Joe Gould's Teeth (3 page)

He never said what he planned to call it. I think of it as
Un-Beloved.

“We offer…this rare and original manuscriptum being the first and only extant draft of Sowerby's History of—what was it you said you was writing a history of, Mr. Sowerby?”

“I am writing a history, sir, of irrelevant and unimportant details.”

—
MAXWELL ANDERSON AND HAROLD HICKERSON,
Gods of the Lightning

H
e picked and pulled at this question, the race question. Variation and heredity, better breeding, sex across the color line, the racial nature of disgust, and of love. He turned to history, to ancestry, to biology, to genealogy. He wrote and he wrote.

“I think it would add to the interest of your fictitious genealogy if you would include an intermarriage with an Indian,” Davenport suggested. “So many of our degenerate families trace back to an Indian ancestor.”
1

“My opinion is that the Indian strain has been a helpful one,” Gould ventured.
2

He decided he disagreed with Davenport's ideas about racial hierarchy. One reason Gould was interested in eugenics was because he'd come to understand—maybe his failures had helped him to see—that he hadn't earned the extravagant opportunities he'd been given in life; he'd inherited them. If, when asked to write an essay on “Who I Am and Why I Came to Harvard,” all he could say was that he was a Gould, what was the lesson there? “It seems to me that one error is commonly made in speaking of heredity which is well illustrated by the descendants of Jonathan Edwards so many of whom were eminent,” Gould wrote Davenport. “Their eminence was due, it seems to me, not as much to inherited ability as to inherited opportunity.”
3
Consider Edwards's grandson, Aaron Burr: he'd inherited not talent, Gould thought, but chance. And so had he.

He studied hatred. He watched the people whose ancestries he'd traced: some hated blacks, some hated Jews. He developed a theory about “race prejudice”: “I have examined over a hundred cases of antipathy among people whose personal equation I knew, and I made a startling discovery which I believe will be borne out by further evidence,” Gould wrote Davenport. “I found that those who had physical repugnance to the Jew had no feeling against the Negro, and vice-versa.” From this, Gould had concluded that “the Jew and the Negro are physically and temperamentally antipodes, being opposites in their mental qualities, vices and virtues. For this reason it would be perfectly natural for them to be disliked by opposite sets of people.” He wished to conduct further experiments: he wanted to test his theory in the field.
4

Davenport had no interest in Gould's ideas about inequality of opportunity or race prejudice; what he wanted was help documenting the degenerative effects of the darker races on the whiter ones. He believed that the whiteness of the United States could be preserved by restricting immigration and banning miscegenation; he also hoped to eliminate the feeble-minded and the insane by forced sterilization. He proposed visiting Gould on his next trip to Boston.
5
Gould invited him to speak at Harvard, where Gould was trying to make up his missing credits by taking exams.
6
He wanted him to speak at the Cosmopolitan Club, whose members included students from China, Germany, England, Canada, Japan, France, India, Cuba, Hawaii, Italy, Brazil, Greece, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Siam, and Spain, and whose faculty sponsor was Gould's heredity professor, William Castle.
7
Gould also told Davenport that he was about to become the editor of a new, cosmopolitan magazine,
Four Seas,
whose features would include “the life-story in serial numbers of Plenyono Gbe Wolo,” a Liberian who had entered Harvard that fall; he invited Davenport to write a column called “The Newer Race.”
8

Gould never became the editor of anything.
9
But he did write for
The Nation,
and for
The Crisis,
the magazine of the NAACP.
10
He helped Upton Sinclair collect essays for an anthology called
The Cry for Justice.
11
He “lectured on behalf of educating the poor southern Negroes.”
12
In the summer of 1914, he spoke at the Sagamore Conference, a social justice gathering convened by Jane Addams.
13
There he met a young progressive reformer from New York named Frances Perlstein. At the end of that summer, he later said, he became engaged to her.
14

Most of all, he gathered evidence for his study of ancestry. The Oral History began as a Harvard senior thesis, later aborted, and turned into an epic novel about race, based on a genealogical chart. It might have been called
Roots
. “I have made some beginning toward my collection of pedigrees, to be welded into the fictitious genealogy of a Negro slave,” he reported to Davenport in
1915,
when he gave a lecture on family history before the Boston Negro Business League. “There will be enough sugar-coating of interesting history to suggest to the members the desirability of collecting their family records,” he promised. Lectures like these, he explained, offered “a good time for starting a eugenic propaganda among colored people.”
15

In April 1915, Gould was arrested outside the Tremont Theatre in Boston, for protesting D. W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation.
“Mr. Gould has made a study of every nation, the people and their lives,” the
Boston Herald
reported.
16
A lot of people were arrested that night protesting Griffith's tribute to the Ku Klux Klan. Nearly all of them were black Bostonians. Gould was the only one who was named in the paper.

Three months after Gould was arrested for protesting
Birth of a Nation,
he applied for work at Davenport's Eugenics Record Office. His application is filed with the Eugenics Record Office Papers, at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

“Has done some historical writing,” one of his interviewers noted. “Is a radical in politics.” Another wrote down, “Spells of depression…violent temper.” Ought he be allowed to breed? “Glasses at 17,” Gould wrote on his application form, noting his inherited defects. He was undersized: five foot four, 115 pounds. He was only twenty-five years old but had already lost most of his hair. On the other hand: “Good teeth.” He supplied the required pedigree chart. He traced the trait of his “temper” back through three generations: the madness of the Goulds.
17

He was hired and sent to North Dakota on a six-month assignment to conduct measurements on Mandan Indians. Using calipers, he was supposed to measure their arms, legs, heads, and noses; using a top designed by Milton Bradley—a child's toy, but put to a new purpose by eugenicists—he was to record skin color.
18
The idea was to attach differently colored cards to the top and then spin it, switching one card for another until the color of the spinning top matched that of the subject's skin.
19
This,
this:
this was the madness of the color line.

Once Gould got to Minnesota he told Davenport that he wished his Eugenics Record Office training had included information about venereal disease.
20
(He may have contracted a form of syphilis, known at the time as “general paresis of the insane,” that eventually infected his brain: that would explain his later psychosis and dementia.
21
It's impossible to say. And there are other explanations for his disorder.) “The life of the Indian is more influenced by sex than ours,” Gould reported: he'd met a man named Four Times (“an allusion to four successive acts of sexual intercourse”) and a woman named Big Vagina. Then, too: “One man was named Goes-to-bed-with-a-man.”
22
Years later, when Gould was floridly mad and living in Greenwich Village, he'd turn up drunk at parties, strip naked, stand on a table, demand a ruler, and measure his penis.
23

In his work among the Indians, he encountered many obstacles. It was fifty degrees below freezing; travel was difficult; he fell off a horse; the shades on his set of Bradley tops were all wrong: “the red used for Negroes is too dark for the Indian.”
24
Also, the people didn't trust him; they refused to be measured. “It is natural that the Indians regard as uncanny what they can not understand,” he wrote Davenport.
25
But they had abundant reason to refuse. The work Gould was doing was to help the U.S. government resolve a series of lawsuits involving the selling off of thirteen hundred parcels of reservation land by “mixed-bloods” whose authority to sell that land was disputed by “full-bloods”: Gould, with a child's plaything, was supposed to determine which Indians were reddest.
26

He wrote to Harvard asking for a course catalog.
27
He needed only one more class to graduate. “In my preoccupation with trying to be an Injun,” he wrote to the dean, “I do not wish to forget the academic life.” He wished to study Tolstoy or, better yet, the history of the Jews.
28
“My racial work is going on in such a way that I do not want to take up college work too remote in subject from it,” he reported, asking to be allowed to take the examination in a zoology class on race mixture taught by the anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton.
29
Meanwhile, he kept up his work as a book reviewer. He condemned
America's Greatest Problem: The Negro,
by R. W. Shufeldt (“He adopts any pseudo-scientific work which strengthens his case, and quotes with ghoulish glee newspaper clippings about Negro crime”), and praised Carter G. Woodson's history of black education (“one colored man at least sees that the hope of his race lies in the appeal to history”).
30
Then he wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, inviting the NAACP to form an alliance with the Society of American Indians.
31
Du Bois did not write back.

Gould returned to Harvard and read with Hooton.
32
Hooton had no use for people he called “ethnomaniacs” who “talk of the psychological characteristics of this or that race as if they were objective tangible properties, scientifically demonstrated.” There was no evidence whatever to support that position, and in any case, “Most if not all peoples are racially mixed.”
33

Gould passed Hooton's exam, changed his mind about race mixture, got his degree, and moved to New York, where he wrote an essay about the institutional care of the insane,
34
bunked in flophouses, begged for handouts, and began telling everyone who would listen that he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century, that he was writing a history of the world, and that it would last as long as the English language.

He knew the book, it was in his mind entirely, and in fact why write it?

—
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
,
“The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head”

T
wo writers guard an archive. One writes fiction; the other writes fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which. Joseph Mitchell said that Gould made things up. But Gould said that Mitchell did. Who's right?

In 1964, in “Joe Gould's Secret,” Mitchell explained that, in 1942, right after “Professor Sea Gull” was published, he'd come to believe that Gould had only imagined that he'd written the longest book ever written: “He very likely went around believing in some hazy, self-deceiving, self-protecting way that the Oral History did exist.” Mitchell said he understood Gould, and wanted to protect him, so he decided to keep his secret. He could see very well how just this sort of thing could happen, how a man could come to believe that he had written a book when in fact he had not—“He had it all in his head, and any day now he was going to start getting it down”—because he'd done the same thing himself. For years, Mitchell had been planning to write an autobiographical novel. He thought about it all the time. “Sometimes, in the course of a subway ride, I would write three or four chapters,” he wrote. “But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it.”
1

Mitchell didn't forgive Gould because he didn't need to; he didn't blame him. It's the grace of this act that carries force: Mitchell's compassion, wrapping little Joe Gould in his great cloak.

Gould, though, said that it was Mitchell who made things up, and he did blame him, and he didn't forgive him. After reading “Professor Sea Gull,” he wrote Mitchell, “I feel as if I was only a figment of your imagination.”
2
Mitchell asked Gould what it was in the profile that wasn't true. “He thought about it for a while and said, ‘I never bought a radio and kicked it to pieces.' ”
3
But Gould's objections ran deeper. He considered “Professor Sea Gull” a work of fiction. In 1943, he told Lewis Mumford that it was “one of the best short stories of 1942.”
4
And in 1945, when the profile was reprinted in an anthology of short stories, he told Mitchell that he was pleased, since “this is a sort of recognition that the piece is fiction.”
5

Gould was not wrong. Mitchell admitted to Gould that he made up facts. “He said his account of the Mayor of Fulton Fish Market was largely fictionalized,” Gould carefully noted in his diary.
6
And it's since come out that Mitchell sometimes invented quotes and even whole scenes, and once wrote an entire profile about a man who did not exist.
7
Gould did not consider this kind of thing a kindness.

But Gould and Mitchell agreed about one thing: when Mitchell looked in the mirror, he saw Gould. “He has pictured me as the sort of person he would like to be,” Gould said.
8
And Mitchell, asked why he was so fascinated by Gould, said, “Because he is me.”
9

“Joe Gould's Secret” is a confession, and it's also a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn't beautiful—the sorry fate of a broken man—and made it beautiful, a fable about art. “The Joe Gould piece is so beautiful and moving that no one could have written it but W. B. Yeats,” a fellow
New Yorker
writer told Mitchell.
10
“Joe Gould's Secret” is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty, its beauty its truth.

I by now sorely regretted having gone to the library, that first day, to see if any of it was true, in the drearier, empirical, Baconian sense: “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”
11
The more I learned about Joe Gould, the uglier it got.

“Not an alcoholic, not psychopathic,” Mitchell wrote in his notes when he interviewed Gould in 1942.
12
Why believe him? Why de-fang him? “I thought of Joe as a kind of hero,” Mitchell said.
13
So did Gould's friends. E. E. Cummings once asked Gould how he reconciled his faith in a benevolent God with the miserableness of his own life. Gould considered the question:

A mood of self-pity came over me. It was hard to be hungry and shabby and worried over finance, and to be deceived by friends and in such a mental state that I, who had smoked the peace-pipe with Water Chief and ought to be strong and honest above all other whites, found myself completely unnerved and untrustworthy when deprived of cigarettes. At the moment I could not answer him. But when I pondered the matter over the answer came. I have not had a hard time. A pinched stomach, a humiliating situation to my pride, and mental torment have never stayed my pen. I have always been able to do that which I felt was worth doing. What cause have I to rail at fate?
14

And that's the way modernist writers and artists tended to regard the situation. Torment had never stayed his pen: Gould was an artist, a bohemian, suffering for his art, suffering for
their
art, suffering for all art.
Because he is me.

Not me.

This difference is partly a function of time. A century on, Gould looks bleak, his mental illness looks serious, and modernism looks fairly vicious, actually. Gould's friends saw a man suffering for art; I saw a man tormented by rage. To me, his suffering didn't look romantic and his rage didn't look harmless. But the difference is even more a matter of evidence. I have never listened to Joe Gould call out, as he strutted along the streets of New York flapping like a seagull, “Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!”
15
I couldn't hear him. But in the stillness of the archives, I could read him. And Mitchell could not. All those letters that I found in archives all over the country? They weren't in archives when Mitchell was writing about Gould; they were stashed in people's desks and closets and attics. Mitchell met one man; I met another.

And I wished, I dearly wished, that I could let him be. But I'd gotten awfully worried. The defense of invention has its limits. Believing things that aren't real and writing fiction are acts of imagination: delusion and illusion. But passing off fiction as fact isn't an act of imagination; it's an act of deception. And with deception, someone usually gets hurt. Gould got hurt, Mitchell got hurt. I figured they weren't the only ones.

I also still thought I might find the Oral History. Because a man who as a boy runs the town's telephone service and as a young man serves as the Enumerator of the Census and collects the pedigrees of everyone he meets seems not unlikely to have recorded in dime-store composition notebooks everything that was ever said to him. That the Oral History had never been found didn't convince me that it had never existed. Very little of what most people write is saved, and nearly all of what is said is lost. That's why Gould was writing the thing in the first place. “I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,” he wrote, because “as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.”
16
Gould wanted to save the ordinary; the ordinary are very hard to save. But when “Professor Sea Gull” appeared, it made Gould famous. (“They had read about me in the New Yorker,” he wrote in his diary about people who sought him out.)
17
And what famous people write is saved.

I had started searching in the winter. In the spring, Joseph Mitchell's papers arrived at the New York Public Library.

They'd been in family hands since his death. They'd only just been picked up from his daughter's house, in forty-two boxes. They hadn't yet been cataloged, and the library was about to ship them to a contractor for sorting and preservation. I asked if I could take a look first.

Joe Gould spent a lot of time in the library at the corner of 42nd and Fifth, writing. The staff took to calling him “the poor man's Shakespeare.”
18
I thought of him while I sat at a table in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, waiting. The semester had ended and I'd taken a train from Boston. I pictured Gould at a table nearby, hunched over his notebook, blotting his ink.

Mitchell kept his Gould material in three big boxes: interview notes, receipts, drafts, proofs, and letters from readers. I keep my yarn in a drawer, and I don't know how this happens, but every time I open that drawer, the different balls of yarn have gotten all tangled up, and before I can knit anything I have to spend hours untangling knots and unraveling skeins. Those boxes were like that drawer. I sat at my table, opened the first box, and began untangling, one knot at a time.

