Joe Gould's Teeth (7 page)

“Of course Joe Gould, he aint printed,” Pound wrote to Williams. Or, as Gould put it, “Things seem to be getting wusser and wusser.”
39

I, too, sing America.

—
LANGSTON HUGHES
,
“I, Too”

A
ugusta Savage returned from Paris in September 1931. Straightaway, Joe Gould began threading himself into her life. “Miss Savage is giving a party,” he wrote to Countee Cullen that November, “and she asked me to invite you.”
1
But, later, he admitted that when Savage returned to New York she refused to speak to him.

She'd grown confident and cosmopolitan and commanding, and increasingly outspoken about art and race. “Something typical, racial, and distinctive is emerging in Negro art in America,” she said.
2
She had shipped home much of her work. “I have brought back some 18 or so pieces,” she reported; “some are quite large.” She placed them in paid storage and worried about where to find the money to keep them.
3
She opened a school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. She was named the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. She founded a club called the Vanguard, to talk about race and politics.
4
This attracted the attention of the FBI. For years, the bureau had spied on the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Now its agents began spying on Savage, too.
5
She grew bitter. She hardened.

Savage was the subject of FBI concern for more than a decade. Gould never drew the Bureau's attention.
6
Most of Savage's FBI surveillance file is redacted, pages of white covered with smears of black. On one page, the Vanguard—“An association of Negro and white intellectuals for social study and protest,” with Augusta Savage as chairman—appears alongside the American Civil Liberties Union on a typewritten list headed “
THE COMMUNIST PARTY: NATIONAL PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS OF PROFESSIONALS
.”
7

Whoever else was following her, Gould shadowed Savage's every move. He called her; he wrote her. He berated her for betraying his secrets: “I have been told you informed people that I was in an asylum when I was in Central Islip,” he wrote to her, furious. If he had lost his mind, this, he insisted, was her fault. “I have had to fight for my sanity, and some of it would have been avoided, if I could have had a real talk with you, on your first return from Europe.” He said that her rejection of him was proof that she didn't really “believe in racial equality.”
8

In February 1933, Alice Neel painted a portrait of Gould, naked. Neel knew Savage. Gould asked Neel to plead with Savage on his behalf. “She and I went to call on Augusta,” he wrote.
9
Savage was unmoved. Neel painted Gould sitting on a stool, his legs spread wide, his hands resting on his knees. He has three penises and three sets of testicles.
10
(Cowley said when he saw the portrait, “The trouble with you, Alice, is that you're not romantic.”) “I call it ‘Joe Gould,' ” Neel said, “but I probably should call it, ‘A Portrait of an Exhibitionist.' ”
11

In 1934, Gould began telling people that he and Savage were about to get married. “Intermarriage has tremendous difficulties, as I realize,” he wrote to Pauline Leader.
12
The engagement seems to have been a figment of his imagination. Savage refused to see or speak with him. “I wrote her several letters which she did not answer,” Gould admitted, and “she complained to others that I was pestering her.”
13

Savage stopped producing much new work, and what little she produced was worse than what she'd made before. She resigned from the Vanguard. She grew distant from her friends: removed, troubled, harder, and even harder.
14

Gould told Millen Brand that he and Savage had had a misunderstanding, and asked him to intervene. “Augusta and I have never had any chance for any explanation of our difficulty,” he wrote to Brand. “She has used her vivid imagination to irritate her family against me and at the same time she has gained prestige with the intelligent members of her group by publicizing my interest in her.”
15
Everything Savage said about him, Gould insisted, was a lie.

