Joseph Mitchell, "Professor Sea Gull"
Joseph Mitchell’s famous 1942 profile of Joe Gould, the Greenwich Village eccentric who claimed to be writing a voluminous “Oral History of Our Time.”
A picture of Joe Gould from the 1947 edition of Colliers
Annotated edition
by Zhang Haibei, Tong Le, Isaiah Hu, and Haeji Cho
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. He sometimes brags rather wryly that he is the last of the bohemians. “All the others fell by the wayside,” he says. “Some are in the grave, some are in the loony bin, and some are in the advertising business.” Gould’s life is by no means carefree; he is constantly tormented by what he calls “the three H’s”—homelessness, hunger, and hangovers. He sleeps on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery. Once in a while he trudges up to Harlem and goes to one of the establishments known as “Extension Heavens” that are operated by followers of Father Divine, the Negro evangelist, and gets a night’s lodging for fifteen cents. He is five feet four and he hardly ever weighs more than a hundred pounds. Not long ago he told a friend that he hadn’t eaten a square meal since June, 1936, when he bummed up to Cambridge and attended a banquet during a reunion of the Harvard class of 1911, of which he is a member. “I’m the foremost authority in the United States,” he says, “on the subject of doing without.” He tells people that he lives on “air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup.” Cowboy coffee, he says, is strong coffee drunk black without sugar. “I’ve long since lost my taste for good coffee,” he says. “I much prefer the kind that sooner or later, if you keep on drinking it, your hands will begin to shake and the whites of your eyes will turn yellow.” While having a sandwich, Gould customarily empties a bottle or two of ketchup on his plate and eats it with a spoon. The countermen in the Jefferson Diner, on Village Square, which is one of his hangouts, gather up the ketchup bottles and hide them the moment he puts his head in the door. “I don’t particularly like the confounded stuff,” he says, “but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.”
Gould is a Yankee. His branch of the Goulds has been in New England since 1635, and he is related to many of the other early New England families, such as the Lawrences, the Clarkes, and the Storers. “There’s nothing accidental about me,” he once said. “I’ll tell you what it took to make me what I am today. It took old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard, and twenty-five years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food.” He says that he is out of joint with the rest of the human race because he doesn’t want to own anything. “If Mr. Chrysler tried to make me a present of the Chrysler Building,” he says, “I’d damn near break my neck fleeing from him. I wouldn’t own it; it’d own me. Back home in Massachusetts I’d be called an old Yankee crank. Here I’m called a bohemian. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.” Gould has a twangy voice and a Harvard accent. Bartenders and countermen in the Village refer to him as the Professor, the Sea Gull, Professor Sea Gull, the Mongoose, Professor Mongoose, or the Bellevue Boy. He dresses in the castoff clothes of his friends. His overcoat, suit, shirt, and even his shoes are all invariably a size or two too large, but he wears them with a kind of forlorn rakishness. “Just look at me,” he says. “The only thing that fits is the necktie.” On bitter winter days he puts a layer of newspapers between his shirt and undershirt. “I’m snobbish,” he says. “I only use the Times.” He is fond of unusual headgear—a toboggan, a beret, or a yachting cap. One summer evening he appeared at a party in a seersucker suit, a polo shirt, a scarlet cummerbund, sandals, and a yachting cap, all hand-me-downs. He uses a long black cigarette holder, and a good deal of the time he smokes butts picked up off the sidewalks.
Bohemianism has aged Gould considerably beyond his years. He has got in the habit lately of asking people he has just met to guess his age. Their guesses range between sixty-five and seventy-five; he is fifty-three. He is never hurt by this; he looks upon it as proof of his superiority. “I do more living in one year,” he says, “than ordinary humans do in ten.” Gould is toothless, and his lower jaw swivels from side to side when he talks. He is bald on top, but the hair at the back of his head is long and frizzly, and he has a bushy, cinnamon-colored beard. He wears a pair of spectacles that are loose and lopsided and that slip down to the end of his nose a moment after he puts them on. He doesn’t always wear them on the street and without them he has the wild, unfocussed stare of an old scholar who has strained his eyes on small print. Even in the Village many people turn and look at him. He is stooped and he moves rapidly, grumbling to himself, with his head thrust forward and held to one side. Under his left arm he usually carries a bulging, greasy, brown pasteboard portfolio, and he swings his right arm aggressively. As he hurries along, he seems to be warding off an imaginary enemy. Don Freeman, the artist, a friend of his, once made a sketch of him walking. Freeman called the sketch “Joe Gould versus the Elements.” Gould is as restless and footloose as an alley cat, and he takes long hikes about the city, now and then disappearing from the Village for weeks at a time and mystifying his friends; they have never been able to figure out where he goes. When he returns, always looking pleased with himself, he makes a few cryptic remarks, giggles, and then shuts up. “I went on a bird walk along the waterfront with an old countess,” he said after his most recent absence. “The countess and I spent three weeks studying sea gulls.”
