Joe Gould's Teeth (16 page)
Authors: Jill Lepore
1.
“One of the chapters I will read from the magnum opus is the Proud Man and the Colored Singer.” Gould to Williams, August 1929, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
2.
Gould, “The Proud Man and the Colored Singer,” originally written in 1929, Macdonald Papers. Gould notes that a version of the story was published in the
Greenwich Villager
in September 1933.
3.
Gardiner Reminiscences, 43â44.
4.
Cummings to Pound, March 1, 1930,
Pound/Cummings,
18.
5.
Wilson was
The New Republic
's literary editor. For more on Cowley's role at the magazine, see his autobiography,
The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the
1930
s
(New York: Viking, 1964).
6.
Contributors,
New Republic,
October 1, 1930, 188.
7.
He also got into a fight there. “I was asked to sign the New Republic manifesto against humanism. I refused. I said I had to devote so much time and energy to my own work that I had no time for religious controversy.” Gould to Pound, April 10, 1930, Pound Papers, Box 7, Folder 169. Gould's reviews are for the most part sensible and lively. Here are some from this period of lucidity: “Sound and Fury,”
New Republic,
June 4, 1930; “The Great Spirit,”
New Republic,
August 20, 1930; and review of
Power for Profit,
by Robert Collyer Washburn,
New Republic,
October 1, 1930.
8.
Gould, “Synopsis,” 5.
9.
Diary entries for May 6, July 13, August 2, and September 3, 1945, Gould Diaries.
10.
Gould, “Freedom,”
Pagany,
1931, 97.
11.
Mitchell's interview with Horace Gregory, typewritten notes, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Wilson missed what came next: he left New York at the end of 1930 to travel the country, doing the reporting that lies behind
American Jitters
(1932). In 1927, for Lew Ney's National Poetry Exhibition, Gould wrote a poem about a woman taking a man to court for assault. It is called “Chivalry”:
It was only force of habit
That made the half-wit nasty in the Black Rabbit.
He said, “With many strange contortions,
That girl has had twenty-one abortions,”
And so Lew Ney the gentile parfaite tonight,
Was hauled to court by Peggy White.
The character witness was Emil Luft,
So the Justice thought he was being spoofed.
He said “We won't let this case pester us,
You can't do in New York, what you do in Texas.”
Graphic Arts Collection, Firestone Library, Princeton University. On Ney and the National Poetry Exhibition, see Julie Mellby, “The True and Honest Story of Lew Ney, Greenwich Village Printer,”
Princeton University Library Chronicle
75 (2013): 65â96.
12.
Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. Gould writes about Werner a lot in his diaries for 1943â1947. And see, for example, “I usually take breakfast with M.J. Werner once a week.” Gould to Cummings, August 23, 1943, Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
13.
Gould to Pound, January 1931, recalling the events of the spring of 1930, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
14.
Horace Gregory, “Pepys on the Bowery,”
New Republic,
April 15, 1931.
15.
Mitchell's interview with Gregory, typewritten notes, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. The publication of Gregory's article also led to Gould announcing, once again, his plans to found an Oral History Association. See, for example, “Lachaise was very pleased with the article on me. It seems to me that now is the time to try and arouse interest in what I am doing. I am therefore forming an Oral Historical Society.” Gould to Edmund Wilson, May 26, 1931, Wilson Papers, Box 30, Folder 784.
16.
“Where Poems Are Sold for Sandwiches,”
Dallas Morning News,
September 27, 1931.
17.
Gould first raised the possibility of applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship in a letter to Henry Allen Moe, October 15, 1931, Gould Guggenheim Files, in which he explained that he had earlier been reticent, because “it happens that my family were among the small investors who were hurt in the amassing of the Guggenheim fortune” but that the response to his workâpresumably through the Gregory articleâhad changed his mind: “I am surprised at the number of people who are interested in my work.” He then began writing to his possible recommenders. “You may be surprised to hear that I am trying to make friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness,” he wrote to Pound. “I am applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship to go to Geneva to collect material for my oral history. If I get this it will enable me to make contacts which should sell my book for me.” Gould to Pound, October 22, 1931, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. This was right around when
Pagany
published two more chapters of the Oral History. Joe Gould, “Me Tempore: A Selection from Joe Gould's Oral History,”
Pagany
2 (1931): 96â99. The selections are two short essays, “I. Insanity,” and “II. Freedom.”
18.
Gould, “Synopsis,” and Gould, fellowship application, Gould Guggenheim Files, 1932. And see André Bernard, email to the author, April 17, 2015.
