Joe Gould's Teeth Read online

  In his breast pocket, sealed in a dingy envelope, he always carries a will bequeathing two-thirds of the manuscript to the Harvard Library and the other third to the Smithsonian Institution. “A couple of generations after I’m dead and gone,” he likes to say, “the Ph.D.’s will start lousing through my work. Just imagine their surprise. ‘Why, I’ll be damned,’ they’ll say, ‘this fellow was the most brilliant historian of the century.’ ”4

  I stumbled. Whatever happened to that will? Had Mitchell seen it? Had Gould made it up? Had Mitchell made it up? For that matter, what about the Oral History? Mitchell hadn’t seen it and said Gould had made it up, but maybe Mitchell had made that up. Wouldn’t my students ask: Isn’t it possible that the Oral History had once existed and even that it still exists? Shouldn’t someone check?

  The day before class, I went to the library. I had this crazy idea: I wanted to find the lost archive.

  Mitchell had gone to the library, too. He made sure to mention that later, when he was wondering how he could have gotten the story so wrong in 1942: What had he missed? He’d checked facts: “I had gone to the library of the Harvard Club and hunted through the reports of his class.” He’d conducted interviews: “I had looked up around fifteen people and spoken on the phone to around fifteen others.” He’d read parts of the Oral History that weren’t oral (these, Gould explained, were the book’s “essay chapters”):

  Now all I needed was one more thing, a look at the oral part of the Oral History, but that seemed to me essential. As far as I was concerned, the Oral History was Gould’s reason for being, and if I couldn’t quote from it, or even describe it first hand, I didn’t see how I could write a Profile of him.5

  But, what with one thing and another, Gould just couldn’t put his hands on any of the necessary notebooks. He was pretty sure he’d stored most of them in the cellar of a friend’s house, at a chicken farm on Long Island. Exasperated, Mitchell told Gould he’d have to kill the piece: no Oral History, no story. Gould then began reciting whole chapters from memory (“Gould is afflicted with total recall,” Mitchell explained):

  “This part of the Oral History is pretty gory,” he said. “It is called ‘Echoes from the Backstairs of Bellevue,’ and it is divided into sections, under such headings as ‘Spectacular Operations and Amputations,’ ‘Horrible Deaths,’ ‘Sadistic Doctors,’ ‘Alcoholic Doctors,’ ‘Drug-Addicted Doctors,’ ‘Women-Chasing Doctors,’ ‘Huge Tumors, Etc.,’ and ‘Strange Things Found During Autopsies.’ ”

  Mitchell went ahead with the piece.

  Reporting begins with listening; history begins with reading. The past is what’s written down. It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all. Gould wanted history to be noisier and more democratic, too: he wanted to record speech. Mitchell loved that idea. What if you could report history?

  When Mitchell went to the library, everything checked out. But when I went to the library, and into the half-light of the archives, hardly anything checked out. And there’s the chasm. I fell right into it.

  —

  Gould did not graduate from Harvard in 1911. Instead, he had a breakdown.6 “There always was a queer streak in the Gould family,” his sister’s best friend said. The Goulds had come to New England in the 1630s, and they’d been strange for as long as anyone could remember. Gould was born in Massachusetts in 1889, and grew up in Norwood. In an office on the first floor of the family’s house, his father, a doctor, saw patients every afternoon and evening. Dr. Gould was known to fly into rages, and so was Joseph. There was something terribly wrong with the boy. In his bedroom, he wrote all over the walls and all over the floor.7 His sister, Hilda, found him so embarrassing, she pretended he didn’t exist.8 He kept seagulls as pets, or at least he said he had, and that he spoke their language: he would flap his hands, and skip, and caw.9 He did this all his life. That’s how he got the nickname “Professor Sea Gull.”

  Categories of illness are a function of history. It’s not possible to diagnose a person who was born in 1889. That aside: hand flapping—and screeching and tiptoe walking—have since come to be understood as symptoms of autism.10 Long ago, long before this distress had a name, wouldn’t it have been remarkably clever for a boy who couldn’t help but flap his hands and walk on tiptoe and screech to make up a story about how he was imitating a seagull, on purpose? It would have been so comforting, sense out of misery.