Gould is almost never seen without his portfolio. He keeps it on his lap while he eats and in flophouses he sleeps with it under his head. It usually contains a mass of manuscripts and notes and letters and clippings and copies of obscure little magazines, a bottle of ink, a dictionary, a paper bag of cigarette butts, a paper bag of bread crumbs, and a paper bag of hard, round, dime-store candy of the type called sour balls. “I fight fatigue with sour balls,” he says. The crumbs are for pigeons; like many other eccentrics, Gould is a pigeon feeder. He is devoted to a flock which makes its headquarters atop and around the statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square. These pigeons know him. When he comes up and takes a seat on the plinth of the statue, they flutter down and perch on his head and shoulders, waiting for him to bring out his bag of crumbs. He has given names to some of them. “Come here, Boss Tweed,” he says. “A lady in Stewart’s Cafeteria didn’t finish her whole-wheat toast this morning and when she went out, bingo, I snatched it off her plate especially for you. Hello, Big Bosom. Hello, Popgut. Hello, Lady Astor. Hello, St. John the Baptist. Hello, Polly Adler. Hello, Fiorello, you old goat, how’re you today?”
Although Gould strives to give the impression that he is a philosophical loafer, he has done an immense amount of work during his career as a bohemian. Every day, even when he has a bad hangover or even when he is weak and listless from hunger, he spends at least a couple of hours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls “An Oral History of Our Time.” He began this book twenty-six years ago, and it is nowhere near finished. His preoccupation with it seems to be principally responsible for the way he lives; a steady job of any kind, he says, would interfere with his thinking. Depending on the weather, he writes in parks, in doorways, in flophouse lobbies, in cafeterias, on benches on elevated-railroad platforms, in subway trains, and in public libraries. When he is in the proper mood, he writes until he is exhausted, and he gets into this mood at peculiar times. He says that one night he sat for six or seven hours in a booth in a Third Avenue bar and grill, listening to a beery old Hungarian woman, once a madam and once a dealer in narcotics and now a soup cook in a city hospital, tell the story of her life. Three days later, around four o’clock in the morning, on a cot in the Hotel Defender, at 300 Bowery, he was awakened by the foghorns of tugs on the East River and was unable to go back to sleep because he felt that he was in the exact mood to put the old soup cook’s biography in his history. He has an abnormal memory; if he is sufficiently impressed by a conversation, he can keep it in his head, even if it is lengthy and senseless, for many days, much of it word for word. He had a bad cold, but he got up, dressed under a red exit light, and, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the men sleeping on cots all around him, went downstairs to the lobby.
He wrote in the lobby from 4:15 A.M. until noon. Then he left the Defender, drank some coffee in a Bowery diner, and walked up to the Public Library. He plugged away at a table in the genealogy room, which is one of his rainy-day hangouts and which he says he prefers to the main reading room because it is gloomier, until it closed at 6 P.M. Then he moved into the main reading room and stayed there, seldom taking his eyes off his work, until the Library locked up for the night at 10 P.M. He ate a couple of egg sandwiches and a quantity of ketchup in a Times Square cafeteria. Then, not having two bits for a flophouse and being too engrossed to go to the Village and seek shelter, he hurried into the West Side subway and rode the balance of the night, scribbling ceaselessly while the train he was aboard made three round trips between the New Lots Avenue station in Brooklyn and the Van Cortlandt Park station in the Bronx, which is one of the longest runs in the subway system. He kept his portfolio on his lap and used it as a desk. He has the endurance of the possessed. Whenever he got too sleepy to concentrate, he shook his head vigorously and then brought out his bag of sour balls and popped one in his mouth. People stared at him, and once he was interrupted by a drunk who asked him what in the name of God he was writing. Gould knows how to get rid of inquisitive drunks. He pointed at his left ear and said, “What? What’s that? Deaf as a post. Can’t hear a word.” The drunk lost all interest in him. “Day was breaking when I left the subway,” Gould says. “I was coughing and sneezing, my eyes were sore, my knees were shaky, I was as hungry as a bitch wolf, and I had exactly eight cents to my name. I didn’t care. My history was longer by eleven thousand brand-new words, and at that moment I bet there wasn’t a chairman of the board in all New York as happy as I.”