Brand wanted to be helpful. “In my then young, still somewhat naïve state, I bought this story of Joe's and met Augusta and in fact liked her and was soon in a position to broach the delicate matter of her ‘misunderstanding' with Joe,” Brand later recounted to Joseph Mitchell. “Her face clouded up and she hesitated, but angrily she seemed to decide to tell me what was really doing.” Gould hardly ever left her alone. He wrote her endless letters. He telephoned her constantly. If she gave an exhibit, he showed up. “Joe was making her life utterly miserable.”
16

There are hints, in these letters, of violence, and even of rape. “White women have had affairs with colored men, and then have accused them of rape to protect themselves, and she is doing something equally yellow,” Gould complained about Savage. “I told you that Augusta would lie to you,” he wrote Brand. “She tells her family that lie about my being excited by force.” Savage pointed out that Gould seemed to be immune from prosecution and that his immunity had to do with his race. This maddened Gould: “I think it is cheap for Augusta to say that a colored man could not annoy a white woman as I am her.” He mocked her: “It was a silly lie for Augusta to make a racial issue out of this matter because I have ties of unbreakable friendship with Harlem.”
17

Gould then told Brand he needed to speak to Savage just one more time, to interview her for the sake of finishing the chapters about Harlem in the Oral History. He begged Brand to set up a meeting. He promised he wouldn't try anything. “I ceased to love Augusta Savage some months ago,” he insisted. “I do not want to urge Augusta to marry me or anything of that sort,” he promised, and “if she is not willing to see me a talk with Irene will do just as well.”
18
But Savage didn't want Gould near her daughter, either.

There wasn't much Savage could do: there was no particular reason to believe the police would help her and much reason to believe they wouldn't. “It was evident that as a Negro she hesitated to take court action,” Brand later wrote to Mitchell. Brand wasn't altogether sure what to make of Gould's behavior: “How much of this was incipient pathology in Joe and how much plain villainy is hard to tell.”
19
But Brand was unwilling to do nothing. He told Gould to leave Savage alone.

Gould then started sending letters to Brand and his wife, “full of obscene and malicious innuendoes about her past life before I had known her.” He developed for Leader what Brand called a “sick hate.” “These letters were of the most open depravity from end to end. He also began telephoning at four o'clock in the morning, shouting obscenities. There was no more of the amusing Joe, Joe the friend, Joe the confidant,” Brand explained to Mitchell, in a letter I read in Mitchell's papers at the New York Public Library. “It was all naked malice.”
20
Portrait of a Madman.

I figured that Brand must have saved Gould's letters as evidence. I got on a bike and rode from 42nd Street to 116th Street, to the Columbia University Library. There, in an uncataloged box of Brand's papers, I found a thick folder marked with a note: “Not to be released for use until my death.”
21

Inside the folder were four chapters of Gould's Oral History, together with a clutch of terrible letters. “If I prefer to woo an American woman to a greasy neurotic Jewess with breath stinking of herring,” Gould wrote to Leader, “do I have to ask your approval?” After Brand told Gould to leave Savage alone, Gould called Leader “filthier than any prostitute” and Brand a “pimp for her intellectual whoredom.” He insisted he didn't want Savage anymore: “I would prefer not to marry her because she is sterile and…I could not adjust myself to going childless to the grave.”
22

Brand never mentioned this to Mitchell, but Gould hadn't only sent obscene, threatening letters to Brand and Leader; he had sent them to their son, Jonathan, a very little boy: “I realize that your father is quite naturally ashamed of the cheap tactics he is using,” Gould wrote to Jonathan Brand, “but if he has intelligence enough he will realize that it would be advisable for him to have a personal talk with me before he takes legal action.”
23

Brand saw a side of Gould he had never seen before. He went to the police and got a summons for Gould's arrest—“I was not a Negro woman, and I wasn't taking it”—but Gould begged him to drop the charges, “saying he had already been taken to court on a similar charge and had received a suspended sentence, but if I went through with this, he would certainly be put in jail and he needed careful treatment of his eyes and would probably go blind.”
24

Brand arranged to meet with Gould under the arch in Washington Square. “I told him I would discontinue the action on condition that he never saw me or spoke to me or Pauline again in his life and stopped all his persecution of Augusta,” Brand told Mitchell. “He agreed and that was the last I ever saw or heard from him.”
25
But for Savage, the end had not come.

