Joe Gould’s Teeth - The long-lost story of the longest book ever written

Annals of Annals July 27, 2015 Issue

Joe Gould’s Teeth

.

By Jill Lepore

• The New Yorker

Table of Contents

Joseph Mitchell thought that Gould’s Oral History didn’t exist. He was wrong. one woman sent Mitchell a notebook of Gould’s from 1923. “I have trunks full!” she wrote. Credit Photograph by William Mebane; From Left to Right: Courtesy Fales Library, N.Y.U.; Philippe Halsman / Magnum; Courtesy Joseph Freeman Collection / Hoover Institution Archives

little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where

to find them

— E. E. Cummings

For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he’d been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.

He wrote with a fountain pen. He filled it with ink he stole from the post office. “I have created a vital new literary form,” he boasted. “Unfortunately, my manuscript is not typed.”

He told everyone who would listen that he was writing down nearly everything anyone said to him. “I am trying to record these complex times with the technique of a Herodotus or Froissart,” he explained to the Harvard historian George Sarton, in 1931, soliciting support. Herodotus wrote his Histories in ancient Greece; Jean Froissart wrote his Chronicles in medieval Europe. Gould was writing his history, a talking history, in modern America. “My book is very voluminous,” Gould told Sarton:

I imagine that the most valuable sections will be those which deal with groups that are inarticulate such as the Negro, the reservation Indian and the immigrant. It seems to me that the average person is just as much history as the ruler or celebrity as he illustrates the social forces of heredity and environment. Therefore I am trying to present lyrical episodes of everyday life. I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.

He called it “The Oral History of Our Time.” (The title, with its ocular “O”s, looks very much like a pair of spectacles.) He told the poet Marianne Moore that he’d come up with a better title when she was editing two chapters of it for The Dial. “mEO TEMPORE seems to me intrinsically a good title, but not better than the one we have,” Moore wrote back.

Writers loved to write about him, the writer who could not stop writing. “The history is the work of some fifteen years of writing in subway trains, on ‘El’ platforms, in Bowery flop houses,” the poet Horace Gregory wrote in The New Republic, in 1931. Five years later, Gould told a reporter, “Havelock Ellis has compared my book to Samuel Pepys’ Diary, because I try to get the forgotten man into history.” He wrote, he drank, he wrote, he begged, he wrote, he starved. “Met Joe il y a quesques jours &,b jeezuz, never have I beheld a corpse walking,” E. E. Cummings wrote to Ezra Pound in 1935. Dwight Macdonald, an editor at the Partisan Review, addressed the question of storage: “He has in 25 years managed to fill incalculable notebooks which in turn fill incalculable boxes.” He kept them in numberless closets and countless attics. “The stack of manuscripts comprising the Oral History has passed 7 feet,” a reporter announced in 1941. Gould was five feet four. His friends wished to have that stack published. “I want to read Joe Gould’s Oral History,” the short-story writer William Saroyan declared. “Harcourt, Brace; Random House; Scribner’s; Viking; Houghton, Mifflin; Macmillan; Doubleday, Doran; Farrar and Rinehart; all of you—for the love of Mike, are you publishers, or not? If you are, print Joe Gould’s Oral History. Long, dirty, edited, unedited, any how—print it, that’s all.” No one ever did.

And no one knew quite where it was. “The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay,” Joseph Mitchell reported in his first piece about Gould, published in The New Yorker in 1942. “It may well be the lengthiest unpublished work in existence.”

Mitchell hadn’t read more than a few pages. Gould had little use for readers. “I would continue to write if I were the sole survivor of the human race,” he said. It’s not as though no one had read the Oral History, but no one had read all of it, nine million words and counting. “Mr. Ezra Pound and I once saw a fragment of it running to perhaps 40,000 words,” Edward J. O’Brien, the editor of “Best American Short Stories,” testified, deeming it to have “considerable psychological and historical importance.” It was also a mess. Pound put it delicately: “Mr. Joe Gould’s prose style is uneven.” Gould had an answer for that. “My history is uneven,” he admitted. “It should be. It is an encyclopedia.”

"" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border-width: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;">

"" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border-width: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;">

It was, in any case, missing. Nearly everything Gould ever held in his hands slipped away. He lost his glasses; he lost his teeth. “I keep losing fountain pens, change, and even manuscripts,” he wrote. “I lost my diary in the toilet,” he reported one day. He himself appeared and disappeared.

He was forever falling apart, falling down, disintegrating, descending. “If I am not careful, I will be again checked by a bad nervous breakdown,” he wrote to William Carlos Williams. If he hadn’t lost his spectacles, he had broken them. “I had a very bad fall, a day or so ago, and smashed my glasses completely,” he wrote to the critic Lewis Mumford. This got worse as he got older, and drunker. Writing—meaninglessly, endlessly—was all that held him together.

Early in 1943, just after The New Yorker published “Professor Sea Gull,” Mitchell’s Profile of Gould, a policeman found Gould outside a bar on Twenty-third Street, bleeding from his head while reciting the Oral History. He’d fallen and cracked his skull. Not long after that, he and Mitchell had a talk. “I’m beginning to believe,” Mitchell blurted out, “that the Oral History doesn’t exist.” Mitchell told this story only after Gould’s death, in a second Profile, called “Joe Gould’s Secret”:

I knew as well as I knew anything that I had blundered upon the truth about the Oral History.

“My God!” I said. “It doesn’t exist.” I was appalled. “There isn’t any such thing as the Oral History,” I said. “It doesn’t exist.”

I stared at Gould, and Gould stared at me. His face was ｅxpressionless.

It didn’t exist. Or did it?

“I wrote all day,” he would write in his diary. “Wrote all day. Went to the library.” “Wrote.”

Buy the print »

There ought to be a “Danger” sign. Writers tumble into this story, and then they plummet. I have always supposed this to be because Gould suffered from hypergraphia. He could not stop writing. This is an illness, a mania, but seems more like something a writer might envy, which feels even rottener than envy usually does, because Gould was a toothless madman who slept in the street. You are envying a bum: Has it come to this, at last? But then you’re relieved of the misery of that envy when you learn that what he wrote was dreadful. Except, wait, that’s worse, because then you have to ask: Maybe everything you write is dreadful, too? But then, in one last twist, you find out that everything he wrote never even existed. Still, either way, honestly, it’s depressing as hell. So I got interested in knowing if any of it was true.