—
GOULD IS HAUNTED by the fear that he will die before he has the first draft of the Oral History finished. It is already eleven times as long as the Bible. He estimates that the manuscript contains 9,000,000 words, all in longhand. It may well be the lengthiest unpublished work in existence. Gould does his writing in nickel composition books, the kind that children use in school, and the Oral History and the notes he has made for it fill two hundred and seventy of them, all of which are tattered and grimy and stained with coffee, grease, and beer. Using a fountain pen, he covers both sides of each page, leaving no margins anywhere, and his penmanship is poor; hundreds of thousands of words are legible only to him. He has never been able to interest a publisher in the Oral History. At one time or another he has lugged armfuls of it into fourteen publishing offices. “Half of them said it was obscene and outrageous and to get it out of there as quick as I could,” he says, “and the others said they couldn’t read my handwriting.” Experiences of this nature do not dismay Gould; he keeps telling himself that it is posterity he is writing for, anyway. 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 be damned,’ they’ll say, ‘this fellow was the most brilliant historian of the century.’ They’ll give me my due. I don’t claim that all of the Oral History is first class, but some of it will live as long as the English language.” Gould used to keep his composition books scattered all over the Village, in the apartments and studios of friends. He kept them stuck away in closets and under beds and behind the books in bookcases. In the winter of 1942, after hearing that the Metropolitan Museum had moved its most precious paintings to a bombproof storage place somewhere out of town for the duration of the war, he became panicky. He went around and got all his books together and made them into a bale, he wrapped the bale in two layers of oilcloth, and then he entrusted it to a woman he knows who owns a duck-and-chicken farm near Huntington, Long Island. The farmhouse has a stone cellar.
Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard. At least half of it is made up of conversations taken down verbatim or summarized; hence the title. “What people say is history,” Gould says. “What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan—is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.” The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations. In it are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, accounts of the wanderings of seamen encountered in South Street barrooms, grisly descriptions of hospital and clinic experiences (“Did you ever have a painful operation or disease?” is one of the first questions that Gould, fountain pen and composition book in hand, asks a person he has just met), summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, testimonies given by converts at Salvation Army street meetings, and the addled opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants. For a time Gould haunted the all-night greasy spoons in the vicinity of Bellevue Hospital, eavesdropping on tired internes, nurses, orderlies, ambulance drivers, embalming-school students, and morgue workers, and faithfully recording their talk. He scurries up and down Fifth Avenue during parades, feverishly taking notes. Gould writes with great candor, and the percentage of obscenity in the Oral History is high. He has a chapter called “Examples of the So-called Dirty Story of Our Time,” to which he makes almost daily additions. In another chapter are many rhymes and observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms. He believes that these scribblings are as truly historical as the strategy of General Robert E. Lee. Hundreds of thousands of words are devoted to the drunken behavior and the sexual adventures of various professional Greenwich Villagers in the twenties. There are hundreds of reports of ginny Village parties, including gossip about the guests and faithful reports of their arguments on such subjects as reincarnation, birth control, free love, psychoanalysis, Christian Science, Swedenborgianism, vegetarianism, alcoholism, and different political and art isms. “I have fully covered what might be termed the intellectual underworld of my time,” Gould says. There are detailed descriptions of night life in scores of Village drinking and eating places, some of which, such as the Little Quakeress, the Original Julius, the Troubadour Tavern, the Samovar, Hubert’s Cafeteria, Sam Swartz’s T.N.T., and Eli Greifer’s Last Outpost of Bohemia Tea Shoppe, do not exist any longer.
