Joe Gould's Teeth (5 page)

That tiny apartment was at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, a gathering place for artists and for poets like Claude McCay and writers like Dorothy West.
50
“I consider you my very dearest friend,” Savage wrote to the poet Countee Cullen.
51
With Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, she planned a magazine called
Fire!!.
Richard Bruce Nugent described the parties she gave in a poem called “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”:

writing…or drawing…or something…or something about the things he felt and thought…then to Augusta's party…Langston…ready…down one hundred thirty-fifth street…fy-ah…meet these people and leave…fy-ah Lawd…now to Augusta's party…fy-ahs gonna burn my soul.
52

Gould must have been at some of those parties, too.
Now to Augusta's.
He began telling people they were having an affair. She denied it. He wrote about her in his notebooks. She asked him to stop.
53
He would not.

In 1926, Gould began claiming that most of “The Oral History of Our Time” was obscene, or indiscreet, and could be published only after he was dead. “It is you know my worst handicap that much of my best material is not intended for general publication in this generation,” he wrote Cummings.
54
Later, the writer Morris Werner said, “He did everything he could to avoid publication.” One day, Gould stopped by Werner's apartment at 61 West 12th Street and asked him to type up some pages of the manuscript. Werner asked him if he knew any editors. “Some editors boast about knowing
me
,” Gould scoffed. Werner asked about the length of the manuscript:

He did not put it in number of words, but he went up to a 12 volume set of the Messages and Letters of the Presidents of the United States I had bought for my work. They were bulky volumes. Stretching out his dirty little hands he said: “If boiled down, it would fit this many volumes.”
55

In 1927, Pound proposed sending the Oral History to the publisher Horace Liveright. “I am not on very good terms with him,” Gould answered, describing an earlier encounter: “He kept insisting that because I was intelligent I must have Jewish blood.”
56
Gould always performed his anti-Semitism for the anti-Semitic Pound, telling him on one occasion that he hated “that boot licking keik Paul Rosenfeld” (Rosenfeld was a critic), and on another that he wished “the literary world were not quite as lousy with keik pants-pressers” (the poet Louis Zukofsky's father was a Yiddish-speaking pants presser).
57
Cummings tried to arrange for Simon and Schuster—he called the firm Shoeman and Scheister—to read the history. Gould one day stopped by Werner's apartment and talked to Cummings. Werner told this story:

“Gould, have you written to Simon & Schuster yet?” Cummings asked.

“No,” Gould said and looked a little shamefaced. Then he asked me for a piece of my stationery. Unthinking, I gave him one with my name and address on it and he sat down and started writing.

“Are you writing to Simon & Schuster on
my
letter head?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I took it away from him and gave him a piece of blank typewriting paper.

“I'll write to Simon & Schuster about you on my letter head, I told him, but you won't.”

He started the letter, “Gentlemen, if any,” and giggled. I told him sternly that it was all very funny but that if he wanted to get his ms. published it was hardly the approach, for I happened to know that there were no gentlemen at Simon & Schuster.

Gould never sent the letter.
58

Pound warned Gould not to be so truculent. But Gould's grandiosity made any editorial conversation difficult. He challenged more than one editor to a duel. He'd write wildly outsized reviews and then abandon them if an editor wished to make cuts. “He brought me back enough manuscript to fill three complete editions of
The Sunday Tribune,
” one editor said.
59
He sneered. “I do not see any point in submitting my work to your splendid mausoleum of European reputations,” Gould told Marianne Moore at
The Dial.
60
(Zukofsky and Pound had arranged for Moore to meet Gould and to read his notebooks.)
61
But after he bared his teeth at her and she didn't flinch, he was courteous with Moore, who published two essays from the Oral History.
62

“I will have some more manuscript for you to look over,” Gould wrote her. “I wish however that you could see your way to letting me do some revisions.” He was picky, but in an interesting way, writing Moore, “I am anxious that the capital N in Negro be preserved as it is a pleasing courtesy to that race which resents being neglected to small letters as a kind of literary Jim Crowism.”
63

Gould respected Moore. “I am sorry that I did not have more criticism from you,” he wrote her in December 1928.
64
Moore asked to see more chapters, but
The Dial
folded the next month.
65
This inspired Gould's only well-known piece of writing:

Who killed the
Dial
?

I, said Joe Gould, with my inimitable style.

One of the essays Gould published in
The Dial
is called “Marriage.”
66
He asked Augusta Savage to marry him. If he wrote down her answer, he never let anyone read it.
67

I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting.

