Joe Gould's Secret Read online

  I asked about visiting him.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” she said. “Right now, he’s so suspicious and confused it might do him more harm than good. He probably wouldn’t know you. And if he did, trying to talk to you would just tire him out. As a matter of fact, if you want to do him a great favor, don’t tell his friends in the Village where he is. At least, not now. Just keep it to yourself. Just forget I ever told you. We had another well-known bohemian in Pilgrim State a year or so ago, and people from the Village came out in droves to visit him, men bohemians and women bohemians, big bohemians and little bohemians, old bohemians and young bohemians, their tongues going a mile a minute, and they certainly didn’t do him any good. Every time we got him to the point where he seemed to be almost reaching shore, so to speak, some of them would come out and push him back in. They’d push him back in and hold his head under. The main reason they came out wasn’t to see him anyway but to try and get one of the psychiatrists aside and impress him or her with how much they knew about psychiatry—a subject, I might add, about which they were fantastically ill-informed.”

  I decided that for the time being I would do as she said and keep Gould’s whereabouts to myself.

  Pretty soon, a number of rumors about Gould sprang up in the Village. The most persistent rumor was that he had inherited a little money and had gone back to Massachusetts to live, and this gradually became the accepted explanation for his absence. A good many people did not believe this, I feel sure, or did not quite believe it, but they chose to appear to believe it, thereby washing their hands of Gould.

  By and by, I told several people that Gould was in Pilgrim State. I told them in confidence. The first person I told was an old, old friend of Gould’s named Edward Gottlieb, who was managing editor of the Long Island Press, a daily newspaper published out in Queens, at Jamaica. In his youth, Gottlieb had lived in the Village and had written poetry for little magazines and had hung out in bohemian joints, in one of which he had got acquainted with Gould. After deciding that he wasn’t a poet and never would be, he had become a newspaperman. He had worked for the Press for twenty-five years, progressing from reporter to city editor to managing editor, and at least once a month, and sometimes several times a month, during all those years, Gould had taken the subway out to Jamaica and had gone to his office and had got a contribution from him. I told Gottlieb for two-reasons. He had called me a couple of times about Gould and sounded worried about him, and I felt guilty about not telling him. The principal reason I told him, however, was that I happened to know he knew a great deal about state mental hospitals. In 1943, he and his newspaper had done an investigation of Creedmoor State Hospital, in Queens Village, that had led to an improvement of conditions not only in Creedmoor but also in other state hospitals, including Pilgrim State, and Governor Dewey had appointed him to the Board of Visitors at Creedmoor, I had once had a talk with him about this investigation, and I knew that he had a number of friends in medical and administrative capacities at Pilgrim State, and it seemed to me that he was in a position to be very helpful to Gould.

  Gottlieb said he would talk with his friends at Pilgrim State and do everything for Gould that he possibly could do. “The way it sounds,” he said, “I’m afraid there isn’t a hell of a lot that can be done. I’m afraid poor Joe is getting on down toward the end of the line.”

  From time to time thereafter, Gottlieb telephoned me and gave me news about Gould. “Joe’s worst symptom is apathy,” he said during one of these calls. “He mostly just sits and stares into the distance. However, every once in a while, the doctors say, something seem to stir in his mind and a smile comes on his face and he rouses himself and gets up and scampers around the ward and waves his arms up and down and makes strange, unearthly screeches until he wears himself out. He seems to be trying to communicate something with these screeches. The doctors and the nurses and the other patients don’t know what he’s doing, of course—they’re completely mystified—but I know what he’s doing, and I’m sure you do.”

  On Sunday, August 18, 1957, around eleven o’clock at night, Gottlieb telephoned me and said he had just been notified that Gould had died. We spoke for a few minutes about how sad it was, and then I asked him if Gould had left any papers.

