Joe Gould's Teeth (18 page)

1.
“Ye FBI has just sent us a pleasant Finn (whose name—according to him—is pronounced ‘Illiterate') to explore Ezra Pound's right to anything, including death, for treason.” Cummings to Qualey, February 15, 1943, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 15.

2.
Gould to Macdonald, January 9, 1945: “Could you possibly use my article on Why Princeton Should Be Abolished?” Macdonald Papers, Box 19, Folder 479. Macdonald had published a piece by Gould in
Politics
in 1944: Joe Gould, “What to Do with Europe,”
Politics,
May 1944, 111. It was sandwiched between “The Only Real Moral People…” by Irving Kristol and “The World of Moloch” by Daniel Bell. The contributors' page (128) lists him this way: “
JOE GOULD
is the author of an ‘Oral History,' compiled exclusively from personal hearsay, which is as yet unpublished. He lives in New York City mostly, and also in Connecticut and on the Cape. His article and picture are reprinted, with permission, from
Don Freeman's Newsstand.
”

3.
Gould to Williams from Maison Gerard, February 8, 1946, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.

4.
Diary entries, February 22, 24,
25,
and 29, 1944, Gould Diaries.

5.
Diary entry, March 4, 1944, Gould Diaries.

6.
Diary entry, March 21, 1944, Gould Diaries.

7.
Gould to Mitchell, April 20, 1944, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

8.
Diary entry, April 13, 1944, Gould Diaries.

9.
Diary entry, April 28, 1944, Gould Diaries.

10.
Rothschild to Gould, May 6, 1944, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

11.
Diary entry for May 11, 1943, Gould Diaries.

12.
Diary entry for March 21, 1945, Gould Diaries. I unfortunately can't make out the name of the person he talked to at the Waldorf.

13.
On the 1940s triumph of psychoanalysis in the United States, see Edward Shorter,
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), chapter 5, especially 170–81.

14.
On that friendship and others, see Gardiner Reminiscences, 180–81, 260.

15.
Ibid., 230.

16.
My biography of Gardiner is reconstructed from her 422-page oral history interview, Gardiner Reminiscences; her memoir, Muriel Gardiner,
Code Name “Mary”: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); a biography, Sheila Isenberg,
Muriel's War: An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Muriel Gardiner, “Meetings with the Wolf-Man, 1938–1949,” in
The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud.
Invaluable short summaries of her life are Samuel A. Guttman, “Muriel M. Gardiner, M.D. (1901–85),”
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child
40 (1985): 1–7; and Fred B. Rogers, “Dr. Muriel M. Gardiner: Psychiatrist and Philanthropist,”
New Jersey Medicine
86 (March 1989): 193–95. See also Janet Malcolm,
In the Freud Archives
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

17.
Mitchell, interview with Gardiner, Princeton, June 30, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.

18.
Gardiner Reminiscences, 190.

19.
Mitchell, interview with Erika Feist, June 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

20.
It's also possible that Gardiner's brother, who was born in 1891, knew Gould at Harvard. On her brother attending Harvard, see Gardiner Reminiscences, 7.

21.
Gardiner Reminiscences, 43–45.

22.
“Dr. Gardiner has always made available a very considerable portion of her annual income to literally hundreds of people and a large number of organizations.” Guttman, “Muriel M. Gardiner.” Gardiner began giving Neel $6,000 a year in 1964. Ann Harvey [Gardiner's granddaughter], email to the author, June 19, 2015.

23.
Gardiner Reminiscences, 257.

24.
Mitchell, interview with Gardiner, Princeton, June 30, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. Rothschild told Mitchell that “she helped G simply because people she liked told her it was a good thing to do.” Mitchell's interview with Rothschild, June 18, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

25.
Gardiner,
The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud,
315.

26.
This begins in the diaries on May 22, 1945, and continues. It's also the subject of all of Gould's letters from this point on, for months. See, for example, Gould to James Laughlin, June 2, 1945, New Directions Records, Folder 655.

27.
Gould to Macdonald from the Maison Gerard, June 4, 1945, Macdonald Papers, Box 19, Folder 479. Also, from Gould's diary, May 29, 1945: “I saw Dwight MacDonald. I explained about Pound. He gave me a dollar and some back issues.” Gould Diaries.

