Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  And that would have been that but for Gould’s subsequent peskiness and his taking advantage of Mitchell’s good nature. Mitchell figured that in time Gould would drift away, but he didn’t. Desperate to extricate himself, Mitchell began introducing Gould to book editors of his acquaintance, hoping the prospect of actually publishing the oral history would be enough of a distraction for Gould that it would purchase Mitchell some peace. When Gould blew off one such meeting, Mitchell set up another. Then a September 1943 meeting with Charles A. Pearce, of Duell, Sloan and Pearce, went awry because of Gould’s various equivocations and, finally, his startling declaration that the oral history should be published only after his death. With that, Mitchell loses all courtly restraint.

  Credit 12.1

  Joe Gould would become a nuisance to Mitchell, but what most unsettled the writer was how much of Gould he saw in himself.

  I was exasperated. As soon as Pearce was out of the room, I turned on Gould. “You told me you lugged armfuls of the Oral History into and out of fourteen publishing offices,” I said. “Why in hell did you do that and go to all that trouble if you’ve always been resolved in the back of your mind that it would be published posthumously? I’m beginning to believe,” I went on, “that the Oral History doesn’t exist.” This remark came from my unconscious, and I was barely aware of the meaning of what I was saying—I was simply getting rid of my anger—but the next moment, glancing at Gould’s face, I knew as well as I knew anything that I had blundered upon the truth about the Oral History.

  Thus did Mitchell discover that the multimillion-word Oral History of Our Time in essence existed only in Gould’s febrile imagination. Mitchell was awash in emotions. He was incensed; he felt betrayed, embarrassed, used—and not a little panicky. He had just written a major Profile predicated on the oral history; would he and The New Yorker now have to take it all back? For a fleeting moment the writer considered following through and demanding of Gould an explicit answer to Mitchell’s accusation—but he didn’t. In part, this was to keep from shattering what little remained of Gould’s dignity. But it was also true that, at that juncture, Mitchell didn’t really want to hear Gould’s answer. For if Mitchell did know with certainty there wasn’t an oral history, he would have to do something about setting the matter straight, with all the attendant embarrassment, or worse. In any case, Mitchell didn’t press Gould for confirmation of his suspicions, and Gould didn’t volunteer it. Both men simply understood that, in an instant, things between them were different.

  Before long, Gould’s health worsened, and an anonymous female patron staked him to a small hotel room of his own, providing some stability and an escape from the flophouses. He stopped dropping by The New Yorker, and he and Mitchell came to see each other only sporadically. But over time Gould lost his patron, and then his health, and then his mind. In 1953, Mitchell learned that Gould was in a state mental hospital, suffering from senility as well as a host of physical maladies. In 1957, he died there. Mitchell, who had kept abreast of Gould’s steady decline through friends and hospital contacts, got the news in a phone call. After hearing the particulars of Gould’s final days, Mitchell thought to inquire whether Gould happened to leave behind any papers. “None at all” was the reply.

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  At the time of Gould’s death, Mitchell was busy reporting “The Rivermen.” And Joe Gould’s secret might well have stayed buried with the vagabond himself but for Mitchell’s pack-rat habits—and a still-nagging sense that Gould had pulled one over on him. Two decades after he had worked on the original Gould Profile, Mitchell was in his office one day going through old files when he came across the notes and related materials that he had gathered in preparing it. Many, perhaps most, reporters would have long since consigned such matter to the rubbish bin. But here were his original reporting notes, typescripts of Gould’s protean monologues, news clippings and drawings and photographs and Gould letters and poems. There were notes on seemingly insignificant events and actions, such as when Mitchell first proposed the Gould story to his editors—June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. The notes also convey how thoroughly Mitchell dove into a Profile assignment—not to mention the extent to which Gould had been adopted by the Village cultural establishment. As Mitchell recounted:

  Ever since my first interview with Gould, I had been tracking down friends and enemies of his and talking with them about him. Most of these people had known Gould for a long time and either were regular contributors to the Joe Gould Fund or had been in the past. In fact, several of them—e.e. cummings, the poet; Slater Brown, the novelist; M. R. Werner, the biographer; Orrick Johns, the poet; Kenneth Fearing, the poet and novelist; Malcolm Cowley, the critic; Barney Gallant, the proprietor of Barney Gallant’s, a Village night club; and Max Gordon, the proprietor of the Village Vanguard, another Village night club—had been giving him a dime or a quarter or a half dollar or a dollar or a couple of dollars once or twice a week for over twenty years. Each person I saw had suggested others to see, and I had looked up around fifteen people and spoken on the telephone with around fifteen others.

