Joe Gould's Teeth (6 page)

This repetition of records was the only pleasure she knew, to play them over and over for hours at a time.

—
MILLEN BRAND
,
The Outward Room

I
n 1929, while he was confined at the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane, Gould wrote a short story called “The Proud Man and the Colored Singer.”
1
It's the story of a man, a not-at-all-disguised Gould, a Yankee here called Blye, who falls in love with a black artist, Savage, here not a sculptor but a singer without a name. (He always erased her name.) It begins:

God once summoned the angel who had charge of his Department of Moral Statistics. He said, “Invent some instrument to measure pride. Go down to earth with it and measure the way in which pride is distributed up in that plaguey little planet.”

So the angel invented a pridometer to measure pride and after much less time than it takes a Congressional Committee to make a report he presented a summary of what he had learned. John Blye had 21% of the World's pride. Other New England Yankees had 15%. The Mandan Indians had 13%. The Kru tribe of Africa had 12%. The Asiatics had 9%. Other whites than Yankee, other Indians than Mandans, other Negroes than Krus had in their groups each 8% of the World's pride. Woodrow Wilson had 8% and the Pope had 2%.

God and the statistical angel decide to break Blye's pride by sending him a beautiful black woman to fall in love with. “He had never expected to fall in love with any woman whose ancestral bones were not mingled with those of his own progenitors in some bleak New England graveyard,” 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….He recognised that the best blood of many races blended in her and he liked the combination.” To earn her love, he decides to research his own genealogy in order to prove that African blood flows in his veins. But “Chronology seemed to interfere with the pedigree that his hypothesis demanded, so he relentlessly thrust it aside so that he might think of himself as the Negro that he wanted to be.” The story ends:

One day he encountered the Colored Singer and when she said, “You are looking darker, Mr. Blye,”…the smile which she gave him cheered his weary soul for many a long day.
2

It was likely at Central Islip, in 1929, that Joe Gould lost his teeth. “The first thing they did with all patients was take out all their teeth,” wrote the psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner, recalling her residency at a mental hospital in New Jersey at the time. This was on the theory, she explained, “that mental illness of any sort was always the result of a physical infection.”
3
It didn't help.

Still, while Savage was in Paris, Gould got back on his feet. He left the hospital, returned to the Village, and began writing the Oral History all over again. Cummings wrote Pound that Gould had recovered and was “mightily distant from a fit of the incheerfuls.”
4
Malcolm Cowley hired him as a regular reviewer for
The New Republic,
where his reviews appeared alongside essays by Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford.
5
(The contributors' page listed him this way: “
JOE GOULD
, anthropologist and critic, has abandoned poetry to devote himself exclusively to his oral history of the world.”)
6
“I am reviewing about fifteen books a week,” Gould reported to Pound in the spring of 1930. “Of course, I am a book-reviewer not a critic. That, I fear, is a distinction. It seems marvelous how many critics they are. And the blathering pother they make….Here is something cheerful to think about. To some extent the radio will supersede printing. That is good. There will be fewer books.”
7
(The Oral History, he once explained, would include a discussion of this transformation: “I intend to write a series of chapters on the various means of communication, from oxcarts to airplanes.”)
8

Things didn't go well for long. “Are you plunderable?” Gould 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 didn't usually ask permission. Later entries from his diary about nights at bars read like this: “I got two other women to kiss me”; “I felt some breasts”; “A girl with lovely breasts leaned over me. I kissed her several times”; “A very fresh girl was sitting at the counter. She gave a good leg show however she talked too much.”
9
If he could get their addresses, he'd visit them; he'd write letters; he wouldn't leave them alone. But “when a very charming young lady nearly sent me to jail for a letter I wrote during a nervous breakdown,” he explained in “Freedom,” an essay from the Oral History published in 1931, “I did not look forward to the experience at all.”
10
He got caught.