  Whatever afflicted little Joe Gould, he had suffered from childhood, and it affected what he could do and what he couldn’t. He started kindergarten at the age of five, but was sent home; he couldn’t sit still. “I was too restless,” he explained.11 He was fidgety and undersized and nearsighted, and his thinking was sticky: he could master the smallest of details; he lost sight of much else. He was put in charge of the town’s telephone service.12 He found it hard to take tests. On his college entrance exams, he got four D’s and one E (which is what F’s used to be called).13 He’d never have been admitted to Harvard if it hadn’t been for the fact that both his father and his grandfather had gone there. (His grandfather also taught at the Harvard Medical School.) He was a Gould, and that was that. When he wrote a freshman essay called “Who I Am and Why I Came to Harvard,” he explained, “I devoted four fifths of it to an account of my ancestors” because “I felt that this was the best explanation of myself.”14

  He was meant to become a doctor, like his father and grandfather. But when he started college, he was no more ready than he’d been for kindergarten. His parents kept him at home. Every day, he rode a train to Cambridge.15 During his freshman year he failed both physics (once) and chemistry (twice). Medicine was out of the question. “Joseph was in the office yesterday, and we had a long talk,” the dean informed Gould’s father. “He has failed in practically all of his courses.” He was put on academic probation. He hardly ever showed up for class. He was hapless. He went to the wrong French exam. In history, he failed to turn in his final paper.16

  During his sophomore year, he managed to get off academic probation. “I am sure that you now have learned your lesson,” the dean wrote to him. But he could not learn that lesson. His senior year, he fell apart and was expelled. “Under the circumstances,” the chair of the college’s Administrative Board wrote to Gould’s father, “I do not think that the Board would be inclined to allow him to return to College until he has shown his ability to do continuous work in a satisfactory manner.”17

  His father was furious. “A College should never become so big or impersonal that it tends to break, rather than make a boy,” he said, but that, he felt, was what happened to his son. Harvard had broken him. Also, he had struggled because he was a terrible notetaker. “He is left handed, very near sighted and not very strong,” Gould’s father explained. “He writes slowly because of this so can not take very good notes.”18

  He could hardly write.

  I wrote all day. Wrote all day. Went to the library. Wrote all day. Wrote.

  Wrote what?

  3

  little joe gould’s quote oral

  history unquote might (publishers note) be entitled a wraith’s

  progress

  —E. E. CUMMINGS

  I decided to retrace his steps. If Gould had actually written a history of the world and then lost it, maybe I could find it along the side of the road somewhere, under a bush, in a gutter, down a ditch. Maybe he left it somewhere, in a cabinet, on a bookshelf, up in an attic, under a bed.

  “I began work on the Oral History—Meo Tempore—in October, 1916,” Gould once explained. “Since then I have written a minimum of a hundred sentences every day except for a period of about four years when there was serious danger of my going blind because of a weakened optic nerve.”1 Nineteen sixteen. Or was it later? “GOT DOWN TO REAL WORK ON ORAL HISTORY IN 1918,” Joseph Mitchell wrote in his interview notes in 1942, but then he scratched in the margin, “later said 1917.”2 Another time Gould told a reporter, “I began my book in October, 1914,” though he then
added, “I didn’t begin to work seriously, however, until 1916.”3 Nineteen fourteen. Or was it earlier? “I have known Mr. Joe Gould since 1911 or 1912,” Edward J. O’Brien remembered. “It was in the latter year, I think, that he conceived the idea of his Oral History.”4 Nineteen twelve. I’d start with 1912.

