Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  I started to try to say something optimistic but sensed that I ran the risk of being presumptuous; a man who has no lice on him is not in a very good position to minimize the disagreeableness of lice if he is talking to a man who is crawling with them, so I changed the subject to where we should meet on Saturday night. We decided that we would meet in Goody’s, one of the saloons on Sixth Avenue in the Village. Then we said goodbye, and Gould started across the street. After he had gone a few steps, he suddenly did an about-face and hurried back to me.

  ‘I just remembered something else I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘Something about the Dial. For a magazine of its kind, the Dial had a long life. It lasted nine and a half years. As I told you, the issue that has my contribution in it – the one I just gave you – was the issue for April, 1929. It lasted only three more issues. After the July issue, it discontinued publication, and that was a great shock to everyone who had any interest whatsoever in the cultural life of this country. In the Village, about the only thing people wanted to talk about for weeks was who killed the Dial or what killed the Dial. I wrote a poem about this.’

  Gould drew himself erect, as he had done before, and recited this poem:

  ‘“Who killed the Dial?”

  “Who killed the Dial?”

  “I,” said Joe Gould,

  “With my inimitable style,

  I killed the Dial.”’

  As he recited it, he watched my face. When he finished it, I laughed more than he had expected me to, I think, and I was struck by how much pleasure this gave him. His bloodshot little eyes glowed with pleasure. Then, giggling, he hurried off.

  It was a cloudy day and looked as if it might pour down any minute, but I disregarded the weather and went over and sat on a bench under the big old elm in the northwest corner of Washington Square and opened one of Gould’s composition books. On the first page was carefully lettered, ‘DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ The chapter was divided into an introduction and four sections. The sections were headed: ‘FINAL ILLNESS,’ ‘DEATH,’ ‘FUNERAL,’ and ‘CREMATION.’ ‘The first thing I must deal with in this account of my father’s death,’ Gould wrote in his introduction, ‘is that, for me, he died twice. In the summer of 1918, I left New York City, where I was getting down to work in earnest on the Oral History, and went up to Norwood to spend a month with my mother. The first World War was going on at that time, and my father was serving as a captain in the Medical Corps of the United States Army and was stationed at Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio. He was assistant adjutant of the base hospital. The second afternoon I was home, my mother went to the nearby town of Dedham to visit a friend, and I took a walk downtown, to the business district of Norwood. While we were both absent from the house, a doctor in Boston who was a friend of my father’s telephoned my mother, and our cook, an old German woman who didn’t understand English any too well and wasn’t any too bright to begin with, took the call. The doctor in Boston said he was calling to ask my mother to inform my father the next time she wrote to him that another Boston doctor who was also a friend of my father’s and had in fact been stationed with him for a while at Camp Sherman had died that day of blood poisoning in another camp out in the Middle West, but the old cook got it all balled up and understood him to say that my father had died that day of blood poisoning out at Camp Sherman. When I came home in the middle of the afternoon, she was sitting in the kitchen crying, and she told me that my father was dead. I went upstairs to my room and drew the shades and sat there mourning my father. I was overwhelmed with grief. Late in the afternoon my mother came home and immediately got on the telephone and called the doctor in Boston and ascertained what he had really told the cook. And then a curious thing happened to me – even though, intellectually, I knew that my father was not dead, I could not stop mourning him. For me, the blow had fallen. I sank into a mood of deep sorrow and could not rouse myself from it. I mourned my father all the rest of my visit to Norwood, and I continued to mourn him for several weeks after returning to New York City. My father was honorably discharged from the Army on December 28, 1918, and returned at once to Norwood and resumed his practice. After he had been back in Norwood for less than three months, he became seriously ill and was taken to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where he died early in the A.M. of Friday, March 28, 1919, aged fifty-four. And now I must put down the fact that his illness was septicemia, or blood poisoning, which was and is to me an astonishing coincidence. When I received the news of his death, I did not mourn him at all. As far as I was concerned, he was already dead. When I write my autobiography, I am going to make the flat statement in it that my father died of blood poisoning in an Army camp in Ohio during the first World War, and I am going to insist that this be so stated in any biographical material that is written about me as long as I am alive and have any control over such things, for to me my father’s untrue death was his true death. I have no misgivings about this. In autobiography and biography, as in history, I have discovered, there are occasions when the facts do not tell the truth. However, in this account, I am going to deal only with what was, I must admit, my father’s actual and factual death.’

