walt Whitman as he artfully concealed himself, yet Goodman does not trouble to disguise himself. The narrators ofMaking Do and Parents’ Day are interchangeable—both closely resembling the sort of intellectual Goodman was: a man of letters who was also a man of the streets.

At his best, Goodman is imaginative, profound, and witty. The Empire City, though uneven, is a neglected masterpiece. At his worst, Goodman becomes hortatory and shrill, as in The Dead of Spring, the third work in the tetralogy, or careless in his prose, as in Making Do.

The Empire City

The Empire City, Goodman’s ambitious tetralogy, follows a cluster of characters who have become alienated from not only society but also themselves. The first novel in the tetralogy, The Grand Piano, is subtitled The Almanac of Alienation; thus, Goodman announces that he will be exploring what Robert Frost called “inner weather”; he will be attempting a chronicle of the spirit as it unfolds in life. Given this aim, it should not be surprising if some of the book’s passages do not yield themselves readily to analysis. Goodman, like his literary forebears, Kafka, André Gide, William Blake, and Rainer Maria Rilke, seems to be charting the ineffable and bidding his reader to follow.

The Grand Piano

The narrator of The Grand Piano, hardly distinguishable from Goodman himself, is often obtrusive in the manner of Henry Fielding. By mediating between character and reader, the narrator encourages the reader to regard the protagonists as friends, members of a community of which he or she is a part. These new friends are vital, larger than life, multitalented, heroic. Witness the name of the hero—Horatio Alger—based on the American writer who encouraged boys to lead virtuous lives full of heroic deeds.

The Alger tales dealt with the self-made man who succeeded in that great mecca of success, New York City. Goodman’s Alger, however, is a street-smart guttersnipe who, having destroyed all records of his existence, revels in his outcast status. Untouched by social institutions, such as school, he is truly a self-made eleven-year-old youth. In the opening episode, he meets Mynheer Duyck Colijn. The critic Sherman Paul has observed that Mynheer is an exemplar of the cultured man. Like his Dutch forebears, Mynheer is a model of tolerance and civic virtue. If Horatio is alienated, Mynheer is the opposite. In their initial meeting, the cunning, sneering, artful dodger is pitted against the sophisticated, virtuous adult. Reading the latter’s name as “Dick Collegian,” however, suggests another aspect of his character: his innocence. His rationality and civic pride will be sorely tested by the outbreak of war.

Horatio has no parents but is being reared, as Goodman was, by a brother and sister and, again like Goodman, is searching for a father. He settles on Eliphaz, a sort of Yiddish Daddy Warbucks, but one who combines patriarchal wisdom with financial acumen. In Eliphaz, Goodman achieves the sort of fantastic realism that readers customarily associate with Charles Dickens. Eliphaz’s presence creates some of the best scenes in the novel. This merchant prince represents the idealized spirit of early capitalism: He keeps a mysterious ledger containing only an accumulating number of zeros; he practices detachment by selling his own furniture, often while his family is still sitting on it; he idly places a price tag on his own son (“$84.95. $75 cash? Good! Sold!”). He is a man of culture who can spout Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Baruch Spinoza. Opposed to the anarchistic spirit of the Algers, who subsist on welfare, he impulsively sends them a grand piano, one that is so large that they are forced to sleep under it. Gnomically, he explains his gesture, which proceeds from mixed motives: “It’s always worthwhile to hurl large gifts toward your adversary. Where is she going to put such an animal? How is she going to explain it to the relief investigator I’ll send around tomorrow?” So wonderful a comic creation is Eliphaz that the reader can only regret his death at the opening of the second novel of the tetralogy. His place in literature has been usurped by the more impersonal Milo Minderbinder of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), a similarly restless but more mindless spirit of capitalism.

Other members of the community include Horatio’s family, Lothario/Lothair and Laura. Lothair, a follower of the anarchist Prince Petr Kropotkin, is a reformer who is vilified and persecuted by the state. As Sherman Paul comments, he is yet another side of Goodman himself—a reformer and educator. In this respect, he is also reminiscent of the protagonists of Making Do and Parents’ Day. The Grand Piano proceeds toward a communal reconciliation that is partial at best; as in Richard Wagner’s music, resolution is never far away but never quite arrives. Indeed, the climax of the novel has the characters attending a performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which promises “an exulting community spirit,” but, as Horatio shrewdly observes, “It’s all to be paid for at [Beckmesser’s] expense.” The survival of the larger society, as it does in fairy tales, hinges on the scapegoating of one of its members, hinges on projecting the dark side of the psyche onto a villain who can then be defeated by a hero.