In 1942, Horace Gregory told Mitchell something about Gould's harassment of women, though he brushed it aside: he said that an “old maid had him arrested,” and that Gregory and Edmund Wilson had signed statements “as character witnesses.”
11
So far as I can tell, Mitchell didn't investigate that story, or talk to any of the women who'd filed charges against Gould (there appear to have been at least three). Nor did he mention any of it in print. According to Morris Werner, Gould was arrested for assault in October 1930 and a judge was about to commit him to an asylum when “Cummings, Edmund Wilson and some others went down to court and heartily perjured themselves by testifying that he was not insane.”
12
Gould was released.

One way to think about the legend of Joe Gould, then, is that it was a fiction contrived by men who wanted to help him stay out of an institution. They'd seen how far he'd declined at Islip: he came back with no teeth! Beginning in 1930, Cummings, Gregory, Wilson, and other writers tried to protect Gould by getting him publicity. The idea seems to have been that if Gould were better known, he could sell the Oral History and get off the streets, and either he would stop bothering women or (as would turn out to be the case) could more easily get away with it. “Some of my friends were rather worried about the threat to my liberty,” Gould told Pound, “and as a result Horace Gregory placed an article on me with ‘The New Republic' which will appear in the spring book number, the best possible time. He said that if I had only been sent to jail that he could have sold my book for me. That does not seem quite as nice as it might be but it is something to think over. I would not be able to write in jail so it is out of the question.”
13

Horace Gregory's loving essay, “Pepys on the Bowery,” appeared in
The New Republic
in April 1931. He wrote, “The history, a library in itself, is written in longhand on the pages of fifty to a hundred high-school copy books. It is in its eighth definitive version.”
14
In 1942, when Mitchell interviewed him, Gregory said that he had read at least fifty of Gould's notebooks containing, among other things, “gossip overheard in Greenwich Village and Harlem,” and found them “extremely interesting,” with “flashes of New England wit” and “great clarity of expression,” but that it was “difficult to get editors to go through them” and much of it was unprintable “because of obscenity.”
15

Gregory's article gained Gould national attention. “No review of Greenwich Village could be complete without mentioning Joe Gould,”
The Dallas Morning News
reported in September 1931:

Gould consumes more cigarettes than any other ten men in the Western Hemisphere. He is also writing a minute survey of our times. In his room in the dilapidated Bradford Hotel are over 500 manuscript books filled with very small handwriting: this is his history. Ezra Pound published a chapter of this amazing work in his magazine, Exile. The Dial put out another chapter in the issue just before it folded up. Gould proudly claims that it was his work which caused the death of the Dial.
16

He became a stock character: the last bohemian.

In October 1931, on the strength of his growing fame, Gould began the process of applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship.
17
He wished to study in Paris.
18
He intended to bring his mother.
19
He missed the deadline by a day.
20
When Henry Allen Moe, the head of the Guggenheim program, wrote Gould that his application would not be considered, Gould wrote back to complain that he ought to have been given a special dispensation “because of my greater need and the greater importance of my work.”
21
He then began yelling at Moe in public, and later tried to apologize (“I was in a rather disturbed state of mind”).
22
He applied again in 1932, when he was more desperate: Cowley had by now fired him from his job at
The New Republic.
23

Gould's falling-out with Cowley began after Cowley reviewed a book by Melville and Frances Herskovits about “the bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana” that Gould had wanted to review himself.
24
“Poor white trash like Cowley should get some one to piss on him so that he at least smells like a man before he writes about primitive people,” Gould wrote to Millen Brand.
25

After that, Cowley would still print a piece of Gould's every once in a while. “Americans are likely to underestimate their history, because it all happened so rapidly,” he wrote in one review.
26
More often, he wrote doggerel:

With his own petard

On May the foist,

I hope to see

William Randolph Hoist
27

Eventually, Cowley stopped accepting Gould's work and just paid him, making contributions to what came to be called “The Joe Gould Fund.”
28

