A Wraith's Progress

"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." - Joe Gould, quoted in Joe Gould's Secret, p. 22

...a myth is a good as a smile but little joe gould's quote oral history unquote might (publishers note) be entitled a wraith's progress or mainly awash while chiefly submerged... - e.e. cummings, No. 261 of the Collected Poems, quoted in Joe Gould's Secret, p. 17.

Joe Gould had one goal in life: to write the longest book in the world.

From about 1916 to the early 1950s, Gould was a Greenwich Village fixture. Everyone knew who the short, thin old man was, with the long bushy beard, dressed in old suits three sizes too big. He was born in 1889 in Norwood, Massachusetts, the son of a Harvard-educated doctor. Nicknamed Pee Wee as a child, Joe never fit in and was seen as incompetent and abnormal by both parents.* He'd worked sporadically as a researcher and a journalist, but from the age of about 27 he devoted himself primarily to the Oral History. He was the last of the bohemians, he said:

All the others fell by the wayside. Some are in the grave, some are in the loony bin, and some are in the advertising business.

The alternate title was An Oral History of Everything. It was contained in 270 composition books that were hidden all over New York City (some were in a stone barn at a Long Island chicken farm). The Oral History consisted only of what Joe Gould saw and heard. he had perfect recall of more than 20,000 conversations with down and out people, accounts of their operations, their hardships, their bar fights and their life stories. He was also including all the things he'd read on bathroom walls, what he'd seen at decades of Greenwich Village parties, and heard in bars and flophouses over all the years he'd been living on the streets of New York.

When he finished, it would be over 9 million words long. When Gould died, he said, people would realize that he was a genius. His will bequeathed two thirds of the manuscript to Harvard and a third to the Smithsonian.

He always carried a overstuffed, half-disintegrating cardboard portfolio full of his writings. He told Mitchell that his Oral History was written down in over 200 composition books. They were hidden all over New York Some were in friends' closets. Some were in a stone barn on a Long Island chicken farm, that belonged to a friend of a friend.

Journalist Joseph Mitchell met Gould in 1932. For a decade, he gave Gould money, endured his ten-hour marathon monologues, read the same few ranting manuscript chapters of the magnum opus - until even he, the most patient of men, could take no more.

Mitchell said that there were a few basic chapters written and rewritten again and again. Two treated the death of his parents. One was about his experiences working on a reservation. And one was on the Dread Tomato Habit. The last might have had something to do with Gould's fondness for eating entire bottles of ketchup in diners (he once downed all the bottles in the diner and then told the enraged waitress that Mitchell had eaten them).

Joseph Mitchell only revealed Gould's secret after his death in Pilgrim State Hospital in 1957. it was simply this: that aside from he few chapters that Gould obsessively wrote and rewrote in his barely legible writing, the Oral History simply did not exist - not outside of Gould's grand imaginings. There were no notebooks hidden on a chicken farm or anywhere else.

Ironically, Joseph Mitchell himself suffered from writer's block after completing this second piece on Gould. Gould had recited much of his own history - and the raw materials of the Oral History - to Mitchell in those ten-hour marathons. In essence, Joseph Mitchell was the author of the only real version of Oral History - through writing about the man in whose mind contained its unwritten secrets.

*Interestingly, in Joe Gould's Secret, there is no mention of the fact that he had a younger sister, Hilda Pauline, born in 1895, though JG speaks often of his parents and of Norwood. See Clarke S. Gould household, 1910 US Census, Norwood, Norfolk, MA; #43/51, Series T624, Roll 609, p. 3.

Image of Macdougal St., Greenwich Village, in 1936 from the NYPL Digital Gallery.

Mitchell, Joseph. Joe Gould's Secret (New York: Vintage Books, 1996; "Professor Seagull" first pub. 1942, "Joe Gould's Secret" first pub. 1964). A wonderful, gripping read - highly recommended.