It began this winter, when I was teaching a course called “What Is Biography?” to sophomores at Harvard. For reading, I assigned not, strictly speaking, biographies but books that I love and that say something cautionary and wise about the error of believing that you can ever really know another person. (This happens to have been Gould’s definition of insanity. “The fallacy of dividing people into sane and insane lies in the assumption that we really do touch other lives,” he once wrote. “Hence I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly.”) I’d included on the syllabus Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending,” a devastatingly beautiful novel, and Joseph Mitchell’s two Profiles of Joe Gould. Rereading Mitchell for the class, I remembered that much of the story has to do with Harvard, beginning with Gould’s claim that he had graduated with the Class of 1911. Then, there are the loose ends:

In his breast pocket, sealed in a dingy envelope, he always carries a will bequeathing two-thirds of the manuscript to the Harvard Library and the other third to the Smithsonian Institution. “A couple of generations after I’m dead and gone,” he likes to say, “the Ph.D.’s will start lousing through my work. Just imagine their surprise. ‘Why, I be damned, they’ll say, ‘this fellow was the most brilliant historian of the century.’ ”

Whatever happened to that will? Had Mitchell seen it? Had Gould made it up? Had Mitchell made it up? For that matter, what about the Oral History? Mitchell hadn’t seen it, and said Gould had made it up, but maybe Mitchell had made that up. Wouldn’t my students ask, “Isn’t it possible that the Oral History had once existed, and even that it still exists? Shouldn’t someone check?”

The day before class, I went to the library. I had this crazy idea: I wanted to find the lost archive.

Mitchell had gone to the library, too. And he’d read some “essay chapters” of the Oral History. But when Gould failed to produce any “oral chapters” Mitchell told him that he would have to abandon the Profile. Gould then began reciting chapters from memory:

“This part of the Oral History is pretty gory,” he said. “It is called ‘Echoes from the Backstairs of Bellevue,’ and it is divided into sections, under such headings as ‘Spectacular Operations and Amputations,’ ‘Horrible Deaths,’ ‘Sadistic Doctors,’ ‘Alcoholic Doctors,’ ‘Drug-Addicted Doctors,’ ‘Women-Chasing Doctors,’ ‘Huge Tumors, Etc.,’ and ‘Strange Things Found During Autopsies.’ ”

When Mitchell went to the library, everything checked out. But when I went to the library, and into the archives, hardly anything checked out. And there’s the chasm. I fell right into it.

Joseph Ferdinand Gould did not graduate from Harvard in 1911. Instead, he had a breakdown. The Goulds had been strange for as long as anyone could remember, and Joe Gould was decidedly so. In his room at his parents’ house, in Norwood, Massachusetts, Gould had written all over the walls and all over the floor. He had a little sister, Hilda. She found him so embarrassing that she pretended he didn’t exist. He could master the smallest of details; he was put in charge of the town’s telephone service. He kept seagulls as pets, or said he had, and that he spoke their language: he would flap his hands, and skip, and caw.

Categories of illness are a function of history. That aside: hand-flapping—and screeching and tiptoe-walking—are today understood as symptoms of autism. Long ago, wouldn’t it have been clever, and comforting, for a boy who had no control over those behaviors to make up a story about how he was imitating a seagull?

Whatever was wrong with him he had suffered from childhood, and it affected his schoolwork. His senior year of high school, on admissions tests, he got four D’s and one E (which is what F’s used to be called). He was admitted to Harvard only because both his grandfather, who taught at Harvard Medical School, and his father, also a doctor, had gone to Harvard.

Young Joseph was meant to become a doctor, too. But during freshman year he flunked physics and chemistry. In history, he failed to turn in his final paper. “Joseph was in the office yesterday,” a college dean informed Gould’s father. “He has failed in practically all of his courses.” During his senior year, he had a breakdown and was kicked out. “Under the circumstances,” the chair of the Administrative Board informed Gould’s father, “I do not think that the Board would be inclined to allow him to return to College until he has shown his ability to do continuous work in a satisfactory manner.”

His father was furious. “A College should never become so big or impersonal that it tends to break, rather than make a boy,” he said. Hadn’t the faculty been able to see? “He is left handed, very near sighted and not very strong,” Gould’s father explained. “He writes slowly because of this so can not take very good notes.” He needed help.

I wrote all day. Wrote all day. Wrote.

Wrote what?

I decided to retrace his steps. If Gould had actually written a history of the world and then lost it, maybe I could find it somewhere, along the side of the road.

“I began work on the Oral History—Meo Tempore—in October, 1916,” Gould once explained. Another time, he said that he started in 1914. Edward J. O’Brien was pretty sure he’d started in 1912, or even 1911.

O’Brien and Gould had overlapped at Harvard, and knew the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite. Braithwaite’s father came from a wealthy British Guiana family; his mother was the daughter of a North Carolina slave. In 1911, O’Brien and Braithwaite began planning to launch a poetry magazine, and there seems to have been some suggestion that Gould would join the editorial staff.

Or maybe Gould imagined that. Many of his relationships with other people existed almost entirely in his head. His first collapse, in 1911, marked the beginning of his obsession with one particular kind of relationship: he believed that the contemplation of interracial sex elicits a disgust that “is felt with such violence that it is comparable to the extreme repugnance some people have to snakes.” It’s possible that he had been sexually rejected. “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” W.  E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903. The problem of the color line was also the problem of Joe Gould’s unravelling mind.

“It’s your captors. They want to know where you are.”Buy the print »

Two months after Gould was kicked out of Harvard, the Boston Globe published a collection of essays on the “race question,” including one by Joseph F. Gould, the president of the Race Pride League. (As far as I can tell, the Race Pride League did not exist.) Gould wrote, “The man who opposes equal treatment for the colored race says, ‘If you ride on the same car with a negro you have to do business with him. If you do business with him you have to invite him to supper. If you invite him to supper he may marry your sister.’ ” The way to defeat this argument, Gould concluded—his was a strange, concocted Plessy v. Ferguson Garveyism—is to disentangle racial equality from racial mixture: keep the races apart and whites won’t object to equality with blacks.

Gould’s parents sent him on a five-hundred-mile walking trip to Canada. He talked to a lot of people, listened to their stories. He also had sex. “I have been bucked off a Cayuse three times in succession, and then on the fourth trial ridden it,” he wrote to Harvard in 1912, when he got back. His petition for readmission was rejected. He had the idea of applying to the graduate school. “I think you could at any rate give me credit for persistence,” he complained. Then he floated the idea of writing a thesis in history to make up his missing credits; no one on the faculty wanted to work with him.

I finished my day at the library, taught my class, and found that I could not stop. Gould was almost impossibly easy to trace. Every time I checked another archive, another library, it had sheaves of letters.

I pictured it like this: I’d dip those letters in a bath of glue and water—the black ink would begin to bleed—and I’d paste them over an armature I’d built out of seagull feathers and rolled-up old New Yorkers. I called my papier-mâché “White Man (Variation).”

In 1913, Gould began writing to Charles B. Davenport, the leader of the American eugenics movement. Gould wrote to eminences all over the world; very few people answered. He once tried to recruit Franz Boas for a campaign he was waging to aid Albania. “I think we have seen sufficiently clearly what that kind of ‘help’ leads to,” Boas wrote back. Then he dropped the correspondence. You can usually tell, when you get the kind of letter Gould wrote, that you are dealing with someone unhinged. Davenport couldn’t tell.

Gould had learned about Davenport’s work when he took a class called “Variation and Heredity.” Davenport had founded the Eugenics Record Office, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. “The race question,” Gould told him, “is largely one of eugenics.” People fall in love across the color line, and other people don’t love them back. He had an idea. He would write a very long book, an epic novel: “I have in mind the writing of a fictitious genealogy of the descendants of a slave brought here in 1619, with an attempt to show all the phases of degeneration or progress which resulted from the introduction of the Negro into this country.” He didn’t say what he planned to call it. I think of it as “Un-Beloved.”

Gould also told Davenport that he had made a “startling discovery”: people who hate Jews don’t hate blacks, and people who hate blacks don’t hate Jews. This led him to a hypothesis: “The Jew and the Negro are physically and temperamentally antipodes.” He wished to test this theory in the field.

Davenport had no interest in Gould’s ideas about racial prejudice; what he wanted was help documenting the degenerative effects of the darker races on the whiter ones. Gould invited him to speak at Harvard (where Gould was trying to make up his missing credits by taking exams), at the Cosmopolitan Club, whose members included students from all over the world. Gould also told Davenport that he was about to become the editor of a new, cosmopolitan magazine, Four Seas, whose features would include “the life-story in serial numbers of Plenyono Gbe Wolo,” a Harvard student from Liberia. He invited Davenport to write a regular column called “The Newer Race.”

Gould never became the editor of anything. Instead, he wrote book reviews for The Nation and for The Crisis, the magazine of the N.A.A.C.P. He condemned “America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro,” by R. W. Shufeldt (“He adopts any pseudo-scientific work which strengthens his case”) and praised Carter G. Woodson’s history of black education (“One colored man at least sees that the hope of his race lies in the appeal to history”). He gave a lecture on “Some Phases of Negro and Negro-Indian Family History” before the Boston Negro Business League, promising Davenport, “There will be enough sugar-coating of interesting history to suggest to the members the desirability of collecting their family records.”

In 1915, Gould applied for work at the Eugenics Record Office. “Has done some historical writing,” one of his interviewers noted. “Is a radical in politics.” Another wrote, “Spells of depression . . . violent temper.” Ought he to be allowed to breed? “Glasses at 17,” Gould wrote on his application form, noting his inherited defects. He had already lost most of his hair. on the other hand: “Good teeth.” He supplied the required pedigree chart, tracing the trait of his “temper” back through three generations: the madness of the Goulds.

He was sent to North Dakota to conduct measurements on Indians. Using calipers, he was supposed to measure their arms, legs, heads, and noses. Using a top designed by Milton Bradley as a child’s toy, he was to record skin color. The idea was to attach differently colored cards to the top and then spin it, switching one card for another, until the color of the spinning top matched the color of the subject’s skin. This, this: this was the madness of the color line.

Gould wrote Davenport that he wished his training had included information about venereal disease. (He may have contracted a form of syphilis that later infected his brain.) “The life of the Indian is more influenced by sex than ours,” Gould reported. He’d met a man named Four Times (“an allusion to four successive acts of sexual intercourse”), and a woman named Big Vagina. Then, too: “One man was named Goes-to-bed-with-a-man.” Years later, when he was floridly mad and living in Greenwich Village, Gould would turn up drunk at parties, strip naked, stand on a table, demand a ruler, and measure his penis.

He encountered many obstacles. The shades on his set of Bradley tops were all wrong: “The red used for Negroes is too dark for the Indian.” Also, people refused to be measured. They had abundant reason. The purpose of the work Gould was doing was to help the U.S. government resolve a series of lawsuits involving the selling off of reservation land by “mixed-bloods” whose authority was disputed by “full-bloods”: Gould, with his little top, was supposed to determine which Indians were the reddest.

He wrote to Harvard, asking to be allowed to make up his outstanding credits by taking the examination in a class taught by the anthropologist Earnest Allen Hooton. Hooton had no use for people he called “ethnomaniacs,” who “talk of the psychological characteristics of this or that race as if they were objective tangible properties, scientifically demonstrated.” There was no evidence whatsoever to support that position, he said, and, in any case, “most if not all peoples are racially mixed.”

Gould passed Hooton’s exam, changed his mind about race mixture, got his degree, and, in 1916, moved to New York, where he wrote an essay about the institutional care of the insane and began telling everyone who would listen that he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century, that he was writing a history of the world, and that it would last as long as the English language.

Two writers guard an archive. one writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which. Mitchell said that Gould made things up. But Gould said that Mitchell did.

Buy the print »

Mitchell said he believed that Gould only thought he had written the Oral History. He said he believed this because he had done the same thing himself regarding the novel he’d meant to produce. “Sometimes, in the course of a subway ride, I would write three or four chapters,” Mitchell explained. “But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it.” Asked why he was so fascinated by Gould, Mitchell said, “Because he is me.” Gould saw this—“He has pictured me as the sort of person he would like to be”—and he resented it. “I feel as if I was only a figment of your imagination,” he told Mitchell. He was not wrong: it has since come out that Mitchell routinely invented quotes and even whole scenes, and once wrote an entire Profile about a man who did not exist.

“Joe Gould’s Secret” is a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn’t beautiful, the sorry fate of a broken man, and made it beautiful—a fable about art. “Joe Gould’s Secret” is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty; its beauty, truth.

I began to regret having gone to the library, that first day, to see if it was true, in the drearier, Baconian sense: “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?” The more I learned, the uglier it got.

