Joe Gould's Teeth Page 3

  I pictured it like this: I’d dip those letters and pages torn from the diaries in a bath of glue and water—the black ink would begin to bleed—and I’d paste them over an armature I’d built out of Gould’s empty cigarette boxes, rolled up old New Yorkers, and seagull feathers. I called my papier-mâché White Man (Variation).

  —

  In 1913, when Gould was twenty-four, he began writing to Charles B. Davenport, the leader of the American eugenics movement.23 Gould sent letters to eminences all over the world; very few people ever answered. He once tried to recruit Franz Boas to a campaign he was waging to aid Albania.24 “I think we have seen sufficiently clearly what that kind of ‘help’ leads to,” Boas wrote back. “You will therefore excuse me if I do not join in an enterprise which seems to me radically wrong.” Then he dropped the correspondence.25 You can usually tell, when you get the kind of letter Gould wrote, that you are dealing with someone unhinged. Davenport couldn’t tell.

  Gould must have first learned about Davenport’s work in 1910 when he took a class called “Variation and Heredity” with William E. Castle, who had trained with Davenport. “I enjoyed his course,” Gould wrote to Davenport. “Although I did not distinguish myself in it as I was on the verge of the breakdown which sent me out to Alberta.”26

  Davenport had earned a Ph.D. in zoology at Harvard in 1892 and taught there until 1899, when he published Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation. In 1904, he founded the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. In 1910, he opened the Eugenics Record Office, and in Eugenics he defined its work as “the science of human improvement by better breeding.”27

  “The race question,” Gould wrote Davenport, “is largely one of eugenics.” People fall in love across the color line and other people don’t love them back. “The glorification of romantic love seems to be one of the chief obstacles to public acceptance of eugenics,” Gould wrote. He had gotten an idea. He would write a very long book, an epic novel, a fictive History of America. “It seems to me that a new fiction is desirable which shall sympathize with the point of view that outside choice might bring greater happiness in wedlock than irresponsible and perhaps momentary fancies of youth.”28 He wrote out the beginning of the book, some early chapters, and sent it to Davenport.

  “It is interesting as literature,” Davenport wrote back. “Do you wish the copy returned?” Gould said no. All that survives is Gould’s description: “I have in mind the writing of a fictitious genealogy of the descendants of a slave brought here in 1619, with an attempt to show all the phases of degeneration or progress which resulted from the introduction of the Negro into this country.”29

  He never said what he planned to call it. I think of it as Un-Beloved.

  4

  “We offer…this rare and original manuscriptum being the first and only extant draft of Sowerby’s History of—what was it you said you was writing a history of, Mr. Sowerby?”

  “I am writing a history, sir, of irrelevant and unimportant details.”

  —MAXWELL ANDERSON AND HAROLD HICKERSON, Gods of the Lightning

  He picked and pulled at this question, the race question. Variation and heredity, better breeding, sex across the color line, the racial nature of disgust, and of love. He turned to history, to ancestry, to biology, to genealogy. He wrote and he wrote.

  “I think it would add to the interest of your fictitious genealogy if you would include an intermarriage with an Indian,” Davenport suggested. “So many of our degenerate families trace back to an Indian ancestor.”1

  “My opinion is that the Indian strain has been a helpful one,” Gould ventured.2

  He decided he disagreed with Davenport’s ideas about racial hierarchy. One reason Gould was interested in eugenics was because he’d come to understand—maybe his failures had helped him to see—that he hadn’t earned the extravagant opportunities he’d been given in life; he’d inherited them. If, when asked to write an essay on “Who I Am and Why I Came to Harvard,” all he could say was that he was a Gould, what was the lesson there? “It seems to me that one error is commonly made in speaking of heredity which is well illustrated by the descendants of Jonathan Edwards so many of whom were eminent,” Gould wrote Davenport. “Their eminence was due, it seems to me, not as much to inherited ability as to inherited opportunity.”3 Consider Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr: he’d inherited not talent, Gould thought, but chance. And so had he.

  He studied hatred. He watched the people whose ancestries he’d traced: some hated blacks, some hated Jews. He developed a theory about “race prejudice”: “I have examined over a hundred cases of antipathy among people whose personal equation I knew, and I made a startling discovery which I believe will be borne out by further evidence,” Gould wrote Davenport. “I found that those who had physical repugnance to the Jew had no feeling against the Negro, and vice-versa.” From this, Gould had concluded that “the Jew and the Negro are physically and temperamentally antipodes, being opposites in their mental qualities, vices and virtues. For this reason it would be perfectly natural for them to be disliked by opposite sets of people.” He wished to conduct further experiments: he wanted to test his theory in the field.4