In 1934, Gould applied for a Guggenheim again, this time with a letter of recommendation from Edward J. O'Brien. O'Brien had read parts of the Oral History decades earlier. “To the best of my knowledge he has devoted his life to it against extraordinary conditions of want and poverty,” O'Brien wrote. He considered Gould to be brilliant. More he could not say. Instead, having known Gould so long, he recommended caution. “If a very large body of material is now available I suggest that the Guggenheim Foundation might experimentally subsidise the editing and typing of a portion of it in order that it may be examined closely….I am not able to judge fairly as to the final value of what he has done without having more evidence to go on.”
26

Gould's application was again rejected. He began sending Moe vicious letters, asking him personally for money and then demanding it. For a while, Moe gave him ten or fifteen dollars, but at a time when he was giving money to refugees from Europe, he wrote a note to himself, “This is the end.” Gould then sent him a letter that's a good illustration of his malice:

Inasmuch as I have created a vital new literary form and have written some things which will last as long as the English language, I cannot expect as much courtesy from you as if I were a plagiarist, and since I am handicapped by being of old American stock, I realize that a foundation as yours is predisposed in favor of the predatory type of recent coolie immigrant such as the original Guggenheim.
27

By now, hardly anyone could fail to see, he was mean; he was vicious. He was wretched and abandoned. He smelled; he was covered with sores and infested with bedbugs. He was terribly, terribly ill. Cummings made him sit on the windowsill so he wouldn't leave lice on the furniture. People would spray the room with a DDT gun as soon as he left.
28
“Quick, Henry, the Flit,” the artist Erika Feist would holler to her husband when she saw Joe Gould coming up the stairs.
29

I'd trudge, weary, to this library or that, to photograph more of Gould's letters, and I'd imagine my camera was a Flit gun. I began to think,
Joe Gould is contagious.

Gould didn't come to Joseph Mitchell's attention by happenstance. In 1934, Edward J. O'Brien visited New York and told Gould that he ought to get himself profiled in
The New Yorker.
30
The New Yorker
's interest in Gould was a product of the years-long campaign waged by Gould's friends to keep him out of an institution. “GING to git you to git some of JOE's oral HISTORY fer Esquire,” Pound wrote Cummings.
31
(
Esquire
didn't print it.)
32

Gould lost his teeth, the fakes. Cummings's sister, who was a social worker, said that if Gould went on relief, he'd get five dollars a week, and could get a pair of someone else's teeth. Gould told Cummings there were only two kinds of people on the dole: “the kind of people you wouldn't be found dead with and the kind of people who need it so much more than we do.”
33
Then he began harassing Cummings's sister with unwanted letters and phone calls.
34
Meanwhile, his rent was so overdue that his landlady threw him out, and threw away all of his notebooks, too.
35
He used his food checks to buy new notebooks.
36
He got new teeth.

Millen Brand never spoke to Joe Gould again, but he sat for a bust by Augusta Savage. It took eighteen sittings, and when Savage cast the head in plaster, the ears broke off. “ ‘You'll have to start all over again,' she said, joking,” Brand wrote in his diary. (Brand's diary is full of speech and sound; he wrote it for his deaf wife, so that she could hear his days.) He went back one evening for Savage to build up the ears. He loved sitting in her studio, watching her:

She mixed plaster in a glass and worked quickly, adding the plaster bit by bit and shaping it. She used a steel chisel. The radio in the next room had on a horror story. Fragments came through the French doors—‘He is sleeping.' A scream. ‘He's dead!'

“My mother listens to them all the time,” Augusta said. “She likes only the stories.”

Brand sat and listened. “The voices from the radio came through the quiet air: tense voices, screams, the expected deception, the bafflement, the forewarning that had no relation to us or to the peace of the night.”
37
He loved the sound, and the silence.

In 1935, Gould got a job with the Federal Writers' Project. He said that he was writing a biographical dictionary of New York's earliest settlers and that he was doing it alone because he was a better writer than everyone else. “I'm a one-man project,” he told the
Herald Tribune.
38
“My own book is too good, of course,” he said, “to be subsidized by a mere government.”
39