19.
Gould to Pound, October 27, 1931, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
20.
Gould, fellowship application, November 30, 1931, and Moe to Gould, December 1, 1931, Gould Guggenheim Files. The deadline was November 30; Gould's application did not arrive in Moe's office until December 1.
21.
Gould to Moe, December 17, 1931, Gould Guggenheim Files.
22.
See, for example, Gould to Moe, August 9, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
23.
Gould wrote contemptuously about Cowley. See, for example, Gould to Pound, December 22, 1932, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861; and Gould to “Dear Comrade,” November 7, 1932, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000.
24.
Gould complained, “I knew the authors and helped them in their work in Harlem. In my junior year at Harvard I took courses in anthropology normally open only to undergraduates. Mr. Cowley's knowledge of the subject is derived from the Daily Worker.” Gould to George Soule, August 12, 1934, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000. The Herskovitses' book was called
Rebel Destiny;
Cowley reviewed it in
The New Republic
(“Primitive Peoples,” June 20, 1934).
25.
Gould to Brand, undated but 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged papers, Box 1, Gould folder.
26.
Gould, “Warpath,”
New Republic,
December 12, 1934.
27.
Gould, “Belated May Day Poem,”
New Republic,
May 13, 1936.
28.
“Joe Gouldâ¦got a dollar every Wednesdayâ¦.Once or twice I tried giving him a book for review, but that was a failed experiment; I suspected that he had sold the books before reading them.” But then Otis Ferguson, the head of the book department, objected:
Otis laid down an edict: no weekly dollar except when Joe submitted something short for the correspondence page. The following Wednesday Joe appeared with a sheet torn from one of his notebooks. “Now you can give me my dollar,” he said as he passed it over. The sheet contained a couplet which Otis recited from memory:
Dear God, save Malcolm Cowley from harm,
Or at least break his neck instead of his arm.
Cowley,
Dream of the Golden Mountains,
261â62, 293. Gould's efforts in
The New Republic
during the latter part of the 1930s steadily declined in quality. See “Poet Among the Planets,”
New Republic,
May 20, 1936; “Song of the Glass-Conscious Intellectuals,”
New Republic,
June 3, 1936; “A Vote for Landon,”
New Republic,
October 28, 1936; “Restless Life,”
New Republic,
August 4, 1937; “Communism Is 20th Century Americanism,”
New Republic,
September 7, 1938 (but in the letters section). “The Third-Class Mailbox,”
New Republic,
October 3, 1939, which is simply a scrap, is introduced this way:
Joe Gould, who is growing a beard again, brought into the office a follow-up on his poem (“Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism”) in which Earl Browder was found to have switched from borscht to clam chowder:
Now Comrade Browder
Lieks Wienerworscht
Both in his chowder
And in his borscht.
29.
Gould to Moe, August 9, 1932, and September 12, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
30.
Gaston Lachaise, letter of recommendation for Gould, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
31.
Gould, review of
Scandinavian Immigrants in New York,
1630
â
1674
,
by John Olaf Evjen,
Survey,
October 21, 1916, 71: “The problems of New York state are essentially an exaggerated form of the great American problem of keeping unity among various racial stocks, without crushing the initiative of any ethnic group.”
32.
John Olaf Evjen, letter of recommendation for Gould, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files. Evjen had read the “Synopsis.” He wrote, “The work he has outlined should prove a storehouse of fascinating material. It would have the charm of Well's History, of Durant's Philosophy, the works of Van Loon and of Ludwig. But I think Gould would exercise more restraint than any of these, and be more careful of scientific truth.”
33.
Gould to Moe, November 21, 1932, and Moe to Gould, August 13, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files. Whatever manuscript Gould may ultimately have submittedâand it appears he did submit some unpublished materialâwas returned to him. On February 16, 1933, he signed a receipt acknowledging the return of all the materials he had submitted in support of his application. Gould Guggenheim Files.
34.
Gould to Moe, August 28, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
35.
The only parts he had that were typed were the parts he'd sent to O'Brien nearly a decade before. Gould to Pound, October 25, 1932. And see Gould to Lincoln Kirstein of the
Hound & Horn,
from Central Hotel, January 7 and January 13, 1933,
Hound & Horn
Records, Box 2, Folder labeled Joe Gould.
36.
Gould to Moe, November 21, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
37.
Gould, “Synopsis,” 1â9.
38.
Moe to Gould (letter of rejection), March 11, 1933, Gould Guggenheim Files; Gould to Edmund Brown, July 1934; February 4, April 1, May 5, and June 5, 1935, Brown Papers, Barrett Minor Box 10.
