Joe Gould's Secret

by Joseph Mitchell

  Gould spent an hour or so on the Deacon’s visions and torments. Then, after drinking another double Martini, he quoted some remarks that he said had been made to him by a doleful old Hungarian woman, known as Old Budapest or Old Buda the Pest, who used to sit in bars on Third Avenue, around Cooper Square, and talk on and on to anyone who would listen. Gould said he had filled many composition books with her talk. Old Buda had been three times a wife and three times a widow; she had had some connection with the dope trade through one of her husbands; she had been a madam, or, as she defined it, “the operator of a furnished-room house for women over in the Navy Yard district in Brooklyn”; and she had wound up working in the kitchen of a city hospital. Her talk was made up for the most part of descriptions of and reflections on awful things that she had experienced or observed. Gould recited a few of her soliloquies verbatim and paraphrased others and summarized others. Finishing with Old Buda, he drank a fourth Martini—a regular one this time. Then he ordered another, but decided not to drink all of it. Instead, he ordered a large beer, drank it, and then ordered a small beer and drank it. At this point, he described an eating place in which he said he had spent a lot of time during the early thirties. It was called Frenchy’s Coffee Pot; it was on First Avenue, near Twenty-ninth Street, just across from the Pathological Building of Bellevue Hospital, a building that also housed the City Mortuary; it stayed open until two in the morning and opened again at six; and it was patronized by nurses, internes, orderlies, ambulance drivers, morgue attendants, embalming-school students, and other people who worked in the hospital and the mortuary. Whenever he could, Gould said, he would engage these people in conversation, and now he began to quote some of the things they had told him. “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.’”

  Presently, after quoting at some length from each of his sections on Bellevue, Gould ordered another small beer and drank it, and then said that he would now quote for a little while from the longest and most important part of the Oral History. He said that he called this part “An Infinitude of Bushwa,” and that it was about the Village, and that it ran through approximately seventy-five composition books. “It contains an enormous number of monologues, conversations, and disputes about a wide variety of art, literary, political, theological, and sexual matters that I overheard in the Village,” he said, “and this will be very valuable to social historians in centuries to come, but the most valuable thing it contains is gossip—the things that people in the Village said about each other behind each other’s backs during the twenties and thirties. As I say somewhere in my introduction to this part, which in itself takes up nine composition books, ‘Malicious gossip, vicious and malicious. Spite and jealousy and middle-aged lust and middle-aged bile.’ You can mention just about anybody who was around the Village during the last quarter of a century, and I’ve probably got something about him or her in this part of the History—something nasty. However and nevertheless and notwithstanding and be that as it may,” he said, suddenly getting to his feet, “please excuse me a minute.”

  I had been so busy taking notes that I hadn’t looked up for some time, and now I looked up and saw that Gould was drunk, or close to it. His eyes were blank and staring; he stared at me as if he had never seen me before. I was surprised, for his voice had been clear and his talk had been coherent. “I’ll be right back,” he said. Starting to step away from the table, he lurched into the aisle. Then, recovering himself, he made his way to the men’s room, shuffling along cautiously and holding his arms out in front of him for balance, like a feeble old man.

  When he returned, I said I was afraid that he was tired of talking, and suggested that we adjourn and meet again the following night. He shook his head vigorously. “I’m not in the least bit tired,” he said. I closed my notebook and started to put it in my pocket. “You’re the one who’s tired,” he said. He reached over and grabbed my sleeve. “Don’t go yet,” he said. “I want to say something about my mother. I didn’t say much about her the other day in the diner, and I feel I should. Don’t bother taking notes. Just listen.”

