September 19, 1964 Issue
Joe Gould’s Secret—I
By
Joseph Mitchell
September 11, 1964
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Joe Gould New York City 1943.
Joe Gould, New York City, 1943.Photograph by Philippe Halsman / Magnum
Joe Gould was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over
thirty-five years. He was a member of one of the oldest families in New England (“The Goulds Were the Goulds,” he used to say, “when the Cabots and the
Lowells were clamdiggers”), he was born and brought up in a town near Boston in which his father was a leading citizen, and he went to Harvard, as did
his father and grandfather before him, but he claimed that until he arrived in New York City he had always felt out of place. “In my home town,” he once
wrote, “I never felt at home. I stuck out. Even in my own home, I never felt at home. In New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the
cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might’ve-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have
always felt at home.”
Gould looked like a bum and lived like a bum. He wore castoff clothes, and he slept in flophouses or in the cheapest rooms in cheap hotels. Sometimes he
slept in doorways. He spent most of his time hanging out in diners and cafeterias and barrooms in the Village or wandering around the streets or looking
up friends and acquaintances all over town or sitting in public libraries scribbling in dime-store composition books. He was generally pretty dirty. He
would often go for days without washing his face and hands, and he rarely had a shirt washed or a suit cleaned. As a rule, he wore a garment continuously
until someone gave him a new one, whereupon he threw the old one away. He had his hair cut infrequently (“Every other Easter,” he would say), and then
in a barber college on the Bowery. He was a chronic sufferer from the highly contagious kind of conjunctivitis that is known as pinkeye. His voice was
distractingly nasal. On occasion, he stole. He usually stole books from bookstores and sold them to second-hand bookstores, but if he was sufficiently
hard pressed he stole from friends. (One terribly cold night, he knocked on the door of the studio of a sculptor who was almost as poor as he was, and
the sculptor let him spend the night rolled up like a mummy in layers of newspapers and sculpture shrouds on the floor of the studio, and next morning
he got up early and stole some of the sculptor’s tools and pawned them.) In addition, he was nonsensical and bumptious and inquisitive and gossipy and
mocking and sarcastic and scurrilous. All through the years, nevertheless, a long succession of men and women gave him old clothes and small sums of money
and bought him meals and drinks and paid for his lodging and invited him to parties and to weekends in the country and helped him get such things as glasses
and false teeth, or otherwise took an interest in him—some simply because they thought he was entertaining, some because they felt sorry for him, some
because they regarded him sentimentally as a relic of the Village of their youth, some because they enjoyed looking down on him, some for reasons that
they themselves probably weren’t at all sure of, and some because they believed that a book he had been working on for many years might possibly turn out
to be a good book, even a great one, and wanted to encourage him to continue working on it.
Gould called this book “An Oral History,” sometimes adding “of Our Time.” As he described it, the Oral History consisted of talk he had heard and had considered
meaningful and had taken down, either verbatim or summarized—everything from a remark overheard in the street to the conversation of a roomful of people
lasting for hours—and of essays commenting on this talk. “Yes, you’re right,” he once said to a detractor. “It’s only things I heard people say, but maybe
I have a peculiar ability—maybe I can understand the significance of what people say, maybe I can read its inner meaning. You might listen to a conversation
between two old men in a barroom or two old women on a park bench and think that it was the worst kind of bushwa, and I might listen to the same conversation
and find deep historical meaning in it.”
“In time to come,” he said on another occasion, “people may read Gould’s Oral History to see what went wrong with us, the way we read Gibbon’s ‘Decline
and Fall’ to see what went wrong with the Romans.”
He told people he met in Village joints that the Oral History was already millions upon millions of words long and beyond any doubt the lengthiest unpublished
literary work in existence but that it was nowhere near finished. He said that he didn’t expect it to be published in his lifetime, publishers being what
they were, as blind as bats, and he sometimes rummaged around in his pockets and brought out and read aloud a will he had made disposing of it. “As soon
as my demise as is convenient for all concerned,” he specified in the will, “my manuscript books shall be collected from the various and sundry places
in which they are stored and put on the scales and weighed, and two-thirds of them by weight shall be given to the Harvard Library and the other third
shall be given to the library of the Smithsonian Institution.”
Gould almost always wrote in composition books—the kind that schoolchildren use, the kind that are ruled and spine-stitched and paper-bound and have the
multiplication table printed on the back. Customarily, when he filled a book, he would leave it with the first person he met on his rounds whom he knew
and trusted—the cashier of an eating place, the proprietor of a barroom, the clerk of a hotel or flophouse—and ask that it be put away and kept for him.
Then, every few months, he would go from place to place and pick up all the books that had accumulated. He would say, if anyone became curious about this,
that he was storing them in an old friend’s house or in an old friend’s apartment or in an old friend’s studio. He hardly ever identified any of these
old friends by name, although sometimes he would describe one briefly and vaguely—“a classmate of mine who lives in Connecticut and has a big attic in
his house,” he would say, or “a woman I know who lives alone in a duplex apartment,” or “a sculptor I know who has a studio in a loft building.” In talking
about the Oral History, he always emphasized its length and its bulk. He kept people up to date on its length. One evening in June, 1942, for example,
he told an acquaintance that at that moment the Oral History was “approximately nine million two hundred and fifty-five thousand words long, or,” he added,
throwing his head back proudly, “about a dozen times as long as the Bible.” He once estimated that if the composition books containing the Oral History
were brought together and laid one on top of another, they would make a stack over seven feet high.
In 1952, Gould collapsed on the street and was taken to Columbus Hospital. Columbus transferred him to Bellevue, and Bellevue transferred him to the Pilgrim
State Hospital, in West Brentwood, Long Island. In 1957, he died there, aged sixty-eight, of arteriosclerosis and senility. Directly after the funeral,
friends of his in the Village began trying to find the manuscript of the Oral History. After several days, they turned up three things he had written—a
poem, a fragment of an essay, and a begging letter. In the next month or so, they found a few more begging letters. From then on, they were unable to find
anything at all. They sought out and questioned scores of people in whose keeping Gould might conceivably have left some of the composition books, and
they visited all the places he had lived in or hung out in that they could remember or learn about, but without success. Not a single one of the composition
books was found, or has ever been found.
In 1942, for reasons that I will go into later, I became involved in Gould’s life, and I kept in touch with him during his last ten years in the city.
I spent a good many hours during those years listening to him. I listened to him when he was sober and I listened to him when he was drunk. I listened
to him when he was cast down and meek—when, as he used to say, he felt so low he had to reach up to touch bottom—and I listened to him when he was in moods
of incoherent exaltation. I got so I could put two and two together and make at least a little sense out of what he was saying even when he was very drunk
or very exalted or in both states at once, and gradually, without intending to, I learned some things about him that he may not have wanted me to know,
or, on the other hand, since his mind was circuitous and he loved wheels within wheels, that he may very well have wanted me to know—I’ll never be sure.
In any case, I am quite sure that I know why the manuscript of the Oral History has not been found.
When Gould died, I made a resolution to keep this as well as some of the other things I had inadvertently learned about him to myself—to do otherwise,
it seemed to me at the time, would be disloyal; let the dead past bury its dead—but since then I have come to the conclusion that my resolution was pointless
and that I should tell what I know, and I am going to do so.
Before I go any further, however, I feel compelled to explain how I came to this conclusion.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-new-yorker-documentary-holy-holocaust-family-history-stands-between-two-friends
Holy Holocaust: Family History Stands Between Two Friends
A few months ago, while trying to make some room in my office, I got out a collection of papers relating to Gould that filled half a drawer in a filing
cabinet: notes I had made of conversations with him, letters from him and letters from others concerning him, copies of little magazines containing essays
and poems by him, newspaper clippings about him, drawings and photographs of him, and so on. I had lost a good deal of my interest in Gould long before
he reached Pilgrim State—as he grew older, his faults intensified, and even those who felt most kindly toward him and continued to see him got so they
dreaded him—but as I went through the file folders, trying to decide what to save and what to throw out, my interest in him revived. I found twenty-nine
letters, notes, and postal cards from him in the folders. I started out just glancing through them and ended up rereading them with care. One letter was
of particular interest to me. It was dated February 12 or 17 or 19 (it was impossible to tell which), 1946; his handwriting had become trembly, and it
always had been hard to read.