  O’Brien and Gould had overlapped at Harvard; O’Brien had dropped out with the idea that he could do a better job educating himself. In 1911, he introduced Gould to the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite, the literary editor of the Boston Evening Transcript.5 Braithwaite hired O’Brien as a reviewer and, possibly, Gould, too. O’Brien and Braithwaite began planning to launch a magazine to be called Poetry. It was to be printed in Boston by the Four Seas Publishing Company, owned by Edmund R. Brown, another friend of Gould’s. There seems to have been some suggestion that Gould would join the editorial staff.6

  Or maybe Gould imagined that. Many of his relationships existed almost entirely in his head. He was smart, very smart, smart enough to have observed what meaningful relationships looked like—he was mannered, gentlemanly—but was generally unable to have them. So he made them up. He’d also bore into people, trying to get at their marrow, their blood and bloodline.

  Braithwaite’s father came from a wealthy British West Indian family; his mother was the daughter of a North Carolina slave. (It irked Braithwaite that he was known as “the Negro poet.”) Gould found Braithwaite’s ancestry fascinating. At the time, and for a very long time, sex between races was all he could think about.

  “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903.7 The problem of the color line became the problem of Joe Gould’s unraveling mind.

  Two months after he was kicked out of Harvard, Gould began introducing himself as president of the Race Pride League. So far as I can tell, the Race Pride League did not exist. In June 1911, The Boston Globe published a collection of essays on the “race question,” including one by Gould, who wrote:

  The man who opposes equal treatment for the colored race says, “If you ride on the same car with a negro you have to do business with him. If you do business with him you have to invite him to supper. If you invite him to supper he may marry your sister.” After repeating this “logical” argument many times, he adds, “And you know that you wouldn’t care to marry a negress.”

  The way to defeat this argument, Gould concluded, was to disentangle racial equality from racial mixture: “It is inevitable that in time men of every color will enjoy equal privileges, and then it will be seen that racial equality is the surest guardian of race purity.”8

  His was the madness of whiteness. What the young, addled president of the Race Pride League proposed was a concocted Plessy v. Ferguson, an upended Garveyism: racial equality is inevitable and will assure racial purity, which is essential because racial mixture is unnatural. Even imagining sex across the color line, Gould believed, causes “an antipathy which is involuntary and is felt with such violence that it is comparable to the extreme repugnance some people have to snakes.”9 It’s impossible not to suspect that he had been sexually rejected.

  “I have been all the last college year on the verge of a collapse,” Gould wrote Braithwaite a few months later, from Alberta: his parents had sent him on a five-hundred-mile walking trip across Canada. (Gould’s mother was from Nova Scotia, and his uncle owned a ranch in British Columbia.) He talked to a lot of people while he was walking: trappers, ranchers, miners, missionaries, homesteaders. He also had sex. Later, in his diary, he told a story about meeting a woman who’d grown up in Alberta. “She said that she lost her virginity there to a man named Ross. I said, ‘Well, I lost some one else’s virginity there too.’ ”10

  “I have been bucked off a Cayuse three times in succession,” he wrote to Harvard when he got back. “My falls showed me how to stay on, and gave me a firmer seat in the saddle.”11 He was not readmitted. He went home to Norwood to live with his parents and his little sister. He became the Enumerator of the Census. He embarked on a racial survey of the town’s inhabitants. He delivered a lecture called “Why Certain Races Are Disliked.”12 And he began writing down the things people say, especially about who they like and who they don’t.

  —

  I finished my day in the archives and went to class. I brought in stacks of photocopies of Gould’s undergraduate files: his academic records, his transcripts, his letters to deans and professors, recounting his adventures, spouting his theories, begging for money. My students and I hunched over a seminar table and peered at his scrawl. The more we read, the sadder the story got.

  In 1913, Gould again petitioned for readmission to Harvard. When that failed, he had the idea of applying to the graduate school. “I think you could at any rate give me credit for persistence,” he complained. Then he floated the idea of writing a thesis in history to make up his missing credits. No one on the faculty wanted to work with him.13

  Class ended. But I found that I could not stop searching.