“Not an alcoholic, not psychopathic,” Mitchell wrote in his notes, recording things that Gould told him. Why take Gould’s word for it? Because modernist writers and artists preferred to believe that Gould was an artist, suffering for his art, suffering for their art.

“I thought of Joe as a kind of hero,” Mitchell said. Not me. But I was too curious to stop.

I have never listened to Joe Gould call out, skipping along the streets, flapping like a seagull, “Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!” I couldn’t hear him. But I could read him. And Mitchell could not. All those letters that I found in archives all over the country? They weren’t in archives when Mitchell was writing about Gould; they were stashed in people’s desks and closets and attics. Mitchell’s own papers arrived at the New York Public Library only this April. once the semester had ended, I took a train to New York to see them.

In 1964, in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Mitchell said that he’d tried and tried to read the Oral History in 1942, without success, but that he took its existence on faith, because he’d done a great deal of other research about Gould’s life, and everything else checked out. only after “Professor Sea Gull” appeared did he change his mind. Mitchell then decided, out of kindness, not to reveal Gould’s secret. He revisited this decision in August, 1957, when, after Gould’s death, Edward Gottlieb, the editor of the Long Island Press, asked him to join a search for the Oral History. This is how Mitchell ends “Joe Gould’s Secret”:

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.”

This is true only in spirit. Aside from a brief telephone conversation with Davenport, who told him that Gould was “erratic,” Mitchell’s only source for Gould’s life before New York was Gould. Nearly all the research Mitchell said he’d done in 1942 actually occurred in the years after Gould’s death, when he searched—genuinely, and tirelessly—for the Oral History. He looked everywhere. He went to the house where Gould had grown up. The woman who lived there told him that she’d found in the attic dusty cardboard boxes full of Gould’s old books and notebooks. In the end, she said, “I took it out to the Norwood Public Dump.”

Then: Mitchell waited. It was a gamble to say that the Oral History didn’t exist when he couldn’t prove it. He clipped obituaries. Cummings died in 1962. After The New Yorker published “Joe Gould’s Secret,” in September, 1964, what Mitchell must have feared came to pass: people began writing and calling to tell him that he was wrong.

One letter that arrived that fall was from a woman named Florence Lowe. “My husband and I were his closest friends,” she wrote. Gould had given her one of his notebooks in 1923. Mitchell asked to see it. Lowe mailed Mitchell the notebook in December. She didn’t hear from him for two months, so she wrote again, asking him if he’d got it. He wrote back and asked whether he might keep it, to give to the New York Public Library. She consented. “If you ever need any pre-Village Joe Gould, let me know,” she added. “I have trunks full!” He did not ask for more.

The notebook is dated 1922. It is titled “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II.” Sitting at a library table, I laid that notebook flat, gripped with an uncertain fear. I pictured Mitchell at his desk, his head in his hands:

When Mr. Coan was a reporter, he heard President Taft speak to a group of suffragists. He happened to mention some man who opposed that measure, and they hissed, not intending disrespect to him, but to show their disapproval of that particular gent. Taft seemed quite huffed about it. He stopped his speech off short to say, “If you women desire a share in the representation of government, you should learn self-control.”

This isn’t uninteresting, but its worth would seem to depend on whether there’s a vast amount more of it. Still, it is oral history.

“I wish I had had this information when I wrote the second Profile,” Mitchell told people who wrote to him, “and if I ever write another article about Joe Gould, which I may do, I’d like very much to have a talk with you.”

It’s a piece of lore that after Mitchell wrote “Joe Gould’s Secret” he never wrote another story ever again, not anything about Gould, not anything about anything, even though he came to the office every day until his death, in 1996. That’s not quite true, but it’s nearly true. In the Keatsian sense.

I picked up the notebook, and turned the page.

“First, let him look at the night sky, so he’ll realize how insignificant he is.”Buy the print »

“Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II” also contains an essay written in Gould’s hand. It is titled “Insanity.” I peered at the page of white with veins of blue. And there I read, “If we could see ourselves as we really are, life would be insupportable.”

“Insanity is a topic of peculiar interest to me,” Gould explained. He had toured New York’s insane asylums as part of his eugenics training. He’d met a woman in a ward at Central Islip: sometimes she thought she was a cat, sometimes a mouse. “Is there really much difference between her and a sane person, after all?” Gould asked. “We all spend our lives chasing into darkness.”

He tried to enlist in the Army: he was rejected three times. For a while, he worked as a reporter for the Evening Mail. “One of my most interesting stunts is visiting Negro Harlem,” he wrote in 1923. “I know a very attractive sculptress there named Augusta Savage.” (“I fell in love with her at first sight,” he later wrote.) In Greenwich Village, he met up with men he’d known at Harvard, like E. E. Cummings. He was always most comfortable with Ivy League men, New England men, “old American stock.” They found him amusing, his eccentricity, his anger—his madness—exotic. Cummings turned one of Gould’s witticisms into verse:

as joe gould says in

 

his terrifyingly hu

man man

ner the only reason every wo

man

 

should

 

go to college is so

that she never can (kno

wledge is po

wer) say o

 

if i

 

’d

OH

n

lygawntueco

 

llege

Cummings and the writer Slater Brown had spent four months together in a prison in France during the war: Cummings had written an autobiographical novel about it, called “The Enormous Room.” Brown and Malcolm Cowley were editors of an avant-garde literary magazine called Broom. In 1923, Broom published “Chapter CCCLXVIII of Joseph Gould’s History of the Contemporary World.” It reads like a parody.

Still, it earned Gould the rather serious attention of Ezra Pound, in Italy. Pound, having also read chapters of the history that Gould had sent to Edward J. O’Brien, deemed Gould vastly more original than, say, Robert Frost. He appears to have been drawn to Gould’s theory about hating blacks versus hating Jews. “There is an infinite gulf between Mr Frost on New England customs, and Mr Gould on race prejudice,” Pound wrote. He wished to see the entire Oral History published. He proposed sending the manuscript to the publisher Horace Liveright. “I am not on very good terms with him,” Gould answered. “He kept insisting that because I was intelligent I must have Jewish blood.” Gould told Pound, on one occasion, that he hated “that boot licking keik Paul Rosenfeld” (Rosenfeld was a critic), and, on another, that he wished “the literary world were not quite as lousy with keik pants-pressers” (the poet Louis Zukofsky’s father was a Yiddish-speaking pants presser).

