Joe Gould's Secret

by Joseph Mitchell

  In 1942, for reasons that I will go into later, I became involved in Gould’s life, and I kept in touch with him during his last ten years in the city. I spent a good many hours during those years listening to him. I listened to him when he was sober and I listened to him when he was drunk. I listened to him when he was cast down and meek—when, as he used to say, he felt so low he had to reach up to touch bottom—and I listened to him when he was in moods of incoherent exaltation. I got so I could put two and two together and make at least a little sense out of what he was saying even when he was very drunk or very exalted or in both states at once, and gradually, without intending to, I learned some things about him that he may not have wanted me to know, or, on the other hand, since his mind was circuitous and he loved wheels within wheels, that he may very well have wanted me to know—I’ll never be sure. In any case, I am quite sure that I know why the manuscript of the Oral History has not been found.

  When Gould died, I made a resolution to keep this as well as some of the other things I had inadvertently learned about him to myself—to do otherwise, it seemed to me at the time, would be disloyal; let the dead past bury its dead—but since then I have come to the conclusion that my resolution was pointless and that I should tell what I know, and I am going to do so.

  Before I go any further, however, I feel compelled to explain how I came to this conclusion.

  A few months ago, while trying to make some room in my office, I got out a collection of papers relating to Gould that filled half a drawer in a filing cabinet: notes I had made of conversations with him, letters from him and letters from others concerning him, copies of little magazines containing essays and poems by him, newspaper clippings about him, drawings and photographs of him, and so on. I had lost a good deal of my interest in Gould long before he reached Pilgrim State—as he grew older, his faults intensified, and even those who felt most kindly toward him and continued to see him got so they dreaded him—but as I went through the file folders, trying to decide what to save and what to throw out, my interest in him revived. I found twenty-nine letters, notes, and postal cards from him in the folders. I started out just glancing through them and ended up rereading them with care. One letter was of particular interest to me. It was dated February 12 or 17 or 19 (it was impossible to tell which), 1946; his handwriting had become trembly, and it always had been hard to read.

  “I ran into a young painter I know and his wife in the Minetta Tavern last night,” he wrote, “and they told me they had recently gone to a party in the studio of a woman painter named Alice Neel, who is an old friend of mine, and that during the evening Alice showed them a portrait of me she did some years ago. I asked them what they thought of it. The young painter’s wife spoke first. ‘It’s one of the most shocking pictures I’ve ever seen,’ she said. And he agreed with her. ‘You can say that again,’ he said. This pleased me very much, especially the young man’s reaction, as he is a hot-shot abstractionist and way up front in the avant garde and isn’t usually impressed by a painting unless it is totally meaningless and was completed about half an hour ago. I posed for this painting in 1933, and that was thirteen years ago, and the fact that people still find it shocking speaks well for it. Speaks well for the possibility that it may have some of the one quality that all great paintings have in common, the power to last. I may have written to you about this painting before, or talked about it, but I am not sure. If so, bear with me; my memory is going. There are quite a few paintings in studios around town that are well known to people in the art world but can’t be exhibited in galleries or museums because they probably would be considered obscene and might get the gallery or museum in trouble, and this is one of them. Hundreds of people have seen it through the years, many of them painters who have expressed admiration for it, and I have a hunch that one of these days, the way people are growing accustomed to the so-called obscene, it will hang in the Whitney or the Metropolitan. Alice Neel comes from a small town near Philadelphia and went to the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia. She used to have a studio in the Village, but she moved uptown long ago. She is highly respected by many painters of her age and generation, although she is not too well known to the general public. She has work in important collections, but this may be her best work. Her best work, and it can’t be shown in public. A kind of underground masterpiece. I wish sometime you’d go and see it. I’d be interested to know what you think. She doesn’t show it to just anyone who asks, of course, but I will give you her telephone number and if you tell her I want you to see it I’m sure she will show it to you.…”