  “No,” he said. “None at all. As the man at the hospital said, ‘Not a scratch.’ I was hoping that he had. I was particularly hoping that he had left some instructions about what he wanted done with the Oral History. He used to say that he wanted two-thirds of it to go to the Harvard Library and the other third to the Smithsonian Institution, but it doesn’t seem right to split it up that way. When scholars start using it as source material, it will be a nuisance if they have to go up to Cambridge to see one part of it and then down to Washington to see some other part. Maybe one institution could be prevailed upon to relinquish its share to the other, and then it could be kept intact. By the way, where is the Oral History?”

  I said that I didn’t know.

  Gottlieb’s voice instantly became concerned. “I took it for granted that you knew,” he said. “I took it for granted that Joe had told you.”

  I said that I didn’t know where the Oral History was, and that I didn’t know anybody who did know where it was.

  “Well,” said Gottlieb, “we’ll just have to start hunting for it. We’ll just have to start telephoning and get in touch with all the people who knew him best and call a meeting and form a committee and get busy and start hunting for it. It’s probably scattered all over. Some of it may still be stored in the cellar of that farmhouse near Huntington where he put it during the war—that stone cellar he was always talking about, the cellar on the duck farm—and some of it may be stored in the studios of friends of his in the Village, and some of it may be stored in storerooms in some of those hotels and flophouses he lived in. Do flophouses have storerooms? They must. People must leave things with the clerks in them for safe-keeping during the night the same as they do in other hotels, and then go off and forget all about them the same as they do in other hotels, and the flophouses must have to make some kind of provision for this. I confess I have no idea where to start. The first thing we’ll need is a list of addresses of places he lived in. Maybe you could start right now making such a list. You will help with this, won’t you? You will be on the committee?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Gottlieb was an energetic man, the kind of man who gets things done, and I could tell by the way he talked that he was going to get to work the first thing in the morning and start forming a committee, and that very soon the members of the committee would be rummaging around in farmhouses all over Long Island and in studios all over the Village and in flophouses all over the Bowery. I could save him a lot of trouble if I spoke up right then and told him what I knew about the Oral History—I could save him and his committee quite a wild-goose chase—but one of the few things I have learned going through life is that there is a time and a place for everything, and I didn’t think that this was the time or the place to be telling one of Joe Gould’s oldest friends that I didn’t believe the Oral History existed. Joe Gould wasn’t even in his grave yet, he wasn’t even cold yet, and this was no time to be telling his secret. It could keep. Let them go ahead and look for the Oral History, I thought. After all, I thought, I could be wrong. Hell, I thought—and the thought made me smile—maybe they’ll find it.

  Gottlieb repeated his question, this time a little impatiently. “You will be on the committee, won’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, continuing to play the role I had stepped into the afternoon I discovered that the Oral History did not exist—a role that I am only now stepping out of. “Of course I will.”

  (1964)

  A Biography of Joseph Mitchell

  Joseph Mitchell was a journalist best known for his career at the New Yorker, where he wrote profiles about some of New York’s most eccentric and offbeat people. His books include McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, My Ears Are Bent, Up in th
e Old Hotel, Old Mr. Flood, and Joe Gould’s Secret.

  Mitchell was born on his family’s farm near Fairmont, North Carolina, on July 27, 1908. His father, Averette “A. N.” Nance, had expanded his holdings to a substantial cotton and tobacco business involving farms, warehouses, and brokering. It was assumed that Mitchell, as the oldest son, would eventually take his place. However, to the disappointment of the family, Mitchell’s inability to do arithmetic was an insurmountable obstacle. When he graduated from high school, he left for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hoping to study medicine, but his mathematical paralysis eliminated that possibility as well. Though lacking the necessary credits to graduate, he received an excellent liberal arts education, taking all the courses that interested him—including the entire journalism catalogue. Having had several stories published while at Chapel Hill, among them one about the Fairmont tobacco market, which ran in the New York Herald Tribune, Mitchell decided that his future was in journalism. He arrived in New York City the day after the 1929 stock market crash with no job, little money, a green suitcase, and high hopes.