28.
Gould to James Laughlin, June 19, 1945, New Directions Records, Folder 655.

29.
Gould to Cowley, June 4, 1945, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000. And, “Some amateur Guggenheim is subsidizing me.” Gould to Mitchell, May 1945, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

30.
Gould to Williams, October 13, 1946, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.

31.
Pound to Cummings, November 20, 1946,
Pound/Cummings,
201.

32.
Cummings to Qualey, October 16, 1946, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 18.

33.
Cummings to Pound, May 1948,
Pound/Cummings,
231.

34.
Mitchell, interview with Gardiner, Princeton, June 30, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.

35.
Erika Feist, interview, June 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

36.
Vivian Marquie, interview, May 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

37.
John Rothschild to Muriel Gardiner, October 10, 1947, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

38.
Reminiscences of Allan Nevins, 1963, Columbia Oral History Project, 169–70, 232, 235–42.

39.
Louis Starr, “Oral History,” in
Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology,
ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 43–44.

40.
Gould to Sarton, 1931, George Sarton Additional Papers, MS Am 1803, Folder 655, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The letter to Sarton is the only one of these I've found in an archive, but Gould invariably sent identical letters to multiple recipients asking for money and support, as he did here. I find it difficult to believe he didn't send a very similar letter to Nevins. The language Gould used in his letter to Sarton is the same as he had been using in describing the Oral History for several years; it was part of what was essentially a letter that he must have sent out en masse. On Nevins (and his great man theory of history), see Gerald L. Fetner,
Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

41.
Nevins issued his first public call in 1938, in
The Gateway to History:
“We have agencies aplenty to seek out the papers of men long dead. But we have only the most scattered and haphazard agencies for obtaining a little of the immense mass of information about the more recent American past—the past of the last half century—which might come fresh and direct from men once prominent in politics, in business, in the professions, and in other fields; information that every obituary column shows to be perishing.” Nevins is quoted in Starr, “Oral History,” 43–44. The project's focus on great men in its early decades is well illustrated by the collections, and their use in books described at its twentieth anniversary, in Columbia University Oral History Research Office,
Oral History: The First Twenty Years
(New York: Columbia University, 1968). At just the moment of that anniversary, though, the political movements of the 1960s, alongside the resurgence of social history, transformed the collections. A very good description of that change is Columbia University Oral History Research Office,
Oral History
(New York: Columbia University, 1992).

42.
Reminiscences of Allan Nevins, 242.

43.
Gould to Cummings, December 2, 1947, Cummings Papers, Folder 490.

44.
Omar Pound to Marion Cummings, December 8, 1947 (“Thanks for a most enjoyable evening, and the onions!…ps. met joe gould before i left”), Cummings Additional Papers II; Pound to Cummings, December 8, 1947; Cummings to Pound, December 1947,
Pound/Cummings,
226.

1.
Pilgrim State Hospital opened in 1931 with two thousand patients. Its one hundred buildings covered two thousand acres. Alfred Eistenstaedt photographed Pilgrim for
Time
in 1938. By 1950 it had eleven thousand patients. Jack Pressman,
Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 173–76. Pressman writes, “Pilgrim's prefrontal lobotomy program had become its clinical showpiece” (174).

2.
I requested Gould's medical records from what is now the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center on April 15, 2015; my request was denied (Deborah Strube, Chairperson, Medical Records Access Review Committee, Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, to the author, April 17, 2015). I appealed that decision (author to Strube, April 29 and 30, 2015), and Pilgrim again declined my request (Strube, email to the author, May 15, 2015).

3.
Chances are very good that Gould was treated with electroshock, and lobotomized, and, when that didn't work, drugged into a stupor that ended only with his death. In some ways drug therapies were a response to the successful treatment of general paresis of the insane with the blood of malarial victims. Early, pre-1950 twentieth-century drug therapies included sedatives and barbiturates. On the early drug regimes, see Edward Shorter,
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 196–207; on electroshock, 218–24; on lobotomy, 225–29. Shorter quotes Gerard Grob: “By 1951, no fewer than 18,608 individuals had undergone psychosurgery since its introduction in 1936.” In 1949 alone, more than five thousand lobotomies were conducted in U.S. hospitals (228). The new generation of antipsychotic drugs did not debut until 1954 (228). Allen Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, was lobotomized at Pilgrim State in 1949, with Ginsberg's consent; he was twenty-one. Naomi Ginsberg never left Pilgrim State and died there in 1956. Gould and Naomi Ginsberg overlapped at Pilgrim; they had also known one another much earlier in life, in the 1920s, and she claimed to have had an affair with Gould's archnemesis, Max Bodenheim. Barry Miles,
Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet
(1989; London: Virgin Books, 2010), 8.

