A review of "Paul Goodman Changed My Life," a documentary that pays tribute to a man — poet, teacher, social critic, guru without portfolio — whose name was once a household word and whose books were talismans of intellectual seriousness and social concern.
“Paul Goodman Changed My Life” pays tribute to a man — poet, teacher, social critic, guru without portfolio — whose name was once a household word and whose books were talismans of intellectual seriousness and social concern. His current obscurity is something this documentary, directed by Jonathan Lee, is determined to overcome.
“I want it to come back,” says Jerl Surratt, who attended Goodman’s memorial service in 1972, despite never having met him. He is referring to the style and substance of Goodman’s remarkably eclectic body of work, and underscoring a point implicit in the rest of Lee’s film.
The time is surely right for a Goodman revival. There are aspects of contemporary life he anticipated and influenced — the gay-rights movement, most notably — and others that are sorely in need of his wisdom.
At a time when the discussion of education is locked into sterile, strident and instrumental debates about “reform,” his radical humanism, at once romantic and common-sensical, would be more than welcome.
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His most famous book, “Growing Up Absurd,” remains essential and troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the young. Libertarians and anarchists of the left and right could learn a lot from this Jeffersonian pacifist’s ideas about freedom. And those drawn to artisanal and agrarian practices as a sustainable alternative to consumerism will find instruction and inspiration in “Communitas,” a 1947 blueprint for utopia that Goodman wrote with his brother, Percival.
Goodman, born in 1911, belonged to a generation of Jewish intellectuals who made their way from the margins to the center of American cultural life. A writer of varied interests and talents — his poetry stands up particularly well — he followed a zigzagging career path.
Married twice and the father of three children, he was open and unapologetic about his sexual attraction to men.
Nobody interviewed in “Paul Goodman Changed My Life” suggests he was easy to understand or to get along with, but a composite portrait emerges of a man who never stopped thinking and who was incapable of anything but honesty in thought and deed.
I suspect Goodman would have approved of Lee’s film, and not only because it approves so unreservedly of him. “Paul Goodman Changed My Life” may not have that effect on every viewer, but it has a passionate, almost prophetic sense of the impact that a writer and thinker can have on his times and the future.