Gould is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets—descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. “I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all,” he says, “but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.” A great deal of the Oral History is in diary form. Gould is afflicted with total recall, and now and then he picks out a period of time in the recent past—it might be a day, a week, or a month—and painstakingly writes down everything of any consequence that he did during this period. Sometimes he writes a chapter in which he monotonously and hideously curses some person or institution. Here and there are rambling essays on such subjects as the flophouse flea, spaghetti, the zipper as a sign of the decay of civilization, false teeth, insanity, the jury system, remorse, cafeteria cooking, and the emasculating effect of the typewriter on literature. “William Shakespeare didn’t sit around pecking on a dirty, damned, ninety-five-dollar doohickey,” he wrote, “and Joe Gould doesn’t, either.”
The Oral History is almost as discursive as “Tristram Shandy.” In one chapter, “The Good Men Are Dying Like Flies,” Gould begins a biography of a diner proprietor and horse-race gambler named Side-Bet Benny Altschuler, who stuck a rusty icepick in his hand and died of lockjaw; and skips after a few paragraphs to a story a seaman told him about seeing a group of lepers drinking and dancing and singing on a beach in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; and goes from that to an anecdote about a demonstration held in front of a moving-picture theatre in Boston in 1915 to protest against the showing of “The Birth of a Nation,” at which he kicked a policeman; and goes from that to a description of a trip he once made through the Central Islip insane asylum, in the course of which a woman pointed at him and screamed, “There he is! Thief! Thief! There’s the man that picked my geraniums and stole my mamma’s mule and buggy”; and goes from that to an account an old stumble-bum gave of glimpsing and feeling the blue-black flames of hell one night while sitting in a doorway on Great Jones Street and of seeing two mermaids playing in the East River just north of Fulton Fish Market later the same night; and goes from that to an explanation made by a priest of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is on Mott Street, in the city’s oldest Little Italy, of why so many Italian women always wear black (“They are in perpetual mourning for our Lord”); and then returns at last to Side-Bet Benny, the lockjawed diner proprietor.
Only a few of the hundreds of people who know Gould have read any of the Oral History, and most of them take it for granted that it is gibberish. Those who make the attempt usually bog down after a couple of chapters and give up. Gould says he can count on one hand or on one foot those who have read enough of it to be qualified to form an opinion. One is Horace Gregory, the poet and critic. “I look upon Gould as a sort of Samuel Pepys of the Bowery,” Gregory says. “I once waded through twenty-odd composition books, and most of what I saw had the quality of a competent high-school theme, but some of it was written with the clear and wonderful veracity of a child, and here and there were flashes of hard-bitten Yankee wit. If someone took the trouble to go through it and separate the good from the rubbish, as editors did with Thomas Wolfe’s millions of words, it might be discovered that Gould actually has written a masterpiece.” Another is E. E. Cummings, the poet, who is a close friend of Gould’s. Cummings once wrote a poem about Gould, No. 261 in his “Collected Poems,” which contains the following description of the history:
…a myth is as good as a smile but little joe gould’s quote oral
history unquote might (publishers note) be entitled a wraith’s
progress or mainly awash while chiefly submerged or an amoral
morality sort-of-aliveing by innumerable kind-of-deaths
