John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Gentlemen:

The manuscript enclosed is not The Seeker, that novel I've been promising you for the past two years and on which you hold a contractual option. The Seeker is lost, I fear; no use to seek him, or any other novel from this pen: I and the Muse, who in any case had not cohabited these many months, are now divorced for good and all a vinculo matrimonii. The wonder is not that our alliance has ended, but that it lasted and produced at all, in the light of my wrong-headedness. I will not admit that it was a mistake to wed her; matrimony may be the death of passion, but need not be of production. The error (by no means my only one) was in believing anything could endure; that my or any programme could work. Nothing "works," in the sense we commonly hope for; a certain goat-boy has taught me that; everything only gets worse, gets worse; our victories are never more than moral, and always pyrrhic; in fact we know only more or less ruinous defeats.

Ah well, now I have caught Knowledge like a love-pox, I understand, not that my former power was a delusion, but that delusions may be full of power: Lady Fancy did become my mistress after all; did mother offspring that my innocent lust got on her — orphans now, but whose hard neglect may be the saving of them in the long run. Think it if you will a further innocence on my part; I stand convinced that she did by George love me while she loved me, and that what she loved was the very thing that ruined us in the end: I mean my epic unsophistication. And this because, contrary to appearance and common belief, she shares it herself; it is if not the essence of her spirit at least one among its chiefer qualities, and has much to do with that goldenness of hers. How else explain the peculiar radiance she maintains despite her past, a freshness as well of spirit as of complexion, which leads each new suitor to take her for a maiden girl? My ambition to husband her, exclusively and forever, as who should aspire to make a Hausfrau out of a love-goddess — do you think she indulged it as a joke, or tickled a jaded appetite by playing at homeliness? Very well: I choose to think the experiment pleased her as simply and ingenuously as it pleased me; we were equally distressed to see it fail, and whatever the fate of our progeny I believe she will remember as sweetly as I the joy of their getting…

No matter. I'm celibate now: a priest of Truth that was a monger after Beauty; no longer a Seeker but a humble Finder — all thanks to the extraordinary document here enclosed. I submit it to you neither as its author nor as agent for another in the usual sense, but as a disinterested servant of Our Culture, if you please: that recentest fair fungus in Time's watchglass. I know in advance what reservations you will have about the length of the thing, the controversial aspects of occasional passages, and even its accuracy here and there; yet whether regarded as "fact" or "fiction" the book's urgent pertinence should be as apparent as its considerable (if inconsistent and finally irrelevant) literary merit, and I'm confident of your final enthusiasm. "A wart on Miss University," as the Grand Tutor somewhere declares, "were nonetheless a wart, and if I will not call it a beauty-mark, neither would I turn her out of bed on its account." There are warts enough on this Revised New Syllabus, artistic and it may be historical; but they are so to speak only skin-deep, and I think no publisher will turn it off his list on their account.

Indulge me now, as a useful introduction to the opus proper, the story of its origin and my coming by it. As you may know, like most of our authors these days I support myself by preaching what I practice. One grows used, in fiction-writing seminaries, to three chief categories of students: elder ladies and climacteric gentlemen who seek in writing an avocation which too might supplement their pensions; well-groomed and intelligent young literature-majors of various sexes who have a flair; and those intensely marginal souls — underdisciplined, oversensitive, disordered in both appearance and reality — whose huge craving for the state of artist-hood may drive them so far in rare instances as actually to work at making pieces of art. It was one of this third sort, I assumed, who came into my office on a gusty fall evening several terms ago with a box of typescript under his arm and a gleam in his face.