Cummings tried to arrange for Simon & Schuster—he called the firm Shoeman & Scheister—to read the history, but Gould refused to hand over his notebooks. His grandiosity made any editorial conversation difficult. “I do not see any point in submitting my work to your splendid mausoleum of European reputations,” Gould told Marianne Moore, at The Dial. But, once he bared his teeth at her and she didn’t flinch, he was courteous to Moore, who published two chapters of the Oral History, in 1929. Moore asked to see more, but The Dial folded three months later. This inspired Gould’s only well-known piece of writing:

Who killed the Dial?

I, said Joe Gould, with my inimitable style.

Then he had another breakdown, and became convinced that he was going blind.

Maybe what looked like contradictions weren’t contradictions at all but were, instead, evidence of a pattern. He wrote it; he lost it. He was a genius; he was going blind. Mitchell either didn’t notice this—he didn’t have Gould’s letters, and had very little sense of him as a man with a past, a man trapped by time, worsening each year—or he didn’t care. I don’t think he was especially interested in reading the Oral History when he first met Gould. It made a better story in 1942 if it existed; it made a better story in 1964 if it didn’t.

“Millen Brand has read a great deal of the history,” Gould told Mitchell in 1942. Mitchell wrote that down but made no effort to speak with Brand. In 1964, Brand was one of the people who wrote to Mitchell to complain. “Much as I hate to detract from the fine effect of your articles,” Brand wrote, “Joe showed me long sections of the Oral History that were actually oral history,” full of “fragments of heard speech here and there, and the longest stretch of it, running through several composition books and much the longest thing probably that he ever wrote, was his account of Augusta Savage, the Negro sculptress. This was full of orality and talk and was a fairly fascinating and skillful piece of writing.”

Savage was three years younger than Gould. She had a very soft voice. As a girl, in Florida, she loved to sculpt out of mud. She married when she was fifteen, had a child, and was widowed. In 1921, she’d moved to New York, where she pretended to be unmarried and later introduced her daughter as her sister. “Miss Savage” enrolled at Cooper Union, supporting herself by cleaning houses and doing laundry. In April, 1923, she won admission to the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts, in France, but was rejected when the selection committee found out that she was black. Urged on by W. E. B. Du Bois, she protested, publicly. That October, she married a Marcus Garvey supporter named Robert L. Poston, a writer for Negro World; he died the following spring, of pneumonia, while returning from Liberia. Savage gave birth to a daughter named Roberta; the baby died ten days later.

In 1926, Savage had nearly left New York for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, an escape arranged by Du Bois. Instead, she’d had to stay in New York, taking in laundry and supporting seven members of her family—refugees from a hurricane—in her tiny apartment on 137th Street. That apartment was at the heart of the Harlem Arts movement. “Now to Augusta’s party,” the poet Richard Bruce Nugent wrote, “fy-ahs / gonna burn ma soul.” With Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Savage planned a magazine called Fire!! She made a work of clay called “The New Negro.” This, like the majority of Savage’s art, is now lost. She never cast most of her work; she couldn’t afford bronze, or time in a foundry. And then there was the difficulty with Gould.

Gould wanted to marry her. He wrote her endless letters. He telephoned her constantly. When she drew away from him, he blamed her for the loss of his sanity, the state of the world, the condition of humanity. “If you really believe in racial equality,” he once wrote to her, “you will try and come to my party.” He hardly ever left her alone. Gould told Millen Brand that he and Savage had had a misunderstanding. “In my then young, still somewhat naïve state, I bought this story,” Brand wrote to Mitchell.

“I remember when you could only lose a chess game to a supercomputer.”Buy the print »

Brand’s most critically acclaimed work is a best-selling novel, “The Outward Room” (1937), in which, in an Islington asylum (a thinly disguised Central Islip), a patient listens to the same record over and over, “on and on, unchanging, in a continual unchanging repetition.” Brand had worked as a psychiatric aid and knew well that, at the time, the treatment for insanity was confinement itself, the relentlessly dull routine a remedy for the disorder of a diseased mind. Brand wasn’t sure what to make of Gould’s behavior. “How much of this was incipient pathology in Joe and how much plain villainy is hard to tell,” he wrote to Mitchell.

In 1929, Savage won an artistic fellowship. She went to Paris, where she worked with black female models to produce work in wood and clay and bronze: figures of black women reclining, dancing, fighting, thinking. “It is African in feeling but modern in design,” Savage said of her work. “But whatever else might be said it is original.”

That year, Gould wrote a short story titled “The Proud Man and the Colored Singer.” It’s the story of a not at all disguised Gould, the proud John Blye, who falls in love with an artist, not a sculptor here but a singer without a name. God decides to break Blye’s pride by sending him a beautiful black woman. “He had never expected to fall in love with any woman whose ancestral bones were not mingled with those of his own progenitors,” Gould wrote. But “when John Blye first met the Colored Singer a most remarkable transformation came over him and in a flash all his pride disappeared.” To earn her love, he uses genealogy, hoping to prove that some African blood flowed in his veins, too. When that fails—“chronology seemed to interfere with the pedigree that his hypothesis demanded”—he decides to “think of himself as the Negro that he wanted to be”: he wills himself to turn black. At the end of the story, the Colored Singer smiles and says, “You are looking darker, Mr. Blye.”

By then, Gould was in the Outward Room. He never acknowledged having been committed. He liked to say, “I’m my own sanitarium. I sort of carry it around with me.” He had certain ruses, little concealments. “I have been in a very unsettled condition,” he wrote to William Carlos Williams in August of 1929, from a Central Islip post-office box. He said that he was living on a chicken farm, and would be back soon. He’d always told Mitchell that he stored most of his notebooks on a chicken farm in Long Island. That chicken farm was a thousand-acre farm in Central Islip, known as the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.

For a time, Gould got back on his feet. Malcolm Cowley hired him as a regular reviewer for The New Republic, where his reviews appeared alongside essays by Edmund Wilson. But then he was arrested for assaulting two women. “Are you plunderable?” he would say to men, asking for money. But “Are you gropable?” was closer to the question he asked women, especially “colored girls,” except that he usually didn’t ask. Entries from his diary read like this: “I felt some breasts”; “I got two other women to kiss me.” Brand tried to protect Savage. Gould’s other friends, instead, protected Gould. Mitchell knew about this, and ignored it. In 1942, Horace Gregory told Mitchell that in 1930, after an “old maid” had Gould arrested, he and Edmund Wilson signed statements attesting to Gould’s sanity in order to keep him out of an asylum. (Cummings testified, too.) Gould was released.

