Joe Gould's Teeth (8 page)

By then, Savage was the most influential artist in Harlem, not for the work she produced but for her teaching, and for the opportunities she tried to provide for younger artists. She was assistant director of the Federal Arts Project. She helped to found the Harlem Artists Guild. She organized an exhibit called
Artists and Models
at the 135th Street branch of the public library.
40

In 1937, Savage received her most important commission: the organizers of the 1939 World's Fair charged her with creating “a group which will symbolize the Negro's contribution to the music of the world.”
41
This got her picture into
Life
magazine, illustrating a story titled “Negroes: Their Artists Are Gaining in Skill and Recognition.”
42
It also led to her leaving her post as the head of the Harlem Community Arts Center—her friend Gwendolyn Bennett took over, an arrangement Savage believed to be temporary—but when Savage finished the World's Fair sculpture, she found she'd lost her job.
43

Gould lost his job, too. He was fired. Cummings tried to intervene, writing to the head of Federal Writers' Project, Henry Alsberg. “I know Gould is an ‘Institution,' ” Alsberg wrote back, “but couldn't do anything to save him.”
44

And still writers loved to write about him, the writer who could not stop writing. He took to saying, “I make good copy.”
45

YOU might write a nize lil piece say harft a page about Joe's ORAL hizzery

And mebbe that wd/ start somfink IF you make it clear and EGGs plain WHY Joe izza hiz

Torian

—
EZRA POUND TO E. E. CUMMINGS

I
n 1939, Augusta Savage held her first one-woman show, at the Argent Galleries on West 57th Street. “I have long felt that Negro artists, in the course of our development, have reached the point where they should have a gallery of their own, one devoted to the exhibition and sale of Negro art,” she said.
1
She opened the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art, the United States' first ever gallery of African American art, at 143 West 125th Street. She ran a workshop called the Uptown Art Laboratory.
2
She began planning a tour of Negro colleges and universities, carrying “a small exhibition of my own and other artists' work”: “Our painting and sculpture, unlike our literature and music, has too long been the property of New York, and I feel it is time for the rest of the country to know what the artists of our race are achieving.”
3
And she finished her commission for the World's Fair, a sixteen-foot sculpture inspired by James Weldon Johnson's “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the so-called Negro National Anthem. “Lift every voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring.” But when the fair closed, she had no money to store that sculpture: it was demolished by a bulldozer.
4

In 1939, Ezra Pound toured the United States.
5
He had become a Fascist and had the idea that he could help keep the United States out of war with Italy by making an argument about history, which was that democracy was impossible since the world was secretly run by Jews. “The COUNTRY needs (hell yes) an historian,” he wrote Cummings.
6

After Pound went back to Italy, where he wrote anti-Semitic essays for Italian newspapers and took to signing letters “Heil Hitler,” he and Cummings redoubled their efforts to get the Oral History published. “Have done what less I could to more your most generosity around little joe,” Cummings wrote Pound early in 1940, telling him that he had set up meetings for Gould. “Coached Joe, which expressed willingness sans astonishment con skepticism.”
7
It was likely through their efforts that in 1941, William Saroyan published an essay called “How I Met Joe Gould”: “Joe Gould remains one of the few genuine and original and American writers,” Saroyan said, in a tribute that sums up exactly what modernists saw in Gould:

He was easy and uncluttered, and almost all other American writing was uneasy and a little sickly; it was literary; and it couldn't say anything simply. All other American writing was trying to get into one form or another, and no writer except Joe Gould seemed to have imagination enough to understand that if the worst came to the worst you didn't need to have any form at all. You didn't need to put what you had to say into a poem, an essay, a story or a novel. All you had to do was say it.
8

Pound had something to say, too. In addresses for Radio Rome, he began attacking the United States and the United Kingdom, which by the end of 1941 were at war with Italy. “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew,” Pound said on Italian radio in March 1942. “And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.”
9

Mitchell began interviewing Gould that June.
10
In July, Cummings rambled about the mysterious whereabouts of Gould's history, within the Enormous Room:

There exist secret passages among those closets or better interstices; and surely the former will end with a furlined trapdoor which (being lifted) reveals a colossal green candybox which (being opened) reveals a microscopic mahogany rolltopdesk which (via dynamite) reveals a lifestatured nugget of thoroughly once chewinggum containing at its very most exact centre Joe (“Are You Plunderable?”) Gould Inc disguised as a Moslem pianotuner.
11

“Within the year there will be a profile of me printed in the New Yorker which ought to set me up again as a reviewer,” Gould reported to William Carlos Williams in October.
12
He told Lewis Mumford that he expected the profile to earn him contracts for four books.
13

“Professor Sea Gull” appeared in
The New Yorker
in December 1942. “Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century,” the piece begins.
14
It is immensely charming and, in it, so is Gould—a delightful eccentric, a strange and wonderful little man, wandering the streets, harmlessly, in a world at war.