  Mitchell initially intended to keep the secret about the oral history just that—“let the dead bury the dead,” as he put it, echoing George Hunter. But in his old files, Mitchell found a letter from Gould in which he referenced a portrait that the painter Alice Neel had done of him in the early thirties. Mitchell followed up with Neel, who invited him to her studio and showed him the Gould portrait. The subject was nude, sitting on a bench in a steam bath. The shocking aspect of the tableau, however, was not the dearth of clothing but that Neel had painted Gould with more than the requisite number of male genitalia. When Mitchell pressed about this, Neel said that Gould was proud of the painting and visited it often. “I call it ‘Joe Gould,’ ” she said, “but I probably should call it ‘A Portrait of an Exhibitionist.’ ” She paused for a moment, then explained. “I don’t mean to say 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.”

  As he contemplated Neel’s remarks, Mitchell began to reconsider the emotional relationship he still maintained with Gould—who, while deceased, had never really left the writer. He realized that in the wake of Gould’s death “I had replaced the real Joe Gould—or at least the Joe Gould I had known—with a cleaned-up Joe Gould…. By forgetting the discreditable or by slowly transforming the discreditable into the creditable, as one tends to do when thinking about the dead, I had, so to speak, respectabilized him.” Once he got Gould back into proportion, Mitchell added, “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.”

  Of course, Mitchell also knew that he had a damn good yarn to tell, and with the publication of “The Rivermen” he’d been seeking his next story. There was perhaps one final motivation for him to revisit Gould, which Mitchell conveys in what is almost—but not quite—a throwaway line from the piece: “I believe in revenge.”

  Whatever the rationale for changing his mind, Mitchell plunged into Joe Gould the sequel. A number of factors combined to make it the steepest challenge of his professional life. The sheer complexity of the reporting and the need to go into so much of the backstory of the 1942 Profile—the sequel was five times longer than the original—meant that the preparation of the article was inordinately time-consuming. “I have been working on [it] for over a year,” Mitchell wrote an admirer while in the throes of composition, “and was under the impression that I had it almost finished, but here lately, little by little, I began to realize that it wasn’t a
nywhere near finished, it was not only far too long it was all lopsided, and that I would have to do a lot of revising and rewriting, and I was about ready to give up and go on down to the Bowery. ‘What the hell’s the use?’ I asked myself yesterday morning. ‘Who reads these damned stories, anyway?’ ”

  At this same time Mitchell was shuttling back and forth to North Carolina due to his mother’s failing health. Betty Mitchell—the quiet woman who inculcated in her firstborn an appreciation for literature and then gave him the support he needed to leave home in search of his writing destiny—died in June of 1963, at the age of seventy-seven. This period was an emotionally and physically exhausting one for Mitchell, and his conflicted feelings about Gould only exacerbated the writing challenge. It exacted a toll on Mitchell. By that November, he wrote to a friend back in North Carolina that he was nearing the end of “a New Yorker Profile that I’ve been working on for what seems like the last three hundred years.”

  Then, just when Mitchell could have used a piece of good news, he got perhaps the worst yet.

  —

  It’s hard to overstate what A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell had meant to each other over the years. One gets a glimpse from a letter their mutual friend and colleague St. Clair McKelway sent Mitchell in the late fifties. It was summer; McKelway was in London, and Liebling was visiting. Any correspondence was welcome from the amusing and peripatetic McKelway, who could drop from sight for months at a time and whose flamboyant bipolar condition and attendant paranoia only made him all the more interesting. But this particular letter had a special resonance for Mitchell. “You’d love London, I think, as much as I do,” McKelway wrote. “I feel about it somewhat as I felt about New York when I first came there in 1925 to work on the World, only now, at this age, I find certain limitations of mine enable me to enjoy things about London I possibly would not have had time for when I was twenty.” McKelway reported on some of the things he and Liebling had been up to during the latter’s visit. “Joe and I miss you. Having dinner last night at Scott’s, a kind of local Dinty Moore’s, but older, Joe said, ‘God damn it, Mac, I wish I was rich. I would send an escort for Mitchell and have him brought over here for three months so we could walk around and talk to him.’ ”

  Liebling’s transatlantic wistfulness captures the deep affection and camaraderie between the two Joes. Mitchell and Liebling had known each other their entire professional lives, and neither man relished anything more than the other’s company—be it while walking the city, debating favorite books over a cup of coffee, eating in a trusted restaurant, or having a nightcap (or three) at Costello’s. And talking, always talking—these were two of the magazine’s greatest talkers: Liebling, the native New Yorker who was garrulous coming out of the womb, and Mitchell, the courtly and once-shy Southerner who could, when enamored of a subject, engage in long flights of discourse as if he were a character out of Thomas Wolfe. Mitchell’s daughters remember Liebling as a kind of eccentric uncle. He was a frequent visitor at their apartment, and he adored Therese’s cooking (as did all the Mitchells’ friends). A treasured bit of family lore recounts how, one morning when Liebling had come around for breakfast, he pulled a volume from Mitchell’s bookcase in the living room, contentedly read for a while, then marked his place with a slice of leftover bacon.