This little fraternity then began attempting to get Gould publicity. The idea seems to have been that, if Gould were better known, he could get off the street, and he would either stop bothering women or (as would turn out to be the case) he could more easily get away with it.

“Some of my friends were rather worried about the threat to my liberty,” Gould wrote to Pound, “and as a result Horace Gregory placed an article on me with ‘The New Republic.’ ” Gregory’s essay, “Pepys on the Bowery,” appeared in April, 1931. “The history, a library in itself, is written in longhand on the pages of fifty to a hundred high-school copy books,” Gregory reported. “It is in its eighth definitive version.” In 1942, Gregory told Mitchell that he had read at least fifty of Gould’s notebooks and found them “extremely interesting,” with “flashes of New England wit” and “great clarity of ｅxpression,” but that much of it was unprintable “because of obscenity.” Mitchell set this aside.

Savage returned from Paris in September, 1931. “Something typical, racial, and distinctive is emerging in Negro art in America,” she said. She opened a school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. Her most important work, she always said, was as a teacher. She was named the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. She founded a club called the Vanguard, to talk politics and ideas. The F.B.I. began investigating her. Gould kept bothering her. Brand went to talk to Savage, in an attempt to patch things up between them. Brand wrote Mitchell, in a letter I read in Mitchell’s papers at the N.Y.P.L., “Her face clouded up and she hesitated, but angrily she seemed to decide to tell me what was really doing. Joe was making her life utterly miserable.” After Savage refused to see Gould, Gould asked Brand to deliver to her the chapters of the Oral History that concerned her. He wrote Brand that Savage, in denying that she and Gould had been intimate, was lying: “White women have had affairs with colored men, and then have accused them of rape to protect themselves, and she is doing something equally yellow.”

Brand told Gould to leave Savage alone. (“It was evident that as a Negro she hesitated to take court action,” Brand explained to Mitchell.) Gould then started calling Brand and his wife, the deaf poet Pauline Leader, in the middle of the night, shouting obscenities, and sending them endless letters: “These were of the most open depravity from end to end.”

I figured Brand must’ve saved those letters. I got on a bike and rode to Columbia, where, in an uncatalogued box of Brand’s papers, I found a thick folder marked with a note: “Not to be released for use until my death.” Inside the folder were four chapters of Gould’s Oral History, together with a clutch of horrible letters. “If I prefer to woo an American woman to a greasy neurotic Jewess with breath stinking of herring,” Gould wrote to Leader, “do I have to ask your approval?” At any rate, he now insisted, he didn’t want Savage anymore: “I would prefer not to marry her because she is sterile.”

Brand saw a side of Gould he had never seen before. He went to the police and got a summons for Gould’s arrest—“I was not a Negro woman, and I wasn’t taking it,” he later wrote—but Gould begged him to drop the charges, “saying he had already been taken to court on a similar charge and had received a suspended sentence, but if I went through with this, he would certainly be put in jail and he needed careful treatment of his eyes and would probably go blind.” Brand backed down.

Gould applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Henry Allen Moe, the head of the Guggenheim Foundation, asked Gould to submit portions of the manuscript. Gould stalled, missed a deadline, and was rejected, twice. He began sending Moe vicious letters, yelling at him in public, asking for cash and then demanding it, and, meanwhile, attacking the foundation for discriminating against men of “old American stock . . . in favor of the predatory type of recent coolie immigrant such as the original Guggenheim.”

“Just even it out.”July 1, 2002Buy the print »

He was getting worse. He was sad; he was scary. Cowley fired him. He smelled; he was covered with sores and infected with bedbugs. He was terribly, terribly ill. E. E. Cummings made him sit on the windowsill so that he wouldn’t leave lice on the furniture. People would spray the room with a DDT gun as soon as he left. When the artist Erika Feist saw Gould coming up the stairs, she would call out to her husband, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!”

I’d head to this library or that, to photograph Gould’s letters and diaries, and I’d imagine that my camera was a can of Flit. I began to think, Joe Gould is contagious.

He lost his teeth. “The first thing they did with all patients was take out all their teeth,” the psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner wrote of her residency at a psychiatric hospital at the time. (The theory, she said, was that “mental illness of any sort was always the result of a physical infection.”) He lost his fakes. He went on the dole. Cummings, whose sister was a social worker, wrote to Pound, “My sister says that if Joe can only keep on relief for a few years he’ll have a new set of somebody’s teeth.”

In 1936, Gould got a job with the Federal Writers’ Project. He told the Herald Tribune that he was writing a biographical dictionary of New York’s earliest settlers. He said that he was doing it alone—“I’m a one-man project”—because he was a better writer than everyone else.

Augusta Savage worked for the W.P.A., too, as the assistant director of the Federal Arts Project. She helped found the Harlem Artists Guild, and organized an exhibit at the 135th Street branch of the public library, telling Arthur Schomburg that she wanted the world “to see Harlem through Harlem’s eyes.” She was commissioned to make a sculpture for the 1939 World’s Fair. She was featured in Life.

Gould was trying to get into national magazines, too. “GING to git you to git some of JOE’s oral HISTORY fer Esquire,” Pound wrote to Cummings. O’Brien proposed Vanity Fair. Or maybe he could get himself profiled in The New Yorker. Gould took to saying, “I make good copy.”

“YOU might write a nize lil piece say harft a page about Joe’s ORAL hizzery, And mebbe that wd/ start somfink IF you make it clear and EGGs plain WHY Joe izza hiz torian,” Pound suggested to Cummings in 1938. “The COUNTRY needs (hell yes) an historian,” he’d written to Cummings earlier. In 1939, Pound visited the United States. He had become a Fascist. He wanted to make an argument about history, which was that democracy was impossible, since the world was secretly run by Jews.

When Pound returned to Italy, he and Cummings redoubled their attempts to get the Oral History published. It was likely through their efforts that, in 1941, William Saroyan published an essay called “How I Met Joe Gould.” “Joe Gould remains one of the few genuine and original American writers,” Saroyan said, in a tribute that sums up exactly what modernists saw in Gould. “He was easy and uncluttered, and almost all other American writing was uneasy and cluttered.” Meanwhile, in speeches on Italian radio Pound began attacking the Allies. “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire,” he said in March, 1942. Mitchell began interviewing Gould that June. “Within the year there will be a profile of me printed in the New Yorker,” Gould wrote in October.

