Giles Goat Boy Read Free Page A

publish or reject a manuscript, one oughtn’t to bear the burden of choosing professional friends and enemies as well. Where such has become the case, the new man’s only choice is to follow his best judgment, laying his future resolutely on the line; and I respectfully suggest that the responsible administrator’s best hope for curing the situation is to turn any threatening ultimatums (like A’s) into opportunities for revitalizing and reharmonizing the staff.
    The fact is, I happen to agree—I think we all do—that
Giles Goat-Boy
is tough sledding in places, artistically uneven, and offensive (we’ll call it
challenging
, of course) to certain literary and moral conventions. Personally I am no great fan of the “Author’s”; like [Editor C, whose opinion follows] I found his early work lively but a bit naïve and his last novel wild and excessive in every respect. I frankly don’t know quite
what
to make of this one. Where other writers seek fidelity to the facts of modern experience and expose to us the emptiness of our lives, he declares it his aim purely to
astonish;
where others strive for truth, he admits his affinity for lies, the more enormous the better. His fellows quite properly seek recognition and wide readership; he rejoices (so he says) that he has but a dozen readers, inasmuch as a thirteenth might betray him. So far frombecoming discouraged by the repeated failure of his novels to make a profit, he confesses his surprise that no one has tarred and feathered him. Apparently sustained by the fact that anyone at all has swallowed his recentest whopper, he sets about to hatch another, clucking tongue at the compass and bedazzlement of those fabrications.
Plot
, for the young novelists we applaud, is a naughty word, as it was for their fathers;
story
to them means invention, invention artifice, artifice dishonesty. As for
style
, it is everywhere agreed that the best language is that which disappears in the telling, so that nothing stands between the reader and the matter of the book. But this author has maintained (in obscure places, understandably) that language
is
the matter of his books, as much as anything else, and for that reason ought to be “splendrously musicked out”; he turns his back on what
is the case
, rejects the familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance; washing his hands of the search for Truth, he calls himself “a monger after beauty,” or “doorman of the Muses’ Fancy-house.” In sum, he is in a class by himself and not of his time; whether a cut above or a cut below, three decades ahead or three centuries behind, his twelve readers must decide for themselves.
    My own net sentiment comes to this: the author in question has, I’m told, a small but slowly growing audience, more loyal than discerning or influential, of the sort one needs no expensive promotion to reach, as they have their own ways of spreading the word around: penniless literature students, professors in second-rate colleges, and a couple of far-out critics.
Giles Goat-Boy
isn’t likely to make anybody rich, but if we can saturate this little group it should at least pay its own way, and may even redeem our losses on the man’s other books. One day those penniless students may be pennied enough; those professors may rise to more influential positions; the far-out critics may turn out to have been prophets … Alternatively, the author’s luck may change (rather,
our
luck, as he seems not to care one way or the other): by pure accident his
next
book might be popular, stranger things have happened. Meanwhile we may write off our losses to that tax-deductible sort of prestige associated with the better publishing houses; the thing to do is keep the advance and advertising expenses as low as possible while holding him under contract for the future, in the meantime exploiting whatever ornamental or write-off value he may have.
    Editor
C
    I vote against publishing the book called
The