39.
Pound to Williams, April 28, 1936,
Pound/Williams,
180; Gould to Pound, November 1936, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
1.
Gould to Cullen, November 28, 1931, Cullen Papers.
2.
“Noted Sculptress Expects Distinct, but Not Different, Racial Art,”
Pittsburgh Courier,
August 29, 1936.
3.
Savage to George R. Arthur, October 19, 1931, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.
4.
On the Vanguard, see the entry for Savage in Carey D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, eds.,
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
(New York: Routledge, 2004).
5.
McKay and Savage were close. In 1934, McKay lived with her. See Lawrence Patrick Jackson,
The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics,
1934
â
1960
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 68. On the FBI's Racial Division, see William J. Maxwell,
F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
6.
Gould does not have an FBI file. David M. Hardy, Record/Information Dissemination Section, Federal Bureau of Investigation, to the author, April 14, 2015.
7.
A copy of Savage's FBI file, the result of a Freedom of Information Act request made by David Garrow in the 1980s, is filed at the Schomburg Center in a manuscript collection called “Surveillance Files on African American Intellectuals and Activists Obtained from the FBI Archives via a Freedom of Information Act Request.” The file has been massively redacted. Thirty-two pages were deleted in their entirety; most of the rest have only two or three words left legible. A document titled “The Communist Party; National Professional Organizations and Organizations of Professionals,” dated October 13, 1936, includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and “The Vanguard (An association of Negro and white intellectuals for social study and protest),” which lists “Augusta Savage, Chairman.” Her name also appears on a list, dated March 4, 1941, of American artists who were members of the American Artists Congress. A memo dated December 3,
1941,
describes the activities of the American Artists Congress. An internal letter to Hoover states, “Files of this office reflect that in 1941
AUGUSTA SAVAGE
was a member of the Artists Congress and on the mailing list of New York Conference for Inalienable Rights.” An inter-office memo concerning Savage, addressed to Hoover, is dated April 10, 1951; its entire contents are redacted.
8.
Gould to Savage, undated but 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
9.
Gould, “My Life,” 9.
10.
Alice Neel,
Joe Gould,
oil on canvas, 1933, on loan to the Tate Modern, London.
11.
Phoebe Hoban,
Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty
(New York: St. Martin's, 2010), 94â97. As Hoban points out, Neel did not admire Mitchell's writing about Gould, saying that it “had an O. Henry ending,” and that Mitchell was wrong to say the Oral History never existed. While researching her biography of Neel, Hoban discovered four chapters of Gould's Oral History in Millen Brand's papers at Columbia, along with documents concerning Gould's relationship with Augusta Savage. In
Alice Neel,
Hoban mentions one of the chapters of Gould's Oral History (94), but she does not mention any of the Savage material. I didn't read Hoban's biography of Neel until after I had completed my own research. Hoban wrote to me after my essay, “Joe Gould's Teeth,” appeared in
The New Yorker.
My thanks to her for pointing me to her work on Neel.
12.
Gould to Leader, October 13, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
13.
Gould, “My Life,” 9.
14.
See Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson,
A History of African-American Artists: From
1792
to the Present
(New York: Pantheon, 1993), 175â76.
15.
Gould to Brand, undated, ca. December 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
16.
Brand to Mitchell, October 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
17.
Gould to Brand, undated but 1934 and September 7 and 26, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
18.
Gould to Brand, October 13 and September 7, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
19.
Brand to Mitchell, October 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
20.
Brand to Mitchell, October 3 and 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
21.
Brand, note to the archivist, October 20, 1954, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
22.
Gould to Leader, September 24, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
23.
Gould to Jonathan Brand, January 8, 1935, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
24.
Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
25.
Brand to Mitchell, October 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
26.
Edward J. O'Brien, letter of recommendation for Gould, 1934, Gould Guggenheim Files.
27.
Moe to Gould, March 14, 1935; Gould to Moe, February 20, 1936 (at the bottom of this letter, Moe has written “
no!
”); and Gould to Moe, no date, but marked as received April 21, 1939, Gould Guggenheim Files.
28.
“Look, Joe, please don't sit on the upholstered furniture, sit on the woolen chairs,” Marquie told Gould when he came to the gallery. “He didn't mind, he understood, he said that E.E. Cummings made him sit on the window case.” Mitchell, interview notes with E. P. Marquie, May 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
29.
Mitchell, interview notes with Erika Feist, June 24, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
30.
Gould to Edmund Brown, January 5, 1934:
