Joe Gould's Teeth (4 page)

Still, it was a gamble to say that the Oral History didn't exist when he couldn't prove it. He clipped out of newspapers the obituaries of people who knew Gould well. They died off one by one. E. E. Cummings died in 1962, William Carlos Williams in 1963.
The New Yorker
published “Joe Gould's Secret” in two parts, in September 1964. And then what Mitchell must have feared happened: people who'd known Gould began writing him letters and calling his office to tell him that he was wrong. “Odds and ends of the
ORAL HISTORY
did
exist,” one man wrote to Mitchell in October.
24
“You were too hard on Joe,” another man wrote in November. “When you became involved in Joe Gould's life in 1942 and onward, his composition books may well have contained only re-polished essays, but in the late 1920's and early 1930s, when I was first friendly with him, he daily jotted down the interests, events, sayings and occurrences of the day.”
25
To everyone who wrote to tell him the Oral History existed, Mitchell sent characteristically courteous, lovely replies: “I wish I had had this information when I wrote the second Profile, for I certainly would've made use of it,” he wrote, “and if I ever write another article about Joe Gould, which I may do, I'd like very much to have a talk with you about him.”
26

If there'd been one stray letter, or two, they'd have been easy to dismiss. Odds and ends, occurrences of the day: Maybe what those readers had seen were volumes of the diary? But there was more.

One letter that arrived that fall was from a woman named Florence Lowe who had known Gould when he first moved to New York. “My husband and I were his closest friends,” Lowe told Mitchell. Gould had given her one of his notebooks in 1923, as a going-away present when she was sailing for Europe. Mitchell asked if he could see it. Lowe mailed Mitchell the notebook in December. She didn't hear from him for three months, so she wrote again, asking him if he'd received it. He wrote back and said he had gotten it, and wondered whether he might keep it to give to the New York Public Library. She said sure. “If you ever need any pre-Village Gould, let me know,” she added. “I've got trunks full!”
27
He did not ask for more.

The notebook Florence Lowe sent Joseph Mitchell in 1964 reached the New York Public Library a half a century later, neatly filed with Mitchell's papers along with the envelope she sent it in. The notebook is dated 1922. It is titled “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II.” Sitting at a desk in the Manuscripts and Archives Reading Room, I laid that notebook flat, gripped with an uncertain fear.

Gould had filled only a few pages before he gave the notebook away. But it does have talk in it, snatches of conversation, like this:

When Mr. Coan was a reporter, he heard President Taft speak to a group of suffragists. He happened to mention some man who opposed that measure, and they hissed, not intending disrespect to him, but to show their disapproval of that particular gent. Taft seemed quite huffed about it. He stopped his speech off short to say, “If you women desire a share in the representation of government, you should learn self-control.”
28

This isn't much. It's not uninteresting, but its worth would seem to depend on whether or not there's a vast amount more of it.
It will have future value as a storehouse of information.
29
Still, it
is
Oral History, not a diary, not a reporter's notebook: a historian's notebook. I pictured Mitchell at his desk at
The New Yorker,
reading “Meo Tempore,” his head in his hands.

It's a piece of lore that after Mitchell wrote “Joe Gould's Secret,” he never wrote another story ever again, not anything about Gould, not anything about anything, even though he went to his office at
The New Yorker
every day for more than three decades, until his death in 1996. That's not quite true, but it's nearly true. In the Keatsian sense. It's as if he'd been silenced by Joe Gould's curse.

I picked up the notebook. I turned the page.

“Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II” also contains an essay, written in Gould's unmistakable hand. It is titled “Insanity.” I peered at the page of white with veins of blue. And there I read:

If we could see ourselves as we really are, life would be insupportable.
30

When you meet a member of the Ku Klux Klan,

Walk right up and hit him like a natural man.

—
ROBERT LINCOLN POSTON
,
“When You Meet a Member of the Ku Klux Klan”

“I
nsanity is a topic of peculiar interest to me,” Gould wrote in “Meo Tempore” in 1922.
1
He had toured New York's insane asylums as part of the training he received at the Eugenics Record Office.
2
He'd measured heads and spun colored tops.
3
“I could very easily imagine myself locked up as a maniac,” he admitted. “Consider the woman I met at Central Islip,” an asylum on Long Island: sometimes she thought she was a cat; sometimes she thought she was a mouse. “Is there really much difference between her and a sane person, after all?” Gould asked. “We all spend our lives, chasing into darkness.”
4

Gould had moved to New York in 1916 and had very quickly gone broke. “I should have gone home,” he wrote. “However Frances Perlstein went into the hospital to be operated on and I lived on tea and cheap cigarettes to be near her.”
5
Whatever Gould's relationship with Perlstein had been, it soon ended; Perlstein married another man.
6
Gould wrote to William Stanley Braithwaite to ask if he might help out with Braithwaite's anthology of American poetry, telling him that he was keen to write about his experiences “reading perfectly pallid poems of prostitution to Motorcycle Billy on an Indian reservation, and making him weep.”
7
Braithwaite said no.

In 1917, when the United States entered the war, Gould tried to enlist in the army: he was rejected three times. His father, a captain in the medical reserve, was stationed in Ohio; he tried to get Gould a job teaching at the University of Ohio. Gould wrote to Harvard asking for a copy of his transcript to support his application.
8
He didn't get the job.

In New York, he was hired as a reporter for the
Evening Mail.
9
That didn't last long: he didn't get along with his editor, or with the other reporters, either. “Some police-court reporters burned several volumes of my history because they resented a man's having intellectual interests,” he later claimed. “It was a great blow to me.”
10
In 1919, penniless, Gould went back to Norwood. That year, his father died suddenly of septicemia; Gould fell apart.
11
After he got better, he tried living in Boston for a while but ended up back in New York. “I had a pretty bad nervous breakdown and am just getting on my feet again,” he wrote at the beginning of 1921, the year that he began describing himself as a historian.
12
He mailed Edward J. O'Brien another chunk of the Oral History, “perhaps a fiftieth of the magnum opus.”
13
He told Braithwaite, “I have found the right task for me to do.”
14
He began signing his letters, “Retrospectively, Joe.”
15

“I am having a great time in New York,” Gould wrote to a cousin in 1923. “I am not making much money. However, I am meeting all sorts of interesting people. They are mainly artists.” He was closest to the writer John Dos Passos and the sculptor Gaston Lachaise. “One of my most interesting stunts is visiting Negro Harlem,” he wrote. He'd settled in Greenwich Village, but he spent a great deal of time uptown, eavesdropping on what Alain Locke called the “New Negro Movement,” the Harlem Renaissance. “The people are trying to do two things,” Gould reported. “They are trying to get our civilization. They are trying to build one of their own.” It was history, unfolding: he took everything down. “I know a very attractive sculptress there named Augusta Savage,” he went on. “She also writes poetry, but I don't hold that against her.”
16
Retrospectively, Joe.

Augusta Savage was born Augusta Fells in Green Cove Springs, Florida, in 1892, the seventh of fourteen children. Both of her parents had been born into slavery. Her father was a minister who earned his living painting houses. Her mother didn't know how to read. Five of her brothers and sisters died as children. As a girl, she loved to sculpt out of clay. “At the mud pie age, I began to make ‘things' instead of mud pies,” she said. She loved to make ducks. “I liked the way their tails perked up in the back.” Reverend Fells considered sculpture idolatrous. “My father licked me five or six times a week and almost whipped all the art out of me.” She'd wanted to be a nurse, an obstetrical nurse. Instead, she married when she was fifteen. She had a baby, a daughter, Irene, and was widowed. Then she married a carpenter named James Savage. She left him. In 1921, she moved to New York to study at Cooper Union. She and her daughter, then fourteen, lived at 228 West 138th Street.
17
Savage supported them by taking in laundry. She told people that Irene was her little sister, pretended that she was a decade younger than she was, and never admitted to her first two marriages. W. E. B. Du Bois, in an essay in
The Crisis,
referred to her as “Miss Savage.”
18
That's what everyone called her.

She had almond eyes, a delicate elegance, and an extraordinarily gentle voice.
19
“I fell in love with her at first sight,” Gould wrote.
20
She was slender and long-limbed. She was taller; he was older.
21
He met her on March 21, 1923, at a poetry night at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library: “Original poems were read by Countee P. Cullen, Eric Waldron, Augusta Savage, Langston Hughes, Sadie Peterson and Gwendolyn Bennett.”
22

She soon abandoned poetry for art. The 135th Street library commissioned her to make a portrait of Du Bois. This led to a commission to make a bust of Marcus Garvey. Through Garvey, Savage met Robert Lincoln Poston, secretary-general of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. He was also a reporter for
Negro World,
and a poet
.
“Hit him in the mouth and push his face right in, / Knock him down a flight of stairs and pick him up again,” Poston wrote in a poem called “When You Meet a Member of the Ku Klux Klan.”
23

She was admitted to the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France—one of only one hundred Americans to be chosen. In April 1923, her offer of admission was rescinded after the American selection committee found out that she was black.
24
(“Her passport had been signed and other preparations for the trip had been made when two white girls reported that Miss Savage was a colored student.”)
25
“I was much surprised when they told me I was a little too dark,” Savage said.
26
Urged on by Du Bois, she protested publicly, especially after she was flooded with letters from people all over the country accusing her of trying to pass for white:

They seem to have the notion that I must be a mulatto or octoroon….Now I happen to be unmistakable, and that way is obviously out of the question. Isn't it rather odd that such people should always suppose that when a colored girl gets a chance to develop her natural powers it must be that she will want to be white?

“How am I to compete with other American artists if I am not given the same opportunity?” she asked.
27
A public meeting was held in May; a delegation was sent to President Harding.
28
The decision was not overturned.
29

In June, three months after she met Gould, Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston. She was soon pregnant. Within a year of the wedding, Poston died of pneumonia while returning from Liberia, where he had attempted to arrange for the mass migration of American blacks. Savage gave birth to a daughter named Roberta; the baby died ten days later.
30

Gould made his literary debut. In Greenwich Village, he'd met up with men he'd known at Harvard, like Cummings. Gould was drawn to Harlem, but he was always most comfortable with Ivy League men, “old American stock.” And they liked him, too. They found him amusing, his eccentricity, his hatreds, exotic. Cummings turned one of Gould's witticisms into verse:

as joe gould says in

his terrifyingly hu

man man

ner the only reason every wo

man

should

go to college is so

that she never can (kno

wledge is po

wer) say o

ifi

'd

OH

n

lygawntueco

llege
31

During the war, Cummings and Slater Brown had spent four months together in a prison in France: Cummings had written an autobiographical novel about it, called
The Enormous Room.
32
Brown and Malcolm Cowley were also editors of a literary magazine called
Broom
(it published Pablo Picasso, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf). In October 1923 there appeared in
Broom,
in an issue containing poems by Cummings and William Carlos Williams, “Chapter CCCLXVIII of Joseph Gould's History of the Contemporary World.”
33

The title, like much of the Oral History itself, was meant satirically. People who read Gould's notebooks generally thought he was writing a parody of historical scholarship.
34
(Gould also presented himself as a fake historian. Once, asked who was his favorite historian, he said, “There's a sense of rivalry. Perhaps I don't like any. Well, I could say Beard.”)
35
The chapter was introduced by a sketch of Gould drawn by Joseph Stella and a little essay, “Joseph Gould: The Man,” written by Brown and Edward Nagel, Cummings's roommate. It contains the first published description of Gould's notebooks, which numbered, already, in the hundreds:

It is this mass of grimy note-books which contain (or rather partially represent), for the fecundity of Mr. Gould passes all natural bounds, his omnivorous history of the contemporary world. Written in a cramped and curiously pedantic hand this work, which now reaches many hundred volumes, touches upon every phase of human, animal, vegetable, and mineral activity. For Mr. Gould is restricted by no subject, neither by the limits of time or space, decency or virtue, interest or insignificance, by the air above or the waters under the earth. His only requirement to which he persistently holds is that no fact shall enter his history which he has not seen with his own eyes or heard with his own ears.
36

Despite the fact that “Chapter CCCLXVIII of Joseph Gould's History of the Contemporary World” reads like a parody, its appearance in
Broom
earned Gould the terribly serious attention of Ezra Pound, who lived in Italy. Pound had a reputation for picking up strays.
37
Yeats wrote about him, “Sometimes about ten o'clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm-trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats.”
38
Gould became one of Pound's cats.

Having read the chapters of the Oral History that Gould had sent O'Brien, Pound classed him among the most distinctive and original of young American writers. (He was especially attracted to Gould's theory about hatred for blacks as against hatred for Jews.) “We have, of course, distinctly American authors, Mr Frost for example,” Pound wrote. “But there is an infinite gulf between Mr Frost on New England customs, and Mr Gould on race prejudice; Mr Frost having simply taken on, without any apparent self-questioning a definite type and set of ideas and sensibilities, known and established in his ancestral demesne. That is to say he is ‘typical New England.' Gould is no less New England, but parts of his writing could have proceeded equally well from a Russian, a German, or an exceptional Frenchman.”
39

What little money Gould earned came from his work on an encyclopedia called
Who's Who in Colored America,
published by the Phillis Wheatley Publishing Company.
40
He wrote to William Carlos Williams, “They want to include all representations of African blood.”
41
He was researching genealogies, tracing pedigrees.

Pound paid to have parts of Gould's Oral History typed, and began sending them to magazines.
42
Gould had found that the great work needed a series of “introductory essays,” containing his thoughts on art and life.
43
“To make another human being all that is needed is a man and a woman and a spasm of lust,” he wrote in an essay published in
Exile.
“To make a poem or a piece of music, you need heredity, environment and the divine gleam.”
44
While Gould wrote contemptuously, about sex and birth, Augusta Savage, who had borne and lost a child, returned to her art.

In 1926 Savage went to Baltimore to exhibit twenty-two of her pieces.
45
Gould wrote her letters; she asked him to stop. Out of clay she molded the figure of a young black man looking back at the past but striding forward. After Locke, she called it
The New Negro.
“There is in New York tonight a black woman molding clay by herself in a little bare room,” Du Bois wrote in 1927. “Surely there are doors she might burst through, but when God makes a sculptor, he does not always make the pushing sort of person who beats his way through doors thrust in his face.”
46
Du Bois arranged for Savage to meet with a patron, who agreed to pay for a year's study at Rome's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. “We got on famously,” Savage reported to Du Bois.
47
But Savage couldn't raise her share of the money she'd need to spend a year in Italy. So she stayed in New York, teaching neighborhood children to sculpt out of soap, for free.
48
She was also supporting the remains of her family: after a hurricane destroyed their house in Florida, seven members of her family, including her father, now paralyzed, moved into her tiny apartment.
49