John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Never mind that," I said. "What's the first one?" I felt my ire rising once more at his — I had almost said Moishian persistence. You're not a Grand Tutor, was what he had in mind. Ah, I felt him shrink at my tone, and nearly wept with frustration. Not merely that his frailness made me conscious of my strength, or that, frailness notwithstanding, he'd provoke and reprovoke me; but precisely that he knew what he was provoking, flinched from what he must invite: he knew, did old Max, tense upon my arm, that I loved him, admired — and wished to strike him with all my force, even to death!

"No more today," he muttered.

I was trembling with annoyance. At the barn-door I let go his arm and declared I wasn't hungry.

"Ja, sure," he nodded. "Me too. Please listen to this about Grand Tutors, Georgie: A Grand Tutor is good. A Grand Tutor is wise. If there's just one grain of wickedness or folly in him — why, he's not a Grand Tutor. Think of that. If there's just one grain of wickedness or folly in him-why, he's not a Grand Tutor. Think of that. If you're here tomorrow I got more to tell you."

He went, if not to lunch at least into the barn, and I strode in frenzy to here, to there. A pounding was at my temple. Doelings sprang fencewards not to be smitten by my stick, the fall of every thistle in my way. Soon I found G. Herrold squat on a rise, his eye on things. I cried, " Ho , G. Herrold! Ho !" He read the signs; with a black hee-hee he crouched to meet me. Knees bent and arms a-swing we circled warily, huffing incitements. His right hand came clap on my nape, I let go the stick to hook on his left knee; we tumbled to it, scissored and hammerheld about the landscape until his old knowledge had the better of my young might, and I lay pinned. Our wrappers, shagged with weed-seed, were askew; our skins gave off sharp odor and mingled sweats.

"Ain't he grown to a big one!" G. Herrold marveled. His nelson unwound into a loose embrace, and he surveyed me frankly. I was not innocent of self-experiment, nor had my fancy been much cumbered with Rights and Wrongs (save in the matter of Redfearn's Tommy's death). A goat-boy, fenced those many years from studentdom, I'd learnt its morals in the spirit of its politics or costume: as an object of study, infinitely various, subject to fashion, and more or less interesting. I had read why the Founder once rained fire upon the Quadrangles of the Plain, and contrariwise in what manner the flower of classical antiquity, the splendid lads of Lykeion, had amused themselves at Maios's feet: the difference impressed me in no other way than did the difference between the architectures of the two colleges, or their verse-styles. In sum, my mind was open as my vestment, and while I could imagine what a right-minded New Tammany freshman would have felt in my circumstances, I myself knew only curiosity when G. Herrold laid hands on me. Any misgivings were purely theoretical, and overbalanced by the fact that I owed the man my life, that he was anyhow insane and but dimly aware of his behavior. Besides, I couldn't know for certain what he was up to.

By way of precaution, however, I said to my friend, "I'd better tell you, G. Herrold: I'm a Grand Tutor, and a Grand Tutor is good. Is this good?"

He grunted. "It just fine, white boy." And as he had for all his handicaps and mine taught me something of gymnastics, now and in the days that followed he trained me somewhat in the arts of love — whereat I found myself a readier hand than at Max's curriculum. In both sports the perfection of my skill was delayed for want of variety in my circumstance and partners: some time was to pass before I grappled with a man in anger or a woman in love. But as husband and black-man, athlete and sweeper of the nighttime stacks, G. Herrold had known many sorts of love and combat; to his broad experience (half-remembered) was joined my reading (half-understood) and boundless fancy. We managed much.

That evening I came home in the best of humors with the herd, my spirit clear and calmed as the mid-March twilight. I felt released from Max's tutelage, yet somehow more ready than ever, just for that, to be counseled by him. G. Herrold and I came into the barn, singing one of his two songs, and straightway I asked Max's pardon for my morning unpleasantness. He put down his violin and nodded from his seat in the pens.

"Look at you two," he marveled. There was straw in my hair and leaf-litter in the growth of new beard I was so proud of; we would never have done picking burrs and hooked seeds from our clothes. "What have you been up to?"

I laughed. "Taking out my bad temper on somebody my size." Stirred still, if tranquilly, I gave my dark friend a comrade's short embrace, and, laughing again at Max's frown, made haste to embrace him also and kiss his brow. "I was wicked and stupid with you this morning," I said.

"So. Ach, get on with you!" With a smile he fended off my gesture. "You admit you're not beyond a little wickedness and stupidity?"

"More than that: I enjoy them. But from now on I'll be wise and good with you and be wicked and stupid with G. Herrold. Wait'll I show you what he did this afternoon, once he got me pinned!"

My dark companion grinned at the pen-side. Max glanced from one to the other of us. "I see." His voice was concerned, but not quite scolding.

"Are you angry?"

Max assured me that he was not: I was a vigorous young man, he said, with normal urgings, and in the absence of generally approved outlets he supposed it was better for me to have recourse temporarily to less generally approved ones than to none at all. So long as my circumstances were as they were, he said, and my motives remained free of perversion, he saw little to choose between auto- and homoerotic activity: masturbation, while more normal in the eyes of most New Tammanians and less liable to cause public embarrassment, carried its dangers in the same single-handedness that recommended it: loveless and reclusive, it fed the fantasies of the timid and could aggravate any tendencies to impotence or withdrawal from engagement with others — narcissism and schizophrenia, he asserted, were the masturbator's inclinations in the realm of psychopathy. Pederasty, on the other hand, though regarded in New Tammany College as a semi-criminal perversion, had at least to be said for it that it involved a passionate, perhaps even a loving, engagement of the self with others. So long as it was practiced in a healthy frame of mind — a virtual impossibility in a college that held it to be vicious — Max saw no great danger of its becoming a substitute for normal relations with women, any more than my casual past connections with does would be. He cautioned me, however, to abandon the practice once I matriculated, lest it lead me into scandal, fistula, or logical realism-the philosophy of Maios and Scapulas, which Max declared to be as favored by pederasts as was solipsism by masturbators.

"So it's probably okay," he concluded. "G. Herrold won't do you any harm, and I been in proctoscopy long enough to be broad-minded."

"I knew it was supposed to be flunkèd," I confessed, "but I enjoyed it anyhow."

"That don't matter, Georgie. What flunkèdness is, it's not doing what you're not supposed to do; flunkèdness is to do it because you're not supposed to, and perverseness is to like it because you know it's flunkèd. 'Even though' is okay; 'because' is flunkèd."

"So I'm still a Grand Tutor," I said happily. "I knew I was."

Max smiled and to my pleasure agreed at least that my disporting with G. Herrold, done as it was innocently and in good faith, didn't refute my claim. "Take the goats, now, for instance," he said: "how come you never humped yourself a doeling since you were a youngster? You were sweet on Hedda once, nicht wahr? And a nanny is not bad, you know, for a goat. But you got no taste for them since you learned you're a human person, isn't that so?"