“I ran into a young painter I know and his wife in the Minetta Tavern last night,” he wrote, “and they told me they had recently gone to a party in the
studio of a woman painter named Alice Neel, who is an old friend of mine, and that during the evening Alice showed them a portrait of me she did some years
ago. I asked them what they thought of it. The young painter’s wife spoke first. ‘It’s one of the most shocking pictures I’ve ever seen,’ she said. And
he agreed with her. ‘You can say that again,’ he said. This pleased me very much, especially the young man’s reaction, as he is a hot-shot abstractionist
and way up front in the avant garde and isn’t usually impressed by a painting unless it is totally meaningless and was completed about half an hour ago.
I posed for this painting in 1933, and that was thirteen years ago, and the fact that people still find it shocking speaks well for it. Speaks well for
the possibility that it may have some of the one quality that all great paintings have in common, the power to last. I may have written to you about this
painting before, or talked about it, but I am not sure. If so, bear with me; my memory is going. There are quite a few paintings in studios around town
that are well known to people in the art world but can’t be exhibited in galleries or museums because they probably would be considered obscene and might
get the gallery or museum in trouble, and this is one of them. Hundreds of people have seen it through the years, many of them painters who have expressed
admiration for it, and I have a hunch that one of these days, the way people are growing accustomed to the so-called obscene, it will hang in the Whitney
or the Metropolitan. Alice Neel comes from a small town near Philadelphia and went to the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia. She used to have
a studio in the Village, but she moved uptown long ago. She is highly respected by many painters of her age and generation, although she is not too well
known to the general public. She has work in important collections, but this may be her best work. Her best work, and it can’t be shown in public. A kind
of underground masterpiece. I wish sometime you’d go and see it. I’d be interested to know what you think. She doesn’t show it to just anyone who asks,
of course, but I will give you her telephone number and if you tell her I want you to see it I’m sure she will show it to you. . . .”
The day that I received this letter, I remembered, I had tried several times to call Miss Neel, but her telephone hadn’t answered, and I had filed the
letter away and Gould had never brought the matter up again and I had forgotten all about it. This day, on an impulse, I called Miss Neel and got her,
and she said that of course I could see the Gould portrait, and gave me the address of her studio. The address turned out to be a tenement in a Negro and
Puerto Rican neighborhood on the upper East Side, and Miss Neel turned out to be a stately, soft-spoken, good-looking blond woman in her middle fifties.
Her studio was a floor-through flat on the third floor of the tenement. Against a wall in one room was a two-tiered rack filled with paintings resting
on their sides. The Gould portrait, she said, was on the top tier. She had to stand on a chair and take out several other paintings in order to get at
it. As she took them out, she held them up for me to see, and commented on them, and her comments were so offhand they sounded cryptic. One painting showed
an elderly man lying in a coffin. “My father,” she said. “Head clerk in the per-diem department.” “Excuse me,” I said, wondering what a per-diem department
was but not really wanting to know, “the per-diem department of what?” “Excuse me,” she said. “Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia.” Another was a painting
of a young Puerto Rican man sitting up in a hospital bed and staring wide-eyed into the distance. “T.b.,” she said. “Dying, but he didn’t. Recovered and
became a codeine addict.” Another was a painting of a woman in childbirth. Then came a painting of a small, bearded, bony, gawky, round-shouldered man
who was strip stark naked except for his glasses, and this was the portrait of Gould. It was a fairly large painting, and Gould seemed almost life-size
in it. The background was vague; he appeared to be sitting on a wooden bench in a steam bath, waiting for the steam to come on. His bony hands were resting
on his bony knees, and his ribs showed plainly. He had one set of male sexual organs in the proper place, another set was growing from where his navel
should have been, and still another set was growing from the wooden bench. Anatomically, the painting was fanciful and grotesque but not particularly shocking;
except for the plethora of sexual organs, it was a strict and sober study of an undernourished middle-aged man. It was the expression on Gould’s face that
was shocking. Occasionally, in one of his Village hangouts or at a party, Gould would become so full of himself that he would abruptly get to his feet
and rush about the room, bowing to women of all ages and sizes and degrees of approachability, and begging them to dance with him, and sometimes attempting
to embrace and kiss them. After a while, rebuffed on all sides, he would get tired of this. Then he would imitate the flight of a sea gull. He would hop
and skip and leap and lurch about, flapping his arms up and down and cawing like a sea gull as he did so. “Scree-eek!” he would cry out. “I’m a sea gull.”
He would keep on doing this until people stopped looking at him and resumed their conversations. Then, to regain their attention, he would take off his
jacket and shirt and throw them aside and do a noisy, hand-clapping, breast-beating, foot-stamping dance. “Quiet!” he would cry out. “I’m doing a dance.
It’s a sacred dance. It’s an Indian dance. It’s the full-moon dance of the Chippewas.” His eyes would glitter, his lower jaw would hang loose like a dog’s
in midsummer and he would pant like a dog, and on his face would come a leering, gleeful, mawkishly abandoned expression, half satanic and half silly.
Miss Neel had caught this expression. “Joe Gould was very proud of this picture and used to come and sit and look at it,” Miss Neel said. She studied Gould’s
face with affection and amusement and also with what seemed to me to be a certain uneasiness. “I call it ‘Joe Gould,’ ” she continued, “but I probably
should call it ‘A Portrait of an Exhibitionist.’ ” A few moments later, she added, “I don’t mean to say that Joe was an exhibitionist. I’m sure he wasn’t—technically.
Still, to be perfectly honest, years ago, watching him at parties, I used to have a feeling that there was an old exhibitionist shut up inside him and
trying to get out, like a spider shut up in a bottle. Deep down inside him. A frightful old exhibitionist—the kind you see late at night in the subway.
And he didn’t necessarily know it. That’s why I painted him this way.” I suddenly realized that in my mind I had replaced the real Joe Gould—or at least
the Joe Gould I had known—with a cleaned-up Joe Gould, an after-death Joe Gould. By forgetting the discreditable or by slowly transforming the discreditable
into the creditable, as one tends to do in thinking about the dead, I had, so to speak, respectabilized him. Now, looking at the shameless face in the
portrait, I got him back into proportion, and I concluded that if it was possible for the real Joe Gould to have any feeling about the matter one way or
the other he wouldn’t be in the least displeased if I told anything at all about him that I happened to know. Quite the contrary.
Ifirst saw Gould in the winter of 1932. At that time, I was a newspaper reporter, working mostly on crime news. Every now and then, I covered a story in
Women’s Court, which in those days was in Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, in Greenwich Village. In the block below the courthouse
there was a Greek restaurant, named the Athens, that was a hangout for people who worked in the court or often had business in it. They usually sat at
a long table up front, across from the cashier’s desk, and Harry Panagakos, the proprietor, sometimes came over and sat with them. One afternoon, during
a court recess, I was sitting at this table drinking coffee with Panagakos and a probation officer and a bail bondsman and a couple of Vice Squad detectives
when a curious little man came in. He was around five feet four or five, and quite thin; he could hardly have weighed more than ninety pounds He was bareheaded,
and he carried his head cocked on one side, like an English sparrow. His hair was long, and he had a bushy beard. There were streaks of dirt on his forehead,
obviously from rubbing it with dirty fingers. He was wearing an overcoat that was several sizes too large for him; it reached almost to the floor. He held
his hands clasped together for warmth—it was a bitter-cold day—and the sleeves of the overcoat came down over them, forming a sort of muff. Despite his
beard, the man, in the oversized overcoat, bareheaded and dirty-faced, had something childlike and lost about him: a child who had been up in the attic
with other children trying on grownups’ clothes and had become tired of the game and wandered off. He stood still for a few moments, getting his bearings,
and then he came over to Panagakos and said, “Can I have something to eat now, Harry? I can’t wait until tonight.” At first, Panagakos seemed annoyed,
but then he shrugged his shoulders and told the man to go on back and sit down and he would step into the kitchen in a few minutes and ask the chef to
fix him something. Looking greatly relieved, the man walked hurriedly up the aisle between two rows of tables. To be precise, he scurried up the aisle.