  Davenport had no interest in Gould’s ideas about inequality of opportunity or race prejudice; what he wanted was help documenting the degenerative effects of the darker races on the whiter ones. He believed that the whiteness of the United States could be preserved by restricting immigration and banning miscegenation; he also hoped to eliminate the feeble-minded and the insane by forced sterilization. He proposed visiting Gould on his next trip to Boston.5 Gould invited him to speak at Harvard, where Gould was trying to make up his missing credits by taking exams.6 He wanted him to speak at the Cosmopolitan Club, whose members included students from China, Germany, England, Canada, Japan, France, India, Cuba, Hawaii, Italy, Brazil, Greece, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Siam, and Spain, and whose faculty sponsor was Gould’s heredity professor, William Castle.7 Gould also told Davenport that he was about to become the editor of a new, cosmopolitan magazine, Four Seas, whose features would include “the life-story in serial numbers of Plenyono Gbe Wolo,” a Liberian who had entered Harvard that fall; he invited Davenport to write a column called “The Newer Race.”8

  Gould never became the editor of anything.9 But he did write for The Nation, and for The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP.10 He helped Upton Sinclair collect essays for an anthology called The Cry for Justice.11 He “lectured on behalf of educating the poor southern Negroes.”12 In the summer of 1914, he spoke at the Sagamore Conference, a social justice gathering convened by Jane Addams.13 There he met a young progressive reformer from New York named Frances Perlstein. At the end of that summer, he later said, he became engaged to her.14

  Most of all, he gathered evidence for his study of ancestry. The Oral History began as a Harvard senior thesis, later aborted, and turned into an epic novel about race, based on a genealogical chart. It might have been called Roots. “I have made some beginning toward my collection of pedigrees, to be welded into the fictitious genealogy of a Negro slave,” he reported to Davenport in 1915, when he gave a lecture on family history before the Boston Negro Business League. “There will be enough sugar-coating of interesting history to suggest to the members the desirability of collecting their family records,” he promised. Lectures like these, he explained, offered “a good time for starting a eugenic propaganda among colored people.”15

  In April 1915, Gould was arrested outside the Tremont Theatre in Boston, for protesting D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. “Mr. Gould has made a study of every nation, the people and their lives,” the Boston Herald reported.16 A lot of people were arrested that night protesting Griffith’s tribute to the Ku Klux Klan. Nearly all of them were black Bostonians. Gould was the only one who was named in the paper.

  —

  Three months after Gould was arrested for protesting Birth of a Nation, he applied for work at Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office. His application is filed with the Eugenics Record Office Papers, at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

  “Has done some historical writing,” one of his interviewers noted. “Is a radical in politics.” Another wrote down, “Spells of depression…violent temper.” Ought he be allowed to breed? “Glasses at 17,” Gould wrote on his application form, noting his inherited defects. He was undersized: five foot four, 115 pounds. He was only twenty-five years old but had already lost most of his hair. On the other hand: “Good teeth.” He supplied the required pedigree chart. He traced the trait of his “temper” back through three generations: the madness of the Goulds.17

  He was hired and sent to North Dakota on a six-month assignment to conduct measurements on Mandan Indians. Using calipers, he was supposed to measure their arms, legs, heads, and noses; using a top designed by Milton Bradley—a child’s toy, but put to a new purpose by eugenicists—he was to record skin color.18 The idea was to attach differently colored cards to the top and then spin it, switching one card for another until the color of the spinning top matched that of the subject’s skin.19 This, this: this was the madness of the color line.

  Once Gould got to Minnesota he told Davenport that he wished his Eugenics Record Office training had included information about venereal disease.20 (He may have contracted a form of syphilis, known at the time as “general paresis of the insane,” that eventually infected his brain: that would explain his later psychosis and dementia.21 It’s impossible to say. And there are other explanations for his disorder.) “The life of the Indian is more influenced by sex than ours,” Gould reported: he’d met a man named Four Times (“an allusion to four successive acts of sexual intercourse”) and a woman named Big V
agina. Then, too: “One man was named Goes-to-bed-with-a-man.”22 Years later, when Gould was floridly mad and living in Greenwich Village, he’d turn up drunk at parties, strip naked, stand on a table, demand a ruler, and measure his penis.23

  In his work among the Indians, he encountered many obstacles. It was fifty degrees below freezing; travel was difficult; he fell off a horse; the shades on his set of Bradley tops were all wrong: “the red used for Negroes is too dark for the Indian.”24 Also, the people didn’t trust him; they refused to be measured. “It is natural that the Indians regard as uncanny what they can not understand,” he wrote Davenport.25 But they had abundant reason to refuse. The work Gould was doing was to help the U.S. government resolve a series of lawsuits involving the selling off of thirteen hundred parcels of reservation land by “mixed-bloods” whose authority to sell that land was disputed by “full-bloods”: Gould, with a child’s plaything, was supposed to determine which Indians were reddest.26

  He wrote to Harvard asking for a course catalog.27 He needed only one more class to graduate. “In my preoccupation with trying to be an Injun,” he wrote to the dean, “I do not wish to forget the academic life.” He wished to study Tolstoy or, better yet, the history of the Jews.28 “My racial work is going on in such a way that I do not want to take up college work too remote in subject from it,” he reported, asking to be allowed to take the examination in a zoology class on race mixture taught by the anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton.29 Meanwhile, he kept up his work as a book reviewer. He condemned America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro, by R. W. Shufeldt (“He adopts any pseudo-scientific work which strengthens his case, and quotes with ghoulish glee newspaper clippings about Negro crime”), and praised Carter G. Woodson’s history of black education (“one colored man at least sees that the hope of his race lies in the appeal to history”).30 Then he wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, inviting the NAACP to form an alliance with the Society of American Indians.31 Du Bois did not write back.

