Joe Gould's Secret

by Joseph Mitchell

  That night after work, I put the letters to Gould in my pocket and went down to the Minetta Tavern. Gould was sitting at the most conspicuous table in the place—it was up front and across from the bar and visible from the front window, on Minetta Lane—and he was busily writing in a composition book. I gave him the letters, and he looked at them with suspicion. Then, after reading a few, he got into a state of excitement and began ripping them open and glancing through them and murmuring appreciatively to himself. All the letters were complimentary in one way or another. One was from a woman in Norwood who had been in his class in high school. It was written in pencil on ruled paper, it was six or seven pages long, it contained news about a number of people Gould said he had not heard of since he’d left home, and it was very friendly. Gould’s face shone as he read it. “Your old home is still one of the nicest-looking places in Norwood,” the woman wrote. “People my age and older call it the old Dr. Gould house. It is now a rooming house for teachers and nurses and widows and women in general of the better class living alone. Do you recall Mrs. Annie Faulkner? She owns it and runs it. Her capacity is eighteen women. Inside it looks pretty much the same as when you lived there. Some of the furnishings are the same, such as that big tall mirror in the front hall with the gold cupids on it. If I remember right, you had some relatives living in Boston and other places in Massachusetts who were very well fixed, and sooner or later maybe one of them will leave you a little something and if this ever happens (and you know as well as I do such things do happen in widely related old families like yours full of old maiden aunts and cousins who might just as well leave it to you as to their dearly beloved old cats or dogs or the Christian Science Church the way they’re always doing it) why don’t you come on back up here and buy back the old house and live part of the year anyway in Norwood? I was very proud to read about the history book you are writing, and I heard others say the same, and someday I predict there will be a statue of you in Norwood.…” Several of the letter writers had enclosed dollar bills. “Buy yourself a drink on me,” they wrote, or something to that effect. One, a Harvard classmate, had enclosed a five-dollar bill. Another, a retired Navy officer, had enclosed a check for twenty-five dollars. The retired Navy officer wrote that he spent a large part of his time sitting on the pier of a crab-picking plant near his home, in Annapolis, Maryland, watching sea gulls and listening to them. “I love sea gulls very much the way you do,” he wrote, “and I sometimes feel that I, too, can understand their language.”

  I told Gould that I hoped he would write these people and thank them.

  “Write them!” he said. “I’m going to get busy tonight and try my best to start a correspondence with each and every one of them. Maybe I can persuade some of them to become regular contributors to the Joe Gould Fund.”

  Gould went over to the bar to show one of the letters to a man he knew who was standing there. The composition book in which he had been writing was lying open on the table, and I looked at it. On the first page, in big, careful capital letters, was “DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.” I reflected that this was the fourth version of this chapter I had seen. When he returned, I said, “I see you’re still working on the chapter about your father’s death.” This made him irritable. “Is there anything wrong in that?” he asked. “The other night, I got into a discussion about this very thing with Maxwell Bodenheim and some other old bohemians in Goody’s. Max knows from perpetually looking over my shoulder that I’ve been working on my father’s death for years. He knows I keep putting it aside and returning to it. And he was making fun of me for spending so much time on it. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still trying to bury your father,’ he said to me. Max himself has written a whole shelf of books—a whole shelf of novels, that is; a whole shelf of no-good novels; a whole shelf of long no-good novels—and he thinks that gives him the right to tell everybody else how to do. I told him that all I’m trying to do is write an account of the matter that will be a little masterpiece and last forever. That’s all. ‘Quality,’ I told him, ‘not quantity.’ I told him that that little five-line poem I once wrote on the death of the Dial was worth more than all his claptrap novels put together. ‘One five-line poem that’s perfect of its kind,’ I said, ‘is worth more than any number of huge, formless, shapeless books.’”

  The thought crossed my mind that this was an odd way for the author of a book as huge and formless and shapeless as the Oral History to be talking.