“Who in God’s holy name is that?” asked one of the detectives. Panagakos said that the man was one of the Village bohemians. He said that the bohemians
were starving to death—in New York City, the winter of 1932 was the worst winter of the depression—and that he had got in the habit of feeding some of
them. He said that the waiters set aside steaks and chops that people hadn’t finished eating, and other pieces of food left on plates, and wrapped them
in wax paper and put them in paper bags and saved them for the bohemians. Panagakos said that all he asked was that they wait until just before closing
time, at midnight, to come in and collect the food, so the sight of them trooping in and out wouldn’t get on the nerves of the paying customers. He said
that he was going to give this one some soup and a sandwich but that he’d have to warn him not to come in early again. The detective asked if the man was
a poet or a painter. “I don’t know what you’d call him,” Panagakos said. “His name is Joe Gould, and he’s supposed to be writing the longest book in the
history of the world.”
Toward the end of the thirties, I quit my newspaper job and went to work for The New Yorker. Around the same time, I moved to the Village, and I began
to see Gould frequently. I would catch glimpses of him going into or coming out of one of the barrooms on lower Sixth Avenue—the Jericho Tavern or the
Village Square Bar & Grill or the Belmar or Goody’s or the Rochambeau. I would see him sitting scribbling at a table in the Jackson Square branch of the
Public Library, or I would see him filling his fountain pen in the main Village post office—the one on Tenth Street—or I would see him sitting among the
young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan
Square. I worked a good deal at night at that time, and now and then, on my way home, around two or three in the morning, I would see him on Sixth Avenue
or on a side street, hunched over and walking along slowly and appearing to be headed nowhere in particular, almost always alone, almost always carrying
a bulging brown pasteboard portfolio, sometimes mumbling to himself. In my eyes, he was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man. I never
saw him without thinking of the Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman, or of a silent old man called Swamp Jackson who lived
alone in a shack on the edge of a swamp near the small farming town in the South that I come from and wandered widely on foot on the back roads of the
countryside at night, or of one of those men I used to puzzle over when I read the Bible as a child, who, for transgressions that seemed mysterious to
me, had been “cast out.”
One morning in the summer of 1942, sitting in my office at The New Yorker, I thought of Gould—I had seen him on the street the night before—and it occurred
to me that he might be a good subject for a Profile. According to some notes I made at the time—I made notes on practically everything I had to do with
Gould, and I found these in the file drawer with the rest of the Gould memorabilia—it was the morning of June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. I happened
to be free to start on something new, so I went in and spoke to one of the editors about the idea. I remember telling the editor that I thought Gould was
a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested
me most, that and his Oral History, and not his bohemianism; in my time, I had interviewed a number of Greenwich Village bohemians and they had seemed
to me to be surprisingly tiresome. The editor said to go ahead and try it.
I was afraid that I might have trouble persuading Gould to talk about himself—I really knew next to nothing about him, and had got the impression that
he was austere and aloof—and I decided that I had better talk with some people who knew him, or were acquainted with him, at least, and see if I could
find out the best way to approach him. I left the office around eleven and went down to the Village and began going into places along Sixth Avenue and
bringing up Gould’s name and getting into conversations about him with bartenders and waiters and with old-time Villagers they pointed out for me among
their customers. In the middle of the afternoon, I telephoned the switchboard operator at the office and asked if there were any messages for me, as I
customarily did when I was out, and she immediately switched me to the receptionist, who said that a man had been sitting in the reception room for an
hour or so waiting for me to return. “I’ll put him on the phone,” she said. “Hello, this is Joe Gould,” the man said. “I heard that you wanted to talk
to me, so I dropped in, but the thing is, I’m supposed to go to the clinic at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and pick
up a prescription for some eye trouble I’ve been having, and if it’s one kind of prescription it won’t cost anything but if it’s another kind it may cost
around two dollars, and I’ve just discovered that I don’t have any money with me, and it’s getting late, and I wonder if you’d ask your receptionist to
lend me two dollars and you can pay her back when you come in and we can meet any time you say and have a talk and I’ll pay you back then.” The receptionist
broke in and said that she would lend him the money, and then Gould came back on the phone and we agreed to meet at nine-thirty the next morning in a diner
on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, called the Jefferson. He suggested both the time and the place.
When I got back to the office, I gave the receptionist her two dollars. “He was a terribly dirty little man, and terribly nosy,” she said, “and I was glad
to get him out of here.” “What was he nosy about?” I asked. “Well, for one thing,” she said, “he wanted to know how much I make. Also,” she continued,
handing me a folded slip of paper, “he gave me this note as he was leaving, and told me not to read it until he got on the elevator.” “You have beautiful
shoulders, my dear,” the note said, “and I should like to kiss them.” “He also left a note for you,” she said, handing me another folded slip of paper.
“On second thought,” this note said, “nine-thirty is a little early for me. Let us make it eleven.”
The Jefferson—it is gone now—was one of those big, roomy, jukeboxy diners. It was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, at the conjunction of Sixth Avenue,
Greenwich Avenue, Village Square, and Eighth Street, which is the heart and hub of the Village. It stayed open all day and all night, and it was a popular
meeting place. It had a long counter with a row of wobbly-seated stools, and it had a row of booths. When I entered it, at eleven, Gould was sitting on
the first counter stool, facing the door and holding his greasy old pasteboard portfolio on his lap, and he looked the worst I had ever seen him. He was
wearing a limp, dirty seersucker suit, a dirty Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and dirty sneakers. His face was greenish gray,
and the right side of his mouth twitched involuntarily. His eyes were bloodshot. He was bald on top, but he had hair sticking out in every possible direction
from the back and sides of his head. His beard was unkempt, and around his mouth cigarette smoke had stained it yellow. He had on a pair of glasses that
were loose and lopsided, and they had slipped down near the end of his nose. As I came in, he lifted his head a little and looked at me, and his face was
alert and on guard and yet so tired and so detached and so remotely reflective that it was almost impassive. Looking straight at me, he looked straight
through me. I have seen the same deceptively blank expression on the faces of old freaks sitting on platforms in freak shows and on the faces of old apes
in zoos on Sunday afternoons.
I went over and introduced myself to Gould, and he instantly drew himself up. “I understand you want to write something about me,” he said, in a chipper,
nasal voice, “and I greet you at the beginning of a great endeavor.” Then, having said this, he seemed to falter and to lose confidence in himself. “I
didn’t get much sleep last night,” he said. “I didn’t get home. That is, I didn’t get to the flophouse I’ve been staying in lately. I slept on the porch
at St. Joseph’s R.C. until they opened the doors for the first Mass, and then I went in and sat in a pew until a few minutes ago.” St. Joseph’s, at Sixth
Avenue and Washington Place, is the principal Roman Catholic church in the Village and one of the oldest churches in the city; it has two large, freestanding
columns on its porch, behind which, shielded from the street, generations of unfortunates have slept. “I died and was buried and went to Hell two or three
times this morning, sitting in that pew,” Gould continued. “To be frank, I have a hangover and I’m broke and I’m terribly hungry, and I’d appreciate it
very much if you’d buy me some breakfast.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Fried eggs on toast!” he called out commandingly to the counterman. “And let me have some coffee right away and some more with the eggs. Black coffee.
And make sure it’s hot.” He slid off the stool. “If you’re having something,” he said to me, “call out your order, and let’s sit in a booth. The waitress
will bring it over.”
