Joe Gould's Secret Read online

  “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 Gitche Gumee,

  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 Trotsky 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 sacril
egious—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.