  I had taken the letters to Gould on a Monday night. On the following Wednesday morning, another letter arrived for him. I forwarded it to him at the Minetta Tavern. On Friday morning, four more letters arrived for him, and I decided to go by the Minetta that night on my way home and give them to him. Instead of which, shortly after lunch the receptionist stuck her head in my office and said that Gould was outside in the reception room and wanted to know if there was any mail for him. My heart sank. Oh, God, I remember thinking, I’m in for it now. He’ll come in looking for letters practically every day from now on. And every time he comes in, he’ll talk and talk and talk. And he’ll keep on doing it, year in and year out, until I die or he dies. “Please send him in,” I said. He came into my office, and I gave him the letters, and he looked each one over, front and back. “I wrote to all those people who wrote to me, just as I said I would,” he said, “and these are the first replies.”

  “If you’re going to keep on writing to them,” I said, “wouldn’t it be better to use the Minetta Tavern as your mail address?”

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, his voice suddenly becoming indignant, “I’ll continue to use The New Yorker as my address. The people at the Minetta are nice to me now, but they might get tired of me at any time and freeze me out, and if they did, I wouldn’t like to have to go back there inquiring about my mail.” Then he said something that brought me up short. “Look,” he said. “You’re the one who started all this. I didn’t seek you out. You sought me out. You wanted to write a story about me, and you did, and you’ll have to take the consequences.”

  “Please forgive me,” I said. “You’re right.”

  The next moment, Gould became conciliatory. “In other words,” he said, giggling, “if you lie down with dogs, you have to expect to get up with fleas.”

  After that, just as I had feared, Gould started coming in frequently. He would come in two or three times a week, usually in the afternoon. When he was cold sober, Gould was shy—shy but desperate. He was a little like one of those men who are too shy to talk to strangers but not too shy to hold up a bank. If he was in this state when he came in, he would walk right past the receptionist and burst into my office without knocking and pick up his mail, if he had any, and collect a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund and snatch that morning’s Herald Tribune out of my waste-basket and be out and gone in a matter of minutes. If he had been drinking when he came in, he would sit down and talk, and I would have to drop everything and listen to him. I didn’t really mind this so much—in this state, he was apt to be full of whatever gossip was floating around at the moment in the barrooms and dumps of the Village, and I had developed a morbid interest in such gossip. Also, I could generally count on getting him out in half an hour or so. If he happened to be suffering from a hangover when he came in, however, my afternoon was shot. In this state, he was driven to talk, he was determined to talk, he would not be denied, and I would be lucky if I got him out in an hour and a half or two hours, or even three. He would sit on the edge of an old swivel chair in a corner of my office, his portfolio on his lap, his clothes smelling of the fumigants and disinfectants used in flophouses, rheumy-eyed, twitching, scratching, close to hysteria, and he would talk on and on and on. His subject was always the same—himself. And I would sit and listen to him and try my best to show some interest in what he was saying, and gradually my eyes would glaze over and my blood would turn to water and a kind of paralysis would set in. I was young then, and much more courteous to older
people—and to everyone else, for that matter, as I look back on it—than I should have been. Also, I had not yet found out about time; I was still under the illusion that I had plenty of time—time for this, time for that, time for everything, time to waste.

