Giles Goat Boy (5 page)

“One day—when we need him again.” How I should have liked to sleep.

His smile returned, albeit melancholily. “We need him now. Things are worse than they ever were in his day. But he’s—on a sort of sabbatical leave, you might say. It’s up to us to carry on.”

He pressed upon me then his story, which I heard in my torpor and made this sense of only on later recollection: His father was or had been some sort of
professor extraordinarius
(of what subject I never learned) whose reputation rested on his success in preparing students to pass their final examinations. His pedagogical method had been unorthodox, and so like many radicals he had worked against vehement opposition, even actual persecution: I gathered his tenure was revoked and he was dismissed from his position on a charge of moral turpitude while still in his early thirties—though it was not clear to me whether he had ever held official rank in his faculty. Neither was it plain what had happened to him afterwards: apparently he’d left the campus for a short time, returned clandestinely (don’t ask me why) to confer with his protégés, and then disappeared for good. The tale was like so many others one has heard, I could almost have predicted certain features—such as that these same protégés had subsequently dedicated their lives to spreading their Mentor’s word and institutionalizing his method as they understood it; that they too were roughly used as they transferred from college to college, but won proselytes by their zeal wherever they went. Neither was it surprising to learn that this Professor Giles, this “Grand Tutor” as his son called him, never committed his wisdom to the press: what academic department has not its Grand Old Man who packs the lecture-halls term after term but never publishes a word in his field? In fact, the one unusual particular of the whole story as I heard it this first time was the not-very-creditable one that the man had got a child, by a lady
married to someone else; otherwise it was the standard painful history of reformers and innovators.

The problem for my visitor, then—the fruit of this illicit planting—was the common one faced by second-generation followers of any pioneer: to formulate the Master’s teaching into some readily disseminable canon, a standard and authority for the fast-swelling ranks of its adherents. By the time Stoker Giles had reached young manhood his father’s original pupils were already divided into factions; the son’s first thought had been to compile as a source-book their reminiscences of the great man’s life and tenure, but so many discrepancies, even contradictions, were made manifest in the collation, he abandoned that project. In its early stages, however, he had gone so far as to read the several texts into an automatic computer, as our fashionable classicists are fond of doing nowadays, to speed the work of comparing them—and here, gentle editors and publishers, your credulity like mine must flex its muscles for a considerable stretch.

This remarkable computer, I was told (a gadget called WESCAC), not only pointed out in accordance with its program the hopeless disagreement of the texts; on its own hook, or by some prior instruction, it volunteered further that there was in its Storage “considerable original matter” read in fragmentarily by George Giles himself in the years of his flourishing: taped lecture-notes, recorded conferences with protégés, and the like. Moreover, the machine declared itself able and ready (with the aid of “analogue facilities” and a sophistication dismaying at least to a poor humanist like myself) to assemble, collate, and edit this material, interpolate all verifiable data from other sources such as the memoirs then in hand, recompose the whole into a coherent narrative from the Grand Tutor’s point of view, and “read it out” in an elegant form on its automatic printers! The son, as disinclined to writing as the father but apparently commanding some authority in his college, agreed, and in the face of opposition from certain “Gilesians” as well as “anti-Gilesians,” the computer made good its promise. After several false starts and program adjustments it produced a first-person chronicle of the life and teachings of the Grand Tutor, a text so faithful to the best evidence and polished in its execution that young Stoker needed only to “change a date or a place-name here and there,” as he vowed, to call it finished.

The great test came, he told me, when he took the manuscript to one Peter Greene, an early student of Giles’s, now past sixty and the strongest critic of the “WESCAC Project.” A famous teacher in his own right by then, Greene met the youngster with a scowl and only after much
persuasion agreed to listen to a dozen pages. Refusing even to sit, he paced the floor of his office with every prejudice in his expression (so Stoker declared) as the reading began. At the end of page one he stood still; halfway through the second he was weeping; by the third he was on his knees at the young man’s feet, begging his pardon and declaring it was “the GILES’s very voice” that sounded off the pages!