“The article was about ten per cent accurate, but it has established me along with the Empire State building as one of the sights of the town,” Gould wrote to Mumford when the profile appeared on newsstands. “Furthermore a couple of publishers seem to be interested in me.”
15
But the interest of publishers in a book he had written and also failed to write was not something a man in severe decline could easily take. On January 13, 1943, he wrote in his diary, “I ate at the Brown's.”
16
And then: he disappeared.

Slater Brown lived at Patchin Place, two floors above Cummings. For months, Brown and his wife had been feeding Gould dinner every night except Saturday. (“Joe Gould rules their roost,” Cummings wrote to his sister.)
17
After that last dinner, on January 13, it took Brown four months to find Gould. When he did, he wrote to Mitchell to say that “Professor Sea Gull” was “one of the best Profiles which the New Yorker has published for years, particularly as you were not afraid to use your imagination about the Little Gentleman.” But he wrote, mainly, to tell him what had happened.
18

Right after the piece came out, Gould had gotten so drunk—he was a celebrity! he was a genius! he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century! he was the subject of an adoring profile in
The New Yorker
!—that he'd fallen down the stairs of the Vanguard Tavern in the Village. The evening of January 13, he had been dizzy at dinner at the Browns'. Later that night, Rex Hunter, a writer for the
Sun
who also lived at Patchin Place, found Gould lying in a pool of blood in the street, reading a chapter of the Oral History to a policeman. (Cummings told this story slightly differently; he said that Hunter had found Gould “all bloody & partially smothered in notebooks,” and that “a cop, while awaiting the Saint Vincent's ambulance, attempted to read one; & failed.”)
19
He'd been taken to St. Vincent's and released, but when he failed to appear at the Browns' for dinner for weeks—he must have been wandering the city, completely disoriented, because he didn't write any entries in his diaries all this time—Brown called Bellevue, on a hunch that he might have been taken in, so concussed and psychotic that he had been unable to identify himself, which was exactly what had happened. Cummings then arranged for a psychiatrist to see him; the psychiatrist, according to Brown, said “that Joe was not insane but just eccentric,” though he nevertheless committed him to Wards Island, “so that he could get three meals a day, a bed, and some feeling of security.”
20

“Dear Mr. Mitchell,” Gould wrote on April 3, 1943. “I am now at the Manhattan State Hospital.” He was writing from Keener 6, the mental ward. “I can be visited Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from 1 to 3 PM.” He asked Mitchell to send him a copy of “Professor Sea Gull,” as there was very little to read in the hospital library.
21
He hoped Mitchell might consider revising it. “It was a splendid article but it was more historical than factual.”
22
(This was a joke of Gould's. History, he liked to say, was fiction.)

Mitchell went to visit him. Before, he'd seen one Joe Gould. At Manhattan State Hospital, he saw another:

They had cut his hair and shaved off most of his beard, leaving him a clipped mustache and a Van Dyke. He said they have changed him in appearance from Trotsky to Lenin. Brought him a carton of Pall Malls, and he called another patient over and gave him a pack. In return, the other patient gave him half a candy bar. Had made a number of friends. Had composed a yell.

Keener, Keener

Sis boom bah

Nuts to you

Bim boom bah

Had invented a game called Ward's Island polo, in which small patients, riding on the backs of large patients, knocked a rubber ball up and down the corridor using brooms for mallets.

Said he had been confused at Bellevue. “I saw the water from the window, the East River,” he said, “and I thought I was in Martha's Vineyard, and I began to talk about Martha's Vineyard, and they decided I was crazy.”
23

The psychiatrist Mitchell talked to in Keener 6 did not believe Gould was a kindly eccentric. He believed he was a psychopath.
24

By summer, Gould was back on the streets, albeit under the monitoring of social services. Slater Brown arranged for Max Perkins at Scribner's to read some of the notebooks. Gould wrote Mitchell, “I believe there is a fifty-fifty chance of Scribners taking my book. I hope so. They are a good firm and deserve a break.”
25

He then began once again hounding everyone he knew, every day, for cash. “Joe Gould's still out of the booby hatch, looking like something the cat brought in but ‘worse and more of it,' ” Cummings wrote to his sister.
26
Wusser and wusser.