  I kept hoping that Gould would talk himself out, but the months went by and he showed no sign of doing so. He continued to come in as often as ever. One afternoon in August, during one of his visits, I suddenly realized, to my dismay, that as time passed, talking to me was becoming more and more important to him, instead of less and less. After a little reflection, I thought I saw why this was so. It didn’t have much to do with me as a person. In fact, I don’t think that Gould particularly liked me. He once said that he couldn’t stand Southerners and that I was no exception, and although he was drunk when he said it, and apologized later, he probably meant it at least as much as he didn’t mean it. It was simply that by listening to him for long sessions while I was working on the Profile and by continuing to listen to him whenever he came in and insisted on talking, I had probably come to know more about his past than anybody else in the city and perhaps than anybody else in the world, and had become a kind of stand-in relative of his, or fellow ex-Norwoodian. Despite the difference in our ages, when he talked to me he might have been talking to someone who had known him all his life. When he spoke of his Uncle Oscar, for example, he knew that I knew he was referring to his mother’s brother, Oscar Vroom, whom his mother virtually worshipped, and he knew that I knew what his father thought of Oscar Vroom and what Oscar Vroom thought of his father. When he mentioned various people he had known while he was growing up in Norwood, such as Mrs. Betty Allsopp, he knew that I knew the parts they had played in his life. (He believed that Mrs. Allsopp was responsible for the fact that he had had a great deal of dental trouble and had had to start wearing false teeth before he was thirty. Mrs. Allsopp was a family friend and lived across the street. She was a widow, she was his mother’s age, and she was small and delicate and pretty. One hot summer day when he was around fourteen, she invited him into her kitchen for a glass of lemonade and he tried to pull up her dress and she slapped him so hard, according to him, that she deadened the nerves of eight of his teeth—four upper and four lower—and ruined his bite.) When he mentioned the Bigelow Block and the Folan Block and the Sanborn Block, he knew that I knew he was referring to store-and-office buildings that were landmarks in Norwood, and he knew that I was aware of some of the emotional connotations that their names had for him. When he spoke of Ed Goodbird or of Water Chief or of Ash-kob-dip, he knew that I knew he was referring to old Indians he had known in North Dakota, and he knew that I knew how much he admired each of them, and why. In his years in the Village, he had pursued a succession of women bohemians, most of whom had been would-be poets or would-be painters, and many of whom had been alcoholics or extreme eccentrics, or both, and several of whom had wound up in state mental hospitals, and when their names came into his talk he knew that I knew which ones had been responsive to him and which ones had been unresponsive and which ones not only had been unresponsive but had complained about him to the police. He had given behind-their-back nicknames to many people in the Village, and when he referred to the Spitter or to the Nickel Snatcher or to Old Aunt Cousin Little Sister Susy Belle Susy Sue, he knew that I knew whom he meant. By knowing so much about his past, I had, in effect, I realized, become a part of his past. By talking to me, he could bring back his past, he could keep it alive. I realized also that there was no getting away from the fact that the more he talked to me the more I would know about his past, and the more I knew about his past the more important talking to me would become to him. This scared me, and I set out deliberately to get him off my back and, if necessary, onto somebody else’s back as soon as possible.

  The best way to do this, I decided, was to get an editor or a publisher interested in the Oral History. Gould had once told me that he had lugged armfuls of the Oral History into and out of fourteen publishing offices and had then given up trying to find a publisher for it. “Half of them said it was obscene and outrageous and to get it out of there as quick as I could,” he said, “and the others said they couldn’t read my handwriting.” I had an idea that Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Scribner’s who had worked with Thomas Wolfe, might possibly take an interest in Gould, and I called him first. His secretary said he was out of town. I told her a little about Gould and asked her if she thought Mr. Perkins would see him and have a talk with him. “No,” she said. “I don’t.” “Why?” I asked. “Mr. Gould has already been here,” she said. “He came in out of the blue one day not long ago and insisted on seeing Mr. Perkins. I saw him instead, and he gave me two perfectly filthy copybooks to give to Mr. Perkins, each containing a manuscript chapter of his history. He seemed to think he might be able to get a large advance from Mr. Perkins on the strength of them. I spent most of the next day deciphering his handwriting and making copies of the chapters for Mr. Perkins to read. One chapter was about the death of his father, although it wandered all over the Western Hemisphere, and the other was something about Indians. Mr. Perkins read them and was not impressed. Some days later, Mr. Gould returned, and Mr. Perkins saw him and told him he was sorry but he couldn’t give him an advance, whereupon Mr. Gould became quite difficult. I don’t think Mr. Perkins would be at all eager to see him again.”

