John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

He never could have prophesied his present fame, clear-seer as he was in his latter years — nor would it much have assuaged his misanthropy to foresee it. Yet though he refused, and justly, the trustees' belated offer of emeritus benefits, there is some evidence of mellowing in his last semesters, perhaps even of loneliness for his own kind. Of the scores who have quoted the famous Maxim, "Der goats is humaner than der men, und der men is goatisher than der goats," how many understand its deep ambivalence? It's true he kept a seraglio of nannies (though his appetites in this line have been much exaggerated, as has his prowess) and named them after leading members of the Faculty Women's Club — but there was no malice in the voice that summoned Helen to his stall, or Maude, or Shirley; and the respect he showed Mary V. Appenzeller, my own dear dam, any boy might wish for his lady mother. But the most revealing evidence that Max still bore some love for men is the thing most often scored to his discredit: I mean my own appearance in the goat-barn and my rearing with the other kids of the West Campus herd. I know now that I am not Max and Mary's kid: that much he told me on the day I learned I was a man. Let those who pity my childhood mark this well: I wept as much to know the one as to know the other. What a fair and sprightly thing my kidship was! Sweet Mary Appenzeller neglected the rest of her family to nurse me; thanks be to her splendid udder, whose twin founts flowed at my least beck, I grew from strapping infancy into a boyhood such as human males may dream of. Fatigue was my only curfew, sufficient rest my one alarm. I ate what, when, and where I pleased — furze and gorse and fescues; oil-cake, willow-peels, and pollard. Acorns bound me when I was loose; mangolds scoured me when I was bound. As there were no rules to break, Max never birched me; since he forked my hay and patted my head, I loved him beyond measure. Like my stallmates I feared fire, loud noise, and the bigger bucks, but only in the presence of those terrors, never between times, and so anxiety was foreign to me as soap. When I was gay I gamboled where I would, banged heads with my brothers and bleated in the clover; angry I kicked my stall, my pals, or Mary Appenzeller, whichever was behind me, and was either ignored or rekicked at once. I learned neither sums nor speech until I was ten, but at five years my crouching lope outstripped any human child of twelve; I could spring like a chamois from rock to rock, break a fencerail with my head, distinguish six hundred ninety sorts of plants and eat all but eighty-three of them. My moral training required no preachment (not the least respect in which it differed absolutely from that of humans): Who neglects his appetites suffers their pangs; Who presumes incautiously may well be butted; Who fouls his stall must sleep in filth. Cleave to him, I learned, who does you kindness; Avoid him who does you hurt; Stay inside the fence; Take of what's offered as much as you can for as long as you may; Don't exchange the certain for the possible; Boss when you're able, be bossed when you aren't, but don't forsake the herd. Simple lessons, instinct with wisdom, that grant to him who heeds them afternoons of blowsy bliss and dreamless nights. Thirteen years they fenced my soul's pasture; I romped without a care. In the fourteenth I slipped their gate — as I have since many another — looked over my shoulder, and saw that what I'd said bye-bye to was my happiness.

They flatter themselves who hold that I was unaware of people all those terms; that had I ever seen normal men I'd have yearned most miserably to leave the herd. The truth is, Max made no particular secret of my existence; people knew of me long before those articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology . Indeed, the New Tammany S.P.C.A., interpreting their jurisdiction widely, moved more than once in my "behalf," and only the direct intervention of the Chancellor (who, let us say, felt guilty about Max's dismissal) prevented their plucking me from my family. Every weekend there were students and faculty along the fence. I was as pleased to see them as were all my friends; we frisked for their amusement. If in time Max forbade me to approach them, it was not out of fear that I might defect : he knew I'd not swap my liberty for the pitiful estate of folk who teetered on two legs, reeked of unnatural scents, bound themselves in layer after layer of cloth, and were never allowed the run of the pastures. What he feared — alas and rightly — was that if they didn't poison me, as they did with tobacco a Schwarzhals doeling I once knew, they'd corrupt me with bad examples. A day came when I chafed at this restriction: Max thought me more innocent than I knew I was, and hence like every youngster I underestimated my susceptibility.

How it would have alarmed him to know my sophistication at fourteen. From simple observation I'd learned to tell men from women, even when the latter wore trousers and sheared their fleece. To be sure, I had yet to guess the measure of human frailty: one whose brothers became fathers before their first birthday, and who has himself in play been humping does since he could crawl, can scarcely feature a beast that may not mate until its thirteenth year. But I well understood why their keepers never scrupled to let human bucks and does run together, and why they all were so ashamed of their bodies that they mated in darkness. More than one night (unknown to Max) pairs of people stole into our buckwheat meadow: if I heard them crashing through the straw — as often I did, their attempts at silence were that clumsy — I'd slip from the pound to watch their performance from some near hiding-place. When I learned how night-blind they were and how poor of smell and hearing, I made bold to come almost upon them, not to miss a word of their curious bleating — and never was found out. By this means I discovered that the brutes were hairiest in the few places where goats were bald, and bald almost everywhere else, where fleece is most needed (my own angora wrapper I regarded as a part of myself, it was so seldom removed). I had assumed that all the men I saw were geldings, since they ran with the women and never smelled lustful: now I learned that neither sex rutted that strongly. Small wonder. Who could mount, for example, a monster with two heads instead of one — which heads moreover sprout from its backside? Just that enormous seemed the first female human I saw unclothed, with her queer small udders at the wrong end of her trunk. Yet praise be to Nature, that finds every dragoness a dragon, all praise to Instinct for making worms love other worms — she managed a feeble coupling after all with her hairless buck, and my education took a great step forward.

But see me stray from the point, quite as I came to stray from the herd and leave behind my good judgment. These espials bear on what's to come — let them show in any case that I was less naïve than gentle Max supposed. For I also understood by the age of fourteen that he was some sort of human himself, despite his long white curls and splendid odor; and further that, for all the herd accepted me as a brother, I was no Rock Alpine, Murciana, or Schwartzenberg-Gluggisberger, but a breed unto myself. It was I the people came to see, I think I always knew that. My pals grew up faster and were nimbler on their feet; after a year they joined the grownups and were replaced by new kids, while I remained season after season in the play-pound. They were stronger, more handsome, and (pass them) more predictable. I was merely clever — yet dull enough to think myself their better on that account. I alone could climb a tree as well as gnaw its bark, pick my own lice, imitate any sound I heard, and transform a herdsman's crook into a weapon. We all loved tricks and stunts, but they hadn't by half my invention, and in the whole of goatdom no kid save Billy Bocksfuss ever tricked himself.