Joe Gould's Secret Read online

  Gould is a native of Norwood, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He comes from a family of physicians. His grandfather, Joseph Ferdinand Gould, for whom he was named, taught in the Harvard Medical School and had a practice in Boston. His father, Clarke Storer Gould, was a general practitioner in Norwood. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps and died of blood poisoning in a camp in Ohio during the First World War. The family was well-to-do until Gould was about grown, when his father invested unwisely in the stock of an Alaska land company. Gould says he went to Harvard only because it was a family custom. “I did not want to go,” he wrote in one of his autobiographical essays. “It had been my plan to stay home and sit in a rocking chair on the back porch and brood.” He says that he was an undistinguished student. Some of his classmates were Conrad Aiken, the poet; Howard Lindsay, the playwright and actor; Gluyas Williams, the cartoonist; and Richard F. Whitney, former president of the New York Stock Exchange. His best friends were three foreign students—a Chinese, a Siamese, and an Albanian.

  Gould’s mother had always taken it for granted that he would become a physician, but after getting his A.B. he told her he was through with formal education. She asked him what he intended to do. “I intend to stroll and ponder,” he said. He passed most of the next three years strolling and pondering on the ranch of an uncle in Canada. In 1913, in an Albanian restaurant in Boston named the Scanderbeg, whose coffee he liked, he became acquainted with Theofan S. Noli, an archimandrite of the Albanian Orthodox Church, who interested him in Balkan politics. In February, 1914, Gould startled his family by announcing that he planned to devote the rest of his life to collecting funds to free Albania. He founded an organization in Boston called the Friends of Albanian Independence, enrolled a score or so of dues-paying members, and began telegraphing and calling on bewildered newspaper editors in Boston and New York City, trying to persuade them to print long treatises on Albanian affairs written by Noli. After about eight months of this, Gould was sitting in the Scanderbeg one night, drinking coffee and listening to a group of Albanian factory workers argue in their native tongue about Balkan politics, when he suddenly came to the conclusion that he was about to have a nervous breakdown. “I began to twitch uncontrollably and see double,” he says. From that night on his interest in Albania slackened.

  After another period of strolling and pondering, Gould took up eugenics. He has forgotten exactly how this came about. In any case, he spent the summer of 1915 as a student in eugenical field work at the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. This organization, endowed by the Carnegie Institution, was engaged at that time in making studies of families of hereditary defectives, paupers, and town nuisances in several highly inbred communities. Such people were too prosaic for Gould; he decided to specialize in Indians. That winter he went out to North Dakota and measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and of five hundred Mandans on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Nowadays, when Gould is asked why he took these measurements, he changes the subject, saying, “The whole matter is a deep scientific secret.” He was happy in North Dakota. “It was the most rewarding period of my life,” he says. “I’m a good horseman, if I do say so myself, and I like to dance and whoop, and the Indians seemed to enjoy having me around. I was afraid they’d think I was batty when I asked for permission to measure their noggins, but they didn’t mind. It seemed to amuse them. Indians are the only true aristocrats I’ve ever known. They ought to run the country, and we ought to be put on the reservations.” After seven months of reservation life, Gould ran out of money. He returned to Massachusetts and tried vainly to get funds for another head-measuring expedition. “At this juncture in my life,” he says, “I decided to engage in literary work.” He came to New York City and got a job as assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the Evening Mail. One morning in the summer of 1917, after he had been a reporter for about a year, he was basking in the sun on the back steps of Headquarters, trying to overcome a hangover, when the idea for the Oral History blossomed in his mind. He promptly quit his job and began writing. “Since that fateful morning,” he once said, in a moment of exaltation, “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.”

  Gould says that he rarely has more than a dollar at any one time, and that he doesn’t particularly care. “As a rule,” he says, “I despise money.” However, there is a widely held belief in the Village that he is rich and that he receives an income from inherited property in New England. “Only an old millionaire could afford to go around as shabby as you,” a bartender told him recently. “You’re one of those fellows that die in doorways and when the cops search them their pockets are just busting with bankbooks. If you wanted to, I bet you could step over to the West Side Savings Bank right this minute and draw out twenty thousand dollars.” After the death of his mother in 1939, Gould did come into some money. Close friends of his say that it was less than a thousand dollars and that he spent it in less than a month, wildly buying drinks all over the Village for people he had never seen before. “He seemed miserable with money in his pockets,” Gordon, the proprietor of the Vanguard, says. “When it was all gone, it seemed to take a load off his mind.” While Gould was spending his inheritance, he did one thing that satisfied him deeply. He bought a big, shiny radio and took it out on Sixth Avenue and kicked it to pieces. He has never cared for the radio. “Five minutes of the idiot’s babble that comes out of those machines,” he says, “would turn the stomach of a goat.”