  A friend of mine named John Woodburn was an editor at Harcourt, Brace, and I called him next. Woodburn said that it had occurred to him several times that a representative selection of chapters from the Oral History might make a book, and that he would like very much to have a talk with Gould, but that he was too busy. He was working day and night going over a manuscript with a novelist who was leaving for Europe, he said, and he himself was supposed to leave on a business trip in a few days. Then, impulsively, he said that he would see Gould. “Ask him to come in at noon tomorrow,” he said. “I have a luncheon date that I’ve been looking forward to, but I’ll break it and have a sandwich sent in, and we can talk for at least half an hour. I have a number of questions I’d like to ask him about the Oral History, and you never can tell—maybe something will come of it.” I telephoned Gould at the Minetta that night and told him about the appointment. He wanted to know if I knew anything about Harcourt, Brace’s policy in regard to giving advances to authors against royalties and if so how much of an advance should he ask for, and he also wanted to know if I had ever seen a Harcourt, Brace contract and if so did it stipulate that the total amount of the advance would be paid upon the signing of the contract between author and publisher or did it stipulate that a certain percentage would be paid upon the signing of the contract and the rest upon the delivery of the manuscript. I begged him not to talk to Woodburn about such things—it was entirely too early for that—but to spend the time describing the Oral History and answering Woodburn’s questions. The next afternoon, Woodburn telephoned me. He was in a rage. Gould hadn’t shown up. That night, I went down to the Minetta and saw Gould and asked him what had happened. He said he had gone into a bookstore and picked out some Harcourt, Brace books and looked them over and had come to the conclusion that Harcourt, Brace would not be the appropriate publishers for the Oral History and had decided not to keep the appointment. By the way he said “appropriate,” he strongly implied that he did not think Harcourt, Brace was good enough to publish the Oral History. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mr. Gould,” I said. “Harcourt, Brace is one of the best publishing houses in the country, and you know it is.”

  I had another friend in the publishing business—Charles A. Pearce, of Duell, Sloan & Pearce—and a few days later I called him and discussed the matter with him. It turned out that he, also, had thought of the possibility of putting out a book of selections from the Oral History. “I’d like to have a talk with Gould and explore the idea,” Pearce said, “but I don’t want to make an appointment with him. If he broke an appointment with Woodburn, he’d most likely do the same with me. Also, I’d prefer to have a
casual talk with him, so he won’t start right away thinking about advances and royalty percentages and movie rights and North American serial rights and worldwide translation rights, and all that. Who does he think he is, anyway—Mary Roberts Rinehart? Suppose we do it this way. My office is only a few minutes from yours. The next time he comes in and sits down and it looks as if he’s going to stay a while, why don’t you call me, and I’ll take a cab right up. I’ll make it appear that I just happened to drop in.” At that time, Pearce’s firm was at 270 Madison Avenue, which is on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, and the distance from his office to mine was only four blocks up and one and a half over. On Friday afternoon, September 3, 1943, around three o’clock, Gould showed up in my office. He said that he had lost his fountain pen and that he wanted me to make a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund so he could buy a new one. He also needed some composition books, he said. Then he sat down in the swivel chair and began talking. He had a hangover, but it didn’t seem to be a particularly bad one; that is, he was unduly talkative but he wasn’t unduly incoherent. I excused myself and went into the next office and telephoned Pearce. Twenty minutes later, Pearce put his head in my door and said he had happened to be in the neighborhood and thought he’d drop in and say hello. “Please come in,” I said, and I introduced him to Gould.

  Pearce and Gould talked for a few minutes about a Village poet they both knew, and then Pearce said that he had been hearing about the Oral History for years and would like to read some of it.

  “‘Some of it’!” said Gould. “Everybody wants to read ‘some of it.’ Nobody wants to just read it. From now on, I’m not going to let anybody read some of it. They’ll read all of it or none of it.”