“Professor Sea Gull” appeared in The New Yorker in December. “Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century,” the piece begins. It is immensely charming, and in it Gould is a delightful eccentric, a strange little man wandering the streets, harmlessly, in a world at war.

“The article was about ten per cent accurate,” Gould wrote to Mumford when the magazine hit newsstands, “but it has established me along with the Empire State building as one of the sights of the town.” That kind of attention was not something a man in severe decline could easily take. Gould got so drunk that he fell down the stairs of a bar. on January 13, 1943, he went to Slater Brown’s for dinner. (Brown lived two floors above Cummings.) He said he felt dizzy. Later that night, he was found lying in a pool of blood in the street. He was taken to St. Vincent’s and released, but was so concussed and psychotic that, after wandering the city, he was taken to Bellevue, where he was unable to identify himself. After Brown finally found him—he went looking for him because Gould had failed to turn up for dinner for weeks—Cummings arranged for a psychiatrist to see him. The psychiatrist had Gould committed.

“I am now at the Manhattan State Hospital,” Gould wrote to Mitchell on April 3, 1943. He said that he hoped Mitchell might consider revising “Professor Sea Gull,” to correct its errors of fact. Mitchell went to see him. “They had cut his hair and shaved off most of his beard, leaving him a clipped mustache and a Van Dyke,” Mitchell wrote. “He said they have changed him in appearance from Trotsky to Lenin.” He was given the diagnosis of “a psychopathic personality.”

By summer, Gould was out. He began, once again, hounding everyone he knew. It was around this time that Savage left Manhattan, her friends, her studio, and her school, and moved to Saugerties, New York, into a house that had no electricity and no plumbing, where she scratched together a meagre living, farming. She died in poverty and obscurity in 1962.

Brown arranged for Max Perkins, at Scribner’s, to read some of Gould’s notebooks. “I believe there is a fifty-fifty chance of Scribners taking my book,” Gould wrote to Mitchell. “I hope so. They are a good firm and deserve a break.” He would drop off a chapter; Perkins would have it typed. Then they would have an editorial talk. “He liked it very much,” Gould wrote in his diary, but “he was still puzzled by the problem of the unity of the book.” And then Perkins would buy the notebook: he paid Gould a dollar.

On March 4, 1944, Gould heard that “a wealthy refugee doctor, who loved to shell out . . . thought she could publish my book.” She offered to pay for his room and board, anonymously, to allow him to finish writing. Two weeks later, Gould went into the hospital and stayed for a month. In his diary, he wrote about meeting a female doctor: “Doctor Gardner.”

Gould never learned the identity of his patroness, but she was the psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner. Gardiner was born Muriel Morris, in Chicago in 1901, an heir to two meatpacking fortunes. She studied at Wellesley, then at Oxford. In 1926, she went to Vienna, to be analyzed by Ruth Mack Brunswick, a disciple of Freud’s. Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat who was also a patient of Brunswick’s, taught Gardiner Russian. Pankejeff is better known as the Wolf-Man: he had been the subject of one of Freud’s most important case studies. In 1926 and 1927, Gardiner lived in Greenwich Village. Returning to Austria, she went to medical school at the University of Vienna. In the nineteen-thirties, she worked for the Resistance, securing false passports for Jewish families and arranging their escape. For a time, she also hid Joseph Buttinger, the head of Austria’s Socialist underground; they later married. Gardiner and Buttinger moved to the United States in 1939. They kept an apartment in New York. Buttinger headed an international aid organization; Gardiner began a psychiatric internship in New Jersey. She also set up a charitable foundation to give away her money, anonymously. She was zealous about her privacy.

“O.K., everybody, let’s eat before the food gets dirty!”July 9, 2001Buy the print »

Gardiner’s interest in the strange case of Professor Sea Gull was clinical. “There is a type of alcoholic or psychopath who can go ahead and accomplish something if he has a little security,” she explained. She’d always been fascinated by the hardest patients. During the years in which she was supporting Gould, she was also translating a memoir written by Pankejeff; she later wrote about what painting meant to him. She believed in rescue, and especially in rescuing intellectuals.

In May of 1945, while Gardiner was supporting Gould, Pound was arrested in Italy. He was jailed in an iron cage, and examined by a team of psychiatrists, who found him mentally unstable. In November, 1945, he was remanded to the United States and committed to an insane asylum outside Washington, D.C. Gould wrote a poem:

Once lost now found

Poor Ezra Pound

Is not a hound.

His mind’s unsound.

He felt that he understood Pound: “I believe he would have snapped out of it if the course of events had been different.” Because he is me.

Gould considered his anonymous patroness’s support the fellowship he had never got; he said that he was “being moderately guggenheimed.” Still, he started hounding people for money again—not for himself, he said, but for Pound. Two undergraduates, reporters for the Harvard Crimson, E. L. Hendel and M. S. Singer, went to New York to interview him. “They seemed naïve,” Gould wrote in his diary. But they weren’t so very naïve. They reported, “One of these days, someone is going to write an article on Joseph Ferdinand Gould ’11 for the Reader’s Digest. It will be entitled ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Met’ and it will present Joe Gould as an unusual but lovable old man. Joe Gould is not a lovable old man.”

In October, 1947, Gardiner told Gould’s friends that she intended to stop supporting him at the end of the year. They begged her to reconsider. Gardiner refused. on December 2, 1947, Gould wrote to Cummings, “I managed to get a pair of glasses and lost them.” Then he crossed that out, because he’d found them: “Bespectacled apologies!!!” Six days later, Pound asked Cummings whether “Jo iz nuts.” Cummings wrote back, “The question Is Joe Gould Crazy strikes me as, putting it very mildly, irrelevant. For ‘crazy’ implies either(crazy) or(not).” And then: Professor Sea Gull disappeared.

Gould spent the last years of his life at Pilgrim State Hospital, in Islip, the largest mental institution in the world. I don’t know what was done to him there. The hospital declined my request for his medical records, citing not federal law (which would have allowed the release of those records) but a state policy that effectively protects not Gould’s privacy but the hospital’s. Gould’s confinement at Pilgrim State coincided with the most troubling era in the troubling history of the treatment of mental illness.