We took a booth, and the waitress brought Gould’s coffee. It was in a thick white mug, diner style, and it was so hot it was steaming. Even so, tipping
the mug slightly toward him without taking it off the table, he bent down and immediately began drinking it with little, cautious, quick, birdlike sips
and gulps interspersed with little whimpering sounds indicating pleasure and relief, and almost at once color returned to his face and his eyes became
brighter and his twitch disappeared. I had never before seen anyone react so quickly and so noticeably to coffee; brandy probably wouldn’t have done any
more for him, or cocaine, or an oxygen tent, or a blood transfusion. He drank the whole mug in this fashion, and then sat back and held his head on one
side and looked me over.
“I suppose you’re puzzled about me,” he said. His tone of voice was condescending; he had got some of his confidence back. “If so,” he continued, “the
feeling is mutual, for I’m puzzled about myself, and have been since childhood. I seem to be a changeling or a throwback or a mutation of some sort in
a highly respectable old New England family. Let me give you a few biographical facts. My full name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, and I was named for my grandfather,
who was a doctor. During the Civil War, he was surgeon of the Fourth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, and later on he was a prominent obstetrician in
Boston and taught in the Harvard Medical School. The Goulds, or my branch of them, have been in New England since the sixteen-thirties and have fought
in every war in the history of the country, including King Philip’s War and the Pequot War. We’re related to many of the other early New England families,
such as the Lawrences and the Clarkes and the Storers. My grandmother on my father’s side was a direct descendant of John Lawrence, who arrived from England
on the Arbella in 1630 and was the first Lawrence in this country, and she could trace her ancestry back to a knight named Robert Lawrence who lived in
the twelfth century. She used to say that the Lawrence line, or this particular Lawrence line, was not only one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in
New England but also one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in England itself, and that we should never forget it.”
Gould abruptly began scratching himself. He went about it unself-consciously. He scratched the back of his neck, and then he thrust his hand inside his
shirt and scratched his chest and ribs.
“I should’ve been born in Boston,” he continued, “but I wasn’t. My father, whose name was Clarke Storer Gould, was also a doctor. He was a Bostonian, but
he had been prevailed upon to move out and practice in Norwood, Massachusetts, and he and my mother had been living there only a few months when I was
born. Norwood is a fairly good-sized old Yankee town about fifteen miles southwest of Boston. It’s a residential suburb, and it also has some printing
plants and some sheepskin tanneries and an ink factory and a glue works. I was born at high noon on September 12, 1889, in a flat over Jim Hartshorn’s
meat market. In Norwood, by the way, that’s pronounced ‘Jim Hatson.’ A year or so later, my father built a big house on Washington Street, the main street
of Norwood. Four-eighty-six Washington Street. It had three stones and twenty-one rooms, and it had gables and dormers and ornamental balconies and parquet
floors, and it was one of the show places of Norwood. There was a mirror in our front hall that was eight feet high and decorated with gold cherubim. There
were beautiful terra-cotta tiles around the fireplaces. There were diamond-shaped windows at the stair landings, and they had red, green, purple, and amber
panes.
“As I said, my grandfather and my father were doctors, and when I was growing up I was well aware that my father hoped I would follow in his footsteps,
just as he had followed in his father’s footsteps. He never said so, but it was perfectly obvious to me and to everybody else that that was what he wanted.
I loved my father, and I wanted him to think well of me, but I knew from the time I was a little boy and fainted at the sight of blood when I happened
to see our cook wring the neck of a chicken that I was going to be a disappointment to him, because I really couldn’t stand the idea of being a doctor;
I kept it to myself, but that was the last thing in the world I wanted to be. Not that I had anything else in mind. The truth is, I wasn’t much good at
anything—at home or at school or at play. To begin with, I was undersized; I was a runt, a shrimp, a peanut, a half-pint, a tadpole. My nickname, when
anybody thought to use it, was Pee Wee. Also, I was what my father called a catarrhal child—my nose ran constantly. Usually, when I was supposed to be
paying attention to something, I was busy blowing my nose. Also, I was just generally inept. Not long ago, looking up something in the unabridged dictionary,
I came across a word that sums up the way I was then, and, for that matter, the way I am now—‘ambisinistrous,’ or left-handed in both hands. My father
didn’t know what to make of me, and I sometimes caught him looking at me with a thoughtful expression on his face.”
Gould stood up and took off his lopsided glasses and peered desperately at the counterman, who was evidently putting off starting on Gould’s order until
he had attended to everyone else in the diner, including some people who had come in after we had sat down, but the counterman deliberately ignored him
and would not let him catch his eye.
“Anyhow,” Gould went on, sitting back down resignedly, “when I was around thirteen, a couple of things happened that showed me pretty clearly where I stood
in the world. At school, we used to do a lot of marching two by two. We’d march into assembly two by two, and we’d march out to recess two by two. I could
never keep in step, so they used to put me on the end of the line and I’d bring up the rear, marching by myself. This particular day, I had been kept in
after school, and the teacher had let me go to the library room to pick out a book to read, and I was alone in there and out of sight, squatting down at
a bookcase in the back of the room trying to decide between two books, when the principal of the school, who was a man, came in with one of the men teachers,
the math teacher. They each dumped some books down on the desk, and then they stood there a few moments, talking about one thing and another, and all of
a sudden I heard the principal say, ‘Did you notice the Gould boy today?’ The math teacher said something I didn’t catch, and then the principal said,
‘The disgusting little bastard can’t even keep in step with himself.’ The math teacher laughed and said something else I didn’t catch, and then they went
on out.
“Now, it so happened my father was on the school board and took a great interest in the school, and he and the principal saw quite a lot of each other.
They were really very good friends; the principal and his wife used to come to our house for dinner, and my father and mother used to go to their house
for dinner. Consequently, I was deeply shocked by the principal’s remark. It hurt to overhear myself being called a disgusting little bastard, but it was
the disrespect to my father that hurt the most. ‘The Gould boy’! That brought my father into it. If he had just said ‘Joseph Gould,’ it wouldn’t’ve been
so bad. It would’ve confined it to me. I felt that the principal had insulted my father. I felt that he had betrayed him. At the very least, he had made
fun of him behind his back. In some strange way, it made me feel closer to my father than I had ever felt before, and it made me feel sorry for him—it
made me want to make it up to him. So that night, after supper, I went into the parlor, where he was sitting reading, and I said to him, ‘Father, I’ve
been doing some thinking lately about what I’d like to be, and I’ve decided I’d like to study medicine and be a surgeon.’ I thought it would please him
twice as much if I said I wanted to be a surgeon. ‘That’ll be the day,’ my father said. ‘If you did become a surgeon, and if you performed operations the
way you do everything else, when you got through with a patient you’d have his insides so balled up you’d have his heart hanging upside down and his liver
turned around backward and his intestines wound around his lungs and his bladder joined on to his windpipe, and you’d have him walking on his hands and
breathing through his behind and making water out of his left ear.’ ”
Gould sighed, and a look of intense sadness passed over his face. “I held that remark against my father for a long time,” he said. “Every once in a while,
through the years, I’d remember it, and it would cut me to the quick. Then, years and years later, long after I had left home and long after my father
had died, I was walking along the street one night here in New York and happened to think of it, and it must’ve been the first time I had ever thought
of it objectively, for I suddenly burst out laughing.”
At this moment, the waitress put a plate of fried eggs on toast and another mug of coffee in front of Gould. As soon as she turned her back, he took up
a bottle of ketchup that was about half full, and emptied it on the plate, encircling the eggs with ketchup. Then he darted around to the next booth and
brought back another bottle of ketchup, which was perhaps a third full, and emptied this on the plate also, completely covering eggs and toast. “I don’t
particularly like the confounded stuff,” he said, “but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.”
He began eating, using a fork at first but quickly switching to a spoon. “Sometimes I go in a place and order a cup of tea,” he said confidingly, “and
I drink it and pay for it, and then I ask for a cup of hot water. The counterman thinks I’m going to make a second cup of tea with the same tea bag, which
he doesn’t mind: that’s all right. Instead of which, I pour some ketchup in, and I have a very good cup of tomato bouillon free of charge. Try it sometime.”
