Joe Gould's Secret Read online

  “I go to as many Village parties as I can. I go for the free food and liquor and for material for the Oral History. I’m invited to some, and I hear about others on the Village grapevine and just go. One Saturday night a few months after I wrote ‘The Barricades,’ I showed up at a big party in a studio on Washington Square South. I hadn’t been invited, but I knew the man and his wife who were giving it, and I had been going uninvited to their parties for years. When I rang the bell, the wife came to the door, and it didn’t seem to me that she was as friendly as she had been in times gone by, but she asked me to come in. I went over and sat in a corner and had a number of drinks, after which it occurred to me that I should create a little diversion and repay my hosts by singing a song, so I stood up and announced that I had a proletarian poem I wanted to recite. Everybody suddenly became quiet, and I took a quick look around the room. It was a big room and there were a lot of people in it, and every face I looked at looked back at me with hatred. That didn’t particularly disturb me. I’m used to that. Then I took a closer look around, and here and there, in among the faces of total strangers and the faces of people whom I knew but who meant nothing to me, I saw the faces of several men and women who had always been ready and willing to give me a little money or stake me to a meal or help me out in various other ways, and their faces were as cold and hostile as the others. And that did disturb me. That sobered me up immediately. I suddenly woke up to the fact that without quite realizing what I was doing I had made God only knows how many enemies. Since then, I’ve been trying to repair the damage, but it doesn’t do any good. I never recite ‘The Barricades’ in public anymore—oh, I do if I’m sure of my audience—and quite a lot of time has gone by, but the Village radicals haven’t forgiven me. They cut me dead on the street. If a group of them are sitting in a cafeteria and I sit down near them, they move away. If I stand near them at a bar, they move away. Some of them used to welcome me when I showed up at parties at their places, but now they shut the door in my face. And I’ve found out that every time my name comes up in conversation they revile me and disparage me and vilify me. And the worst thing is, they communicate the way they feel about me to others. Sooner or later, they’ll turn everybody in the Village against me. The countermen and the waitresses in the diner, for example—I’m sure they’ve turned against me simply because they’ve heard some of the Village radicals making remarks about me and running me down. Oh, well, what’s done’s done. Here,” he said, handing me his portfolio, “hold this, and I’ll recite ‘The Barricades’ for you.”

  He straightened his tie and buttoned his dirty seersucker jacket. He drew himself excessively erect, like a schoolboy pledging allegiance to the flag. Then, raising his right fist in the air, he recited the following poem:

  “This prissy hedge in front of the Brevoort

  Is but a symbol of the coming revolution.

  These are the barricades,

  The barricades,

  The barricades.

  And behind these barricades,

  Behind these barricades,

  Behind these barricades,

  The Comrades die!

  The Comrades die!

  The Comrades die!

  And behind these barricades,

  The Comrades die—

  Of overeating.”

  Gould took back his portfolio. “On the other hand,” he said, “as far as the people in the diner are concerned, it may not be that at all. I’ve been terribly run down and nervous this summer, and when I get that way, I scratch a lot. It’s just a nervous habit—I’ve been doing it since childhood. The people in the diner have undoubtedly noticed me scratching, and they may have gotten it in their heads that I’m lousy, and that may very well be why they’ve turned against me.” He had been speaking calmly, but now his manner changed. His face was abruptly contorted by an expression of pain and fury, and he spat on the street. “The absolutely hideous and disgusting and unspeakable God-damned truth of the matter is,” he said, “I am lousy. I discovered it this morning while I was sitting through all those Masses in St. Joseph’s. It’s the second time in a month. I’ll have to go to the Municipal Lodging House tonight and take a bath and let them put my clothes in the fumigator.” He shook his head, vaguely. “This is no way to live,” he said—and his voice sounded defeated—“but it’s the only way I can live and work on the Oral History.”

  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 thoughts 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.”