Throughout the nineteen-twenties Gould haunted the office of the Dial, now dead, the most highbrow magazine of the time. Finally, in its April, 1929, issue, the Dial printed one of his shorter essays, “Civilization.” In it he rambled along, jeering at the buying and selling of stocks as “a fuddy-duddy old maid’s game” and referring to skyscrapers and steamships as “bric-a-brac” and giving his opinion that “the auto is unnecessary.” “If all the perverted ingenuity which was put into making buzz-wagons had only gone into improving the breed of horses,” he wrote, “humanity would be better off.” This essay had a curious effect on American literature. A copy of the Dial in which it appeared turned up a few months later in a second-hand bookstore in Fresno, California, and was bought for a dime by William Saroyan, who then was twenty and floundering around, desperate to become a writer. He read Gould’s essay and was deeply impressed and influenced by it. “It freed me from bothering about form,” he says. Twelve years later, in the winter of 1941, in Don Freeman’s studio on Columbus Circle, Saroyan saw some drawings Freeman had made of Gould for Don Freeman’s Newsstand, a quarterly publication of pictures of odd New York scenes and personalities put out by the Associated American Artists. Saroyan became excited. He told Freeman about his indebtedness to Gould. “Who the hell is he, anyway?” Saroyan asked. “I’ve been trying to find out for years. Reading those few pages in the Dial was like going in the wrong direction and running into the right guy and then never seeing him again.” Freeman told him about the Oral History. Saroyan sat down and wrote a commentary to accompany the drawings of Gould in Newsstand. “To this day,” he wrote, in part, “I have not read anything else by Joe Gould. And yet to me he remains one of the few genuine and original American writers. He was easy and uncluttered, and almost all other American writing was uneasy and cluttered. It was not at home anywhere; it was trying too hard; it was miserable; it was 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.” Not long after this issue of Newsstand came out, someone stopped Gould on Eighth Street and showed him Saroyan’s endorsement of his work. Gould shrugged his shoulders. He had been on a spree and had lost his false teeth, and at the moment he was uninterested in literary matters. After thinking it over, however, he decided to call on Saroyan and ask him for help in getting some teeth. He found out somehow that Saroyan was living at the Hampshire House, on Central Park South. The doorman there followed Gould into the lobby and asked him what he wanted. Gould told him that he had come to see William Saroyan. “Do you know Mr. Saroyan?” the doorman asked. “Why, no,” Gould said, “but that’s all right. He’s a disciple of mine.” “What do you mean, disciple?” asked the doorman. “I mean,” said Gould, “that he’s a literary disciple of mine. I want to ask him to buy me some teeth.” “Teeth?” asked the doorman. “What do you mean, teeth?” “I mean some store teeth,” Gould said. “Some false teeth.” “Come this way,” said the doorman, gripping Gould’s arm and ushering him to the street. Later Freeman arranged a meeting, and the pair spent several evenings together in bars. “Saroyan kept saying he wanted to hear all about the Oral History,” Gould says, “but I never got a chance to tell him. He did all the talking. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
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AS LONG AS HE can remember, Gould has been perplexed by his own personality. There are a number of autobiographical essays in the Oral History, and he says that all of them are attempts to explain himself to himself. In one, “Why I Am Unable To Adjust Myself To Civilization, Such As It Is, or Do, Don’t, Do, Don’t, A Hell Of A Note,” he came to the conclusion that his shyness was responsible for everything. “I am introvert and extrovert all rolled in one,” he wrote, “a warring mixture of the recluse and the Sixth Avenue auctioneer. One foot says do, the other says don’t. One foot says shut your mouth, the other says bellow like a bull. I am painfully shy, but try not to let people know it. They would take advantage of me.” Gould keeps his shyness well hidden. It is evident only when he is cold sober. In that state he is silent, suspicious, and constrained, but a couple of beers or a single jigger of gin will untie his tongue and put a leer on his face. He is extraordinarily responsive to alcohol. “On a hot night,” he says, “I can walk up and down in front of a gin mill for ten minutes, breathing real deep, and get a jag on.”