  Over the next few years Mitchell wrote feature and news stories for, first, the New York Herald Tribune and then for the World-Telegram, meeting tight deadlines and learning the city, walking for miles and living in different neighborhoods every month. He interviewed political figures, mobsters, cave dwellers, evangelists, strip teasers, and actors; covered the police beat; and sent daily reports from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial. He became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1938.

  Throughout his career Mitchell was famous for his extraordinary curiosity and interest in his subjects: “The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors—except W. C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit—and any actress under the age of thirty-five.”

  One of Mitchell’s most notable subjects was Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a homeless and belligerent Greenwich Village figure who was a descendant of a substantial New England family and, he claimed, a Harvard graduate. In 1942 Mitchell wrote “Professor Sea Gull,” a profile of Gould, who claimed to be writing an Oral History of the World. The story received a great deal of interest and attention, and many donations—shamelessly cadged from friends and strangers alike—were made to the Joe Gould Fund, on which he lived. In 1964, having endured a long and difficult association with Gould and having learned a great deal more about him, Mitchell wrote a second profile, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” which he then paired with the first in a book of the same name. Joe Gould’s Secret was later adapted into a film directed by Stanley Tucci, starring Tucci as Mitchell and Ian Holm as Gould.

  Much has been said about the “writer’s block” that Mitchell suffered at this time, from which he never recovered. He never published another piece. The many possible reasons for this are carefully discussed in Man in Profile, a recent biography by Thomas Kunkel. In 1993, a collection of his profiles and earlier stories was published in Up in the Old Hotel, earning him a whole new generation of fans. Mitchell never publicly acknowledged his thirty-two-year silence, and he still reported to the New Yorker offices every day. Although his colleagues could hear his typewriter, his lack of output was a subject that was never discussed with him. He remained on the payroll until he died in 1996.

  Although Mitchell had a close lifelong connection to Fairmont—he returned at least once a year and knew everything that was happening with his family, on the farms, and in the town—he continued to live in the small West Village apartment he shared with his wife, Therese, where they raised their daughters. When she died in 1980, after their forty-nine-year marriage, it was a blow from which he never recovered. Mitchell’s writing (and his not-writing) remains a subject of fascination, and he is considered one of the most memorable writers of his time.

  All photographs appear courtesy of the Estate of Joseph Mitchell.

  In 1909, Mitchell sits in the family high chair that he later passed down to his own grandchildren.

  Mitchell reads to his three siblings in their family home in Fairmont, North Carolina, circa 1918.

  Mitchell in 1925 at his high school graduation in Fairmont, North Carolina.

  Mitchell sits on a rocky Block Island beach in the 1930s.

  Mitchell covering the Bruno Hauptmann trial for the World-Telegram in January 1935.

  In 1948, Mitchell visits his family home in Fairmont, North Carolina, with his daughters, Nora and Elizabeth.

  Mitchell stands in front of his apartment building in the 1950s. He lived there from his early thirties until his death at age eighty-six, and raised his children in the home.

  Mitchell with his wife, Therese, in August, 1969. They were married for forty-nine years.

  Mitchell with his grandson in 1969 at a demolition site that would later serve as the location for the World Trade Center.

  Mitchell admires tobacco with his father, A. N., at the family farm in Fairmont, North Carolina, in 1972.

  In the 1970s, Mitchell enjoys the New York City streets that he famously explored throughout his career.

  In the 1990s, Mitchell returns to the Fulton Fish Market, which served as inspiration for his book Old Mr. Flood. Mitchell was a regular customer at the market for many decades.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Introduction copyright © 1996 by William Maxwell

  “Professor Sea Gull” copyright © 1942 by Joseph Mitchell, originally appeared in the December 12, 1942, issue of The New Yorker

  “Joe Gould’s Secret” copyright © 1964 by Joseph Mitchell, originally appeared in the September 19 and 26, 1964, issues of The New York

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2661-1

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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