This article, when first drafted, began Who on earth, you ask, was Joe Gould? But, thanks to the power of Hollywood, Joe Gould may not now be the obscure figure he was during his lifetime. Joseph Ferdinand Gould claimed to have written the longest work in literary history -- his 'Oral History of Our Time' was (or should that be is?) some dozen times longer than the Bible. The telltale quotations marks here rather than italics indicate that this mammoth work has never appeared in its entirety in print; though isolated 'essay chapters' were published in magazines such as The Dial and Ezra Pound's The Exile. The author is the subject of a charming little study, Joe Gould's Secret (Jonathan Cape, 1997; Vintage, 1998), by the late New Yorker staff writer Joseph Mitchell. The portrait of Gould consists of two articles, 'Professor Sea Gull' (1942) and 'Joe Gould's Secret' (1964), written after Gould's death. The book has been praised by such luminaries as John Fowles, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge and Martin Amis. Amis wrote: 'If Borges has been a New Yorker, he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret.' Indeed, Gould is as curious a literary figure as Borges' half-veridical creations Pierre Menard and Herbert Quain.
The book gained a higher profile in Britain in March 2000 when Radio 4 featured it as its daily 'Book of the Week'. It was read -- or rather performed -- by the veteran Method-ist Eli Wallach. Really, this essay risks spoiling readers' pleasure. And all that needs to be said are eight words: Go forth and beg, borrow or steal it.
Gould (1889-1957) was a glorious New York bohemian -- a kind of Greenwich Village Enoch Soames or John Gawsworth, whose apparel and appearance made those two poets resemble the epitome of elegance. Gould, writes Mitchell in his second article, 'looked like a bum and lived like a bum. He wore castoff clothes, and he slept in flophouses or in the cheapest rooms in cheap motels. Sometimes he slept in doorways. He spent most of his time hanging out in diners and cafeterias and barrooms in the Village or wandering around the streets or looking up friends and acquaintances all over town or sitting in public libraries scribbling in dime-store composition books. He was generally pretty dirty. He would often go for days without washing his face and hands, and he rarely had a shirt washed or a suit cleaned.' For years, before a mysterious wealthy patroness supported him (the story, explaining how she withdrew her financial aid for no reason revealed to Gould is chronicled in Mitchell's book), Gould lived on 'air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee [strong, black, sugarless], fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup'. He was toothless and emaciated, 'bald, small, bearded like an Old Testament prophet', and he slept 'on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery'. Gould, wrote Mitchell, always carried a bulging, greasy, portfolio. 'He keeps it on his lap while he eats and in flophouses he sleeps with it under his head'. In it he kept chapters of his 'formless, rather mysterious book that he calls "An Oral History of Our Time",' which he began in his late twenties, writing in children's composition books. He estimated in the 1940s that the manuscript, in two hundred and seventy of these books, contained, in poor penmanship, nine million words.
As its title suggests, the History, or half of it, chronicled thousands of interviews between Gould and the denizens of New York. Gould told Mitchell: '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 short-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 idea for the Oral History came to him while he was working as a junior police reporter in New York in 1917. He was recovering from a hangover at police headquarters one summer morning when the concept dawned. He immediately quit his job to work on the book. He explained:
' . . . I would spend the rest of my life going about the city listening to people -- eavesdropping, if necessary -- and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me, no matter how boring or idiotic or vulgar or obscene it might sound to others. I could see the whole thing in my mind -- long-winded conversations and short and snappy conversations, brilliant conversations and foolish conversations, curses, catch phrases, coarse remarks, snatches of quarrels, the mutterings of drunks and crazy people, the entreaties of beggars and bums, the propositions of prostitutes, the spiels of pitchmen and peddlers, the sermons of street preachers, shouts in the night, wild rumours, cries from the heart. I decided right then and there that I couldn't possibly continue to hold my job, because it would take up time that I should devote to the Oral History, and I resolved that I would never again accept regular employment unless I absolutely had to or starve but would cut my wants down to the bare bones and depend on friends and well-wishers to see me through. The idea for the Oral History occurred to me around half past ten. Around a quarter to eleven, I stood up and went to a telephone and quit my job . . .
'Since that fateful morning . . . 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.'
Mitchell summarizes the History as '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 clinical 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.)'