I'd not seen him before — but then, these bohemians appear and vanish like spooks, change their aspect at the merest whim (quite as does the creature called Harold Bray hereinafter), and have often the most tenuous connection with their Departments. Imagine a lean young man of twenty, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, almost a mulatto, but with a shag of bronze curls, unbarbered, on head and chin; even his eyebrows were like turnings of that metal. He wore battered workshoes laced with rawhide, nondescript trousers tucked at the ankles into boot-socks, and an outlandish fleecy jacket that in retrospect I'd guess he fashioned for himself — one may presently suppose of what material. Though he had no apparent limp, he affected a walkingstick as odd as the rest of his get-up: a three-foot post of white ash, somewhat stouter than a pick-shaft, it had what appeared to be folding lenses and other gadgetry attached here and there along its length, which was adorned with rude carvings (both intaglio and low-relief) of winged lingams, shelah-na-gigs, buckhorns, and domestic bunch-grapes.

Near the tip of this unprecedented tool was a small blunt hook wherewith my visitor first unstopped and closed the door, then smartly drew himself a chair out and sat him down at the desk next to mine. All this I remarked in two glances, and then to collect myself returned to that manuscript of my own at which I'd been tinkering when he entered. The fellow's dress, if extreme, was not unique — one may see as strange at any gathering of student artists, and I myself in disorderly moods will wear mungos and shoddies, though my preference is for the conventional. But your average bohemian's manner is shy as a kindergartener's with those he respects, and overweening with everyone else, while my caller's was neither: brisk, forthright, cordial, he plunked his paper-box onto my desk, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and both hands at the cane-top, and rested his chin upon all, so that his striking beard hung over. Disconcerting as the grin he then waited my pleasure with was the cast of his features, not just like any I had seen. Such of his kind as had strayed into my office thitherto were either dark of beard, coal-eyed, and intense, after the model of a poet they admired, or else had hair the shade of wheatstraw, forget-me-not eyes, and the aspect and deportment of gelded fawns. Not so this chap: his bronze beard; his eyes not pale nor tormented but simply a-dance; his wiry musculature, the curl of his smile, even a positive small odor about his person that was neither of dirt or cologne — in a word, he was caprine : I vow the term came to mind before I'd ever spoken to him, much less read what he'd brought me. And that walking-stick, that instrument without parallel…

"Don't fear," he said directly — in a clear, almost a ringing voice, somewhat clickish in the stops. "I'm not a writer, and it's not a novel."

I was disarmed as much by the insouciance and timbre of his voice as by the words themselves. It sounded as though he actually meant what he said, sincerely and indifferently, as who should announce: "I'm not left-handed," or "I'm no clarinetist." And this I felt with the ruefuller twinge for its expressing, glibly as the verdict of a child, that fear no fiction is proof against, and which had dwelt a-haunt in my Fancy's garret for the twelve months past. I had just turned thirty; it was my seventh year of toil in the prevaricating art, and scant-rewarded for my labors I was weary as the Maker of us all on the seventh morning. Monday, I still trusted, would roll round; in the meanwhile I was writing so to speak a sabbatical-piece — that book you'll never see. I knew what novels were: The Seeker wasn't one. To move folks about, to give them locales and dispositions, past histories and crossed paths — it bored me, I hadn't taste or gumption for it. Especially was I surfeited with movement, the without-which-not of story. One novel ago I'd hatched a plot as mattersome as any in the books, and drove a hundred characters through eight times that many pages of it; now the merest sophomore apprentice, how callow soever his art, outdid me in that particular. His inspirations? Crippled: but I sat awed before the bravery of their unfolding. His personae ? Raw motors cursed with speech, ill-wrought as any neighbors of mine — but they blustered along like them as if alive, and I shook my head. Stories I'd set down before were children gone their ways; everything argued they'd amount to nothing; I scarcely recognized their faces. I was in short disengaged, not chocked or out of fuel but fretfully idling; the pages of my work accumulated to no end, all noise and no progress, like a racing motor. What comfort that in every other way my lot improved? House and gardens prospering, rank and income newly raised, my small fame spreading among the colleges — to a man whose Fancy is missing in action, all boons feel posthumous. The work before me (that I now put by, with a show of interruption): Where was its clutch, its purchase? Something was desperately wanting: a thing that mightn't be striven for, but must come giftlike and unsought; a windfall from orchards of the spirit, a voice from nowhere; a visitation. Indeed it was no novel… My heart turned sinking from the rest.