4.
Morton M. Hunt, “Pilgrim's Progress, Part I,”
New Yorker,
September 30, 1961, and Hunt, “Pilgrim's Progress, Part II,”
New Yorker,
October 7, 1961. An enlargement of Hunt's two essays was printed as a book: Morton M. Hunt,
Mental Hospital
(New York: Pyramid Books, 1962), with a foreword by Robert H. Felix, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The book, like the articles, is a chronicle and celebration of the triumph of the new psychiatric regime. The back cover copy of the paperback reads, “The snake-pit is becoming non-existent!” (
The Snake Pit
was the title of a 1948 film about an insane asylum; the Oscar-nominated script was written by Millen Brand.) For a more recent vantage on Pilgrim, see a memoir by the daughter of a former patient: Jacqueline Walker,
Pilgrim State
(London: Sceptre, 2008). Walker's mother, Dorothy Walker, was committed to Pilgrim State in 1949.

5.
Harry J. Worthing, M.D., “A Report on Electric Shock Treatment at Pilgrim State Hospital,”
Psychiatric Quarterly
15 (1941): 306–9. And see Worthing et al., “The Organization and Administration of a State Hospital Insulin-Metrazol-Electric Shock Therapy Unit,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
99 (1943): 692–97.

6.
Harry J. Worthing, M.D., Henry Brill, M.D., and Henry Widgerson, M.D., “350 Cases of Prefrontal Lobotomy,”
Psychiatric Quarterly
23 (1949): 617–56. And see Henry Brill, “The Place of Neurosurgery in the Treatment Program of a Department of Mental Hygiene,”
New York State Journal of Medicine
52 (October 15, 1952): 2503–7. Pressman argues that lobotomy was at the center, not the fringe, of medical practice, and that it emerged out of earlier practices. He also takes issue with popular accounts that demonize lobotomy, which is useful, although his efforts to rehabilitate the practitioners who conducted, for instance, more than five thousand lobotomies in 1949 alone is unpersuasive. See Pressman,
Last Resort,
172–77.

7.
Worthing et al., “350 Cases,” 626–27.

8.
Ibid., 632.

9.
Ibid., 645.

10.
“Greatest expansion occurred in the surgical division. A total of 265 major operations were performed, including 205 prefrontal lobotomies. This compares with the figures of 112 for the previous year of which 33 were lobotomies.” And “the central shock therapy unit also provided special care to 124 patients (94 female and 30 male) following prefrontal lobotomy.” Pilgrim State Hospital,
Annual Report
(New York, 1948), 12–15.

11.
Pressman,
Last Resort,
180.

12.
See Worthing et al., “350 Cases,” 626. In Gould's case, either the hospital believed he had no family, or else they received consent from Chassan, Gould's niece. Chassan was in agony about her uncle when Mitchell interviewed her after Gould's death. And when “Joe Gould's Secret” came out, Mitchell wrote to Chassan that he had decided not to mention anything she had told him; these were details concerning the family's history of mental illness and psychiatric treatment (including Chassan's own). Brill explained that patients suffering from dementia praecox (schizophrenia) tended not to respond well to shock, which is why they were the patients most likely to be lobotomized. Brill, “The Place of Neurosurgery,” 2503–4. Brill may have been involved in Gould's lobotomy, as well as in that of Ginsberg's mother. In October 1952 he reported, “The author's experience with lobotomy was gained…when he worked with a series of 600 cases of lobotomy done at Pilgrim State Hospital, New York, between the years 1945 and 1950. (The number in this series now stands above 1,100.) Many of the patients had been known to him for periods of five years and longer; each was chosen for operation personally after discussion with the family and careful review of the record. Initiative was practically always taken by the hospital and in no case was a patient operated at the insistence of relatives when it seemed medically not indicated” (2505). The surgery itself was done by Henry Widgerson.

13.
Worthing et al., “350 Cases,” 654.

14.
Gould to Williams, May 27, 1949, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243. During that period, though, Cummings did see him. “I've been seeing a lot of Joe G lately,” Cummings wrote to Pound in May 1948,
Pound/Cummings,
231. This is explained, though, if Cummings visited Gould at that time.