In 1964, in “Joe Gould's Secret,” Mitchell said that he'd tried and tried to read the Oral History while interviewing Gould in 1942, without success, but that he'd taken its existence on faith because he did a great deal of other research about Gould's life and everything else checked out. Only after “Professor Sea Gull” appeared did he change his mind about the existence of the Oral History. This came about because Gould kept hounding him for money and attention and Mitchell, exasperated, arranged for Gould to meet with Max Perkins, an editor at Scribner's—Perkins edited Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe—and when Gould kept on failing to deliver to Perkins any “oral parts” of the Oral History, and said he would only publish it posthumously, Mitchell confronted him with his suspicion that the history did not exist. Mitchell then decided, out of generosity and empathy, not to tell anyone the truth. He revisited this decision in August 1957, when, two days after Gould's death, Edward Gottlieb, editor of the
Long Island Press,
asked Mitchell to join a search committee to look for the Oral History. This is how Mitchell ends “Joe Gould's Secret”:

Joe Gould wasn't even in his grave yet, he wasn't even cold yet, and this was no time to be telling his secret. It could keep. Let them go ahead and look for the Oral History, I thought. After all, I thought, I could be wrong. Hell, I thought—and the thought made me smile—maybe they'll find it.

Gottlieb repeated his question, this time a little impatiently. “You will be on the committee, won't you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, continuing to play the role I had stepped into the afternoon I discovered that the Oral History did not exist—a role that I am only now stepping out of. “Of course I will.”
19

This is true in spirit, but it's not actually true. Mitchell did not do a great deal of research in 1942 on Gould's early life. He did call Charles Davenport: Davenport told him that Gould was “erratic” and did not have a scientific mind. Mitchell did not type his notes with Davenport, since the call was so short, and he didn't use any of it. Other than Davenport, Mitchell's only real source for Gould's life before New York was Gould, who was not forthcoming. “Gould is not particularly communicative about what he calls his pre–Oral History life,” Mitchell wrote in a draft of “Professor Sea Gull”—a line a
New Yorker
editor cut before the piece went to press.
20
In 1942, Gould gave Mitchell the names of people who had read the Oral History; Mitchell did not seek them out. I don't think he was especially interested in reading it; he was interested in listening to Gould.
21
(It made a better story in 1942 if the Oral History existed. It made a better story in 1964 if it did not.) Mitchell also heard a lot about Gould in 1942 that he did not report in “Professor Sea Gull.” He heard about a man named William Allen who believed Gould's “oral history a fake” and that the “reason he is so secretive about it is that there is nothing there.” As far as I can tell, Mitchell did not interview Allen. A woman named Mary Holt, who knew Gould well, told Mitchell, “Some people think he is a monster.”
22
That didn't make it into the piece, either.

It is true, absolutely true, horribly true, that after “Professor Sea Gull” appeared, Gould hounded Mitchell. It must have been awful, much worse than Mitchell ever let on. Gould had a terrible way of turning on people. But it's not true that not until after the profile appeared did Gould begin saying the Oral History could only be published posthumously; Gould had been saying that since the 1920s. Nor is it true that Mitchell introduced Gould to Perkins: that introduction was made in April 1943 by the writer Slater Brown, whose kindnesses to Gould included feeding him dinner six nights a week. Nor is it true that, after Gould's death in August 1957, Mitchell participated in a search initiated by Gottlieb. Instead, beginning in October of that year, Mitchell began his own search for the Oral History. It seems as though nearly all of the research Mitchell said he'd done in 1942, including going to the library of the Harvard Club, he did not in 1942 but between 1957 and 1963, when he not only researched Gould's life but also searched for the lost manuscripts, tirelessly. He looked everywhere (and kept careful receipts). In July 1959, he went to Norwood to visit the house where Gould had grown up and to interview the woman who lived there. She told him that when she bought the house, in 1946, she'd found in the attic, under the eaves, “trunks of books” and dusty cardboard boxes tied with string, full of “report cards, school papers, compositions.” She didn't know what to do with them. She tried to find a Gould family relative; no luck. She consulted an antiques dealer; the stuff was worthless. Finally, she told Mitchell, “I took it out to the Norwood Public Dump and dumped it.” The only thing of Gould's that she kept, she said, was an old Edison phonograph.
23