  The day that I received this letter, I remembered, I had tried several times to call Miss Neel, but her telephone hadn’t answered, and I had filed the letter away and Gould had never brought the matter up again and I had forgotten all about it. This day, on an impulse, I called Miss Neel and got her, and she said that of course I could see the Gould portrait, and gave me the address of her studio. The address turned out to be a tenement in a Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhood on the upper East Side, and Miss Neel turned out to be a stately, soft-spoken, good-looking blond woman in her middle fifties. Her studio was a floor-through flat on the third floor of the tenement. Against a wall in one room was a two-tiered rack filled with paintings resting on their sides. The Gould portrait, she said, was on the top tier. She had to stand on a chair and take out several other paintings in order to get at it. As she took them out, she held them up for me to see, and commented on them, and her comments were so offhand they sounded cryptic. One painting showed an elderly man lying in a coffin. “My father,” she said. “Head clerk in the per-diem department.” “Excuse me,” I said, wondering what a per-diem department was but not really wanting to know, “the per-diem department of what?” “Excuse me,” she said. “Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia.” Another was a painting of a young Puerto Rican man sitting up in a hospital bed and staring wide-eyed into the distance. “T.b.,” she said. “Dying, but he didn’t. Recovered and became a codeine addict.” Another was a painting of a woman in childbirth. Then came a painting of a small, bearded, bony, gawky, round-shouldered man who was strip stark naked except for his glasses, and this was the portrait of Gould. It was a fairly large painting, and Gould seemed almost life-size in it. The background was vague; he appeared to be sitting on a wooden bench in a steam bath, waiting for the steam to come on. His bony hands were resting on his bony knees, and his ribs showed plainly. He had one set of male sexual organs in the proper place, another set was growing from where his navel should have been, and still another set was growing from the wooden bench. Anatomically, the painting was fanciful and grotesque but not particularly shocking; except for the plethora of sexual organs, it was a strict and sober study of an undernourished middle-aged man. It was the expression on Gould’s face that was shocking. Occasionally, in one of his Village hangouts or at a party, Gould would become so full of himself that he would abruptly get to his feet and rush about the room, bowing to women of all ages and sizes and degrees of approachability, and begging them to dance with him, and sometimes attempting to embrace and kiss them. After a while, rebuffed on all sides, he would get tired of this. Then he would imitate the flight of a sea gull. He would hop and skip and leap and lurch about, flapping his arms up and down and cawing like a sea gull as he did so. “Scree-eek!” he would cry out. “I’m a sea gull.” He would keep on doing this until people stopped looking at him and resumed their conversations. Then, to regain their attention, he would take off his jacket and shirt and throw them aside and do a noisy, hand-clapping, breast-beating, foot-stamping dance. “Quiet!” he would cry out. “I’m doing a dance. It’s a sacred dance. It’s an Indian dance. It’s the full-moon dance of the Chippewas.” His eyes would glitter, his lower jaw would hang loose like a dog’s in midsummer and he would pant like a dog, and on his face would come a leering, gleeful, mawkishly abandoned expression, half satanic and half silly. Miss Neel had caught this expression. “Joe Gould was very proud of th
is picture and used to come and sit and look at it,” Miss Neel said. She studied Gould’s face with affection and amusement and also with what seemed to me to be a certain uneasiness. “I call it ‘Joe Gould,’” she continued, “but I probably should call it ‘A Portrait of an Exhibitionist.’” A few moments later, she added, “I don’t mean to say that Joe was an exhibitionist. I’m sure he wasn’t—technically. Still, to be perfectly honest, years ago, watching him at parties, I used to have a feeling that there was an old exhibitionist shut up inside him and trying to get out, like a spider shut up in a bottle. Deep down inside him. A frightful old exhibitionist—the kind you see late at night in the subway. And he didn’t necessarily know it. That’s why I painted him this way.” I suddenly realized that in my mind I had replaced the real Joe Gould—or at least the Joe Gould I had known—with a cleaned-up Joe Gould, an after-death Joe Gould. By forgetting the discreditable or by slowly transforming the discreditable into the creditable, as one tends to do in thinking about the dead, I had, so to speak, respectabilized him. Now, looking at the shameless face in the portrait, I got him back into proportion, and I concluded that if it was possible for the real Joe Gould to have any feeling about the matter one way or the other he wouldn’t be in the least displeased if I told anything at all about him that I happened to know. Quite the contrary.