—
AUGUSTA SAVAGE

S
he said no. He fell apart. “Augusta had flirted with me to attract someone else and I had a bad nervous breakdown,” Gould explained in an essay from the Oral History called “My Life.”
1
That essay, like everything else Gould ever wrote about Augusta Savage, or about the Harlem Renaissance, was never published. Much of it he may have destroyed. “I came near burning everything that I had written,” he wrote in a letter to Pound, though he never told Pound about Savage.
2
“When I snapped out of it, I tried to make up for lost time. I wrote day and night.” He became convinced he was going blind.
3

I got to thinking that what had at first looked like contradictions weren't contradictions at all. Instead, they were evidence of a pattern. The Oral History existed, and then it didn't; it didn't, and then it did. He wrote it; he lost it. He was a genius; he was a blind man. Gould always said that most of his history was revision. Dwight Macdonald believed that Gould threw away the manuscript every January and began all over again, “editing, adding, deleting, and revising, lovingly distilling his information and comment into suitable form until the next revolution of the relentless year brings him to the beginning of a new version.”
4
Maybe he did throw most of it away and start it again. But the parts that he kept and the parts that he destroyed were different. It's his record of her that's really missing.

I went to see the Augusta Savage Papers. They're housed in an archive on the second floor of the library on 135th Street where Savage and Gould first met in 1923. Savage once told the collector Arthur Schomburg that she wanted the world “to see Harlem through Harlem's eyes.”
5
The library on 135th Street has since become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Savage's papers consist of two slim boxes, containing mainly clippings of newspaper articles and manuscripts of children's books that Savage wrote and never published. She rarely wrote letters, and the letters she received she didn't keep. She left no diary, no real account of herself. Her legacy, she always said, was her students. “My monument will be in their work,” she said.
6
Much of her own art is either lost or didn't last. She never cast most of her work; she couldn't afford bronze, or time in a foundry. She sculpted in plaster and painted it to look like bronze, using a formula she made out of shoe polish.
7
Some of her work has been stolen. Much of it, though, it appears she herself destroyed.

I went back and reread the ten volumes of Gould's diaries that I had found at New York University. Gould sometimes wrote about a “colored sculpturess,” but instead of writing her name, he usually left a blank space.
8
In other archives, all over the country, Gould is everywhere; Savage is hardly anywhere. The asymmetry of the written historical record was the whole reason Gould had begun the Oral History in the first place: he wanted to correct that asymmetry by writing down speech.
I imagine that the most valuable sections will be those which deal with groups that are inarticulate such as the Negro.
But in destroying the chapters of the Oral History that chronicled the Harlem Renaissance—in erasing Savage even from his diary—he'd reproduced that asymmetry. He'd made it worse. Or, no, the closer I looked, the more likely it seemed that
she'd
done it, that she'd asked him to destroy everything he'd written about her. It was very hard to know.

I tried piecing together fragments about Savage that I found here and there, colored shards of broken tile. I found a paragraph from the Oral History that sounded like a story Savage, the daughter of a firebrand preacher, might have told Gould:

A negro preacher in the south enjoyed baptizing new converts by immersion in the river. He enjoyed it most when they made a great deal of noise. One short stout woman from beyond the mountains was brought to him to be baptized. He took her out to the river and shoved her under the water.

She bobbed right up and he said, “Do you believe?”

She said nothing.

He ducked her under again and when she came up, asked her again, “Do you believe?”

She said nothing.

He pushed her under a third time and this time kept her under a while. When he let her up this time, he said, “Do you believe?”

Still the woman said nothing. He became irritated and shoved her under again and in spite of her struggling, kept her under a good time. At last he let her up. “Do you believe?” he said.

“I do,” she said. He faced her towards some people on the shore and said, “Tell these people what you believe.”

“I do believe this man's trying to drown me.”
9

It seemed, I thought, like a story that Savage could have told not only to Gould, but also about him, and about how she was wise to him, and wise, too, to what white modernist writers and artists were doing to the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He said he was trying to save her, but really he was trying to drown her.

It took me months to find out that Augusta Savage had been the subject of Gould's long and terrifying obsession. Nearly every trace of her was gone. I'd never have found her if it hadn't been for Millen Brand.

“Millen Brand has read a great deal of the history,” Gould told Joseph Mitchell in 1942, when Mitchell was interviewing him about the Oral History for “Professor Sea Gull.”
10
Mitchell set that aside: he didn't meet with Brand, or even call him; he wasn't much interested, then, in finding and reading the Oral History. But in 1964, after
The New Yorker
published “Joe Gould's Secret,” Brand was among the many people who wrote to Mitchell to tell him the Oral History did exist. “Much as I hate to detract from the fine effect of your articles,” he wrote, in a letter I found among Mitchell's papers, “Joe showed me long sections of the Oral History that were actually oral history.”
11
These, Brand explained, “were definitely oral history as he defined it and meant it. Fragments of heard speech here and there, and the longest stretch of it, running through several composition books and much the longest thing probably that he ever wrote, was his account of Augusta Savage, the Negro sculptress.”
12