  His mother had been a good mother, he said, except for one thing: She had never treated him as a grownup. While he was at Harvard, he said, and even after he had been living in New York City for years and had become well known as a bohemian and had grown a beard, she had occasionally sent him packages of a kind of penny candy, called peach pits, that he had liked as a child. This was typical of her, he said. “My mother did one thing to me when I was a boy,” he said, “that I’ve never been able to forgive or forget. It may seem like a trivial incident to you, not worth thinking about twice, but I must’ve thought about it a thousand times. We were sitting in the parlor of our house in Norwood one evening after supper. I was studying, and I happened to look up and I saw that she was looking at me and apparently had been for some time and that tears were running down her cheeks. ‘My poor son,’ she said.” Gould’s eyes blazed. He was silent for a few moments. Then he forgot all about his mother and began talking about his father. He got wound up talking about his father; he couldn’t seem to stop. His father had been a railroad enthusiast, he said, and a collector of timetables and of pictures of locomotives. Norwood is on a branch line of what was then the New England Railroad and is now the New York, New Haven & Hartford, and his father had been local surgeon for the railroad and a member of the International Association of Railway Surgeons. “One evening,” Gould said, “my father put down his newspaper, which was the Boston Evening Transcript, you may be sure, and announced that he was going in to Boston in the morning to see a new locomotive that the railroad was getting ready to put into service, and then he announced that he was taking me with him. This was when I was around nine or ten, back before he had given up on me, so to speak, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. We got up before day and had breakfast together, and then we went in on an early train and stopped in the station restaurant in Boston and had a second breakfast. He had coffee and a cinnamon bun, and I had hot chocolate and a cinnamon bun. Then we went out in the yards. There was a crowd of railroad men standing around the locomotive, looking it over, and my father knew one of them. ‘How do you do, Mr. Delehanty,’ my father said. ‘This is my son Joseph.’”

  Gould was so moved by this recollection that his voice broke and his eyes filled with tears and he was unable to continue talking. A few moments later, while he was dabbing at his eyes with a paper napkin and trying to regain his composure, one of the old bohemians at the bar came over to him and said, “I know how you feel, Joe. It was really quite a shock.” Gould stared at the old bohemian. “What shock?” he asked. The old bohemian stared back at Gould. “Hearing about it,” he said. “Hearing about what?” asked Gould. “Bob,” said the old bohemian. Then, giving Gould a searching look and seeing that he was mystified, the old bohemian said that a man named Bob Something-or-Other (I didn’t catch his last name), who was evidently another old bohemian and a friend of both of them, had keeled over in Goody’s during the afternoon, while he was sitting at the bar, and had been taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where, according to a telephone call the bartender had just received, he had died not long after he arrived. Gould was visibly delighted by this piece of news. “Well, I must say,” he said, “I think that was very commendable of Bob. In fact,” he went on, “it’s probably the most commendable thing he ever did.” The old bohemian was taken aback, but a moment later his face changed and he laughed heartily. “Poor old Bob,” said Gould, in mitigation. Then he and the old bohemian became engrossed in an intensely serious discussion about Bob’s age—whether he had hit seventy or was still in his sixties—and I took the oppor
tunity to say good night and depart.

  Next night, Gould and I met again in Goody’s. We met at six, and I listened to him until around midnight. We skipped the following night, which was Sunday night. On Monday night, we met again at six, and once again I listened to him until around midnight. I thought that we had agreed to meet at eight on Tuesday night, but when I arrived at eight I found that I had not made this clear to him and he had been waiting for me since six and was so anxious to start talking that he was in a state of agitation. To square myself, I listened to him until Goody’s closed, at four o’clock in the morning. I saw him again on Wednesday night, and again on Thursday night, and again on Friday night. These sessions followed a pattern. Gould would quote from the Oral History while the gin and beer were gradually taking hold, and then he would lose interest in the Oral History and talk more and more about himself, until presently he would give up and talk about nothing but himself. He seemed to think that no detail of his life was too trivial to tell about. He would tell about the first time he caught a fish or about the removal of his tonsils, he would tell fatuous family anecdotes, laughing all the while, and he would recall the ins and outs of conversations that he had had long ago with boyhood friends about the mysteries of the adult world. Once, he pointed out several scars on his cheeks and forehead and told how he got each one; I remember that he got a couple of those on his forehead when a Mason jar of stewed tomatoes that his mother had put up exploded. Late one evening, he paused for a moment and asked me if I was tired of listening to him, and I started to be polite and say “Oh, no!,” but weariness made me frank and I said that I was, whereupon he snickered and said that he could sympathize with me but that he had been waiting for years to talk to someone about himself and really go into detail, and now that he had an opportunity to do so he was going to make the most of it. “And since you’re going to write about me,” he said, “you can’t help yourself—it’s your duty to listen to me, it’s part of your job.”