Gould came from Norwood, near Boston, from an old New England family who had been settled in the region since 1635. Since Joe Gould did not share his family's respectability, he described himself as a 'throwback'. He went to Harvard, but only because it was a family custom. In 1934 Gould told a Herald Tribune reporter that the History was 7,300,000 words long. By 1937 it was 8,800,000 words. By 1941 Gould was dubbed by one journalist 'an author who has written a book taller than himself' and the work stood at nine million words.
Strangely, for one so unknown, Gould inspired William Saroyen. A Gould essay, 'Civilization', appeared in the April 1929 issue of The Dial. The twenty-year-old Saroyen found a copy for a dime in a California bookstore and was deeply influenced by it. 'It freed me from bothering about form,' he said. Years later Gould briefly claimed Saroyan as a disciple, but their meetings in the 1940s were unsatisfactory. 'Saroyan kept saying he wanted to hear all about the Oral History,' Gould told Mitchell, 'but I never got the chance to tell him. He did all the talking.' Gould rather enjoyed shocking and annoying people, especially the bourgeois. At a religious poetry night he upset members of the serious Raven Poetry Circle with his poem 'My Religion' which ran:
Seeing Gould wandering around Greenwich Village in the early hours of the morning Mitchell was reminded of the 'Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman'. In 1942 it occurred to him that Gould would make an excellent subject for a profile, and so he spent long hours interviewing him. Gould studied the language of seagulls and would frequently alarm people with his piercing imitations of the birds. 'I have translated a number of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poems into sea gull,' he solemnly claimed. Thus the profile in the New Yorker was titled 'Professor Sea Gull'. After the piece was published, Gould found people looked on him with a new found affection and respect. Admirers wrote to him, some with money, care of Mitchell, and this prompted him to establish 'The Joe Gould Fund' for his admirers. He became something of an albatross round Mitchell's neck, forever dropping into his office and staying for hours, soliciting contributions to the fund. e.e. cummings was friendly with Gould and wrote a poem about him, referring to the 'wraith's progress' of the Oral History, contributing, as friends were expected to do, to the fund. Mitchell managed to read a little of the History: several versions of Gould's account of the death of his father, a physician, were published as essay chapters in The Exile and The Dial. Ezra Pound referred to Gould in an essay as an 'unreceived and uncomprehended native hickory'. Mitchell also read a whimsical piece satirizing statistics called 'The Dread Tomato Habit', in which Gould claimed that eating tomatoes was killing millions. Mitchell discovered multiple copies of the composition books in which Gould had written these two essays over and over, presumably in attempts at perfection. Gould told Mitchell that, worried about the possibility of his magnum opus being destroyed through possible bombing during the Second World War, he had stored the notebooks in the cellar of a farmhouse on Long Island. Gould said it was difficult to retrieve the manuscript but would recite long sections of it to Mitchell. When Mitchell tried to interest publishers in the book, Gould raised objections: he didn't want them to read only extracts, and the nine-million-word book had to be published in its entirety. He said the book was fated to be published posthumously, when he expected to be acclaimed as a historian as great as Gibbon, with the advantage that he was reporting on contemporary events rather than at the remove of centuries.
Mitchell writes that Gould 'has never been able to interest a publisher in the Oral History. At one time or another he has lugged armsfuls 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".' At his death he planned to divide the enormous manuscript between Harvard Library and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
And now Professor Sea Gull has been immortalized on the movie screen. Ian Holm, peerless impersonator of such varied figures as J. M. Barrie, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Bilbo (and Frodo) Baggins and Sir William ('Ripper'?) Gull plays him in a dramatization of Joe Gould's Secret. Unfortunately the film has fared badly at the US box-office: one can hardly expect American teens, obsessed with beautiful faces, or so we are told, to be enthusiastic about a scruffy, bald, toothless bohemian from the Forties who spends most of his time writing or talking, and so its journey across the Atlantic has been tardy.
It would spoil readers' pleasure to reveal the nature of Joe Gould's secret -- they must go to Mitchell's classic book to discover what it was -- but brilliant as the study is, one wonders whether Mitchell was correct in his conclusion. 'After all, I thought, I could be wrong,' he admits on the final page. The crucial point is that Lost Club readers should on no account miss this masterpiece. What, you may inquire, happened to Gould at the end of his life? Go read the book!