When Gould wasn't writing, he was drinking; when he wasn't drinking, he was plundering; and when he wasn't plundering, he was groping. He could hardly have been more different from the character described in
The New Yorker.
Meanwhile, “Professor Sea Gull” lived on and Gould collected his press clippings. By July 1943,
Time
had written about him and Mitchell's profile had been reprinted in
McSorley's Wonderful Saloon,
a collection of Mitchell's essays.
27
Gould's daily rounds now included not only the offices of
The New Republic,
where Cowley was usually good for a dollar, and of the
Herald Tribune,
where Gould put the touch on editor Robert J. Cole, but also the offices of
The New Yorker
and of Scribner's. A typical day:

I got up at one. Bugs bothered me. I asked Mr. Cole for a dime for a drink. He gave me a quarter. I went to the White Rose. I had an ale. One of the bartenders came over to talk to me. He was nice. I told him I would be more sociable another time. I went back and used the Flit. The bugs still persisted. I got up late. I had coffee on my way uptown. I went to the New Republic. I had a wait for Malcolm. I had a copy of Time with my photo in it. I slept while I waited. At last Malcolm came. He gave me one half a dollar and six cents for stamps. He had a book for me. I went to Scribners. I had a long wait. I was told Mr. Perkins was very busy. At quarter of five I decided to leave. I showed Time to his secretary. She said she would tell him about it. She asked me to come in on Friday. I posted my letters at the Post Office. 25 W. 43d St. I phoned Joe Mitchell. He said to come up. I did so. He had a copy of his book for me. We chatted. I asked him if he had any clippings. He said his publisher had. The only copy I had not heard about was a mention in Newsweek which he thought mentioned me. He gave me a dollar.
28

With Perkins, Gould performed a disordered parody of the strange arrangement that is publishing: the selling of a book to an editor, every man his manuscript. “He had typed three chapters of the Book,” Gould wrote in his diary on July 30, 1943, after seeing Perkins. “He liked it very much.” They'd go on like this, having an editorial chat:

He was still puzzled by the problem of the unity of the book. I said that would clear up as I handed him more material. I also said that I was working on chapters that will not be immediately available, but that any other way of work would spoil the spirit of my history. I read him three short chapters on George II.

And then, as Perkins would do every time Gould came to visit, he would buy the book:

He gave me a dollar. He said Friday was the best time to look in. He gave me a dollar. I got cigarettes. I had an ale in the Minetta Tavern.
29

This went on and on. August 6, 1943: “I went to Scribners. I had a short wait for Perkins. He liked the new chapters. He gave them back typed. He gave me two dollars.” August 9: “I gave him two chapters….He gave me a dollar.” Then Gould dropped the pretense. August 24: “I went to Scribners. Max Perkins gave me a dollar. I had no manuscript for him.”
30

Slater Brown took Gould away for a rest, to spend a few weeks with him at his house in Truro. “I have been on Cape Cod for nearly a month and have added a great deal to the oral history as well as gotten much new material,” Gould reported to Mitchell that fall.
31
Brown later said that while Gould was up in Truro “he read an essay he had just written for the Oral History, read it aloud, but the strange thing was, I had heard him read the same essay a long time ago, years and years ago.”
32
On the Cape, Brown composed a parody of the Oral History—“Page 3,769,300…Chapter 5,768”—and sent it to Cummings. It involves a young Gould leading a girl off into the woods and asking her if she would like to see a big wolf. “She would say yes and then I would show her a wolf.”
33
The wolf, of course, was Gould himself.

When Gould got back to New York, Perkins cut him off. This put more pressure on everyone else he ordinarily tapped. “I went to 597 Fifth Avenue,” he wrote in his diary. “I could not see Perkins. I phoned Joe Mitchell. He gave me two dollars.” (Gould, predictably, turned on Perkins, writing to Mumford, “He is not enough of a scholar to read his own language.”)
34
That wolf, he kept on showing people that wolf. “Met Joe Mitchell and his wife,” Gould wrote in his diary one day. They were having drinks; he joined them. “His wife accused me of goosing her.”
35