15.
Postcard stamped February 1950, sent to Macdonald by the Department of Hospitals, Bellevue Hospital. On one side are visiting hours and policies; on the other, a form filled out “Dear Sir or Madam: [handwritten ‘Joseph Gould'] has been admitted to Bellevue Hospital and has given your name as that of the nearest friend or relative.” Macdonald Papers, Box 19, Folder 479. “I was on Joe's calling list in the later years; toward the end, I arranged with Dorothy Day to have him taken into a Catholic Worker of hospitality up the Hudson, he stayed there a while (a month maybe) but left—he'd become bored and the inhabitants also, with him—he needed a constant turnover audience, as you note, for his sake, and theirs.” Macdonald to Mitchell, on
New Yorker
stationery, October 15, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.

16.
Chassan saw him once more, the next year: It was through Dorothy Day that Colleen Chassan “had her last contact with Joe Gould in 1952.” Mary L. Holman, Work Summary, October 23, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

17.
Morris Werner sent Worthing five dollars, to pay for some cigarettes for Gould, but, Werner said, “I…expected and of course got no letter, as by that time he was too far gone.” Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.

18.
Hunt, “Pilgrim's Progress, Part II.” In “Pilgrim's Progress, Part I,” Hunt's history of the rise of tranquilizers and their place in the history of psychiatric hospitalization is largely a transcription of a history given to him by Worthing's successor, Henry Brill.

19.
Hunt, “Pilgrim's Progress, Part I.” And see Hunt,
Mental Hospital,
42–44.

20.
Notes about a phone call with Ed Gottlieb, June 20, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

21.
Gould to Pound, 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

22.
Harry Worthing, M.D., to Slater Brown, August 19, 1957, by telegram. Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

23.
Michael Cipollino, Chief Clerk, Suffolk County Surrogates' Court, to the author, May 12, 2015.

24.
Mitchell, “Joe Gould's Secret.”

25.
Mitchell, notes from August 21, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

26.
Ibid.

27.
Mitchell, notes from August 22, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

28.
“Joe Gould Saved from Potter's Field,”
Washington Post,
August 22, 1957. On the alleged Joe Gould scholarship at NYU, see Charles Hutchinson and Peter Miller, “Joe Gould's Secret History,”
Village Voice,
April 4, 2000.

29.
Time,
September 2, 1957. And also “Joe Gould Dead; ‘Last Bohemian,' ”
New York Times,
August 20, 1957. (The
Time
obituary is cribbed from the
Times.
)

30.
Dan Balaban, “Last Rites for a Bohemian,”
Village Voice,
August 28, 1957.

31.
Chris Cominel to Cummings, August 20, 1957, Cummings Papers, Folder 251.

32.
Mitchell's notes about interviewing Margules, September and October 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

33.
That it was Chassan who hired Holman is revealed in Holman to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. And see Holman to Mitchell, September 30, 1957; Holman to Mitchell, October 23, 1957; telephone call with Holman, October 9, 1957; telephone call with Holman, May 21, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

34.
Holman, “Work Summary,” October 23, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

35.
See Mitchell's interviews with Woodman, November 7, 1957, and with Nalbud, June 23, 1958, and May 20, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

36.
Nalbud, May 20, 1959, interview, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

37.
Nalbud, letter to the editor,
Harvard Crimson,
April 30, 1958, Nathan Pusey Papers, Harvard University Archives.

38.
This produced a long chain of letters in the Pusey Papers, most of them from April and May 1958.

39.
Nalbud, June 23, 1958, interview, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. And see the flyer itself.

40.
James Nalbud, mass-mailed postcard, April 17, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

41.
Pound to Cummings, April 14, 1958,
Pound/Cummings,
399.

42.
Gould, “Why I Write.”

43.
Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson,
A History of African-American Art: From
1792
to the Present
(New York: Pantheon, 1993), 180.

44.
Obituaries include Chester Hampton, “Augusta Savage Dies,”
Baltimore Afro-American,
April 7, 1962.

45.
On Savage's fate, see the Hugh Samson letters, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 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), 162. “Memories of Augusta Savage in Saugerties,”
Auction Finds,
October 14, 2010. Karlyn Knaust Elia, emails to the author, October 7, 10, and 22, 2015.

46.
Richard A. Hitchcock to Mitchell, November 11, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Hitchcock's is a long and detailed letter. Hitchcock is all over Gould's diary.

47.
Jane Magill, New York, to Mitchell, October 22, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.