Even though Gould requires only a few drinks, getting them is sometimes quite a task. Most evenings he prowls around the saloons and dives on the west side of the Village, on the lookout for curiosity-seeking tourists from whom he can cadge beers, sandwiches, and small sums of money. If he is unable to find anyone approachable in the tumultuous saloons around Sheridan Square, he goes over to Sixth Avenue and works north, hitting the Jericho Tavern, the Village Square Bar & Grill, the Belmar, Goody’s, and the Rochambeau. He has a routine. He doesn’t enter a place unless it is crowded. After he is in, he bustles over to the telephone booth and pretends to look up a number. While doing this, he scrutinizes the customers. If he sees a prospect, he goes over and says, “Let me introduce myself. The name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a graduate of Harvard, magna cum difficultate, class of 1911, and chairman of the board of Weal and Woe, Incorporated. In exchange for a drink, I’ll recite a poem, deliver a lecture, argue a point, or take off my shoes and imitate a sea gull. I prefer gin, but beer will do.” Gould is by no means a bum. He feels that the entertainment he provides is well worth whatever he is able to cadge. He doesn’t fawn, and he is never grateful. If he is turned down politely, he shrugs his shoulders and leaves the place. However, if the prospect passes a remark like “Get out of here, you bum,” Gould turns on him, no matter how big he is, and gives him a shrill, nasal, scurrilous tongue-lashing. He doesn’t care what he says. When he loses his temper, he becomes fearless. He will drop his portfolio, put up his fists, and offer to fight men who could kill him with one halfhearted blow. If he doesn’t find an audience on the trip up Sixth, he turns west on Eleventh and heads for the Village Vanguard, in a cellar on Seventh Avenue South. The Vanguard was once a sleazy rendezvous for arty people, but currently it is a thriving night club. Gould and the proprietor, a man named Max Gordon, have known each other for many years and are on fairly good terms much of the time. Gould always hits the Vanguard last. He is sure of it, and he keeps it in reserve. Since it became prosperous, the place annoys him. He goes down the stairs and says, “Hello, Max, you dirty capitalist. I want a bite to eat and a beer. If I don’t get it, I’ll walk right out on the dance floor and throw a fit.” “Go argue with the cook,” Gordon tells him. Gould goes into the kitchen, eats whatever the cook gives him, drinks a couple of beers, fills a bag with bread crumbs, and departs.
Despite his shyness, Gould has a great fondness for parties. There are many people in the Village who give big parties fairly often. Among them are a rich and idiosyncratic old doctor, a rich old spinster, a famous stage designer, a famous theatrical couple, and numbers of painters and sculptors and writers and editors and publishers. As often as not, when Gould finds out that any of these people are giving a party, he goes, and as often as not he is allowed to stay. Usually he keeps to himself for a while, uneasily smoking one cigarette after another and stiff as a board with tenseness. Sooner or later, however, impelled by a drink or two and by the desperation of the ill at ease, he begins to throw his weight around. He picks out the prettiest woman in the room, goes over, bows, and kisses her hand. He tells discreditable stories about himself. He becomes exuberant; suddenly, for no reason at all, he cackles with pleasure and jumps up and clicks his heels together. Presently he shouts, “All in favor of a one-man floor show, please say ‘Aye’!” If he gets the slightest encouragement, he strips to the waist and does a hand-clapping, foot-stamping dance which he says he learned on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota and which he calls the Joseph Ferdinand Gould Stomp. While dancing, he chants an old Salvation Army song, “There Are Flies on Me, There Are Flies on You, but There Are No Flies on Jesus.” Then he imitates a sea gull. He pulls off his shoes and socks and takes awkward, headlong skips about the room, flapping his arms and letting out a piercing caw with every skip. As a child he had several pet gulls, and he still spends many Sundays on the end of a fishing pier at Sheepshead Bay observing gulls; he claims he has such a thorough understanding of their cawing that he can translate poetry into it. “I have translated a number of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems into sea gull,” he says.
Inevitably, at every party Gould goes to, he gets up on a chair or a table and delivers some lectures. These lectures are extracts from chapters of the Oral History. They are brief, but he gives them lengthy titles, such as “Drunk as a Skunk, or How I Measured the Heads of Fifteen Hundred Indians in Zero Weather” and “The Dread Tomato Habit, or Watch Out! Watch Out! Down with Dr. Gallup!” He is skeptical about statistics. In the latter lecture, using statistics he claims he found in financial sections in newspapers, he proves that “the eating of tomatoes by railroad engineers was responsible for fifty-three per cent of the train wrecks in the United States during the last seven years.” When Gould arrives at a party, people who have never seen him before usually take one look at him and edge away. Before the evening is over, however, a few of them almost always develop a kind of puzzled respect for him; they get him in a corner, ask him questions, and try to determine what is wrong with him. Gould enjoys this. “When you came over and kissed my hand,” a young woman told him one night, “I said to myself, ‘What a nice old gentleman.’ A minute later I looked around and you were bouncing up and down with your shirt off, imitating a wild Indian. I was shocked. Why do you have to be such an exhibitionist?” “Madam,” Gould said, “it is the duty of the bohemian to make a spectacle of himself. If my informality leads you to believe that I’m a rum-dumb, or that I belong in Bellevue, hold fast to that belief, hold fast, hold fast, and show your ignorance.”
