Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  As long as he can remember, Gould has been perplexed by his own personality. There are a number of autobiographical essays in the Oral History, and he says that all of them are attempts to explain himself to himself. In one, ‘Why I Am Unable To Adjust Myself To Civilization, Such As It Is, or Do, Don’t, Do, Don’t, A Hell Of A Note,’ he came to the conclusion that his shyness was responsible for everything. ‘I am introvert and extrovert all rolled in one,’ he wrote, ‘a warring mixture of the recluse and the Sixth Avenue auctioneer. One foot says do, the other says don’t. One foot says shut your mouth, the other says bellow like a bull. I am painfully shy, but try not to let people know it. They would take advantage of me.’ Gould keeps his shyness well hidden. It is evident only when he is cold sober. In that state he is silent, suspicious, and constrained, but a couple of beers or a single jigger of gin will untie his tongue and put a leer on his face. He is extraordinarily responsive to alcohol. ‘On a hot night,’ he says, ‘I can walk up and down in front of a gin mill for ten minutes, breathing real deep, and get a jag on.’

  Even though Gould requires only a few drinks, getting them is sometimes quite a task. Most evenings he prowls around the saloons and dives on the west side of the Village, on the lookout for curiosity-seeking tourists from whom he can cadge beers, sandwiches, and small sums of money. If he is unable to find anyone approachable in the tumultuous saloons around Sheridan Square, he goes over to Sixth Avenue and works north, hitting the Jericho Tavern, the Village Square Bar & Grill, the Belmar, Goody’s, and the Rochambeau. He has a routine. He doesn’t enter a place unless it is crowded. After he is in, he bustles over to the telephone booth and pretends to look up a number. While doing this, he scrutinizes the customers. If he sees a prospect, he goes over and says, ‘Let me introduce myself. The name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a graduate of Harvard, magna cum difficultate, class of 1911, and chairman of the board of Weal and Woe, Incorporated. In exchange for a drink, I’ll recite a poem, deliver a lecture, argue a point, or take off my shoes and imitate a sea gull. I prefer gin, but beer will do.’ Gould is by no means a bum. He feels that the entertainment he provides is well worth whatever he is able to cadge. He doesn’t fawn, and he is never grateful. If he is turned down politely, he shrugs his shoulders and leaves the place. However, if the prospect passes a remark like ‘Get out of here, you bum,’ Gould turns on him, no matter how big he is, and gives him a shrill, nasal, scurrilous tongue-lashing. He doesn’t care what he says. When he loses his temper, he becomes fearless. He will drop his portfolio, put up his fists, and offer to fight men who could kill him with one halfhearted blow. If he doesn’t find an audience on the trip up Sixth, he turns west on Eleventh and heads for the Village Vanguard, in a cellar on Seventh Avenue South. The Vanguard was once a sleazy rendezvous for arty people, but currently it is a thriving night club. Gould and the proprietor, a man named Max Gordon, have known each other for many years and are on fairly good terms much of the time. Gould always hits the Vanguard last. He is sure of it, and he keeps it in reserve. Since it became prosperous, the place annoys him. He goes down the stairs and says, ‘Hello, Max, you dirty capitalist. I want a bite to eat and a beer. If I don’t get it, I’ll walk right out on the dance floor and throw a fit.’ ‘Go argue with the cook,’ Gordon tells him. Gould goes into the kitchen, eats whatever the cook gives him, drinks a couple of beers, fills a bag with bread crumbs, and departs.