  Throughout the postwar forties and into the fifties, the long period during which Mitchell became increasingly selective about his story pursuits and steadily reined in his production, Liebling kept turning out an almost heroic stream of Reporter pieces, Profiles, and criticism—all of it infused with a winking drollery and sharp judgments. (In an appreciation published on the centennial of Liebling’s birth, The New York Times caught his spirit perfectly with its headline: HE SPREAD HIMSELF THICK.) For the Rabelaisian Liebling, the very act of writing had a theatrical quality about it, and he was an approving audience of one. “You could hear Liebling—not only his typewriter going, but his own amusement, his self-appreciation,” recalled Philip Hamburger. “And you could hear him chuckling and laughing and actually doubled over.” Still, when the story was done, there was no one whose judgment mattered more to him than Mitchell, and vice versa.

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  Therese Mitchell took this photograph of A. J. Liebling and his third wife, the writer Jean Stafford, during a visit to the Lieblings’ Long Island home.

  In time, however, decades of overindulgent eating and drinking, and his resulting corpulence, caught up with Liebling. Chronic health issues began to slow him down, and he started experiencing periods of depression—something new to him but familiar enough to Mitchell. By the early sixties, the torrent of Liebling stories for The New Yorker had been reduced to a trickle.

  Mitchell could see plainly enough the parlous state of his friend’s health. Nonetheless, he was shaken to his core when, in December of 1963, Liebling was rushed to the hospital with what was diagnosed as viral pneumonia. The following week brought a series of spiraling complications, until Liebling at last died of congestive heart failure. He was fifty-nine years old. The shock of this turn and the deep imprint it left on Mitchell are evident in a letter he wrote to Liebling’s widow, Jean Stafford, more than a decade later. Said Mitchell, “Every Christmas since 1963 has been shadowed for me by recollections of those deeply disturbing and for that matter deeply puzzling days up at Doctors Hospital and Mount Sinai (and particularly by recollections of that bleak, cold-to-the-bone, new-snow-on-top-of-slush afternoon that Joe was moved from Doctors to Mount Sinai)….”

  At Liebling’s funeral, Mitchell offered the eulogy. The service was held at Frank E. Campbell’s celebrated funeral home at 81st and Madison, and Mitchell told the mourners that he and Liebling had come there together on a number of occasions—one time in particular, he recalled, for the funeral of an old newspaper colleague. In accord with the deceased’s wishes, Mitchell said, literally no words were spoken at the service. “Everybody sat for a while with his own thoughts,” he continued. “Some music was played, and then it was over. I was shocked by this, and, as Joe and I walked up the street afterwards, I said so, but Joe said that he wasn’t. I have forgotten his exact words, but he said something to the effect that it was the only funeral he had ever attended that he completely approved of.”

  It had been a season of loss for Mitchell. Within months he had experienced the death of his mother and that of a best friend who, more than anyone else, was also a professional muse to him. They represented two polestars in his life. The sudden severing had the effect of quickening, and deepening, the spells of depression he was prone to anyway. And the blows came just as Mitchell was desperately trying to wrestle the difficult Joe Gould story to a conclusion. The timing almost certainly darkened the already-dark tenor Mitchell intended for the sequel.

  —

  Through that winter and spring, Mitchell willed himself forward, channeling his grief into his writing. “Joe Gould’s Secret” finally appeared in The New Yorker, in two long installments, in September of 1964. Once again, Mitchell had managed to produce a story that, in its tone, direction, and surprising conclusion, no other New Yorker writer ever had.

  From the opening lines, Mitchell’s revisit takes a much harsher line with Gould than the genial original. “He was nonsensical and bumptious and inquisitive and gossipy and mocking and sarcastic and scurrilous,” Mitchell says of his subject. He reports that sometimes Gould resorted to petty thievery, even from his own friends, to survive. Readers familiar with the first Profile—and there were many—would have sensed immediately that, for some inexplicable reason, Mitchell’s once-affectionate attitude toward Gould had changed, even to the point of anger.

  That anger gradually becomes understandable as Mitchell spends the first half of the sequel describing his complicated relationship with Gould and his growing sense that all was not as it seemed with the oral history. By two-thirds of the way through the piece, when Mitchell reveals Joe Gould’s secret—that the oral history does not really exist—the
reader fully grasps that the puckish misfit of “Professor Sea Gull” is a manipulative and self-deluding figure who warrants, it would seem, only pity.

  Yet at this point Mitchell executes an emotional pirouette. Rather than condemning Gould for his elaborate charade, Mitchell begins to reconstruct all the reasons why he had admired him in the first place. Everyone has masks, Mitchell says, so in that way Gould was no different from the rest of us. But what did set him apart was that he had the courage to reject convention and societal (even familial) expectations, in order to live the life he felt called to. Joe Gould fielded the world’s indignities with wit and resourcefulness. And he carried with him an idea—not a trifling idea, but one so epic and audacious and stubborn that it had to be admired on its face. Besides, as Gould had explained to Mitchell, it wasn’t a question that the oral history didn’t exist, exactly; it was all up there in his head. He simply hadn’t had the opportunity to transcribe it, if you will.