Joe Gould's Teeth (14 page)

1.
A version of Gould's essay on insanity appeared in
Pagany
in 1931. But the version quoted here is the manuscript: “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” 1922, in the Joseph Mitchell Papers.

2.
Regarding New York, “I describe clinics at the three largest insane asylums in the state which I attended while a student of the Eugenics Record Office.” Gould, “Synopsis,” 7.

3.
Gregory described the oral chapters of the history this way: “In general the history is a record of nearly everything that Mr. Gould has heard (hence ‘oral'), seen or thought during his fifteen years of wandering. It includes his autobiography and the biographies of a few of his friends, data upon the insane asylums at Central Islip and King's Park, notations scrawled on the walls of public latrines, reminiscences of a New England childhood, gossip overheard in Greenwich Village and Harlem, and rumors concerning public men that are retailed in and out of New York City, New England and Nova Scotia.” Horace Gregory, “Pepys on the Bowery,”
New Republic,
April 15, 1931.

4.
Gould, “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” 1922.

5.
Gould, “My Life,” 3.

6.
Ibid., 8.

7.
Gould to Braithwaite, December 2, 1916, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould.

8.
“If you wish you might add the information that I received a special mention in trying for the Menorah prize.” Gould to Hurlbut, November 8, 1918, Gould Harvard Files. The Menorah Prize was given for “the best essay by an undergraduate on a subject concerning the history and achievements of the Jewish people.” The prize was first awarded in 1908. Intercollegiate Menorah Association,
The Menorah Movement for the Study and Advancement of Jewish Culture and Ideals: History, Purposes, Activities
(Ann Arbor, MI: Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1914), 101–3.

9.
“I am at present on the staff of the Evening Mail, as three attempts to volunteer for military service were unsuccessful.” Gould to Hurlbut, November 8, 1918, Gould Harvard Files. On his draft card, in 1917, Gould listed his occupation as “Journalist” and his employer as the Leslie Company. Joseph Ferdinand Gould, Registration Card,
U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards,
1917
–
1918
(Provo, UT:
Ancestry.com
Operations Inc., 2005).

10.
Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould's Oral History: Art,”
Exile,
November 1927, 113.

11.
Clarke Storer Gould died on March 28, 1919, of septicemia. “Memorial to Clarke Storer Gould, M.D.,”
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
180 (1919): 542–43; Gould, “My Life,” 4.

12.
Gould to Maclean, March 15, 1921, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

13.
Gould to Braithwaite, May 22, 1922, Braithwaite Papers, 428. And see Gould to Pound, January 4, 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

14.
Gould to Braithwaite, April 1, 1922, Braithwaite Papers, 428.

15.
Gould to Maclean, July 7, 1921, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

16.
Gould to Maclean, 1923, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

17.
The earliest biographical treatment is Eric Walrond, “Florida Girl Shows Amazing Gift for Sculpture,”
Negro World,
December 16, 1922, though it contains some factual errors. Other early accounts are Augusta Savage, “An Autobiography,”
Crisis,
August 1929; and Savage, Federal Arts Commission interview at her studio, June 20, 1935, Savage Papers, Box 1, Folder 2. Savage's first husband was named John Moore. A brief biographical treatment with reproductions of some of Savage's work is in Gary A. Reynolds and Beryl J. Wright,
Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation
(Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1989), 251–54. See also Unpublished Biography of Augusta Savage, November 20, 1928, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12. On the illiteracy of Savage's mother, see Millen Brand's diary entry for April 9, 1935, Journals, 1919–1943, Brand Papers, Box 76.

18.
Du Bois, “The Technique of Race Prejudice,”
Crisis
26 (August 1923): 152–54. See also Hugh Samson to Clyde J. Hart Jr., September 24, 1989, Hugh Samson Letters, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. And see, for example, “I do so want him to have one of my sister Irene's old southern cooked dinners.” Savage to Countee Cullen, no date, Cullen Papers. Cullen was also an associate of Gould's. In 1932, Gould listed Cullen among the sponsors of his Oral History Society. See Gould to Joseph Freeman, December 31, 1932, Joseph Freeman Collection, Box 25, Folder 10, Hoover Institution Archives. (Other sponsors included Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Horace Gregory, and Pauline Leader.)

19.
“C'est une jeune femme mince, à la voix extraordinairement douce, d'une simplicité qui la rend immédiatement sympathique,” a reporter wrote about Savage when she was later studying in Paris. Paulette Nardal, “Une Femme Sculpteur Noire,”
La Dépêche Africaine,
August–September 1930, 4.

20.
Gould, “My Life,” 5.

21.
Savage, Application Form, May 17, 1929, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.

22.
“Poet's Evening,”
New York Age,
March 24, 1923.

23.
Robert Lincoln Poston, “When You Meet a Member of the Ku Klux Klan” (1921), in
African Fundamentalism: A Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance,
ed. Tony Martin (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1991), 169.

24.
“Color Line Drawn by Americans,”
New York Amsterdam News,
April 25, 1923.

25.
“Miss Augusta Savage,” unpublished biography, November 20, 1928, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.

26.
“Miss Savage Tells Story at Lyceum,”
New York Amsterdam News,
May 16, 1923.