Gould finished his breakfast, and the waitress came to take away his plate. Catching sight of the empty ketchup bottles, she said, “You ought to have more
self-respect than do a thing like that.” “When I’m hungry, I don’t have any self-respect,” Gould said. “Anyhow, I didn’t do it.” He motioned with his head
in my direction. “He did it,” he said. “He turned both bottles up and drank them. You should’ve heard him. Glug, glug, glug! It was really quite embarrassing.
Besides—and this is something you people can’t seem to get through your heads—I’m not just an ordinary person, I’m Joe Gould—I’m Joe Gould, the poet; I’m
Joe Gould, the historian; I’m Joe Gould, the wild Chippewa Indian dancer; and I’m Joe Gould, the greatest authority in the world on the language of the
sea gull. I do you an honor by merely coming in here, and what do you do in return but bother me about such things as ketchup.” This did not amuse the
waitress. She was a portly, distracted, heavy-breathing woman, almost twice as big as Gould. “Who the hell do you think you are, you little rat?” she said.
“One of these days, I’m going to pick you up by that Joe Gould beard of yours and throw you out of here.” “Try it,” said Gould, his voice becoming surprisingly
intimidating, “and it’ll be you and I all over the floor.” He took a fistful of cigarette butts from a pocket of his seersucker jacket and put them on
the table. As he did so, a shower of tobacco crumbs fell on his lap and on the floor and on the table, and I was afraid that he and the waitress would
have some more words with each other. While she watched with disgust, Gould picked through the butts and chose one and fitted it in a long black cigarette
holder. Paying no attention to the waitress, he lit it with an arch-elegant, Chaplinlike flourish, and she walked away.
“Now,” he said, “to return to the story of my life for just a minute, I finished school in Norwood and then I went to Harvard. In 1911, I graduated from
Harvard, and I spent the next few years debating in my mind what I should do next. By 1915, I had about given up hope of coming to any conclusion about
this matter when I somehow became interested in the subject of eugenics. In fact, I became so interested that I borrowed some money from my mother and
went to the Eugenics Record Office, at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island—an organization connected with the Carnegie Institution—and took a summer course
in eugenical field-work methods. After that, I decided I ought to put what I had learned to some use, and I borrowed a little more money from my mother
and went out to North Dakota and began measuring the heads of Indians. In January and February, 1916, I measured the heads of five hundred Mandan Indians
on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and in March and April I measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and then my money
ran out. I wrote and asked my mother for more, and I received a telegram from her sending me my train fare and telling me to come home at once, which I
did, whereupon she told me that she and my father were in financial difficulties to the point they had had to sell our house and were now renting it by
the month from the new owner. It seems that a few years previous to this my father had invested his own money as well as the money his family had left
him in the stock of a company that had been formed to buy and develop a huge tract of land in Alaska. In other words, as smart as he was, my father had
bought some gold-mine stock. And while I was out in North Dakota he and my mother had found out that the stock was worthless.
“Well, I didn’t see how I could be of any help to my parents, and I really had enjoyed measuring heads, so I went to Boston and called on various relatives
and tried to raise money for another expedition to Indian reservations, but I was unsuccessful, to say the least. At this juncture in my life, my father
took it upon himself to find a job for me. He had a friend in Boston, a Mr. Pickett, who was the lawyer for an estate that owned several rows of dwelling
houses in Norwood. These houses were rented by the week to people who worked in the tanneries and the glue works, and Mr. Pickett offered me the job of
collecting the rents. My father was tired of what he called my shilly-shallying, and I knew it was either take this job or leave Norwood. I was terribly
mixed up in my feelings about Norwood. I really never had felt at home in it, but there were things about it that I liked very much, or had liked at one
time. I used to like to walk beside a little river that winds along the eastern and southern edges of it, the Neponset. And I used to like to wander around
in a weedy old tumbledown New England graveyard that was directly in back of our house on Washington Street. The weeds were waist-high, and you could lie
down and hide in them. You could hide in them and speculate on the rows upon rows of skeletons lying on their backs in the dirt down below. And I used
to like some of the old buildings downtown, the old wooden stores. And I used to like the smell from the tanneries, particularly on damp mornings. It was
a musky, vinegary, railroady smell. It was a mixture of the smells of raw sheepskins and oak-bark acid that they used in the tanning vats and coal smoke,
and it was a characteristic of the town. And I used to like a good many of the people—they had some old-Yankee something about them that appealed to me—but
as I grew up I gradually realized that I was a kind of fool to them. I found out that even some of the dignified old men that I admired and respected the
most made little jokes about me and laughed at me. I somehow just never fitted in. So, little by little, through the years, I had come to hate Norwood.
I had come to hate it with all my heart and soul. There were days, if wishes could kill, I would’ve killed every man, woman, and child in Norwood, including
my mother and father. So I told my father that I couldn’t accept Mr. Pickett’s offer. ‘I have decided,’ I said, ‘to go to New York and engage in literary
work.’ ‘In that case, Son,’ my father said, ‘you’ve made your bed and you can lie in it.’ I left Norwood a few days later. I left it with a light heart,
even though I knew in my bones that I was leaving it for good, except I might possibly go back in the course of time for such occasions as funerals—my
father’s funeral, my mother’s funeral, my own funeral. I hadn’t gone far, however, before I began having a reaction that took me by surprise. On the train,
all the way to New York, I was so homesick for Norwood that I had to hold on to myself to keep from getting off and turning around and going back. Even
today, I sometimes get really quite painfully homesick for Norwood. A sour smell that reminds me of the tanneries will bring it on, such as the smell from
a basement down in the Italian part of the Village where some old Italian is making wine. That’s one of the damndest things I ever found out about human
emotions and how treacherous they can be—the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of
the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.
“I came to New York with the idea in mind of getting a job as a dramatic critic, for I thought that that would leave me time to write novels and plays
and poems and songs and essays and an occasional scientific paper on some eugenical matter, and eventually I did succeed in getting a job as a sort of
half messenger boy, half assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the Evening Mail. One morning in the summer of 1917, I was sitting in the sun on the
back steps of Headquarters recovering from a hangover. In a second-hand bookstore, I had recently come across and looked through a little book of stories
by William Carleton, the great Irish peasant writer, that was published in London in the eighties and had an introduction by William Butler Yeats, and
a sentence in Yeats’s introduction had stuck in my mind: ‘The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to
each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.’ All at once, the idea for the Oral History occurred to
me: I would spend the rest of my life going about the city listening to people—eavesdropping, if necessary—and writing down whatever I heard them say that
sounded revealing to me, no matter how boring or idiotic or vulgar or obscene it might sound to others. I could see the whole thing in my mind—long-winded
conversations and short and snappy conversations, brilliant conversations and foolish conversations, curses, catch phrases, coarse remarks, snatches of
quarrels, the mutterings of drunks and crazy people, the entreaties of beggars and bums, the propositions of prostitutes, the spiels of pitchmen and peddlers,
the sermons of street preachers, shouts in the night, wild rumors, cries from the heart. I decided right then and there that I couldn’t possibly continue
to hold my job, because it would take up time that I should devote to the Oral History, and I resolved that I would never again accept regular employment
unless I absolutely had to or starve but would cut my wants down to the bare bones and depend on friends and well-wishers to see me through. The idea for
the Oral History occurred to me around half past ten. Around a quarter to eleven, I stood up and went to a telephone and quit my job.”
A throbbing quality had come into Gould’s voice.
“Since that fateful morning,” he continued, squaring his shoulders and dilating his nostrils and lifting his chin, as if in heroic defiance, “the Oral
History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock
and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.”
It was obvious that this was a set speech and that he had it down pat and that he had spoken it many times through the years and that he relished speaking
it, and it made me obscurely uncomfortable.
“Just now, when you told the waitress that you were an authority on the language of the sea gull,” I said, changing the subject, “did you mean it?”