  During the twenties and the early thirties Gould occasionally interrupted his work on the Oral History to pose for classes at the Art Students’ League and to do book-reviewing for newspapers and magazines. He says there were periods when he lived comfortably on the money he earned this way. Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the old Tribune, gave him a lot of work. In an entry in “A Bookman’s Daybook,” which is a diary of happenings in the New York literary world in the twenties, Rascoe told of an experience with Gould. “I once gave him a small book about the American Indians to review,” Rascoe wrote, “and he brought me back enough manuscript to fill three complete editions of the Sunday Tribune. I especially honor him because, unlike most reviewers, he has never dogged me with inquiries as to why I never run it. He had his say, which was considerable, about the book, the author, and the subject, and there for him the matter ended.” Gould says that he quit book-reviewing because he felt that it was beneath his dignity to compete with machines. “The Sunday Times and the Sunday Herald Tribune have machines that review books,” he says. “You put a book in one of those machines and jerk down a couple of levers and a review drops out.” In recent years Gould has got along on less than five dollars in actual money a week. He has a number of friends—Malcolm Cowley, the writer and editor; Aaron Siskind, the documentary photographer; Cummings, the poet; and Gordon, the night-club proprietor, are a few—who give him small sums of money regularly. No matter what they think of the Oral History, all these people have great respect for Gould’s pertinacity.

  Gould has a poor opinion of most of the writers and poets and painters and sculptors in the Village, and doesn’t mind saying so. Because of his outspokenness he has never been allowed to join any of the art, writing, cultural, or ism organizations. He has been trying for ten years to join the Raven Poetry Circle, which puts on the poetry exhibition in Washington Square each summer and is the most powerful organization of its kind in the Village, but he has been blackballed every time. The head of the Ravens is a retired New York Telephone Company employee named Francis Lambert McCrudden. For many years Mr. McCrudden was a collector of coins from coin telephones for the telephone company. He is a self-educated man and very idealistic. His favorite theme is the dignity of labor, and his major work is an autobiographical poem called “The Nickel Snatcher.” “We let
Mr. Gould attend our readings, and I wish we could let him join, but we simply can’t,” Mr. McCrudden once said. “He isn’t serious about poetry. We serve wine at our readings, and that is the only reason he attends. He sometimes insists on reading foolish poems of his own, and it gets on your nerves. At our Religious Poetry Night he demanded permission to recite a poem he had written entitled ‘My Religion.’ I told him to go ahead, and this is what he recited:

  ‘In winter I’m a Buddhist,

  And in summer I’m a nudist.’

  And at our Nature Poetry Night he begged to recite a poem of his entitled ‘The Sea Gull.’ I gave him permission, and he jumped out of his chair and began to wave his arms and leap about and scream, ‘Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!’ It was upsetting. We are serious poets and we don’t approve of that sort of behavior.” In the summer of 1942 Gould picketed the Raven exhibition, which was held on the fence of a tennis court on Washington Square South. In one hand he carried his portfolio and in the other he held a placard on which he had printed: “JOSEPH FERDINAND GOULD, HOT-SHOT POET FROM POETVILLE, A REFUGEE FROM THE RAVENS. POETS OF THE WORLD, IGNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS!” Now and then, as he strutted back and forth, he would take a leap and then a skip and say to passers-by, “Would you like to hear what Joe Gould thinks of the world and all that’s in it? Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!”

  (1942)

  Joe Gould’s Secret

  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 secondhand 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. Some talk has an obvious meaning and nothing more, he said, and some, often unbeknownst to the talker, has at least one other meaning and sometimes several other meanings lurking around inside its obvious meaning. The latter kind of talk, he said, was what he was collecting for the Oral History. He professed to believe that such talk might have great hidden historical significance. It might have portents in it, he said—portents of cataclysms, a kind of writing on the wall long before the kingdom falls—and he liked to quote a couplet from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

  The harlot’s cry from street to street

  Shall weave Old England’s winding-sheet.

  Everything depended, he said, on how talk was interpreted, and not everybody was able to interpret it. “Yes, you’re right,” he once said to a detractor of the Oral History. “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 after 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 b
ulk. He kept people up to date on its length. One evening in June, 1942, for example, he told an acquaintance that at the 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.”

  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.