Tide’s turning: the Hooper Straits buoys begin to lean towards Sharkfin Shoal; time to bottle this and begone. Henry Burlingame III, we are told, was launched in his infancy from this island, to which in middle manhood he returned for better or worse. Do you likewise, letter, if return you must; not to the sender, who, something tells him, shan’t.
L: The Author to Jerome Bray. Admonition and invitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14212
July 6, 1969
Jerome B. Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, New York 14752
Mr. Bray:
Let’s get things straight.
I did indeed spend the first half of the 1960’s writing a long novel which was published in August 1966, under the title Giles Goat-Boy. It is the story of a child sired by an advanced computer upon a virgin lady and raised by kindly goats on the experimental livestock farms of a nameless university which encompasses and replicates the world. In young “manhood” my goat-boy learns from his tutor that the extraordinary circumstances of his birth and youth correspond to those of the wandering heroes of myth. With this actuarial pattern as his map and script, he adventures to the heart and through the bowels of the campus, twice fails at the accomplishment of certain ambiguous labors, and the third time succeeds — though in a fashion equivocal as the tasks themselves — to the status of “Grand Tutor.”
It was my further pleasure to reorchestrate the venerable conceit, old as the genre of the novel, that the fiction is not a fiction: G.G.B. pretends to be a computer-edited and — printed, perhaps computer-authored, transcript of tapes recorded by the goat-boy and — under the title R.N.S.: The Revised New Syllabus, etc. — laid on the Author by Giles’s son for further editing and publication.
I have before me your letters of March 2 and April 1. Their imputation of plagiarism, their allegation that I somehow pirated an extraterrestrial scripture from you and published a distorted version of it as fiction, their ominous demands for reparation, and the rest, I take in the spirit of that lengthy satire. Like those book reviewers who choose to mimic (and attempt to surpass) the author under review, you have seen fit to address me in the manner of my novel, as though you were one of its characters nursing a grievance against your author.
Such mimicries and allegations are best left unacknowledged: Claw a churl by the breech, an Elizabethan proverb warns, and get a handful of shite. But your passing invocations of Napoleon, George III, Mme de Staël, Bellerophon and the Gadfly — these echo provocatively, not to say uncannily, some concerns of my work in progress; and I am intrigued by your distinction between the fiction of science and the science of fiction. Finally, it interests me that the world may actually contain a person who raises goats and devises “revolutionary” computer programs to analyze, imitate, revolutionize, and perfect the form of the Novel — or is it the form of Revolution?
Inasmuch as my current, nowise revolutionary story includes a character rather like that person (derived from the putative editor of Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus), I am curious to hear more from you on the subject of your LILYVAC 5-Year Plan, for example. In exchange, if you’re interested, I offer what I’ve learned since the publication of G.G.B. about actual computer applications in such areas as literary structural analysis and the generation of, say, hypothetical plots: information laid on me by workers in the field of artificial intelligence who happen to have read or heard of my novel.
To be sure, none of what I’ve learned may be news to you; or you may not care to share your investigations with me. But if you’re willing, please address me at my university office, which reliably forwards my mail. And do let’s keep the letters “straight”: the 700-plus pages of Giles Goat-Boy have surfeited their author with that particular vein of “transcendent parody” and (literally, of course) sophomoric allegory.
Cordially,
F: The Author to Jacob Horner. Accepting the latter’s declining of his invitation of May 11 and thanking him for several contributions to the current project.
Chautauqua, New York, July 13:
Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee,
Boxer Rebellion quelled in Tientsin,
Civil War draft riots in N.Y.C.,
Marat stabbed by Charlotte Corday, etc.
Dear Jacob Horner,