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GOULD IS A NATIVE of Norwood, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He comes from a family of physicians. His grandfather, Joseph Ferdinand Gould, for whom he was named, taught in the Harvard Medical School and had a practice in Boston. His father, Clarke Storer Gould, was a general practitioner in Norwood. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps and died of blood poisoning in a camp in Ohio during the First World War. The family was well-to-do until Gould was about grown, when his father invested unwisely in the stock of an Alaska land company. Gould says he went to Harvard only because it was a family custom. “I did not want to go,” he wrote in one of his autobiographical essays. “It had been my plan to stay home and sit in a rocking chair on the back porch and brood.” He says that he was an undistinguished student. Some of his classmates were Conrad Aiken, the poet; Howard Lindsay, the playwright and actor; Gluyas Williams, the cartoonist; and Richard F. Whitney, former president of the New York Stock Exchange. His best friends were three foreign students—a Chinese, a Siamese, and an Albanian.
Gould’s mother had always taken it for granted that he would become a physician, but after getting his A.B. he told her he was through with formal education. She asked him what he intended to do. “I intend to stroll and ponder,” he said. He passed most of the next three years strolling and pondering on the ranch of an uncle in Canada. In 1913, in an Albanian restaurant in Boston named the Scanderbeg, whose coffee he liked, he became acquainted with Theofan S. Noli, an archimandrite of the Albanian Orthodox Church, who interested him in Balkan politics. In February, 1914, Gould startled his family by announcing that he planned to devote the rest of his life to collecting funds to free Albania. He founded an organization in Boston called the Friends of Albanian Independence, enrolled a score or so of dues-paying members, and began telegraphing and calling on bewildered newspaper editors in Boston and New York City, trying to persuade them to print long treatises on Albanian affairs written by Noli. After about eight months of this, Gould was sitting in the Scanderbeg one night, drinking coffee and listening to a group of Albanian factory workers argue in their native tongue about Balkan politics, when he suddenly came to the conclusion that he was about to have a nervous breakdown. “I began to twitch uncontrollably and see double,” he says. From that night on his interest in Albania slackened.
After another period of strolling and pondering, Gould took up eugenics. He has forgotten exactly how this came about. In any case, he spent the summer of 1915 as a student in eugenical field work at the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. This organization, endowed by the Carnegie Institution, was engaged at that time in making studies of families of hereditary defectives, paupers, and town nuisances in several highly inbred communities. Such people were too prosaic for Gould; he decided to specialize in Indians. That winter he went out to North Dakota and measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and of five hundred Mandans on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Nowadays, when Gould is asked why he took these measurements, he changes the subject, saying, “The whole matter is a deep scientific secret.” He was happy in North Dakota. “It was the most rewarding period of my life,” he says. “I’m a good horseman, if I do say so myself, and I like to dance and whoop, and the Indians seemed to enjoy having me around. I was afraid they’d think I was batty when I asked for permission to measure their noggins, but they didn’t mind. It seemed to amuse them. Indians are the only true aristocrats I’ve ever known. They ought to run the country, and we ought to be put on the reservations.” After seven months of reservation life, Gould ran out of money. He returned to Massachusetts and tried vainly to get funds for another head-measuring expedition. “At this juncture in my life,” he says, “I decided to engage in literary work.” He came to New York City and got a job as assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the Evening Mail. One morning in the summer of 1917, after he had been a reporter for about a year, he was basking in the sun on the back steps of Headquarters, trying to overcome a hangover, when the idea for the Oral History blossomed in his mind. He promptly quit his job and began writing. “Since that fateful morning,” he once said, in a moment of exaltation, “the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.”