Thus was born
The Revised New Syllabus
, which like its narrator and its evangels was destined for arduous vicissitudes. Those Gilesians whose teaching it contradicted—some of them chairmen of their own departments by that time—charged that the work was spurious, concocted either by WESCAC or by the upstart Stoker Giles, perhaps both, if not by the “Dean o’ Flunks” himself.
*
The most antipathetic went so far as to deny that my visitor was actually the Grand Tutor’s son, calling him an opportunist and antigiles who made the best of an accidental resemblance; while the non-Gilesians, “naturally,” maintained as they had from the first that the man called George was never “the true GILES” at all but a dangerous impostor, and that the
R.N.S
., “authentic” or not, was anti-intellectual, immoral, subversive, and altogether unfit for undergraduate reading-lists.

My visitor sighed as he concluded this account, and toyed glumly with the shaft of his stick; then with a shrug his animation returned. “But it all worked to our advantage, you understand—all that censorship and prohibition, and beating us up and throwing us in jail. Even the imitations and pirated versions that everybody ran into print with helped us out—you must have wished for that sort of ruckus over your own books! We put up with it, just as Dad used to, and the New Curriculum gets established sooner or later despite all. Because you see, classmate, the one thing we have on our side is the only thing that matters in the long run: we’re
right
. The others are wrong.” His face was joyous. “It may take a hundred semesters, but we know the New Curriculum will win. The non-majors will flunk; the impostors and false tutors will be exposed. It’s just a matter of time until that book on your desk there will be in every briefcase on every campus in the University. It
must
be so: there isn’t any other hope for studentdom.”

He consulted his walking-stick watch again and abruptly rose to leave. It occurred to me that I had lost track of the clock-chimes from Main Tower.

“I can’t stay longer; I’ve got other colleges to visit—even other universities.”
He winked at me. “There
are
other universities, you know.”

“Look here, now—” I shook my head vigorously to throw off my drowsiness and indicated the box of typescript. “What am I supposed to do with this? I don’t have time—”

“Indeed you don’t!” He laughed—and what a stance he struck with his mad cane! “It’s late, late, late, that’s certain! On the other hand, you have all the time there is, exactly.” He poked at the manuscript with his stick. “Forget about yourself if you like. Just send this on to your publishers without reading it; they’ll be grateful enough, and so will your students. Or throw it out, if you don’t care what happens to them on the Finals. I have other copies for other campuses; this one is your affair entirely …”

He spoke without testiness, only a bit teasingly: now, however, it was my shoulder he touched the stick to, and his voice became full of a fiery solicitude. “But classmate, read it! We lecture to studentdom as a whole, and yet there isn’t any studentdom, Daddy always said that—only students, that have to be Graduated one at a time. I want you to be Giles’s professor to this campus, for their sakes; but more than that I want you to Commence yourself, for your own sake. Do read it!”

A moment longer the stick-tip rested there. Then he tapped me a little smart one with it and left, calling back from the hallway, “I’ll keep in touch!”

But he never did. His typescript languished beside mine—the one unread, the other unwritten—even got mixed with it by a careless janitor. I took a breath, and the winter term was over; paused a moment to reflect, and found myself thirty-two. What gets better? Confronting a class I forgot what my opinion was about anything, and had to feign illness. Famous men died; the political situation deteriorated. No longer could I eat at bedtime as a young man does and still sleep soundly. Fewer social invitations; presently none. The polar ice-cap, scientists warned, is going to melt. The population problem admits of no solution. “Today’s freshman is more serious about his studies than were his predecessors—but is he also perhaps less inclined to think for himself?” Yesterday one was twenty; tomorrow one dies of old age.

In unnaturally clear March twilight when the air is chill, one reflects upon passionate hearts now in their graves and wishes that the swiftly running hours were more intense. Young men and girls cut off while their blood flamed, sleeping in the fields now; old folks expiring with a curse; the passionately good, the passionately wicked—all in their tombs,
soft-lichened, and the little flowers nodding. One yearns—to make a voyage. Why is one not a hero?