  I first saw Gould in the winter of 1932. At that time, I was a newspaper reporter, working mostly on crime news. Every now and then, I covered a story in Women’s Court, which in those days was in Jefferson Market Court-house, at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, in Greenwich Village. In the block below the courthouse there was a Greek restaurant, named the Athens, that was a hangout for people who worked in the court or often had business in it. They usually sat at a long table up front, across from the cashier’s desk, and Harry Panagakos, the proprietor, sometimes came over and sat with them. One afternoon, during a court recess, I was sitting at this table drinking coffee with Panagakos and a probation officer and a bail bondsman and a couple of Vice Squad detectives when a curious little man came in. He was around five feet four or five, and quite thin; he could hardly have weighed more than ninety pounds. He was bareheaded, and he carried his head cocked on one side, like an English sparrow. His hair was long, and he had a bushy beard. There were streaks of dirt on his forehead, obviously from rubbing it with dirty fingers. He was wearing an overcoat that was several sizes too large for him; it reached almost to the floor. He held his hands clasped together for warmth—it was a bitter-cold day—and the sleeves of the overcoat came down over them, forming a sort of muff. Despite his beard, the man, in the oversized overcoat, bareheaded and dirty-faced, had something childlike and lost about him: a child who had been up in the attic with other children trying on grownups’ clothes and had become tired of the game and wandered off. He stood still for a few moments, getting his bearings, and then he came over to Panagakos and said, “Can I have something to eat now, Harry? I can’t wait until tonight.” At first Panagakos seemed annoyed, but then he shrugged his shoulders and told the man to go on back and sit down and he would step into the kitchen in a few minutes and ask the chef to fix him something. Looking greatly relieved, the man walked hurriedly up the aisle between two rows of tables. To be precise, he scurried up the aisle. “Who in God’s holy name is that?” asked one of the detectives. Panagakos said that the man was one of the Village bohemians. He said that the bohemians were starving to death—in New York City, the winter of 1932 was the worst winter of the depression—and that he had got in the habit of feeding some of them. He said that the waiters set aside steaks and chops that people hadn’t finished eating, and other pieces of food left on plates, and wrapped them in wax paper and put them in paper bags and saved them for the bohemians. Panagakos said that all he asked was that they wait until just before closing time, at midnight, to come in and collect the food, so the sight of them trooping in and out wouldn’t get on the nerves of the paying customers. He said that he was going to give this one some soup and a sandwich but that he’d have to warn him not to come in early again. The detective asked if the man was a poet or a painter. “I don’t know what you’d call him,” Panagakos said. “His name is Joe Gould, and he’s supposed to be writing the longest book in the history of the world.”

  Toward the end of the thirties, I quit my newspaper job and went to work for The New Yorker. Around the same time, I moved to the Village, and I began to see Gould frequently. I would catch glimpses of him going into or coming out of one of the barrooms on lower Sixth Avenue—the Jericho Tavern or the Village Square Bar & Grill or the Belmar or Goody’s or the Rochambeau. I would see him sitting scribbling at a table in the Jackson Square branch of the Public Library, or I would see him filling his fountain pen in the main Village post office—the one on Tenth Street—or I would see him sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square. I worked a good deal at night at that time, and now and then, on my way home, around two or three in the morning, I would see him on Sixth Avenue or on a side street, hunched over and walking along slowly and appearing to be headed nowhere in particular, almost always alone, almost always carrying a bulging brown pasteboard portfolio, sometimes mumbling to himself. In my eyes, he was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man. I never saw him without thinking of the Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman, or of a silent old man called Swamp Jackson who lived alone in a shack on the edge of a swamp near the small farming town in the South that I come from and wandered widely on foot on the back roads of the countryside at night, or of one of those men I used to puzzle over when I read the Bible as a child, who, for transgressions that seemed mysterious to me, had been “cast out.”