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GOULD SAYS THAT HE RARELY has more than a dollar at any one time, and that he doesn’t particularly care. “As a rule,” he says, “I despise money.” However, there is a widely held belief in the Village that he is rich and that he receives an income from inherited property in New England. “Only an old millionaire could afford to go around as shabby as you,” a bartender told him recently. “You’re one of those fellows that die in doorways and when the cops search them their pockets are just busting with bankbooks. If you wanted to, I bet you could step over to the West Side Savings Bank right this minute and draw out twenty thousand dollars.” After the death of his mother in 1939, Gould did come into some money. Close friends of his say that it was less than a thousand dollars and that he spent it in less than a month, wildly buying drinks all over the Village for people he had never seen before. “He seemed miserable with money in his pockets,” Gordon, the proprietor of the Vanguard, says. “When it was all gone, it seemed to take a load off his mind.” While Gould was spending his inheritance, he did one thing that satisfied him deeply. He bought a big, shiny radio and took it out on Sixth Avenue and kicked it to pieces. He has never cared for the radio. “Five minutes of the idiot’s babble that comes out of those machines,” he says, “would turn the stomach of a goat.”
During the twenties and the early thirties Gould occasionally interrupted his work on the Oral History to pose for classes at the Art Students’ League and to do book-reviewing for newspapers and magazines. He says there were periods when he lived comfortably on the money he earned this way. Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the old Tribune, gave him a lot of work. In an entry in “A Bookman’s Daybook,” which is a diary of happenings in the New York literary world in the twenties, Rascoe told of an experience with Gould. “I once gave him a small book about the American Indians to review,” Rascoe wrote, “and he brought me back enough manuscript to fill three complete editions of the Sunday Tribune. I especially honor him because, unlike most reviewers, he has never dogged me with inquiries as to why I never run it. He had his say, which was considerable, about the book, the author, and the subject, and there for him the matter ended.” Gould says that he quit book-reviewing because he felt that it was beneath his dignity to compete with machines. “The Sunday Times and the Sunday Herald Tribune have machines that review books,” he says. “You put a book in one of those machines and jerk down a couple of levers and a review drops out.” In recent years Gould has got along on less than five dolllars in actual money a week. He has a number of friends—Malcolm Cowley, the writer and editor; Aaron Siskind, the documentary photographer; Cummings, the poet; and Gordon, the night-club proprietor, are a few—who give him small sums of money regularly. No matter what they think of the Oral History, all these people have great respect for Gould’s pertinacity.
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GOULD HAS A POOR OPINION of most of the writers and poets and painters and sculptors in the Village, and doesn’t mind saying so. Because of his outspokenness he has never been allowed to join any of the art, writing, cultural, or ism organizations. He has been trying for ten years to join the Raven Poetry Circle, which puts on the poetry exhibition in Washington Square each summer and is the most powerful organization of its kind in the Village, but he has been blackballed every time. The head of the Ravens is a retired New York Telephone Company employee named Francis Lambert McCrudden. For many years Mr. McCrudden was a collector of coins from coin telephones for the telephone company. He is a self-educated man and very idealistic. His favorite theme is the dignity of labor, and his major work is an autobiographical poem called “The Nickel Snatcher.” “We let Mr. Gould attend our readings, and I wish we could let him join, but we simply can’t,” Mr. McCrudden once said. “He isn’t serious about poetry. We serve wine at our readings, and that is the only reason he attends. He sometimes insists on reading foolish poems of his own, and it gets on your nerves. At our Religious Poetry Night he demanded permission to recite a poem he had written entitled ‘My Religion.’ I told him to go ahead, and this is what he recited:
‘In winter I’m a Buddhist,
And in summer I’m a nudist.’
And at our Nature Poetry Night he begged to recite a poem of his entitled ‘The Sea Gull.’ I gave him permission, and he jumped out of his chair and began to wave his arms and leap about and scream, ‘Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!’ It was upsetting. We are serious poets and we don’t approve of that sort of behavior.” In the summer of 1942 Gould picketed the Raven exhibition, which was held on the fence of a tennis court on Washington Square South. In one hand he carried his portfolio and in the other he held a placard on which he had printed: “JOSEPH FERDINAND GOULD, HOT-SHOT POET FROM POETVILLE, A REFUGEE FROM THE RAVENS. POETS OF THE WORLD, IGNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS!” Now and then, as he strutted back and forth, he would take a leap and then a skip and say to passers-by, “Would you like to hear what Joe Gould thinks of the world and all that’s in it? Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!”
(1942)