The novel ends with another musical contest, one involving the grand piano. Embedded in this section are hints of the Arthurian contest to secure the sword Excalibur. Lothair, who is a composer, performs beautifully and by rights should be declared the winner, but he is arrested and transported to jail—presumably a victim of scapegoating by a society preparing itself for war.

The State of Nature

The second novel in the tetralogy, The State of Nature, pursues Goodman’s interest in the contact point between the organism and its environment. The setting is now 1944. Horatio has grown to young adulthood; his adopted father has died, just like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s King Arthur, leaving behind a world that has grown incomprehensible to him. In this book, the narrator discourses tirelessly (and, at times, tiresomely) on the subject of war, as not only a social reality but also a spiritual phenomenon. Goodman viewed war as a debased form of the spiritual life that requires putting oneself in jeopardy. This novel is weaker than its predecessor, first because Goodman exhorts his reader rather than rendering his material intonarrative, and second because the author uses the war as a symbol but does not acknowledge the moral imperatives that made World War II a necessity.

The State of Nature explores the themes of putting oneself in danger and engaging in “a long drawn out losing fight”—both activities in which the social activist Goodman was experienced. In this book, the central figures pass from dissent to alienation. Horatio is shot at by overwrought National Guardsmen. Lothair broods in jail about the paradox that his ardent desire to serve society is unappreciated unless that service takes the form of fighting. Laura, the community planner and wife of Mynheer, has been ordered to undo her work: By means of camouflage, she is to transform a community of her design, a land of milk and honey, back into a desert. Lothair escapes, but, driven mad by social rejection (his name Lothario indicates he is a lover, but of humanity), he executes a plan to release the animals from the zoo. In the pandemonium created, little Gus, incestuous offspring of Arthur and his sister, Emily (both children of Eliphaz), is killed. The zoo’s curator happens to be Mynheer, who in contrast to Lothair is permitted to serve humanity but is fated to do so without conviction. He and his wife, Laura, the reader is told, are “alienated from their natures.” In his case, the result is that the connection between his intellect and his emotions is severed, rendering him impotent. In a scene reminiscent of Blake’s prophetic books, Mynheer (intellect) is paralyzed by Emily’s anguished cry (heart) concerning the sight of the tiger destroying little Gus. Lothair then leads Mynheer into the cage vacated by the tiger.

In this chapter, Goodman shifts emphasis from social concerns to psychological ones. Community needs must wait while individuals attempt to restore their shattered equilibrium. Emily, for example, is unable to save her son from the tiger; she is “frozen into inaction by her ’mixed desire.’” The death of her son, however, leads her to a primal cry that enables her to function once again. Her therapeutic experience (this section was conceived at the time of Goodman’s developing interest in Gestalt therapy) becomes a paradigmatic model for others who also are experiencing their alienation from self. Social conditions only serve to enforce this alienation, as is revealed in the prophecy of Eliphaz that concludes the novel. In it, the dying capitalist foresees the advent of a consumer economy, mass conformity, and mass education, all resulting in “Asphyxiation”—a state in which the individual is unable to breathe freely or to experience his or her own vital desires. What has replaced human community he scornfully terms “Sociolatry.”

The Dead of Spring

The third novel in the tetralogy is The Dead of Spring. All must come to grips with the aftermath of war, must fight the long, drawn-out losing fight of the duration, as Eliphaz predicted. Lothair turns inward to his own pain, away from social concerns; Mynheer delivers a valediction on human beings combining elements of Prince Hamlet and Fritz Perls; the marriage between Emily and Lothair proves barren; the community spirit languishes. There is a brief interlude when Horatio meets Laura, but generally this is a gloomy period. Horatio discovers himself to be impotent but is redeemed and taught to love by a young lad, whom Sherman Paul identifies as an aspect of Horatio’s own submerged self—the youthful street urchin Horatio had been in the opening novel. As is typical in a romance, the lovers overcome their vicissitudes—though here the impediments are largely of their own devising—and fall in love. As Horatio is about to become a father, however, he is arrested—forced, as it were, by parenthood into recognition of the social contract. Horatio is indicted, not for resisting the state as Lothair had been at the conclusion of The Grand Piano, but for refusing to adopt a stand, much like the lost souls in Hell’s anteroom of Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1320). Horatio admits to his error but counters it with the information that he is in love; in comic fashion, the conflict is resolved, the charge is dropped.