  One morning in the summer of 1942, sitting in my office at The New Yorker, I thought of Gould—I had seen him on the street the night before—and it occurred to me that he might be a good subject for a Profile. According to some notes I made at the time—I made notes on practically everything I had to do with Gould, and I found these in the file drawer with the rest of the Gould memorabilia—it was the morning of June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. I happened to be free to start on something new, so I went in and spoke to one of the editors about the idea. I remember telling the editor that I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his Oral History, and not his bohemianism; in my time, I had interviewed a number of Greenwich Village bohemians and they had seemed to me to be surprisingly tiresome. The editor said to go ahead and try it.

  I was afraid that I might have trouble persuading Gould to talk about himself—I really knew next to nothing about him, and had got the impression that he was austere and aloof—and I decided that I had better talk with some people who knew him, or were acquainted with him, at least, and see if I could find out the best way to approach him. I left the office around eleven and went down to the Village and began going into places along Sixth Avenue and bringing up Gould’s name and getting into conversations about him with bartenders and waiters and with old-time Villagers they pointed out for me among their customers. In the middle of the afternoon, I telephoned the switchboard operator at the office and asked if there were any messages for me, as I customarily did when I was out, and she immediately switched me to the receptionist, who said that a man had been sitting in the reception room for an hour or so waiting for me to return. “I’ll put him on the phone,” she said. “Hello, this is Joe Gould,” the man said. “I heard that you wanted to talk to me, so I dropped in, but the thing is, I’m supposed to go to the clinic at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and pick up a prescription for some eye trouble I’ve been having, and if it’s one kind of prescription it won’t cost anything but if it’s another kind it may cost around two dollars,
and I’ve just discovered that I don’t have any money with me, and it’s getting late, and I wonder if you’d ask your receptionist to lend me two dollars and you can pay her back when you come in and we can meet any time you say and have a talk and I’ll pay you back then.” The receptionist broke in and said that she would lend him the money, and then Gould came back on the phone and we agreed to meet at nine-thirty the next morning in a diner on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, called the Jefferson. He suggested both the time and the place.

  When I got back to the office, I gave the receptionist her two dollars. “He was a terribly dirty little man, and terribly nosy,” she said, “and I was glad to get him out of here.” “What was he nosy about?” I asked. “Well, for one thing,” she said, “he wanted to know how much I make; Also,” she continued, handing me a folded slip of paper, “he gave me this note as he was leaving, and told me not to read it until he got on the elevator.” “You have beautiful shoulders, my dear,” the note said, “and I should like to kiss them.” “He also left a note for you,” she said, handing me another folded slip of paper. “On second thought,” this note said, “nine-thirty is a little early for me. Let us make it eleven.”

  The Jefferson—it is gone now—was one of those big, roomy, jukeboxy diners. It was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, at the conjunction of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, Village Square, and Eighth Street, which is the heart and hub of the Village. It stayed open all day and all night, and it was a popular meeting place. It had a long counter with a row of wobbly-seated stools, and it had a row of booths. When I entered it, at eleven, Gould was sitting on the first counter stool, facing the door and holding his greasy old pasteboard portfolio on his lap, and he looked the worst I had ever seen him. He was wearing a limp, dirty seersucker suit, a dirty Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and dirty sneakers. His face was greenish gray, and the right side of his mouth twitched involuntarily. His eyes were bloodshot. He was bald on top, but he had hair sticking out in every possible direction from the back and sides of his head. His beard was unkempt, and around his mouth cigarette smoke had stained it yellow. He had on a pair of glasses that were loose and lopsided, and they had slipped down near the end of his nose. As I came in, he lifted his head a little and looked at me, and his face was alert and on guard and yet so tired and so detached and so remotely reflective that it was almost impassive. Looking straight at me, he looked straight through me. I have seen the same deceptively blank expression on the faces of old freaks sitting on platforms in freak shows and on the faces of old apes in zoos on Sunday afternoons.