  Despite his shyness, Gould has a great fondness for parties. There are many people in the Village who give big parties fairly often. Among them are a rich and idiosyncratic old doctor, a rich old spinster, a famous stage designer, a famous theatrical couple, and numbers of painters and sculptors and writers and editors and publishers. As often as not, when Gould finds out that any of these people are giving a party, he goes, and as often as not he is allowed to stay. Usually he keeps to himself for a while, uneasily smoking one cigarette after another and stiff as a board with tenseness. Sooner or later, however, impelled by a drink or two and by the desperation of the ill at ease, he begins to throw his weight around. He picks out the prettiest woman in the room, goes over, bows, and kisses her hand. He tells discreditable stories about himself. He becomes exuberant; suddenly, for no reason at all, he cackles with pleasure and jumps up and clicks his heels together. Presently he shouts, ‘All in favor of a one-man floor show, please say “Aye”!’ If he gets the slightest encouragement, he strips to the waist and does a hand-clapping, foot-stamping dance which he says he learned on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota and which he calls the Joseph Ferdinand Gould Stomp. While dancing, he chants an old Salvation Army song, ‘There Are Flies on Me, There Are Flies on You, but There Are No Flies on Jesus.’ Then he imitates a sea gull. He pulls off his shoes and socks and takes awkward, headlong skips about the room, flapping his arms and letting out a piercing caw with every skip. As a child he had several pet gulls, and he still spends many Sundays on the end of a fishing pier at Sheepshead Bay observing gulls; he claims he has such a thorough understanding of their cawing that he can translate poetry into it. ‘I have translated a number of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems into sea gull,’ he says.

  Inevitably, at every party Gould goes to, he gets up on a chair or a table and delivers some lectures. These lectures are extracts from chapters of the Oral History. They are brief, but he gives them lengthy titles, such as ‘Drunk as a Skunk, or How I Measured the Heads of Fifteen Hundred Indians in Zero Weather’ and ‘The Dread Tomato Habit, or Watch Out! Watch Out! Down with Dr Gallup!’ He is skeptical about statistics. In the latter lecture, using statistics he claims he found in financial sections in newspapers, he proves that ‘the eating of tomatoes by railroad engineers was responsible for fifty-three per cent of the train wrecks in the United States during the last seven years.’ When Gould arrives at a party, people who have never seen him before usually take one look at him and edge away. Before the evening is over, however, a few of them almost always develop a kind of puzzled respect for him; they get him in a corner, ask him questions, and try to determine what is wrong with him. Gould enjoys this. ‘When you came over and kissed my hand,’ a young woman told him one night, ‘I said to myself, “What a nice old gentleman.” A minute later I looked around and you were bouncing up and down with your shirt off, imitating a wild Indian. I was shocked. Why do you have to be such an exhibitionist?’ ‘Madam,’ Gould said, ‘it is the duty of the bohemian to make a spectacle of himself. If my informality leads you to believe that I’m a rum-dumb, or that I belong in Bellevue, hold fast to that belief, hold fast, hold fast, and show your ignorance.’

  Gould is a native of Norwood, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He comes from a family of physicians. His grandfather, Joseph Ferdinand Gould, for whom he was named, taught in the Harvard Medical School and had a practice in Boston. His father, Clarke Storer Gould, was a general practitioner in Norwood. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps and died of blood poisoning in a camp in Ohio during the First World War. The family was well-to-do until Gould was about grown, when his father invested unwisely in the stock of an Alaska land company. Gould says he went to Harvard only because it was a family custom. ‘I did not want to go,’ he wrote in one of his autobiographical essays. ‘It had been my plan to stay home and sit in a rocking chair on the back porch and brood.’ He says that he was an undistinguished student. Some of his classmates were Conrad Aiken, the poet; Howard Lindsay, the playwright and actor; Gluyas Williams, the cartoonist; and Richard F. Whitney, former president of the New York Stock Exchange. His best friends were three foreign students – a Chinese, a Siamese, and an Albanian.