  Gould returned to Harvard and read with Hooton.32 Hooton had no use for people he called “ethnomaniacs” who “talk of the psychological characteristics of this or that race as if they were objective tangible properties, scientifically demonstrated.” There was no evidence whatever to support that position, and in any case, “Most if not all peoples are racially mixed.”33

  Gould passed Hooton’s exam, changed his mind about race mixture, got his degree, and moved to New York, where he wrote an essay about the institutional care of the insane,34 bunked in flophouses, begged for handouts, and began telling everyone who would listen that he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century, that he was writing a history of the world, and that it would last as long as the English language.

  5

  He knew the book, it was in his mind entirely, and in fact why write it?

  —PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, “The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head”

  Two writers guard an archive. One writes fiction; the other writes fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which. Joseph Mitchell said that Gould made things up. But Gould said that Mitchell did. Who’s right?

  In 1964, in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Mitchell explained that, in 1942, right after “Professor Sea Gull” was published, he’d come to believe that Gould had only imagined that he’d written the longest book ever written: “He very likely went around believing in some hazy, self-deceiving, self-protecting way that the Oral History did exist.” Mitchell said he understood Gould, and wanted to protect him, so he decided to keep his secret. He could see very well how just this sort of thing could happen, how a man could come to believe that he had written a book when in fact he had not—“He had it all in his head, and any day now he was going to start getting it down”—because he’d done the same thing himself. For years, Mitchell had been planning to write an autobiographical novel. He thought about it all the time. “Sometimes, in the course of a subway ride, I would write three or four chapters,” he wrote. “But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it.”1

  Mitchell didn’t forgive Gould because he didn’t need to; he didn’t blame him. It’s the grace of this act that carries force: Mitchell’s compassion, wrapping little Joe Gould in his great cloak.

  Gould, though, said that it was Mitchell who made things up, and he did blame him, and he didn’t forgive him. After reading “Professor Sea Gull,” he wrote Mitchell, “I feel as if I was only a figment of your imagination.”2 Mitchell asked Gould what it was in the profile that wasn’t true. “He thought about it for a while and said, ‘I never bought a radio and kicked it to pieces.’ ”3 But Gould’s objections ran deeper. He considered “Professor Sea Gull” a work of fiction. In 1943, he told Lewis Mumford that it was “one of the best short stories of 1942.”4 And in 1945, when the profile was reprinted in an anthology of short stories, he told Mitchell that he was pleased, since “this is a sort of recognition that the piece is fiction.”5

  Gould was not wrong. Mitchell admitted to Gould that he made up facts. “He said his account of the Mayor of Fulton Fish Market was largely fictionalized,” Gould carefully noted in his diary.6 And it’s since come out that Mitchell sometimes invented quotes and even whole scenes, and once wrote an entire profile about a man who did not exist.7 Gould did not consider this kind of thing a kindness.

  But Gould and Mitchell agreed about one thing: when Mitchell looked in the mirror, he saw Gould. “He has pictured me as the sort of person he would like to be,” Gould said.8 And Mitchell, asked why he was so fascinated by Gould, said, “Because he is me.”9

  —

  “Joe Gould’s Secret” is a confession, and it’s also a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn’t beautiful—the sorry fate of a broken man—and made it beautiful, a fable about art. “The Joe Gould piece is so beautiful and moving that no one could have written it but W. B. Yeats,” a fellow New Yorker writer told Mitchell.10 “Joe Gould’s Secret” is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty, its beauty its truth.

  I by now sorely regretted having gone to the library, that first day, to see if any of it was true, in the drearier, empirical, Baconian sense: “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”11 The more I learned about Joe Gould, the uglier it got.

  “Not an alcoholic, not psychopathic,” Mitchell wrote in his notes when he interviewed Gould in 1942.12 Why believe him? Why de-fang him? “I thought of Joe as a kind of hero,” Mitchell said.13 So did Gould’s friends. E. E. Cummings once asked Gould how he reconciled his faith in a benevolent God with the miserableness of his own life. Gould considered the question:

  A mood of self-pity came over me. It was hard to be hungry and shabby and worried over finance, and to be deceived by friends and in such a mental state that I, who had smoked the peace-pipe with Water Chief and ought to be strong and honest above all other whites, found myself completely unnerved and untrustworthy when deprived of cigarettes. At the moment I could not answer him. But when I pondered the matter over the answer came. I have not had a hard time. A pinched stomach, a humiliating situation to my pride, and mental torment have never stayed my pen. I have always been able to do that which I felt was worth doing. What cause have I to rail at fate?14

  And that’s the way modernist writers and artists tended to regard the situation. Torment had never stayed his pen: Gould was an artist, a bohemian, suffering for his art, suffering for their art, suffering for all art. Because he is me.