Giles Goat Boy Read Free

profit. In serving the dream we prevent the deed: vicariously the reader debauches, and is vicariously redeemed; his understanding is not taxed; his natural depravity may be tickled but is not finally approved of; no assaults have been made upon his imagination, nor any great burden put on his attention. He is the same fellow as before, only a little better read, and in most cases the healthier for his small flirtation with the Pit. He may even remark, “Life is absurd, don’t you think? There’s no answer to anything”; whereafter, his luncheon-companion agreeing absolutely, they have another cocktail and return to more agreeable matters.
    Consider the difference with
R.N.S
.: here fornication, adultery, even rape, yea murder itself (not to mention self-deception, treason, blasphemy, whoredom, duplicity, and willful cruelty to others) are not only represented for our delectation but at times approved of and even recommended! On aesthetic grounds too (though they pale before the moral), the work is objectionable: the rhetoric is extreme, the conceit and action wildly implausible, the interpretation of history shallow and patently biased, the narrative full of discrepancies and badly paced, at times tedious, more often excessive; the form, like the style, is unorthodox, unsymmetrical, inconsistent. The characters, especially the hero, are unrealistic. There never was a Goat-boy! There never will be!
    In sum it is a bad book, a wicked book, and ought not—I will say
must
not—be published. No computer produced it, but the broodings of an ineffectual megalomane: a crank at best, very possibly a psychopath. As the elder, if no longer the ranking, member of this editorial group I urge that we take this opportunity to restore a part of the moral prestige that was ours when our organization was more dedicated and harmonious, if less wealthy; to reverse our lamentable recent policy of publishing the esoteric, the bizarre, the extravagant, the downright vicious. I urge not only that the manuscript in question be rejected forthwith, but also that the “Author’s” superiors, his Dean and Department Chairman, be advised what they are exposing undergraduate minds to. Would the present editor-in-chief, I wonder, permit his own daughter to be taught by such a man? Then in the name of what decent principle ought we to make his scribbling available to all our sons and daughters?
    Editor
B
    I vote to publish the Revised
New Syllabus
and agree with the Editor-in-chief that
Giles Goat-Boy
is a more marketable title for it. We all know what [A’s] objections to the manuscript are; we also know why he’s noteditor-in-chief any more, after his rejection of ——— † on similar “moral” grounds. What I must add, at the risk of “impropriety,” is that in addition to his predictable bias against anything more daring than
Gay Dashleigh’s Prep-School Days
, he may have a private antipathy for this particular manuscript: his own daughter, I happen to know, “ran off” from college with a bearded young poetry-student who subsequently abandoned her, pregnant, in order to devote himself to sheep-farming and the composition of long pastoral romances in free verse, mainly dealing with his great love for her. Her father never forgave her; neither has he, it seems, forgiven bearded heterosexuality or things bucolic, and it is a mark of his indiscrimination that he makes a goat-boy suffer for a sheep-boy’s sins. Much as I respect your request that these statements remain impersonal, and hesitate as a new employee to criticize my colleagues in addition to disagreeing with them, I must argue that the “personal” and “professional” elements are so bound together in this case (indeed, are they ever separable in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against
Giles Goat-Boy
is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in harmonious diversity or languish in acrimonious dissension. In choosing to