  Gould’s mother had always taken it for granted that he would become a physician, but after getting his A.B. he told her he was through with formal education. She asked him what he intended to do. ‘I intend to stroll and ponder,’ he said. He passed most of the next three years strolling and pondering on the ranch of an uncle in Canada. In 1913, in an Albanian restaurant in Boston named the Scanderbeg, w
hose coffee he liked, he became acquainted with Theofan S. Noli, an archimandrite of the Albanian Orthodox Church, who interested him in Balkan politics. In February, 1914, Gould startled his family by announcing that he planned to devote the rest of his life to collecting funds to free Albania. He founded an organization in Boston called the Friends of Albanian Independence, enrolled a score or so of dues-paying members, and began telegraphing and calling on bewildered newspaper editors in Boston and New York City, trying to persuade them to print long treatises on Albanian affairs written by Noli. After about eight months of this, Gould was sitting in the Scanderbeg one night, drinking coffee and listening to a group of Albanian factory workers argue in their native tongue about Balkan politics, when he suddenly came to the conclusion that he was about to have a nervous breakdown. ‘I began to twitch uncontrollably and see double,’ he says. From that night on his interest in Albania slackened.

  After another period of strolling and pondering, Gould took up eugenics. He has forgotten exactly how this came about. In any case, he spent the summer of 1915 as a student in eugenical field work at the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. This organization, endowed by the Carnegie Institution, was engaged at that time in making studies of families of hereditary defectives, paupers, and town nuisances in several highly inbred communities. Such people were too prosaic for Gould; he decided to specialize in Indians. That winter he went out to North Dakota and measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and of five hundred Mandans on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Nowadays, when Gould is asked why he took these measurements, he changes the subject, saying, ‘The whole matter is a deep scientific secret.’ He was happy in North Dakota. ‘It was the most rewarding period of my life,’ he says. ‘I’m a good horseman, if I do say so myself, and I like to dance and whoop, and the Indians seemed to enjoy having me around. I was afraid they’d think I was batty when I asked for permission to measure their noggins, but they didn’t mind. It seemed to amuse them. Indians are the only true aristocrats I’ve ever known. They ought to run the country, and we ought to be put on the reservations.’ After seven months of reservation life, Gould ran out of money. He returned to Massachusetts and tried vainly to get funds for another head-measuring expedition. ‘At this juncture in my life,’ he says, ‘I decided to engage in literary work.’ He came to New York City and got a job as assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the Evening Mail. One morning in the summer of 1917, after he had been a reporter for about a year, he was basking in the sun on the back steps of Headquarters, trying to overcome a hangover, when the idea for the Oral History blossomed in his mind. He promptly quit his job and began writing. ‘Since that fateful morning,’ he once said, in a moment of exaltation, ‘the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.’

  Gould says that he rarely has more than a dollar at any one time, and that he doesn’t particularly care. ‘As a rule,’ he says, ‘I despise money.’ However, there is a widely held belief in the Village that he is rich and that he receives an income from inherited property in New England. ‘Only an old millionaire could afford to go around as shabby as you,’ a bartender told him recently. ‘You’re one of those fellows that die in doorways and when the cops search them their pockets are just busting with bankbooks. If you wanted to, I bet you could step over to the West Side Savings Bank right this minute and draw out twenty thousand dollars.’ After the death of his mother in 1939, Gould did come into some money. Close friends of his say that it was less than a thousand dollars and that he spent it in less than a month, wildly buying drinks all over the Village for people he had never seen before. ‘He seemed miserable with money in his pockets,’ Gordon, the proprietor of the Vanguard, says. ‘When it was all gone, it seemed to take a load off his mind.’ While Gould was spending his inheritance, he did one thing that satisfied him deeply. He bought a big, shiny radio and took it out on Sixth Avenue and kicked it to pieces. He has never cared for the radio. ‘Five minutes of the idiot’s babble that comes out of those machines,’ he says, ‘would turn the stomach of a goat.’