I read
The Revised New Syllabus
. Do you likewise, gentlemen and ladies in whose hands this letter is!

A final word. I sought diligently to locate Mr. Stoker Giles, or Giles Stoker (the comma in his name on the title-page, and my imperfect memory of that fateful evening’s details, make the order uncertain), with an eagerness you will presently appreciate. In vain: no such name is in our Student Directory, nor is a “New Tammany College” listed in the roll of accredited institutions of higher learning. At the same time I consulted one of our own computer-men on the matter of the
R.N.S
.’s authorship: his opinion was that no automatic facility he knew of was capable presently of more than rudimentary narrative composition and stylistics—but he added that there was no theoretical barrier even to our own machine’s developing such a talent in time. It was simply a matter of more sophisticated circuitry and programming, such as the computer itself could doubtless work out; literature and composition, he observed, like every other subject, were being ably taught by the gadget in pilot projects all over our quarter of the campus, and it was his conviction that anything “computer-teachable” (his term) was “computer-learnable.” Moreover, he could not vouch for what his military colleagues might be up to, not to mention their counterparts “on the other side”; the computer-race he counted no less important than the contest in weapons-development, and it had become as shrouded in secrecy. His impression was that our enemies were more concerned with raw calculation-power than with versatility and sophistication—there was no evidence of their using computers as we do to manage sausage-making, recommend marriages, bet on sporting-events, and compose music, for example—but no one could say for sure.

Acknowledge with me, then, the likelihood that
The Revised New Syllabus
is the work not of “WESCAC” but of an obscure, erratic wizard whose
nom de plume
, at least, is
Stoker, Giles;
and, again with me, acknowledge further that this is not the only possibility—for as that splendid odd fellow observed, there are in literal truth “other universities than ours.” To the individual student of the book’s wisdom the question of its authorship is anyhow irrelevant, and it seems most improbable to me that any prior copyrights, for example, will be infringed by its publication. The text herewith submitted I declare to be identical to the one left in my hands on that momentous night (excepting only certain emendations and rearrangements which the Author’s imperfect mastery of our idiom and his
avowed respect for my artistic judgment encouraged me to make). My intentions are 1) to put aside any monies paid me as agent, against the Author’s reappearance; 2) to resign my professorship forthwith, whatever hardship that may work upon my family, and set about the task of my own re-education, to the point even of “becoming as a kindergartener” if neccessary; 3) in pursuance of this objective, to compile a more formal and systematic exposition of the Goat-Boy’s teachings, as well as a full commentary on and concordance to
The Revised
New
Syllabus—
these latter for classroom use in my own “New Curriculum,” still in the planning phase.

Which several projects, I hope and believe, together with the extraordinary
Syllabus
itself, will more than make good what losses you have sustained on my previous manuscripts and vindicate your unremitting, most touching faith in

This regenerate Seeker after Answers,
J.B.

Being the Autobiographical and Hortatory Tapes
Read Out at New Tammany College to His Son

Giles
(,)
Stoker

By the West Campus Automatic Computer
And by Him Prepared for the Furtherment of the Gilesian
Curriculum

George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood has been chronicled in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology
. I am he that was called in those days Billy Bocksfuss—cruel misnomer. For had I indeed a cloven foot I’d not now hobble upon a stick or need ride pick-a-back to class in humid weather. Aye, it was just for want of a proper hoof that in my fourteenth year I was the kicked instead of the kicker; that I lay crippled on the reeking peat and saw my first love tupped by a brute Angora. Mercy on that buck who butted me from one world to another; whose fell horns turned my sweetheart’s fancy, drove me from the pasture, and set me gimping down the road I travel yet. This bare brow, shame of my kidship, he crowned with the shame of men: I bade farewell to my hornless goathood and struck out, a hornèd human student, for Commencement Gate.