Gould’s face lit up. “When I was a child,” he said, “my mother and I spent summers at a seaside town in Nova Scotia, a town called Clementsport, and every
summer an old man would catch me a sea gull for a pet, and I sometimes used to have the impression that my sea gull was speaking to me, or trying to. Later
on, when I was going to Harvard, I spent a great many Saturday afternoons sitting on T wharf in Boston listening very carefully to sea gulls, and finally
they got through to me, and little by little I learned the sea-gull language. I can understand it better than I can speak it, but I can speak it a lot
better than you might think. In fact, I have translated a number of famous American poems into sea gull. Listen closely!”
He threw his head back and began to screech and chirp and croak and mew and squawk and gobble and cackle and caw, occasionally punctuating these noises
with splutters. There was something singsong and sonorous in this racket that made it sound distantly familiar.
“Don’t you recognize it?” cried Gould excitedly. “It’s ‘Hiawatha’! It’s from the part called ‘Hiawatha’s Childhood.’ Listen! I’ll translate it back into
English:
By the shores of Gitchee Gurnee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them . . .”
Gould snickered; his spirits had risen the moment he had begun talking about sea gulls. “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translates perfectly into sea gull,”
he said. “On the whole, to tell you the truth, I think he sounds better in sea gull than he does in English. And now, with your kind permission,” he went
on, standing up and starting to get out of the booth, a leering expression appearing on his face as he did so, “I’ll step out in the aisle and give you
my interpretation of a hungry sea gull circling above a fish pier where they’re unloading fish.” I had been aware, out of the corner of an eye, that the
counterman had been watching us. Now this man spoke to Gould. “Sit down,” he said. Gould whirled around and looked at the counterman, and I expected him
to speak sharply to him, the way he had spoken to the waitress. He surprised me. He sat down meekly and obediently, without opening his mouth. Then, picking
up his portfolio and putting it under his arm, as if preparing to go, he leaned across the table and began talking to me in a low voice. “You know the
money I borrowed from you yesterday to get the eye prescription,” he said. “Well, I started over to the Eye and Ear Infirmary, but on the way something
came up, and when I got there the clinic was closed, and I’m in a worse fix today than yesterday as far as money is concerned, and the clinic closes earlier
on Thursdays than on Wednesdays, and I wonder if you could lend me two or three or four or maybe five dollars, so I can go get the prescription and start
using it. We can continue our talk some other time.”
“Of course,” I said.
“You won’t mind?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Except I was hoping I could see some of the Oral History and maybe read some of it.”
“I can easily arrange that,” Gould said.
He sat his portfolio on his lap and untied it and opened it and dug around in it and brought out two composition books and put them on the table. “You’ll
find a chapter of the Oral History in each of these,” he said. “I finished them only night before last. I’ve still got to polish them up a little, but
you won’t have any trouble reading them.” He kept on digging around in the portfolio, using both hands. “In the twenties and thirties, a few bits and pieces
and fragments of the Oral History were published in little magazines,” he said, “and I have copies of them somewhere in here.” He took a small, rolled-up
paper bag with a rubber band around it from the deepest part of the portfolio and looked at it inquisitively. “What in hell is this?” he said, opening
the bag and peering into it. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Cigarette butts.” He carefully put the bag back in the portfolio. “Sometimes, in wet weather or snow
all over the streets,” he said, “it’s good to have some butts stuck away.” Then he brought out four magazines one by one and stacked them on the table.
They were dog-eared and grease-spotted and coffee-stained.
“Here’s Ezra Pound’s old magazine the Exile,” he said, riffling the pages of the one on top. “The Exile lasted exactly four issues, and this is the second
issue—Autumn, 1927—and there’s a chapter from the Oral History in it. I have E. E. Cummings to thank for that. Cummings is one of my oldest friends in
New York. He and I come from pretty much the same kind of New England background, and our years at Harvard overlapped—my last year was his first year—but
I got to know him in the Village. Sometime around 1923 or ’24 or ’25, Cummings spoke to Pound about me and the Oral History, and then Pound wrote to me,
and we got into a correspondence that extended over several years. Pound became very enthusiastic about my plan for the History. He printed this little
selection in the Exile, and later on, in his book ‘Polite Essays,’ after speaking of William Carlos Williams as a great, neglected American writer, he
referred to me as ‘that still more unreceived and uncomprehended native hickory, Mr. Joseph Gould.’ And here’s Broom for August-November, 1923. It has
a chapter from the History—Chapter C-C-C-L-X-V-I-I-I. At that time I was numbering the chapters with Roman numbers. And here’s Pagany for April-June, 1931.
It has some snippets from the History.
“And here’s the greatest triumph of my life so far—the Dial for April, 1929. There are two essays from the Oral History in it. Marianne Moore, the poet,
was editor of the Dial, and her office was right down here in the Village—on Thirteenth Street, just east of Seventh Avenue. It was one of those old houses—red
brick, three stories high, a steep stoop leading up to the parlor floor, an ailanthus tree growing at a slant in front—that have always typified the Village
to me. I used to drop in there about once a week and sit in her outer office all morning and sometimes all afternoon, too, reading back copies, and whenever
I was able to wangle a little time with her I would try to get her to see the literary importance of the Oral History, and finally she printed these two
little essays. Everything else I’ve ever done may disappear, but I’ll still be immortal, just because of them. The Dial was the greatest literary magazine
ever published in this country. It published a great many masterpieces and near-masterpieces as well as a great many curiosities and monstrosities, and
there’ll be bound volumes of it in active use in the principal libraries of the world as long as the English language is spoken and read. ‘The Waste Land’
came out in it. So did ‘The Hollow Men.’ Eliot reviewed ‘Ulysses’ for it. Two great stories by Thomas Mann came out in it—‘Death in Venice’ and ‘Disorder
and Early Sorrow.’ Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ came out in it, and so did Hart Crane’s ‘To Brooklyn Bridge,’ and so did Sherwood Anderson’s ‘I’m a
Fool.’ Joseph Conrad wrote for it, and so did Joyce and Yeats and Proust, and so did Cummings and Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf and Pirandello and
George Moore and Spengler and Schnitzler and Santayana and Gorki and Hamsun and Stefan Zweig and Djuna Barnes and Ford Madox Ford and Miguel de Unamuno
and H. D. and Katherine Mansfield, and a hundred others. For centuries to come, people will be going through the bound volumes looking up things by those
writers, and now and then one of them will surely notice my two little essays and become curious about them and read them (God knows they aren’t very long),
and that’s closer to immortality than a good many of my rooting and tooting contemporaries are likely to get—best-sellers, interviews on the radio, the
dry little details of their dry little lives in Who’s Who, photographs of their empty faces in the book-review sections, six or seven divorced wives, and
all. Just look at some of the other things in this issue. A poem by Hart Crane. An essay by Logan Pearsall Smith. A couple of photographs of a sculpture
of a nude by Maillol. A Paris Letter by Paul Morand. A piece about the theatre by Padraic Colum. A book review by Bertrand Russell.”
Gould pushed the magazines and the composition books across the table to me. “Take them along and read them,” he said.
Outside the diner, on the sidewalk, we agreed to meet again on Saturday night. “But not in the diner,” Gould said. “I used to get along very well with
the countermen and the waitresses in there. They used to kid around with me and I used to kid around with them. But they seem to have turned against me.”
A deeply troubled look appeared on his face, a haunted look, and he was silent for a few moments, reflecting. Then he shrugged his shoulders, as if dismissing
the matter from his mind, but evidently the matter would not stay dismissed, for right away he started talking about it again. “In recent years,” he said,
“quite a few people have turned against me. Men and women all over the Village who once were good friends of mine now hate me and loathe me and despise
me. You’re bound to run into some of them, and they’ll probably give you various reasons why they feel that way, and I guess I ought to get in ahead of
them and give you the real reason. Would you like to hear it?”
I said that I would.
“The real reason,” he said, “is a certain poem I wrote.”
We walked slowly along Sixth Avenue.