27.
Quoted in Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson,
Six Black Masters of American Art
(New York: Doubleday & Co., 1972), 76–98. And see Du Bois, “The Technique of Race Prejudice.”

28.
“Appeal Artists' Race Ban,”
New York Times,
May 11, 1923.

29.
For more on Savage, see Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson,
A History of African American Artists: From
1792
to the Present
(New York: Pantheon, 1993), 168–80; Denise Ellaine Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage: Her Art, Progressive Influences, and African-American Representation” (M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 1991); and Theresa Leininger-Miller,
New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light,
1922
–
1934
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

30.
Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage,” 110.

31.
Cummings was terribly fond of this poem and set it in dozens of different ways before settling on its final form. See E. E. Cummings, “as joe gould says in,” Cummings Papers, Additional I, folders 50 and 51, and also Cummings to Qualey, April 16, 1955, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 2, Folder 30.

32.
A typescript edition with Cummings's original drawings is E. E. Cummings,
The Enormous Room
(1922; New York: Liveright, 2014), with an introduction by Susan Cheever. Matthew Josephson writes that Cummings delighted in humiliating Gould, quite cruelly. This doesn't strike me as impossible, but I haven't seen anyone else describe it this way. Josephson and Gould hated each other. Matthew Josephson,
Life Among the Surrealists: A Memoir
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), 90–93, 272–73; see also 384–85.

33.
Gould, “Social Position,”
Broom
5 (October 1923): 147–49.

34.
For example, “I was much less aware than I later became of the ph.d. candidate's passion for footnotes and sources, but I knew a little about it, and I thought the book was, in effect, a parody, and a parody also of the H.G. Wells Outline of History and the Hendrik Willem Van Loon Story of Mankind, with Joe patiently tracing the history of the universe from its gaseous beginnings and documents each stage of the way by something somebody had told him.” Bob Cantwell to Mitchell, September 27, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. Robert Cantwell was a novelist and critic whose first novel,
Laugh and Lie Down,
was published in 1931. His criticism appeared in
The New Republic;
Cowley was his editor. See Cowley,
The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the
1930
s
(New York: Viking, 1980), 126–27 and 262–63; and T. V. Reed,
Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left: A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

35.
Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It.”

36.
Edward Nagel and Slater Brown, “Joseph Gould: The Man,”
Broom
5 (October 1923): 145–46, with a sketch by Joseph Stella.

37.
See Hugh Kenner,
The Pound Era
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Louis Menand, “The Pound Error,”
New Yorker,
June 9, 2008.

38.
William Butler Yeats, “Rapallo” (March and April 1928), in
A Vision
(London: Macmillan, 1937), 5–6.

39.
Pound, “Dr Williams' Position,”
Dial,
November 1928, 396.

40.
Joseph J. Boris, ed.,
Who's Who in Colored America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Persons of Negro Descent in America,
vol. 1 (New York: Phillis Wheatley Publishing Co., 1927). The editor in chief was Roscoe Conkling Bruce. The board of editors included Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson. See the letterhead in Helen L. Watts, Associate Editor, Phillis Wheatley Publishing Co., to Du Bois, February 16, 1926, Du Bois Papers.

41.
Gould to Williams, January 16, 1925, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.

42.
Gould to Pound, February 15, 1930, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861, in which he also says, “I am tremendously pleased and obliged that you had my manuscript typed.” On Pound having Gould's notebooks typed, see also Pound to Williams, November 5, 1929: “I at least sent off some of Gould's stuff to a London typist.”
Pound/Williams,
99. And: “You will be pleased to hear that Ezra Pound has typed some of my manuscript and has sent it to Hound and Horn. I asked him to send it to Bijur the French quarterly which had asked for some of it but quite characteristically he sent it elsewhere. He said the Hound and Horn paid better. If that magazine does take it, it will be very good luck for me. Other magazines watch the Hound and Horn as well as publishers of books.” Gould to Lachaise, February 1930, Lachaise Collection, Box 1. One trail in the search for the lost Oral History leads to the offices of
Hound & Horn.
In March 1930, Gould wrote to the novelist Nino Frank, the editor of
Bifur,
“None of my manuscript on this side of the ocean has been typed. I wrote Edward O'Brien and Ezra Pound who had some of it. O'Brien said he had sent it all to Ezra Pound. Pound wrote me and said that he had got quite a batch of my manuscript typed. He had sent it to Hound and Horn. This magazine is edited by a group of Harvard students. Apparently they are not very businesslike. I wrote to them and did not receive a reply. I do not know which chapters they have.”
Bifur
Archive, Box 1, Folder 13.

43.
Gould to Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, December 5, 1927, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe Additional Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 524, 550.

44.
Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould's Oral History: Art,”
Exile,
November 1927, 112–16; quotation from 113–14.

45.
On the Baltimore exhibit, see Hope Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage: Sculpting the African-American Identity” (M.A. thesis, City University of New York, 1990), 16.

46.
Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,”
Crisis
32, no. 6 (October 1927): 290–97. Lynn Igoe and James Moody,
250
Years of Afro-American Art: Annotated Bibliography
(New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), 294, where they identify Savage as the subject of Du Bois's remarks.