  Gould told O’Brien about the Oral History, and O’Brien began giving him money to support his work; that’s why O’Brien was pretty certain about the year Gould began: 1912. In Chicago, the poet Harriet Monroe got word of O’Brien and Braithwaite’s plans to launch a poetry magazine and decided to beat them to it; she called her magazine Poetry, leaving O’Brien and Braithwaite to call theirs The Poetry Journal. Braithwaite was editor, O’Brien and Brown assistant editors. Gould’s name did not appear anywhere in the inaugural issue.14 In 1913, Braithwaite began editing an annual poetry anthology, and in 1914, O’Brien did the same for fiction with Best Short Stories, which he edited for the rest of his life. It’s still printed, every year.

  O’Brien moved to England; Gould sent him a wad of his manuscript. Among Gould’s many excuses for having misplaced hundreds of his notebooks is that O’Brien never returned them. Quite possibly, that’s true. Whatever notebooks O’Brien once had are gone; after his death, his papers were destroyed.15

  I started looking every place I could think to look, for anything Gould had left behind: not just the Oral History, anything at all. It turns out that a graphomaniac is an unnervingly irresistible research subject. Gould was almost impossibly easy to trace. Every time I checked another archive, another vault, another library, it’d have sheaves of letters. And then there were the diaries.

  Gould kept a diary in the same kind of black-and-speckled-white, dime-store composition notebooks that he used to write the Oral History. For years, the artist Harold Anton kept ten volumes of Gould’s diaries at his studio in Greenwich Village. “I know where Joe Gould keeps his Oral History and I will take you to their hiding place,” a man named Jack Levitz wrote to Joseph Mitchell in 1964.16 “As I suspected, ‘their hiding place’ is Harold Anton’s studio,” Mitchell wrote in a note to himself, after he spoke to Levitz on the phone.17 Mitchell had already seen those notebooks: they were probably part of what convinced him that the Oral History didn’t exist. After “Joe Gould’s Secret” was published, Anton sold the notebooks to a Village impresario, who sold them to an archivist at New York University, who, after skimming them, decided that Mitchell was a dupe (“Joe recognized a mark when he saw one”) and Gould was a fraud (“Joe Gould lied about his work; the quality of what remains is dreadful; and he has no place in literary history”).18

  Maybe so. Or maybe not. Opening those notebooks expecting the Oral History and finding only a diary, it’s easy to conclude that, all along, Gould had only ever been writing a diary, and passing it off as something more. It’s also easy, then, not to read the diary carefully: Why bother?

  I went to see the diaries as soon as I found out about them, cursing my curiosity. I brought a camera. I filled out a call slip and sat at a table. Gould’s notebooks came out from the stacks, one by one, stained and blotted. The ten surviving volumes of Gould’s diary fill more than eight hundred pages. I photographed every page.

  The first diary begins on the first of the year.
“New Years found me at Slater Brown’s,” he wrote, in black ink now faded. “I took a bath and wrote.”19

  Wrote what? Not the diary. Something else. Instead of proving that the Oral History never existed, the diaries suggest exactly the opposite. Also, Gould’s diaries are only disappointing if you’re looking for the Oral History. As diaries, as a record of a life, they’re often dull, but they’re also cluttered with detail and full of speech. One day, Gould traveled to Connecticut:

  I went to the Grand Central. I could not phone from there. I took a train. The man who sat besides me handled an argument with a man who tried to steal his baggage space. He loaned me his magazines. I talked with him. He had travelled widely. He knew much about cattle. He was interested when I told him about seeing oxen shod. When the train took a turn at South Norwalk he said, “From now on it will get more civilized.”20

  On the train ride home, I tried transcribing the diaries, squinting at my photographs. “I got up late. I ate at Stewarts. I had an invitation from Doctor Alan Gregg. I wrote.”21 Gregg, a psychiatrist, had been a member of Gould’s class at Harvard. His papers are housed at the National Library of Medicine. I emailed the archivist there and asked him if he’d be willing to check the “G” correspondence file in Gregg’s papers for anything from Joe Gould (“You mean the Joe Gould?” people would ask). An hour later, the archivist emailed me PDFs of letters in that familiar hand: “My dear Doctor Gregg…”22