“In the early thirties, because of the Depression,” he went on,” a good many people in the Village got interested in Marxism and became radicals. All of
a sudden, most of the poets down here became proletarian poets and most of the novelists became proletarian novelists and most of the painters became proletarian
painters. I know a woman who’s married to a rich doctor and collects art and has a daughter who’s a ballet dancer, and I ran into her one day and she informed
me very proudly that her daughter was now a proletarian ballet dancer. The trouble is, the more radical these people became, the more know-it-all they
became. And the more self-important. And the more self-satisfied. They sat around in the same old Village hangouts that they had sat around in when they
were just ordinary bohemians and they talked as much as they ever had, only now it wasn’t art or sex or booze that they talked about but the coming revolution
and dialectical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat and what Lenin meant when he said this and what Trotzky meant when he said that, and
they acted as if any conclusions they arrived at on these matters might have a far-reaching effect on the future of the whole world. In other words, they
completely lost their sense of humor. The way they talked about the proletariat, you’d think they were all the sons and daughters of iron puddlers, but
the truth was, a surprisingly large number of them came from families that were either middle-class or upper-class and either very well-to-do or really
quite rich. As time went on, I began to feel like a stranger among them. It wasn’t so much their politics that bothered me, beyond the fact that politics
of any kind bores the living hell out of me; it was the self-important way they talked about politics. As much as anything else, it was the way they said
‘we.’ Instead of ‘I think this’ or ‘I think that,’ it was always ‘We think this’ or ‘We think that.’ I couldn’t get used to the ‘we.’ I began to feel intimidated
by it. Once, trying to make a joke and lighten the atmosphere, I blurted out to one of them that I belonged to a party that had only one member and the
name of it was the Joe Gould Party. He said that every time I made such remarks and joked about serious matters I showed myself in my true colors. ‘We’re
on to you and people like you,’ he said ‘When you act the clown, all you’re doing is trying to hide the fact that you’re a reactionary. To be frank about
it,’ he said, ‘we would classify you as a parasite, a reactionary parasite. As for the Oral History,’ he said, ‘all you’re doing in that, as far as we’re
concerned, is collecting the verbal garbage of the bourgeoisie.’
“At that time, in the summer, one of the novelties of the Village was the sidewalk café in front of the Brevoort Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street.
It was just a couple of rows of tables set back behind a hedge growing in a row of wooden boxes painted white, but people thought it was very European
and very elegant. For some reason, this café was a great gathering place for the Village radicals. One afternoon in the summer of 1935, I was walking past
it and I didn’t have a penny in my pocket and I was hungry—not just a little hungry, the way I usually am, but so hungry I was dizzy and my eyes wouldn’t
focus right and my gums were sore and I had a sick headache and a dull, gnawing pain in the pit of my stomach—and a number of them were sitting there drinking
the best Martinis money could buy and eating good French cooking and gravely discussing some matter no doubt having to do with the coming revolution, when
a poem popped into my mind. I called it ‘The Barricades.’ That night, at a Village party, I stood up and said I had a proletarian poem I wanted to recite,
and I recited this poem. It really wasn’t much of a poem—in fact, it was just a piece of doggerel—but a surprising thing happened. Some of the people were
mildly amused by it and laughed a little, which was all I had expected and all I had wanted, but there were several Village radicals and radical sympathizers
present, including the man who had let me in on the fact that I was a reactionary parasite, and they were shocked. At first, I thought they were kidding
me, pulling my leg, but they weren’t, they were genuinely shocked—they looked at me the way deeply religious people might look at someone who had done
something horribly sacrilegious—and when they got over their shock they became angry. They became so angry and hysterical that I left the party, which
was away over on the east side of the Village, and started walking back to the west side. On Ninth Street, near University Place, I looked in the window
of a restaurant called Aunt Clemmy’s and saw a miscellaneous group of Villagers sitting around a table in there, some of whom I vaguely knew, and I decided
to try ‘The Barricades’ out on them. I went in and recited it to them, and the same thing happened—some laughed politely and some got blazing mad. Then
I went into a real old-time Village restaurant on Eighth Street, called Alice McCollister’s—the kind of place that has red water glasses—and recited it
to some people in there, and the same thing happened. Then I went over to Sheridan Square and went into a cafeteria that was the most popular late-at-night
bohemian hangout in the Village at the time, a Stewart’s cafeteria, and recited it in there, and the same thing happened. I was amazed at the fanatical
reaction some people had to the poem. They practically foamed at the mouth. At the same time, I was delighted. I began to spend a good many evenings just
going around the Village looking for opportunities to recite ‘The Barricades.’ Pretty soon, I found a way to make it even more inflammatory. Instead of
reciting it, I would work myself into a state and chant it. I would chant it in a highly excited voice, the voice of a flaming revolutionary, and shake
my fist at the end of each line. It got so, in some places in the Village, late at night, all I had to do was stand up and say that I had a proletarian
poem I wanted to recite and half the people would leap to their feet and try to stop me and the other half would leap to their feet and egg me on.
“I go to as many Village parties as I can. I go for the free food and liquor and for material for the Oral History. I’m invited to some, and I hear about
others on the Village grapevine and just go. One Saturday night a few months after I wrote ‘The Barricades,’ I showed up at a big party in a studio on
Washington Square South. I hadn’t been invited, but I knew the man and his wife who were giving it and I had been going uninvited to their parties for
years. When I rang the bell, the wife came to the door, and it didn’t seem to me that she was as friendly as she had been in times gone by, but she asked
me to come in. I went over and sat in a corner and had a number of drinks, after which it occurred to me that I should create a little diversion and repay
my hosts, the way a guest who’s a singer might repay his hosts by singing a song, so I stood up and announced that I had a proletarian poem I wanted to
recite. Everybody suddenly became quiet, and I took a quick look around the room. It was a big room and there were a lot of people in it, and every face
I looked at looked back at me with hatred. That didn’t particularly disturb me. I’m used to that. Then I took a closer look around, and here and there,
in among the faces of total strangers and the faces of people whom I knew but who meant nothing to me, I saw the faces of several men and women who had
always been ready and willing to give me a little money or stake me to a meal or help me out in various other ways, and their faces were as cold and hostile
as the others. And that did disturb me. That sobered me up immediately. I suddenly woke up to the fact that without quite realizing what I was doing I
had made God only knows how many enemies. Since then, I’ve been trying to repair the damage, but it doesn’t do any good. I never recite ‘The Barricades’
in public anymore—oh, I do if I’m sure of my audience—and quite a lot of time has gone by, but the Village radicals haven’t forgiven me. They cut me dead
on the street. If a group of them are sitting in a cafeteria and I sit down near them, they move away. If I stand near them at a bar, they move away. Some
of them used to welcome me when I showed up at parties at their places, but now they shut the door in my face. And I’ve found out that every time my name
comes up in conversation they revile me and disparage me and vilify me. And the worst thing is, they communicate the way they feel about me to others.
Sooner or later, they’ll turn everybody in the Village against me The countermen and the waitresses in the diner, for example—I’m sure they’ve turned against
me simply because they’ve heard some of the Village radicals making remarks about me and running me down. Oh, well, what’s done’s done. Here,” he said,
handing me his portfolio, “hold this, and I’ll recite ‘The Barricades’ for you.”
He straightened his tie and buttoned his dirty seersucker jacket. He drew himself excessively erect, like a schoolboy pledging allegiance to the flag.
Then, raising his right fist in the air, he recited the following poem:
“This prissy hedge in front of the Brevoort
Is but a symbol of the coming revolution.
These are the barricades,
The barricades,
The barricades.
And behind these barricades,
Behind these barricades,
Behind these barricades,
The Comrades die!
The Comrades die!
The Comrades die!
And behind these barricades,
The Comrades die—
Of overeating.”