Brand knew Gould through his wife, the poet Pauline Leader, who'd met Gould in 1927.
13
Born in Vermont, Leader had lost all of her hearing when she was twelve years old. At seventeen, she ran away from home and went to New York to become a writer. “My poetry became the door that led me out of my deafness,” she later wrote. She got a job as a dishwasher. At night, after her shift, she'd go to a cafeteria in Greenwich Village full of poor poets and writers. “They did not seem to mind my deafness.” She couldn't hear them, but they'd write her notes. “They wrote in my cheap notebook and perhaps when someone else had the notebook and they wished to say something to me and could not wait, they used the napkins as paper.”
14
It was in one of those cafeterias that Leader met Joe Gould, who wrote her notes in his dime-store notebooks. She moved into the Hotel Bradford, into a room that adjoined Gould's.
15
Three of Leader's poems appeared in
Poetry.
16
She wrote an autobiography called
And No Birds Sing.
17
Brand read it and wrote to her.
18
After Leader introduced Brand to Gould, he read some of the Oral History. Soon after that, Brand began writing
The Outward Room,
a novel about a patient who escapes from an insane asylum.

In the 1920s, when Brand was a student at Columbia, he'd worked as a psychiatric aide.
19
At the time, especially at wards for the poor, the treatment was confinement itself: the relentlessly dull routine of the institution was meant to remedy the disorder of a diseased mind. Order answered chaos.
20
Brand set
The Outward Room
at Islington asylum, where Miss Cummings (a name closely associated with Gould) listens all day to the same record over and over again, “on and on, unchanging, in a continual and unchanging repetition.”
21

After
The Outward Room,
a critical sensation, Brand became a literary editor; he had an excellent editorial eye. When Brand wrote to Mitchell in 1964, he told him that he'd read about thirty-five thousand words of Gould's Oral History,
22
and that the longest and best parts of it chronicled the Harlem Renaissance; the part about Savage “was full of orality and talk and was a fairly fascinating and skillful piece of writing.”
23
If those notebooks no longer existed, Brand told Mitchell, it was because Gould had probably destroyed everything he'd ever written about Savage: “It would be like him.”
24

In the summer of 1929, after Savage told Gould she didn't want to marry him, Gould fell apart, and Savage left New York for Paris. Her most accomplished work,
Gamin,
a nine-inch-high figure of a small boy from the streets of Harlem, had earned her considerable acclaim, and she'd won a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. “I hope you will continue to work primarily with Negro models,” an officer from the fund wrote to her. “I hope also you will try to develop something original, born out of a deep spirituality which you, as a Negro woman, must feel.”
25
Quite what she felt she did not usually say.

“Augusta Savage is here,” Countee Cullen wrote to Dorothy West in October. “She is one of my prime delights.” Du Bois had arranged for Cullen to meet Savage when she reached Paris, and to introduce her to the city's writers and artists in exile. (At the time, Cullen was married to Du Bois's daughter.)
26
Savage's years in Paris were the happiest of her life, though she didn't entirely escape Gould. Cummings sought her out, with messages, when he visited France.
27
But she was freed from her domestic obligations; she had better materials and more models; and she produced a remarkable body of work in wood and marble and clay and bronze: figures of black women reclining, dancing, fighting, thinking. “It is African in feeling but modern in design,” she said of her work, “but whatever else might be said it
is
original.”
28

Modernists sneered at realism and cultivated primitivism. (Gould liked to say that “the trobble with the bahr-bay-ree-ans is that they ol-wez bee-come civil-eyezed.”)
29
But Savage rejected white artists' fetish for the primitive as African. “I am opposed to the theories of the critics that the American Negro should produce African art,” she said. And she rejected, too, the conventions of modernism.
30
“I am a realist instead of a modernist,” she insisted.
31
Only four works from Savage's time in Paris have been found, but photographs of much of the lost work survive.
32
There are tributes to Haiti and allusions to Africa, and a work of clay called
Mourning Victory:
a black female figure stands, head bowed, peering down at a man's severed head, lying at her feet.
33

By then, Gould was in the Outward Room. He never admitted to having been committed. He liked to say, “I'm my own sanitarium. I sort of carry it around with me.”
34
He had certain ruses, little concealments. “I have been a very unsettled condition,” he wrote to William Carlos Williams in August 1929, from a Central Islip post office box. He said that he was living on a chicken farm and would be back soon.
35
He always told Mitchell that he stored most of his notebooks on a chicken farm in Long Island. That chicken farm was a one-thousand-acre farm in Central Islip known as the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.
36