Joe Gould's Teeth (17 page)
Authors: Jill Lepore
O'Brien thought I ought to delay my book until next fall. He said it would be built up more. He offered his assistant, but his principle [
sic
] idea was very flukey. He wants to sell me to the public as a sort of William Saroyan. He introduced me to Allan Seager, the editor of Vanity Fair. Seager saw some of my stuff. He said they could use oodles of it after my book is published. One of his suggestions was a “profile” in the New Yorker and another was that he could get me in the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame. Cowley thinks that Peggy Bacon may do a sketch of me for the New Republic and he could use his influence to get a profile of me published.
Brown Papers, Barrett Minor Box 10.
31.
Pound to Cummings, April 28, 1935,
Pound/Cummings,
65.
32.
Although it apparently seemed as if they would: Cummings to Pound, “Bravo JoeGouldâEsquire!!,” May 1935,
Pound/Cummings,
69.
33.
Cummings to Pound, May 1935,
Pound/Cummings,
73â74. Cummings's sister, Elizabeth Cummings Qualey, was a social worker in New York from 1926 to the summer of 1936. See Qualey, “Notes to assist in understanding letters from Estlin to Elizabeth,” July 1965, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.
34.
“God pity the women he fell in love with,” Morris Werner wrote to Mitchell. “She came to me for advice when he kept bombarding her with letters and phone calls. I told her not to answer any of his letters and to make it clear to him sternly that he was not to bother her.” Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
35.
Richard A. Hitchcock to Mitchell, November 11, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
36.
Gould to Moe, February 20, 1936, Gould Guggenheim Files.
37.
Millen Brand, April 4 and April 9, 1935, Journals, 1919â1943, Brand Papers, Box 76.
38.
“Writer Honors 7,300,000th Word by Party,”
New York Herald Tribune,
March 2, 1936. Gould told Pound, “I was fired for a while because I got too much publicity.” Gould to Pound, May 30, 1938, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
39.
“800,000-Word History Book Unlimbers Its Author for More,”
New York Herald Tribune,
April 10, 1937.
40.
Savage to Arthur Schomburg, January 1935, quoted in Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage,” 29â30.
41.
Edgar T. Bouzeau, “Augusta Savage Is Commissioned by World's Fair,”
Pittsburgh Courier,
December 18, 1937. For more on the commission, see the materials in the Rosenwald Archives, Box 127, Folder 7.
42.
“Negroes: Their Artists Are Gaining in Skill and Recognition,”
Life,
October 3, 1938, 55.
43.
Bearden and Henderson,
History of African-American Artists,
177. They speculate that the commission itself may have been a way for her to be removed.
44.
“The best judgment of everybody in a position to know was that Mr. Gould's work was not essential.” Henry G. Alsberg to Cummings, March 7, 1939, Cummings Papers, Additional II, Folder 15.
45.
He says that here: E. L. Hendel and M. S. Singer, “Joe Gould '11, Poet, Dilettante, Bum, and Bohemian, Last of a Disappearing Species,”
Harvard Crimson,
March 16, 1945. And also earlier: “I am, as you know, a very cosmopolychromatic person. Whatever form the thing takes will be colorful and good copy.” Gould to Pound, December 22, 1932, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
1.
“Artists Get New Inspiration from Augusta Savage Who Opens Gallery to Sell Their Work to the Public,”
Chicago Defender,
June 10, 1939.
2.
Savage describes some of the work of her studio in a letter to Edwin R. Embree, March 4, 1936, Rosenwald Archives, Box 127, Folder 7. On the Uptown Art Laboratory, see Savage to Embree, no date, same folder. And for a discussion of the Uptown Art Laboratory in the context of similar efforts, and of the WPA itself, see Erin Park Cohn, “Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010), chapter 2.
3.
Savage to Thomas Elsa Jones, January 10, 1939 or 1940, Thomas Elsa Jones Collection, Fisk Library, Box 8, Folder 6.
4.
Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson,
A History of African-American Artists: From
1792
to the Present
(New York: Pantheon, 1993), 177.
5.
He did not see Gould during this visit. Gould later said, after Pound's arrest for treason, that he hadn't seen Pound then because he was out of political sympathy with him. Gould to Williams, February 8, 1946, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
6.
Pound to Cummings, 1933,
Pound/Cummings,
4.
7.
Cummings to Pound, May 1940,
Pound/Cummings,
149.
8.
William Saroyan, “How I Met Joe Gould,”
Don Freeman's Newsstand
1 (1941): 25, 27. And: “William Saroyan has adopted a 75-year-old Greenwich Villager yclept Joe Gould. The âbaby' has been penning a tome called âThe History of My Times from All Sources' for the past 20 years.” Dorothy Kilgallen, “The Voice of Broadway,”
Trenton Evening Times,
March 27, 1941.
9.
Pound, “England,” Broadcast #16, March 15, 1942, in
“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II,
ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 59.
10.
Mitchell, in his notes, said that his first interview with Gould was on June 10, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
11.
Cummings to Loren and Lloyd Frankenberg, July 2, 1942, Cummings Letters, Box 1.
12.
Gould to Williams, October 1942, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
13.
Gould to Mumford, October 1942, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
14.
Mitchell, “Joe Gould's Secret.”
15.
Gould to Mumford, January 1943, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
16.