Gould took back his portfolio. “On the other hand,” he said, “as far as the people in the diner are concerned, it may not be that at all. I’ve been terribly
run down and nervous this summer, and when I get that way, I scratch a lot. It’s just a nervous habit—I’ve been doing it since childhood. The people in
the diner have undoubtedly noticed me scratching, and they may have gotten it in their heads that I’m lousy, and that may very well be why they’ve turned
against me.” He had been speaking calmly, but now his manner changed. His face was abruptly contorted by an expression of pain and fury, and he spat on
the street. “The absolutely hideous and disgusting and unspeakable God-damned truth of the matter is,” he said, “I am lousy. I discovered it this morning
while I was sitting through all those Masses in St. Joseph’s. It’s the second time in a month. I’ll have to go to the Municipal Lodging House tonight and
take a bath and let them put my clothes in the fumigator.” He shook his head, vaguely. “This is no way to live,” he said—and his voice sounded defeated—“but
it’s the only way I can live and work on the Oral History.”
I started to try to say something optimistic but sensed that I ran the risk of being presumptuous; a man who has no lice on him is not in a very good position
to minimize the disagreeableness of lice if he is talking to a man who is crawling with them, so I changed the subject to where we should meet on Saturday
night. We decided that we would meet in Goody’s, one of the saloons on Sixth Avenue in the Village. Then we said goodbye, and Gould started across the
street. After he had gone a few steps, he suddenly did an about-face and hurried back to me.
“I just remembered something else I want to tell you,” he said. “Something about the Dial. For a magazine of its kind, the Dial had a long life. It lasted
nine and a half years. As I told you, the issue that has my contribution in it—the one I just gave you—was the issue for April, 1929. It lasted only three
more issues. After the July issue, it discontinued publication, and that was a great shock to everyone who had any interest whatsoever in the cultural
life of this country. In the Village, about the only thing people wanted to talk about for weeks was who killed the Dial or what killed the Dial. I wrote
a poem about this.”
Gould drew himself erect, as he had done before, and recited this poem:
“ ‘Who killed the Dial?’
‘Who killed the Dial?’
‘I,’ said Joe Gould,
‘With my inimitable style,
I killed the Dial.’ ”
As he recited it, he watched my face. When he finished it, I laughed more than he had expected me to, I think, and I was struck by how much pleasure this
gave him. His bloodshot little eyes glowed with pleasure. Then, giggling, he hurried off.
It was a cloudy day and looked as if it might pour down any minute, but I disregarded the weather and went over and sat on a bench under the big old elm
in the northwest corner of Washington Square and opened one of Gould’s composition books. On the first page was carefully lettered, “death of dr. clarke
storer gould. a chapter of joe gould’s oral history.” The chapter was divided into four sections, and contained descriptions of Gould’s father’s final
illness (he had blood poisoning), death (he died in the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, in Boston, in March, 1919, aged fifty-four), funeral (he had a big
funeral in Norwood), and cremation. Gould’s writing was very much like his conversation; it was a little stiff and stilted and mostly rather dull, but
enlivened now and then by a surprising observation or bit of information or by sarcasm or malice or nonsense. It was full of digressions; there were digressions
that led to other digressions, and there were digressions within digressions. Gould’s father had belonged to the Universalist Church and the Masons, and
his funeral service had been conducted jointly by the pastor of the local Universalist church and the chaplain and the Worshipful Master of the local Masonic
lodge. Gould described the Universalist part of the service, and went from that to a discussion of the subtle differences between the members of the Universalist,
Unitarian, and Congregational churches in New England towns, and went from that to a discussion of the differences between an Easter service he had once
attended in an Albanian Orthodox Catholic church in Boston with a friend of his, an Albanian student at Harvard, and Easter services he had attended in
Roman Catholic churches, and went from that to a description of a strange but unusually good meat stew he had once eaten in a basement restaurant in Boston
frequented by Albanian shoe-factory workers that the Albanian student had taken him to (“They said it was lamb and it may have been mutton,” he wrote,
“but it was probably goat, either that or horse meat, not that I have any objection to goat meat or horse meat, having had the experience of eating boiled
dog with the Chippewa Indians, which incidentally tasted like mutton, only sweeter, although I should point out here that eating dog has a ceremonial significance
to the Chippewas and might be compared to our communion services and consequently the taste per se is not of great importance”), and went from that to
a description of a baked-bean pot he had once seen in the window of an antique store on Madison Avenue that was exactly like the baked-bean pot used in
the kitchen of his home in Norwood when he was a child. “Gazing at that so-called antique baked-bean pot,” he wrote, “I felt for the first time that I
understood something about Time.” He then began a description of the Masonic part of his father’s funeral service, but went astray almost immediately with
a digression on the importance of the Masons and the Elks and the Woodmen of the World and similar fraternal orders in the night life of small towns, which
he interrupted at one point for a subsidiary digression on the subject of life insurance. “I wonder what Lewis and Clark would have thought of life insurance,”
he wrote in the course of the latter digression, “never mind Daniel Boone.” (He had run a line through “never mind” and had written “let alone” just above
it; then he had run a line through “let alone” and had written “not to speak of” just above it; then he had run a line through “not to speak of;” and then,
in the margin, beside “never mind,” he had written “stet.”) Scattered through the book were many sentences that were wholly irrelevant; they seemed to
be thoughts that had popped into his mind as he wrote, and that he had put down at once, because he didn’t want to forget them. In the description of the
Easter service in the Albanian church, for example, apropos of nothing that went before or came after, was this sentence: “Mr. Osgood, the Indian teacher
at Armstrong, N.D., said that whiskey made the Sioux murderous and the Chippewa good-natured.”
On the cover of the other composition book was lettered, “the dread tomato habit. a chapter of joe gould’s oral history.” I couldn’t make much sense out
of this chapter until I skipped around in it and found that it was mock-serious and that its purpose was to make fun of statistics. Gould maintained that
a mysterious disease was sweeping the country. “It is so mysterious that doctors are unaware of its existence, he wrote. “Furthermore, they do not want
to become aware of its existence because it is responsible for a high percentage of the human misfortunes ranging from acne to automobile accidents and
from colds to crime waves that they blame directly or indirectly on microbes or viruses or allergies or neuroses or psychoses and get rich by doing so.”
Gould devoted several pages to a description of the nature of the disease, and then stated that he knew the cause of it and was the only one who did. “It
is caused by the increased consumption of tomatoes both raw and cooked and in the form of soup, sauce, juice, and ketchup,” he wrote, “and therefore I
have named it solanacomania. I base this name on Solanaceae, the botanical name for the dreadful nightshade family, to which the tomato belongs.” At this
point, Gould began filling page after page with unrelated statistics that he had obviously copied out of the financial and business sections of newspapers.
“If this be true,” he wrote after each statistic, “this also must be true,” and then he introduced another statistic. He filled twenty-eight pages with
these statistics. “And now,” he wrote, winding up the chapter, “I hope I have proven, and I have certainly done so to my own satisfaction, that the eating
of tomatoes by railroad engineers was responsible for fifty-three per cent of the train wrecks in the United States during the last seven years.”
I was puzzled. These chapters of the Oral History bore no relation at all that I could see to the Oral History as Gould had described it. There was no
talk or conversation in them, and unless they were looked upon as monologues by Gould himself there was nothing oral about them. I turned to the little
magazines Gould had given me, and found that his contributions to them were brief but rambling essays, each of which had a one- or two-word title and a
subtitle stating that it was “a chapter of” or “a selection from” the Oral History. In the Exile, his subject was “Art.” In Broom, his subject was “Social
Position.” He had two essays in the Dial—“Marriage” and “Civilization.” And he had two in Pagany—“Insanity” and “Freedom.” By this time, I had read enough
of Gould’s writing to know what these essays were. They were digressions cut out of chapters of the Oral History by the editors of the little magazines
or by Gould himself and given titles of their own. In other words, they were more of the same. I read them without much interest until, In the “Insanity”
essay, came across three sentences that stood out sharply from the rest. These sentences were plainly meant by Gould to be a sort of poker-faced display
of conceit, but it seemed to me that he told more in them than he had intended to. In the years to come, as I got to know him better, they would return
to my mind a great many times. They appeared at the end of a paragraph in which he had made the point that he was dubious about the possibility of dividing
people into sane and insane. “I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential
purposes calmly,” he wrote. “I suppose I feel about it in this way because I have a delusion of grandeur. I believe myself to be Joe Gould.”
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