Joe Gould's Secret Read online

  “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 there 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.

  “Joe comes up here every few days and hits me for a handout, or what he calls a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund, and if he happens to have a finished composition book with him he goes over and tosses it in the closet,” Siskind told me as I looked through the books. “He’s been doing that for quite a long time now. He leaves the books in the closet until anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen or so have accumulated, and then, one day, he gathers them up and puts them in his portfolio and takes them away. By and by, he starts a new accumulation. He used to ask me to read them, and I would, but I don’t anymore. He writes on the same subjects over and over again, and I’m afraid I’ve lost interest in the death of his father and the death of his mother and the dread tomato habit and the Indians out in North Dakota and all that. He seems to be a perfectionist; he seems to be determined to keep on writing new versions of each of his subjects until he gets one that is absolutely right. One cold day last winter, he came up here and sat by the radiator and started correcting and revising one of his books. He went through it once, changing a word here and a word there and scratching out sentences and writing new ones in. Then he went through it again and changed some more words and scratched out some more sentences. Then he went through it again. Then he tore the whole thing up and threw it in the wastebasket. ‘Jesus, Joe!’ I said. ‘You certainly improved that one. You improved it right out of existence.’”

  “When he gathers up his composition books and puts them in his portfolio, where does he take them?” I asked.

  “He’s always been kind of vague and remote about that.” Siskind said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve never really understood why he takes them away in the first place. I’ve often told him that he can leave them here as long as he likes, and that he can have the whole closet to himself if he wants it. He’s such a perfectionist I wouldn’t be surprised if he tears them up and throws them in the first trash basket he comes to. Then he starts all over again. Starts fresh. Oh, I guess he has some secret place or other where he takes them and stores them away.”

  The next night, I went into Goody’s again. Gould was sitting at a table across from the bar. There was an empty beer glass in front of him. He was wearing the same dirty seersucker suit that he had been wearing at our first meeting, only now it was much dirtier and had a bad rip at the shoulder. It looked as if somewhere along the line someone had given his left sleeve an angry jerk, ripping it half off at the shoulder. I went over and sat down and returned the composition books and the little magazines that I had got from him, and thanked him for letting me read them.

  “You were disappointed,” he said accusingly.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Yes you were,” he said. “I can tell.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I was. I understood from what you told me that the Oral History was mostly talk, but there wasn’t any talk in the chapters you lent me or in the ones I saw at Siskind’s.”

  Gould threw up his hands. “Naturally there wasn’t,” he said. “The
re are two kinds of chapters in the Oral History—essay chapters and oral chapters. As it happens, all those you read were essay chapters.”

  This remark instantly cleared up my puzzlement about the Oral History; it seemed to explain everything. I took Gould’s empty glass over to the bar and got him a beer. Then, sitting down, I told him I would like very much to read some of the oral chapters.

  “Oh, Lord,” Gould said. “Since we’ve gone this far, there’s something about the Oral History I’ll have to tell you—something about its present whereabouts. I was hoping I could keep it quiet, but I can see now I would’ve had to let people know about it sooner or later anyhow.” He frowned and cocked his eyes at the ceiling and stroked his bearded chin and seemed to be casting around in his mind for the simplest way to tell about something that was extraordinarily involved. “Oh, well, to go back a little,” he said, “a woman I know who used to work in the main branch of the Public Library retired several years ago and bought a duck-and-chicken farm on Long Island, and last Thanksgiving she invited me out there. I’m not going to tell you her name or the exact location of her farm, so don’t ask me any questions. It’s an isolated place, out on a dirt road. Huntington is the nearest railroad station, but it’s a considerable distance from Huntington. There are two houses on the place. One is a frame house, and a Polish farmer and his wife live in it and look after the ducks and chickens. The other is an old stone house, and my friend and a niece of hers live in it. My friend showed me over the house, including the cellar. The cellar was snug and dry and whitewashed, and it was partitioned into one large room and three small rooms. The small rooms were built to be used for storage, and had good strong doors. And the doors had locks on them—set-in locks, not padlocks. Now, early in January of this year, a month and a half or so after I was out there, a painter friend of mine told me that an art dealer had told him that the Metropolitan Museum was moving a good many of its most precious paintings to a bombproof location outside the city for the duration of the war, and I decided I’d better get busy and do something about the Oral History. I immediately thought of those rooms in my friend’s cellar, and it seemed to me that one of them would be an ideal place for the Oral History. So I wrote to my friend and inquired into the possibility. She didn’t think much of the idea at first—didn’t want the responsibility—but I wrote to her again and said that a good librarian such as herself ought to be able to understand the importance to posterity of what I was asking her to do, and I promised her that generations yet unborn would be grateful to her and rise up and call her blessed, and finally she wrote and said for me to get the Oral History together and wrap it in two layers of oilcloth and tie some ropes around it—in other words, bale it up. I did so, and the following Sunday she and her niece drove in and picked it up and took it out and deposited it in her cellar. And that’s where it is. And if you’ll pay my train fare out to Huntington and back and my taxi-cab fare from the station out to her place and back and give me money enough to buy her a box of candy for a present, I’ll take a run out there early next week and open the bale and select a couple of dozen representative chapters—oral ones, that is—and bring them in.”

  We figured out how much money he would need for the trip, and I gave it to him.