This lighthearted respite provides comic relief from the chapters that precede it and the event that follows—the suicide of Laura. Her death serves as a sacrificial act, one that will redeem the community. Testaments to its effectiveness are the regenerations of Mynheer, Minetta (the social worker), and Horatio—each of whom begins finding ways to cope with the dilemma that results when one must choose between living within a mad society or the madness of living outside society. The dilemma is expressed, too, in the baseball game that follows, built as it is on a paradox: The participants “played in order to keep the ball alive, nevertheless desperately destroyed the play by bringing nearer the end of the game.” Each copes with this paradox in his or her own fashion; each participates as an individual and as a teammate, but nothing can enjoin the game’s end. To their common cry “Creator spirit, come,” a combination of entreaty and sexual joke, a reply comes in the birth of St. Wayward. He is a restorer, a conservator of humanity’s spirit, which has been abused by advancing civilization.

The Holy Terror

In the fourth and final novel of the series, The Holy Terror, Goodman promises a “register of reconciliation,” and indeed, the principals move toward a harmony, what Blake would call experiencing their “joys and desires.” Such chapter titles as “Conversing,” “Dancing,” “Eating,” “Relaxing,” and “Wakening” reflect the social nature of their existence. Horatio and Rosalind dance in sexual joy, while Lothair finds fulfillment in his music. They undergo a kind of Gestalt therapy, a form of body mysticism. Each pursues self-awareness: Mynheer experiences primal consciousness by means of the Tao Te Ching; Lothair, the public man, discovers his repressed rage. In a poignant episode, Lothair, overcome by feelings of rage, hope, and love, is slain by his son, Wayward, in a scene rife with Oedipal implications. In killing his father, Wayward achieves adulthood, and his exploits in Ireland, which later cap the book, offer an affirmative ending.

After Lothair’s death, Horatio undergoes a form of madness that involves accepting the reality of the world as it is expressed by the now-defunct newspaper The New York Herald Tribune. The time is 1952. One symptom of Horatio’s insanity is that he wishes to vote for the General—that is, Dwight D. Eisenhower—for president. Although this section is at times amusing, it seems inappropriate, more a symptom of the author’s political outrage than a stage in the development of Horatio’s personality. No effort is made by the author to imply that Horatio is seriously exploring conservative values; instead, Goodman sacrifices his character’s credibility to parody topical theories of politics and education.

Indeed, much of the final book reveals Goodman’s flagging imagination. Events are related to one another only thematically rather than as the outgrowth of character. One such example involves the youthful cardplayers who appear as a foil for St. Wayward. The latter transcends and redeems the sordid world of boys, performing miracles in a way that suggests events in the Gospels. The boys, however, are only a convenience for the author, and they disappear from the novel. The Gospel parallel is reinforced in the next chapter, however, which is called “Good News” and deals with the discovery by Lefty Duyvendak, son of Mynheer and Laura, of an edenic community where life is reasonable, joy permissible. As the novel nears its conclusion, the principals meet to reaffirm their sense of community, each announcing the “work that is at hand.” The novel ends with a lyrical fantasy of St. Wayward freeing Ireland of its sexual repression. Horatio has the tetralogy’s final word, entreating God for more life.

After its publication in 1959, The Empire City achieved a kind of cult status. Though at times obscure, it represents Goodman’s most ambitious novelistic effort and clearly his best. His reputation as a novelist rests on this often impressive and imaginative work.

Making Do

In Making Do, Goodman develops and amplifies themes he had earlier explored in The Empire City. “My only literary theme has been the community,” he remarked in his journal Five Years. Once more, he returns to familiar themes: psychology, education, radical reform, and the efforts of the individual to satisfy natural desire in a repressive environment. Making Do is a less hopeful and exuberant novel than its predecessor: As Communitas (1947) glosses The Empire City, so Growing Up Absurd clarifies Making Do. The titles of these latter works suggest the more circumscribed possibilities for achievement Goodman perceived in American life. Entitling his earlier work with New York’s sobriquet the Empire City does suggest Goodman’s hope: his vision of heroism and transcendence that has the capacity to stimulate the protagonists. “Making do,” on the other hand, is far less optimistic, a diminished variation of the American credo—“making it”—that spurred an earlier generation of Jewish immigrants (among them Goodman’s own father, perhaps). “Making do” implies less a remaking of the environment to render it worthy of its best citizens than an attempt to adjust and find comfort in a framework of truncated possibilities.