  Gould’s writing was very much like his conversation; it was a little stiff and stilted and mostly rather dull, but enlivened now and then by a surprising observation or bit of information or by sarcasm or malice or nonsense. It was full of digressions; there were digressions that led to other digressions, and there were digressions within digressions. Gould’s father had belonged to the Universalist Church and the Masons, and his funeral service had been conducted jointly by the pastor of the local Universalist church and the chaplain and the Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge. Gould described the Universalist part of the service, and went from that to a discussion of the subtle differences between the members of the Universalist, Unitarian, and Congregational churches in New England towns, and went from that to a discussion of the differences between an Easter service he had once attended in an Albanian Orthodox Catholic church in Boston with a friend of his, an Albanian student at Harvard, and Easter services he had attended in Roman Catholic churches, and went from that to a description of a strange but unusually good meat stew he had once eaten in a basement restaurant in Boston frequented by Albanian shoe-factory workers that the Albanian student had taken him to (‘They said it was lamb and it may have been mutton,’ he wrote, ‘but it was probably goat, either that or horse meat, not that I have any objection to goat meat or horse meat, having had the experience of eating boiled dog with the Chippewa Indians, which incidentally tasted like mutton, only sweeter, although I should point out here that eating dog has a ceremonial significance to the Chippewas and might be compared to our communion services and consequently the taste per se is not of great importance’), and went from that to a description of a baked-bean pot he had once seen in the window of an antique store on Madison Avenue that was exactly like the baked-bean pot used in the kitchen of his home in Norwood when he was a child. ‘Gazing at that so-called ANTIQUE baked-bean pot,’ he wrote, ‘I felt for the first time that I understood something about Time.’ He then began a description of the Masonic part of his father’s funeral service, but went astray almost immediately with a digression on the importance of the Masons and the Elks and the Woodmen of the World and similar fraternal orders in the night life of small towns, which he interrupted at one point for a subsidiary digression on the subject of life insurance. ‘I wonder what Lewis and Clark would have thought of life insurance,’ he wrote in the course of the latter digression, ‘never mind Daniel Boone.’ (He had run a line through ‘never mind’ and had written ‘let alone’ just above it; then he had run a line through ‘let alone’ and had written ‘not to speak of’ just above it; then he had run a line through ‘not to speak of’; and then, in the margin, beside ‘never mind,’ he had written ‘stet.’) Scattered throughout the book were many sentences that were wholly irrelevant; they seemed to be th
oughts that had popped into his mind as he wrote, and that he had put down at once, because he didn’t want to forget them. In the description of the Easter service in the Albanian church, for example, apropos of nothing that went before or came after, was this sentence: ‘Mr Osgood, the Indian teacher at Armstrong, N.D., said that whiskey made the Sioux murderous and the Chippewa good-natured.’

  On the cover of the other composition book was lettered, ‘THE DREAD TOMATO HABIT, A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ I couldn’t make much sense out of this chapter until I skipped around in it and found that it was mock-serious and that its purpose was to make fun of statistics. Gould maintained that a mysterious disease was sweeping the country. ‘It is so mysterious that doctors are unaware of its existence,’ he wrote. ‘Furthermore, they do not want to become aware of its existence because it is responsible for a high percentage of the human misfortunes ranging from acne to automobile accidents and from colds to crime waves that they blame directly or indirectly on microbes or viruses or allergies or neuroses or psychoses and get rich by doing so.’ Gould devoted several pages to a description of the nature of the disease, and then stated that he knew the cause of it and was the only one who did. ‘It is caused by the increased consumption of tomatoes both raw and cooked and in the form of soup, sauce, juice, and ketchup,’ he wrote, ‘and therefore I have named it solanacomania. I base this name on Solanaceae, the botanical name for the dreadful nightshade family, to which the tomato belongs.’ At this point, Gould began filling page after page with unrelated statistics that he had obviously copied out of the financial and business sections of newspapers. ‘If this be true,’ he wrote after each statistic, ‘this also must be true,’ and then he introduced another statistic. He filled twenty-eight pages with these statistics. ‘And now,’ he wrote, winding up the chapter, ‘I hope I have proven, and I have certainly done so to my own satisfaction, 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.’