  He took his time about making the trip. I didn’t see him again until the following Thursday, when he came to my office and said that he had gone out to his friend’s farm the day before but hadn’t been able to get at the Oral History. “My friend wasn’t home,” he said. “According to her niece, she’s been away a couple of months. She’s down in Florida. She has a brother who’s a retired high-school English teacher, a bachelor, and he was spending the winter in St. Augustine, and sometime around the middle of April he had a stroke. She’s very attached to him, and she went down there to look after him. And just before she left, the niece said, she locked up half the place, including the three rooms in the cellar, and took the keys with her. This upset me, and I begged the niece to write her at once and ask her to send back the key to the room the Oral History is in. ‘Write her yourself,’ the niece said. ‘It’s none of my business.’ Then I decided it might be a lot wiser to telephone her, so the niece gave me the number of the place where she’s staying, and I’d appreciate it very much if you’d let me have money enough to make the call.”

  I said I could arrange for him to make the call right then, through the office switchboard.

  “That would be fine,” he said, “except I’m not supposed to call her during the day. The niece told me I should call her at night, because she’s at the hospital during the day. If you’ll just let me have the money, I’ll call her tonight from the pay phone in Goody’s.”

  Next morning, shortly after I got to the office, Gould telephoned and said that after calling the woman person-to-person several times he had reached her around midnight. “She must be all tired out and nervous,” he said, “because she scolded me severely. She reminded me that when she agreed to store the Oral History she had made it clear that I couldn’t be taking it out and putting it back in but that I’d have to let it stay put for the duration of the war. ‘You wanted it in a safe place,’ she said, ‘and it’s in a safe place, so just relax.’ I asked her when she expected to return, but I didn’t get much satisfaction out of her. ‘It might be weeks,’ she said, ‘and it might be months, and it might be years. And in the meantime,’ she said, ‘quit bothering me.’ I tried to reason with her, and she hung up on me.”

  “Would it do any good if I called her?” I asked.

  “As soon as she found out what you were calling about,” Gould said, “she’d hang up on you.”

  This put me in a predicament. 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. All of them had been willing, or more than willing, to tell what they knew about Gould, and I had got a great many anecdotes and a great deal of biographical information about him from them. I had read the clippings concerning him in the morgues of three newspapers. (The oldest clipping I found was dated March 2, 1934, and was from the Herald Tribune. In it, Gould told the reporter that the Oral History was 7,300,000 words long. In another clipping from the Herald Tribune, dated April 10, 1937, he said that the Oral History was now 8,800,000 words long. In one from PM, dated August 24, 1941, Gould was called “an author who has written a book taller than himself.” “The stack of manuscripts comprising the Oral History has passed 7 feet,” PM said. “Gould is 5 feet 4.”) At the suggestion of one of his classmates, I had gone to the library of the Harvard Club and hunted through the reports of his class—the class of 1911—for references to him. I had spent a day in the genealogy room in the Public Library looking through New England genealogies and town and county histories for information about his ancestors and family connections, and had been able to verify most of the statements he had made about them. Now all I needed was one more thing, a look at the oral part of the Oral History, but that seemed to me to be essential. As far as I was concerned, the Oral History was Gould’s reason for being, and if I couldn’t quote from it, or even describe it first hand, I didn’t see how I could write a Profile of him. I could postpone further work on the Profile until the woman returned from Florida and let Gould into her cellar, but I knew from experience
that postponing a project of this nature usually meant the end of it; I knew that my interest in it would fade as soon as I got involved in other matters, and that before long simply having it hanging over me would very likely cause me to turn against it. Furthermore, I was growing leery of Gould; I had begun to feel that, whatever the reason, he really didn’t want me to see the oral part of the Oral History, and that when the woman returned, some brand-new difficulty might very well present itself. I decided on the spur of the moment that the best thing to do was to abandon the project right then and there and go on as quickly as possible to something else.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Gould,” I said, “but I think we’d better just drop the whole thing.”

  “Oh, no!” Gould said. His voice sounded alarmed. “Look,” he said. “I have an abnormal memory. In fact, people have often told me that I probably have what the psychologists call total recall. I’ve lost chapters of the Oral History several times and reconstructed them entirely from memory. Once, I lost one and reconstructed it and then found the one I had lost, and a good many pages in the two of them matched almost word for word. If you’ll meet me in Goody’s tonight, I’ll recite some chapters for you. I’ll recite dozens of chapters. If you’ve got the patience to listen, I’ll recite hundreds. You’ll get as good an idea of the oral part of the Oral History that way as you would by reading it. Considering my handwriting, you may even get a better idea.”

  That night, around eight, Gould and I sat down at a table in a quiet corner in the back of Goody’s. First, he drank two double Martinis, doing so, he said, for a particular purpose. “I have found,” he said, “that gin primes the pump of memory.” Then he began telling the life story of a man he said he used to run into in flophouses who was a kind of religious fanatic and was called the Deacon, telling it in the first person, just as the Deacon had told it to him. The Deacon was a gloomy periodical drinker. He was a backslidden member of some schismatic Lutheran sect, he was under the impression that he had lost his soul, he believed that he had discovered hints in the Bible concerning the exact date—year, month, day, and time of day—of the end of the world, and he often saw things at night. One summer night, for example, while he was sitting in a doorway on Great Jones Street, near the Bowery, he smelled sulphur and looked up and saw the Devil walk past and felt the heat of Hell emanating from him. Later the same night, he saw two mermaids in the East River. They were off Pier 26, at the foot of Catharine Street, frolicking in the moonlight. “They weren’t exactly half women, half fishes,” he told Gould. “They were more like half women, half snakes. When they saw me sitting on the pier looking at them, they held out their arms and wriggled and made certain other motions trying to tempt me to come in with them, and if I had done so they would’ve wrapped themselves around me and dragged me to the bottom.”