He didn't find out what happened next until May 8, when he finally got out of the hospital and got his diary back. He wrote, “I looked in on Cummings. He said that Rex Hunter had seen me bleeding, unconscious and drunk at 23 St. An ambulance took me to Saint Vincent where I was treated for concussion of the skull. I apparently was released from there before Bellevue.” Diary entries for January 13, 1943, and May 8, 1943, Gould Diaries. Hunter lived at Patchin Place. See Cummings to Qualey, January 16, 1947, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 19.
17.
Cummings to Qualey, November 30, 1942, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 15. The reference is to Slater Brown's 1942 book
The Burning Wheel,
published by Bobbs-Merrill.
18.
Brown to Mitchell, April 8, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
19.
Cummings to Qualey, March 13, 1943, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 15.
20.
Brown to Mitchell, April 3, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. An alarming portrait of Wards Island at the time is Albert Deutsch,
The Shame of the States
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948), chapter 6, “New York's Isle of Despair.” On Bellevue, see chapter 11, “Bellevue âPsycho'âFamous and Forlorn.”
21.
Gould to Mitchell, April 3, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
22.
Gould to Mitchell, May 14, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. The publication of “Professor Sea Gull” did lead to the publication of a book by Gould, a chapbook of six very short poems: Joseph F. Gould,
VI
(Jacksonville-on-the-St-Johns, FL: Privately printed for John S. Mayfield, 1943).
23.
Mitchell's notes on Gould, April 3, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
24.
Ibid. The category was far more capacious then. Alfred Margulies, email to the author, June 1, 2015. And see Elizabeth Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 65â69.
25.
Mitchell's notes on Gould, April 3, 1943; Brown to Mitchell, April 3, 1943; Gould to Mitchell, August 1, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
26.
Cummings to Qualey, January 4, 1944, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 16.
27.
Gould to Cummings, July 1943: “Joe Mitchell's profile was reprinted in his book on McSorleys. (This is a place you and Nagel might remember. I don't. I never left there conscious.) This book is to be played up in the next issue of Time, and they took in my photo for the review. This should not hurt me none.” Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
28.
Diary entry for July 1, 1943, Gould Diaries.
29.
Diary entry for July 30, 1943, Gould Diaries. And see also Gould to Cummings, August 23, 1943, Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
30.
It was during this period that Gould sold Mitchell the dramatic rights to the story of his life. On
New Yorker
stationery, dated September 3, 1943, he wrote: “I, Joe Gould, for value received, give Mr. Joseph Mitchell permission to use or allow others to use creatively the material in his book âMcSorley's Wonderful Saloon,' in any stage or musical production.” Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
31.
Gould (c/o Slater Brown) to Mitchell, October 27, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
32.
Slater Brown interview, April 1960, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
33.
Slater Brown, “Page 3,769,300, Oral History of Our Time,” one-page typescript, Cummings Papers, Folder 110.
34.
Gould to Mumford, July 12, 1944, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
35.
Diary entry for March 4, 1945, Gould Diaries.
36.
Diary entry for March 1, 1945, Gould Diaries.
37.
E. L. Hendel and M. S. Singer, “Joe Gould '11, Poet, Dilettante, Bum, and Bohemian, Last of a Disappearing Species,”
Harvard Crimson,
March 16, 1945. Gould asked for a retraction. “I met one of the Crimson boys there. He said that they had printed a partial
copy
retraction of their story.” Diary entry for June 12, 1945, Gould Diaries.
38.
Rev. Herb Gibney to Clyde Hart, October 13, 1992:
Eventually Communist agents tried to use Augusta to influence young blacks with their political philosophy. When she refused, her life was threatened so she closed her studio and fled to the West. There she contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever and almost died. After her recovery she came back to the East, settled in Saugerties in the renovated hen house, and began to eke out a living raising chickens and selling their eggs. Eventually through a family in our church I was able to get her a job that gave her a sufficient income and thus permitted the continuance of her sculpturing.
This letter is in the possession of Karlyn Knaust Elia.
39.
Millen Brand, Diary entry for February 26, 1942, Journals, 1919â1946, Brand Papers, Box 76.
40.
In April and June 1941, Savage was questioned by the FBI in New York. She said she believed Gwendolyn Bennett to be “a Communist sympathizer” and recounted conversations the two women had had together while driving together to and from the National Negro Congress in Philadelphia in 1937. (In 1939, Bennett replaced Savage at the Harlem Community Arts Center, and Savage believed, correctly, that she was not allowed to have the job back because she herself wasn't a Communist.) Frances Pollock, who knew both women, encouraged the FBI to dismiss anything Savage might have said about Bennett on the ground that Savage was known to get “emotional” about Communism. But Savage's accusation, along with that of many other informants, proved damning; Bennett was fired. Gwendolyn Bennett File, Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Division of Investigation, June 19, 1941, case No. 5-NY-3717, especially pp. 6â8, 14. My great thanks to Patricia Hills for providing me with the FBI's account of Savage's testimony. Bennett's own FBI file and the files of many other Harlem Renaissance figures are available at the FBEyes Digital Archive,
http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/
. For more on Bennett's files, see William Maxwell,
F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 88â89.
41.
Interviews with Karlyn Knaust Elia, Richard Duncan, John Finger, and Adrienne Nieffer, October 25, 2015. Heartfelt thanks to everyone in Saugerties who spoke with me.