  I was puzzled. These chapters of the Oral History bore no relation at all that I could see to the Oral History as Gould had described it. There was no talk or conversation in them, and unless they were looked upon as monologues by Gould himself there was nothing oral about them. I turned to the little magazines Gould had given me, and found that his contributions to them were brief but rambling essays, each of which had a one-or two-word title and a subtitle stating that it was ‘a chapter of’ or ‘a selection from’ the Oral History. In the Exile, his subject was ‘Art.’ In Broom, his subject was ‘Social Position.’ He had two essays in the Dial – ‘Marriage’ and ‘Civilization.’ And he had two in Pagany – ‘Insanity’ and ‘Freedom.’ By this time, I had read enough of Gould’s writing to know what these essays were. They were digressions cut out of chapters of the Oral History by the editors of the little magazines or by Gould himself and given titles of their own. In other words, they were more of the same. I read them without much interest until, in the ‘Insanity’ essay, I came across three sentences that stood out sharply from the rest. These sentences were plainly meant by Gould to be a sort of poker-faced display of conceit, but it seemed to me that he told more in them than he had intended to. In the years to come, as I got to know him better, they would return to my mind a great many times. They appeared at the end of a paragraph in which he had made the point that he was dubious about the possibility of dividing people into sane and insane. ‘I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly,’ he wrote. ‘I suppose I feel about it in this way because I have a delusion of grandeur. I believe myself to be Joe Gould.’

  On Saturday night, June 13, 1942, I went into Goody’s to keep the appointment I had made with Gould. Goody’s (the proprietor’s name was Goodman) was on Sixth Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth streets, directly across the avenue from Jefferson Market Courthouse. I had often noticed the place, but this was the first time I had ever been in it. Like most of the barrooms on Sixth Avenue in the Village, it was long and narrow and murky, a blind tunnel of a place, a burrow, a bat’s cave, a bear’s den. I learned later that many of the men and women who frequented it had been bohemians in the early days of the Village and had been renowned for their rollicking exploits and now were middle-aged or elderly and in advanced stages of alcoholism. I arrived at nine, which was when Gould and I had agreed to meet. He was nowhere in sight, and I went over and stood at the bar. ‘I’m just waiting for someone,’ I said to the bartender, who shrugged his shoulders. In a little while, I got tired of standing and sat on a bar stool. After I had been sitting there for half an hour or so, peering into the gloom, I recalled something that one of the first persons I had talked with about Gould had told me – a man who had been at Harvard with him. ‘If you’re going to have any dealings with Joe Gould,’ he had said, ‘one thing you want to keep in mind is that he’s about as undependable as it’s possible to be. If he’s supposed to be somewhere at a certain time, he’s just as likely to arrive an hour or two early as an hour or two late, or he may arrive on the dot, or he may not show up at all, and in his mind Tuesday can very easily become Thursday.’ Around a quarter to ten, the telephone in a booth up near the front end of the bar began to ring. One of the customers stepped inside the booth and reappeared a few moments later and shouted out my name. When I stood up, startled, he said, ‘Joe Gould wants to speak to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to meet you tonight,’ Gould said, his voice sounding a little boozy. ‘I completely forgot that I had to go to a meeting of the Raven Poetry Circle. In fact, the meeting is going on right now, and I just slipped out and came down here to a phone booth in a drugstore to call you, and I have to go right back. I don’t belong to the Ravens; they won’t let me join – they blackball me every time my name comes up – but they let me attend their meetings, and now and then they give me a place on the program. The Ravens are the biggest poetry organization in the Village, and there isn’t one real poet in the whole lot of them. The best parts of all of them put together wouldn’t make one third-rate poet. They’re all would-bes. Pseudos. Imitators of imitators. They’re imitators of bad poets who themselves were imitators of bad poets. I can’t stand them and they can’t stand me, but the hell of it is, I enjoy them and I enjoy their meetings. They’re so bad they’re good. Also, after the program they serve wine. Also, there’s a high percentage of unmarried lady poets among them, and sooner or later I’m going to bamboozle one of them into free love or matrimony, even if it has to be a certain tall, thin, knock-kneed drink of water I’ve had my eye on for some time now who’s supposed to have a private income and writes poems about the eternal sea and has a Dutch bob and a long nose and an Adam’s apple and always has cigarette ashes in her lap and cat hair all over her. “Roll on, roll on,” she says, “eternal sea,” and her big old Adam’s apple bobs up and down. But the main reason I didn’t want to miss tonight’s meeting is I see a chance to poke some fun at the Ravens. Tonight is Religious Poetry Night, and I talked them into putting me on the program. I asked for a place right at the end. You can just imagine the kind of religious poetry they’re capable of. Mystical! Soulful! Rapturous! “Methinks” or “albeit” in every other line, and deep – oh, my God, they’re deeper than John Donne ever hoped to be. When they’ve all recited theirs, I’m going to stand up and recite mine. Listen, and I’ll recite it for you. “My Religion,” by Joe Gould:

  In winter I’m a Buddhist,

  And in summer I’m a nudist.’

  Gould giggled. He asked me if I had read the chapters of the Oral History he had given me. I said that I had, and that they had been a good deal different from what I had expected, and that I would like to read some more.

  ‘The great bulk of the Oral History is stored away in a place that’s quite inaccessible,’ he said, suddenly becoming serious, ‘but I have a few chapters stuck away here and the
re around town where they’re easy to get at. I’ll tell you what. I have an old friend named Aaron Siskind, who’s a kind of avant-garde documentary photographer, and he has his darkroom and his living quarters in a flat up over a second-hand bookstore at 102 Fourth Avenue, and I must have six, seven, eight, nine, ten, or a dozen composition books stuck away up there. He’ll be in now – he works in his darkroom at night – and it’s only a short walk from Goody’s over to his place. Why don’t you take a walk over there and read those chapters? He won’t mind getting them out for you. And let’s meet in Goody’s tomorrow night. I promise you I’ll be there this time.’

  Siskind’s flat was over the Corner Book Shop, at Fourth Avenue and Eleventh Street, right in the middle of the second-hand-bookstore district. He came to the door, a short, jovial man with skeptical eyes, and I told him what I was after, and he laughed. ‘Good God!’ he said. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time than that?’ However, he went at once to a clothes closet in the hallway of the flat and squatted down and looked around among the shoes and the fallen coat hangers on the floor of it and picked up five composition books. ‘Joe’s a little off in his calculations,’ he said. ‘He has only five up here at present.’ He slapped the dust off the books and handed them to me, and I sat down and opened one. On the first page of it was carefully lettered, ‘DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ This turned out to be another version of Gould’s account of his father’s final illness, death, funeral, and cremation. The facts in it having to do with these matters were the same as those in the version I had already read, although they were differently arranged, but the digressions were completely different. I opened the second book, and the title was exactly the same: ‘DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD, A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ This was still another version. The title in the third book was ‘DRUNK AS A SKUNK, OR HOW I MEASURED THE HEADS OF FIFTEEN HUNDRED INDIANS IN ZERO WEATHER. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ This appeared to be an account of the trip that Gould had made to the Indian reservations in North Dakota. The title in the fourth book was ‘THE DREAD TOMATO HABIT, OR WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! DOWN WITH DR GALLUP! A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ This was another version of the statistical chapter. The title in the fifth book was ‘DEATH OF MY MOTHER. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.’ This was the shortest of the chapters. It took up only eleven and a half pages, and most of it was a digression on the subject of cancer.