  During the twenties and the early thirties Gould occasionally interrupted his work on the Oral History to pose for classes at the Art Students’ League and to do book-reviewing for newspapers and magazines. He says there were periods when he lived comfortably on the money he earned this way. Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the old Tribune, gave him a lot of work. In an entry in ‘A Bookman’s Daybook,’ which is a diary of happenings in the New York literary world in the twenties, Rascoe told of an experience with Gould. ‘I once gave him a small book about the American Indians to review,’ Rascoe wrote, ‘and he brought me back enough manuscript to fill three complete editions of the Sunday Tribune. I especially honor him because, unlike most reviewers, he has never dogged me with inquiries as to why I never run it. He had his say, which was considerable, about the book, the author, and the subject, and there for him the matter ended.’ Gould says that he quit book-reviewing because he felt that it was beneath his dignity to compete with machines. ‘The Sunday Times and the Sunday Herald Tribune have machines that review books,’ he says. ‘You put a book in one of those machines and jerk down a couple of levers and a review drops out.’ In recent years Gould has got along on less than five dolllars in actual money a week. He has a number of friends – Malcolm Cowley, the writer and editor; Aaron Siskind, the documentary photographer; Cummings, the poet; and Gordon, the night-club proprietor, are a few – who give him small sums of money regularly. No matter what they think of the Oral History, all these people have great respect for Gould’s pertinacity.

  * * *

  Gould has a poor opinion of most of the writers and poets and painters and sculptors in the Village, and doesn’t mind saying so. Because of his outspokenness he has never been allowed to join any of the art, writing, cultural, or ism organizations. He has been trying for ten years to join the Raven Poetry Circle, which puts on the poetry exhibition in Washington Square each summer and is the most powerful organization of its kind in the Village, but he has been blackballed every time. The head of the Ravens is a retired New York Telephone Company employee named Francis Lambert McCrudden. For many years Mr McCrudden was a collector of coins from coin telephones for the telephone company. He is a self-educated man and very idealistic. His favorite theme is the dignity of labor, and his major work is an autobiographical poem called ‘The Nickel Snatcher.’ ‘We let Mr Gould attend our readings, and I wish we could let him join, but we simply can’t,’ Mr McCrudden once said. ‘He isn’t serious about poetry. We serve wine at our readings, and that is the only reason he attends. He sometimes insists on reading foolish poems of his own, and it gets on your nerves. At our Religious Poetry Night he demanded permission to recite a poem he had written entitled “My Religion.” I told him to go ahead, and this is what he recited:

  “In winter I’m a Buddhist,

  And in summer I’m a nudist.”

  And at our Nature Poetry Night he begged to recite a poem of his entitled “The Sea Gull.” I gave him permission, and he jumped out of his chair and began to wave his arms and leap about and scream, “Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!” It was upsetting. We are serious poets and we don’t approve of that sort of behavior.’ In the summer of 1942 Gould picketed the Raven exhibition, which was held on the fence of a tennis court on Washington Square South. In one hand he carried his portfolio and in the other he held a placard on which he had printed: ‘JOSEPH FERDINAND GOULD, HOT-SHOT POET FROM POETVILLE, A REFUGEE FROM THE RAVENS. POETS OF THE WORLD, IGNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS!’ Now and then, as he strutted back and forth, he would take a leap and then a skip and say to passers-by, ‘Would you like to hear what Joe Gould thinks of the world and all that’s in it? Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!’


  (1942)

  A Spism and a Spasm

  A GARRULOUS OLD Southerner, the Reverend Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, is the greatest and the most frightening street preacher in the city. He is an Episcopal priest in good standing, but he hasn’t had a church since 1904. ‘The gutter is my pulpit,’ he says, ‘and the roaring traffic is my pipe organ. Halleluiah!’ He has preached in the streets and squares of Manhattan for twenty years. Before coming here, he had been, successively, a rector in several cottongin towns in Alabama, a convict-camp chaplain, and the superintendent of a nickel-a-meal, dime-a-flop mission for down-and-outs in Philadelphia. Hall used to preach in Wall Street at noon, in Madison Square or Union Square in the afternoon, and in Columbus Circle at night, but for the last seven years he has concentrated on the theatrical district, an area which he once described as ‘the belly and the black heart of that Great Whore of Babylon and mother of abominations, the city of New York.’ He has a little band of disciples, the majority of whom are elderly spinsters or widows, and they sometimes refer to him as the Bishop of Times Square.