Pilgrim State, which opened in 1931, began administering electroshock treatments in 1940. Patients suffering from manic depression responded best, the hospital’s director, Harry J. Worthing, reported; psychotics less well. Electroshock was used even on those for whom “recovery cannot be anticipated”; it left patients “quieter and more manageable.” Doctors at Pilgrim began conducting prefrontal lobotomies in 1945, and launched a formal, two-year study in 1947. Their research set the standard for the procedure. By the end of the study, three hundred and fifty patients had been lobotomized: sixty-five had gone home; the rest were either still in the hospital or dead. But this counted as success, since what Worthing reported was relief from the previous treatment (“chronic sedation and restraint”) and a mitigation of pain: after the surgery, patients suffered less, because they felt less.

“Cases are chosen primarily on the basis of their intractable course and their resistance to the usual procedures,” Worthing explained. As with shock, lobotomy was recommended even for patients for whom no recovery was expected, since it made them easier to manage. By 1948, doctors at Pilgrim were lobotomizing more than two hundred patients a year. The patient’s consent was not required.

Reporting on his work in a scientific journal, Worthing presented the case of a man who was Gould’s age, fit his description, and had his symptoms:

Case No. 231. Aged 57, this man was diagnosed dementia praecox, paranoid, onset “more than 10 years ago.” There were delusions of persecution, economic incapacity, withdrawal from the family, letters to authorities. He was admitted to Pilgrim State Hospital in 1947. In the hospital, he was furiously resistive, actively hallucinated, resentful, grandiose, unapproachable. Attempts to administer electric shock resulted in such combat that cardiac collapse was feared, in view of his age. Finally, he went on a hunger strike for several months and resisted tube-feeding so violently that this procedure was undertaken very reluctantly. Death seemed likely. Lobotomy was done on February 8, 1949, followed by the immediate cessation of the hunger strike. The patient admitted that he had been “imagining things.” He became friendly and approachable. on close examination, residual psychotic content was noted. There was cessation of paranoid letter-writing. This man was released June 4, 1949. on first report, he was comfortable, but economically dependent. He was well-behaved. “No loss of intelligence in conversation” was observed, but “no will to work.”

Between December 2, 1947, when Gould wrote to Cummings—“Bespectacled apologies!!!”—and May, 1949, when he sent a pained letter to William Carlos Williams—“I am now slowly coming to life again. I will have to rewrite a great deal of my history. That scares me as I seem to have lost much of my initial urge”—no letter in his hand survives. If Gould was not Case No. 231, he was very like him. After writing to Williams, Gould wrote one more letter—to Cummings, in September, 1949—and then, as far as I can tell, none, ever again. If he was indeed lobotomized, the treatment alleviated at least one of his symptoms: “letter-writing.”

In February, 1950, Gould was admitted to Bellevue. In October, 1951, Colleen Chassan, who was the daughter of Gould’s sister, Hilda, and grew up not knowing that she had an uncle, read “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,” a collection of Mitchell’s stories, and went to every place Mitchell had mentioned in “Professor Sea Gull,” trying to find Gould. Finally, she saw him. “He was very dirty, his suit was too large,” she remembered. “His nose was running, and he didn’t do anything about it.” He had difficulty speaking. She said, “I felt that I had come too late.”

In 1952, Gould was admitted to Columbus Hospital and transferred to Pilgrim. He never left. He had no visitors. on Monday, August 19, 1957, Worthing sent a telegram to Slater Brown telling him that Gould had died: “IF YOU CAN CARE FOR REMAINS OR KNOW THE WHEREABOUTS OF HIS FAMILY PLEASE CONTACT HOSp IMMEDIATELY.” Mitchell got the news, by telephone, from Edward Gottlieb:

“Andy may be out next weekend, if he gets down to his beach weight.”July 27, 1998Buy the print »

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.’ ”

He left no will. on Wednesday, Mitchell was asked to deliver the eulogy at Gould’s funeral; he said that he would be out of town. Time ran an obituary: “Gould had no known relatives but many friends, including Poet E. E. Cummings, Artist Don Freeman, Writers Malcolm Cowley and William Saroyan.” Not one of them showed up for his funeral.

“Gould always said that he wanted his Oral History of the World printed posthumously,” the editor of the New York World Telegram wrote to Cummings. “Could you tell me perhaps where I could locate it?” Cummings wrote to Pound, who was still locked up in an insane asylum in Washington. on April 14, 1958, Pound wrote to Cummings, “Am doin wot I kan to hellup yr friends edit Joe Gould.” Four days later, Pound was released.

Colleen Chassan engaged a family friend, Mary L. Holman, to conduct a search for the manuscript. The Harvard Library examined its records and determined that Gould had never arranged any gift. In Greenwich Village, the search for the Oral History was led by a sketchy character named James Nalbud, who sent a letter to the Harvard Crimson, inviting undergraduates to join a treasure hunt. He posted flyers all over New York, offering a twenty-five-dollar reward for any leads. He sent out a form typed on a postcard:

What was the largest number of Joe’s note books you saw? ________

In crates, suitcases, bales, loose (check)

Did you examine and read any of the books? ____________________

How many? ____ Form an opinon? ____

Did you at any time own or store any of the books? ______________

Mitchell’s own search lasted years. He must have been so haunted.

“You solve the problem of escape by being an expatriate,” Gould once wrote to Pound. “I am an extemporate.”

He believed he’d lived outside of time. He believed he’d escaped.

At the end, at the very end, I found in the archives a chapter of Joe Gould’s Oral History of Our Time called “Why I Write.” It held an answer to the question I’d started with. “If one were to pick anyone up at random and study him intensely enough in all the ramifications of his life, we would get the whole story of man,” he wrote. What is biography? A man in time.

Summer came, and stillness. I packed my stacks of notes and photocopies and photographs into a box. Gould’s school transcripts. The Gould Family Pedigree. His Guggenheim application. The diaries, the letters, the letters, the letters. A copy of Harry J. Worthing et al., “350 Cases of Prefrontal Lobotomy,” in Psychiatric Quarterly. I dragged the box into a closet. I carried my books back to the library: discharged.

I spoke on the telephone to an old man in a faraway land. He told me that he had some of Gould’s notebooks. I believed him. I did not call him again.

I still sometimes picture a door with the word “Archive” etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this: I open the door, sneak inside, and enter an enormous room, cluttered with notebooks stacked on the floor, on shelves, on desks. I reach into my pocket for what I’ve brought. It feels like porcelain. It opens like a clam. And then I back out of that room, as soundlessly as I came, having left behind: Joe Gould’s teeth. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.