Gould had asked Pound to write him a letter to support his Guggenheim application, but Pound, who had been in a years-long feud with Moe, refused, telling Gould, “My name on your recommendation will indubitably prevent your getting a scholarship.”
29
Gaston Lachaise wrote him a short letter of recommendation, mentioning the work (“From time to time he would read me a chapter of his oral history, and this has always been of very great interest to me and a joy to hear English beautifully written”) and commending his diligence (“Mr. Gould has carried on his work with absolute regularity for all these years with unabated enthusiasm and with a fortitude equal to the extraordinary difficulties which came before him”).
30
His only other letter of recommendation came from John Olaf Evjen, a scholar of Scandinavian studies from the Augsburg Seminary in Minneapolis. In 1916, Gould had written a review of Evjen's monograph
Scandinavian Immigrants in New York,
1630
–
1674
.
31
He'd then gone to visit Evjen; they spent two hours together, and Evjen was so impressed that he'd asked Gould to give a lecture at the seminary and it had been a great success. Evjen had never seen him again, but remembered him vividly:

He came into my life as a flash, a pleasing little fellow of most engaging ways, interested in a thousand things, even in the political affairs of Albania: gentle, polite, versatile, combining the traits of a historian, a sociologist and man of letters, too mindful of truth to be rubricated as a journalist, and yet possessing the qualities of one of them to a notable degree. I admired his candor.
32

This sounds a lot like the man Joseph Mitchell met in 1942. If Gould came into your life in a flash, and left in a flash, he could be like that.
Gentle, polite, versatile, combining the traits of a historian, a sociologist and a man of letters…

With his Guggenheim application, Gould submitted a list of his publications, but Moe kept asking him to submit portions of the unpublished manuscript: “Have you any item of evidence of your work which we ourselves may consider?”
33
Gould stalled: “I have had rather serious trouble with my eyes, and this has meant that it was practically impossible to prepare any of my manuscript in a legible form.” He offered to meet with the judges and recite the Oral History instead.
34
Then he dodged.
35
In the end, much of his application amounted to bluster: “If the committee is intelligent enough it will judge me by two facts that are as well documented as any in current literary history. I have created a new literary form of vital interest. Competent critics believe that I have written some things that will last as long as the English language.”
36

The heart of the application was a nine-page typewritten “Synopsis of the Oral History.” The book's chapters were arranged geographically, Gould explained, covering all seven lands and all four seas. “In my section on polar exploration I have much verbal information about life in the Arctic.” “I have been in every province in Canada.” “I have hitherto unrecorded folklore about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.” “I next take up Mexico.” “I have talked with natives or visitors to every country in South America.” “I begin my European section with a chapter on the Great War. I then discuss it nation by nation.” “I have oral information about nearly every port of Asia. I have entertained at my home Rustum Rustomji, the Parsi; Professor Tejah Singh, a Sikh; and Lala Lajput Rai, the Hindu nationalist. My African material includes data from members of Negro tribes, as well as from Boers and explorers.” He ended with more bluster: “If I receive a Guggenheim award, international and possibly interplanetary confidence in the committee will be increased.”
37
It was gibberish.

Gould's application was rejected. He did, though, get a book contract, for a book to be called
Cosmopolychromatic: Selections from the Oral History.
It was to be published by his old friend Edmund Brown, or at least Gould imagined that was the case. “You will feel more confidence in my book when you see a few chapters,” he wrote Brown. “If it is possible I wish you could send me some advance,” he asked the next year. Then he told him, “You can make a killing on the Oral History if you handle it intelligently.” When Brown asked him to submit the manuscript, Gould turned on him: “You used to have enterprise and guts. What has become of them?” Brown wanted the manuscript typed. Gould said that was impossible. “My muscular coordination is poor. As you know I am left-handed in both hands. At the present time the nervous strain would be bad for my eyes.”
38
Cosmopolychromatic
was abandoned.