Unlike its predecessor, Making Do is not a fantasy imbued with the energy and spirit that such a form implies, but is a tale conceived in a realistic-naturalistic vein. As before, the novelist has a dual role as both narrator (“the tired man”) and participant (Goodman appears by name in a cameo role). Once again, Goodman presents his characters as special friends, members of a community of which his persona is the guiding spirit. Other members include the saintly Harold, spiritual father to a gang of delinquent Puerto Ricans, and Jason, a graduate student in English with passionate convictions on education. Jason is writing a dissertation on Theodore Dreiser, an author who explored the tragic implications of the American Dream. Another member of the group, Meg, has a generous sexual spirit and guilelessness that render her attractive, however undirected she appears. The narrator’s friend, Roger, shares his commitment to their surroundings, as displayed in his eagerness to establish Vanderzee as a haven for artists. Finally, there is Terry, an inarticulate youth full of a kind of puppylike devotion to the community of friends.

The very qualities that make these individuals attractive also prove their undoing. Harold is mocked and abused by his hustler-lover Ramon, who eventually betrays his protector to the police. Jason expresses his rage (and probably Goodman’s own) concerning educational textbooks by the impotent gesture of punching a textbook salesman. His dissertation is probably doomed for reasons that make a mockery of the notion of academia as a community of scholars. Meg’s tolerant and nurturing sexual practices provide the police with a pretext for attacking the group; her innocence even permits her to cooperate with her persecutors. Terry, like Horatio, though lacking the street smarts and mental discipline to provide him with equilibrium, desperately embraces the notion of community. He is inarticulate, however, a primitive who relies on insight to the exclusion of cognitive thought; hence, he is unable to negotiate in a fallen world and is ultimately institutionalized. Unhappy though he is, the narrator, “the tired man,” does cope successfully with the world—in large measure because he is sufficiently detached to achieve at least a modest success, satisfying his needs for love, work, and self-expression. As noted earlier, a character named Paul Goodman appears briefly in the novel, but the lineaments of the author’s own life appear most fully in the character of the narrator.

The vicissitudes experienced by the community do not simply result from the larger society’s victimization of the group (though that does exist); as in The Empire City, they result in large measure from weaknesses within the community. Harold has lost contact with his animal nature, as symbolized both by his impotence with Ramon and by his self-lacerating behavior at the racetrack, where he bets against his own selections. Meg is envious of others’ sexual pleasures; Jason is unwilling to act the responsible father; Terry is inarticulate unless he can be physically intimate. Presumably, for Goodman, Terry is the end product of all that is distorted about American culture. The reader, however, may find that Joanna’s attraction to him is rather implausible. “She did not see about her any other young man who was worthwhile,” the narrator remarks. Hardly a very satisfactory explanation to justify her love affair with a promiscuous, bisexual, drug-addicted dropout on the verge of being institutionalized for schizophrenia. Even the founder of the community, Meg’s former husband, Amos, is “insane,” and threatens to kill his wife.

The setting of this novel is Vanderzee, a community directly across the river from New York City. For Goodman, everything Dutch has positive connotations (recall Mynheer of The Empire City or the collection of poems The Lordly Hudson). Vanderzee, however, having betrayed its origins, does not actualize its potential for community; the town is controlled by a venal police force and a narrow-minded mayor, both of whom endorse “community” but mean by it a life-denying, mind-numbing conformity. There is little difference in Goodman’s eyes between the self-serving values of the Puerto Rican hustlers and those of the police force (a point Goodman had already made in Growing Up Absurd), so that when Ramon is arrested, Judas-like, he betrays the smaller community in order to gain entrance into the larger.

The novel ends on a mixed note. The narrator, “the tired man,” has a glimmering vision of a transcendent love of country—an outgrowth, he explains, of erotic love. Harold and Meg find comfort in each other’s arms, but Terry is institutionalized, the Puerto Rican youths are arrested, and Amos is left free but homeless.

As a novel, Making Do has occasional strengths and glaring weaknesses. Goodman, as ever, is a compelling writer, with trenchant insights into American culture and social life, but this book lacks the exuberant spirit and incandescent invention of The Empire City. A serious drawback of the book, as Richard Poirier observes, is that “its actions never [accumulate] the necessity that brings on subsequent actions.The links between the events are largely external.” Making Do is an interesting book but not a good novel.

Goodman’s novels have had a mixed reception. Parents’ Day is largely forgotten and difficult to find, even in research libraries. (It was reprinted in 1985.) Making Do, the most popular of his novels, is marred by serious flaws; it is best remembered for its vivid scenes of communal life in the 1960’s. Goodman’s reputation as a novelist rests on his tetralogy The Empire City, a work that will no doubt endure as a minor classic.