  After the Friday-night session, which lasted ten hours—it started at 6 P.M. and ended at 4 A.M.—I decided that I had become sufficiently familiar with a representative group of chapters of the Oral History and that enough was enough and that I wouldn’t listen to him any longer, although it was obvious that he had scarcely got started and could go on for weeks; I simply didn’t have the endurance. I tried to tell him this but found myself hesitating and dissembling, and he interrupted me. “If you’re trying to tell me that you don’t want to hear any more,” he said, a little angrily, “you don’t have to apologize. I’m perfectly well aware that I talk too much.”

  On the following Monday, which was June 29th, I started writing the Profile of Gould. On Tuesday, around noon, Gould telephoned and said he was worried about the facts concerning his family background that he had given me, and wanted to come up and interpret them for me. There were subtleties involved that I might miss, he said, since he was a New Englander and I was not. He came and stayed until deep in the afternoon, but he didn’t interpret any facts; he simply talked some more about himself. On Wednesday, bright and early, he telephoned and said he had spent most of the previous night going over our talks in his mind, and had been shocked to discover that he had forgotten to tell me a great many very important things. He said he wanted to come up and give me this additional information. I told him that I was sinking and suffocating and drowning in information, and begged him not to tell me anything else until I had finished writing the first draft of the Profile and he had read it. He could point out the gaps in it then, I said. On Thursday, in the middle of the morning, the receptionist came in and said that he was outside and wanted to see me. “He says it’s very important,” she said. I asked her to tell him that I had gone to a funeral. He sat in the reception room for an hour or so, and then left a note for me with the receptionist and went away. “It is my recollection that I told you the title of the Greenwich Village part of the Oral History was ‘An Infinitude of Bushwa,’” he wrote in the note. “After much thought, I have decided to change this title, and I felt that I should inform you of this decision at once. The new title is ‘The Bughouse Without Bars, or Descents by Day and Descents by Night Into the Intellectual Underworld of Our Time.’ If you have occasion to refer to this part of the O.H., please keep this in mind.” On Friday, he telephoned, and I lied to him. I told him that I was going on vacation and would be away for two weeks. During these two weeks, I came to my office early and left late, I had no interruptions, and I finished writing the Profile. Then I did go on vacation.

  Soon after I returned, early in August, Gould telephoned. By that time, the Profile had been put in proof, and I asked him to come up and read it. He read it slowly and carefully, and said he was pleased with it. “Is there anything in it you want me to change?” I asked. “Not a word,” he said. Next day, he came in and said he thought that a paragraph having to do with his knowledge of sea gulls should be made much longer. “People are going to want to know a lot more about that matter,” he said. Two days later, he came in with a similar suggestion about another paragraph. Three days after that, he came in with a similar suggestion about still another paragraph. He got in the habit of coming in at least once a week and trying to talk me into adding a few sentences here or a paragraph there. He never tried to get me to change anything; he just wanted me to put more in. On the majority of the days that he didn’t come in, he telephoned me. The sound of his voice began to make me wince.

  The Profile of Gould was printed in the issue of The New Yorker for December 12, 1942, under the title of “Professor Sea Gull.” The day before this issue went on the newsstands, I had to go down South, because of the sickness of a relative. I ran into some bad luck down there—I was thrown from a horse jumping a ditch and dislocated a shoulder, and while I was laid up from that I had pneumonia—and it was over three weeks before I returned to New York City; it was after the first of the year, in fact. When I got back to my office, there was a pile of letters on my desk from readers of the Profile. There were forty-five addressed to me, and seventeen addressed to Gould in care of me. Among the letters addressed to me was one from Gould himself.

  “I have always had a feeling of being way ahead of my time,” Gould wrote. “Consequently, I have always taken it for granted that the importance of the Oral History would not be recognized until sometime in the distant future, long after I am dead and gone, but now, thanks to your little piece, I am beginning to see signs that it may happen in my own lifetime. Strangers passing me on the street used to look at me with reactions ranging from bafflement to outright hostility, but now a steadily increasing number of them seem to know who I am and look at me with respect, and every now and then one of them stops me and ask questions about the Oral History. Serious and sensible questions. And people who really know me and have known me from old are beginning to look at me in a different light. I’m not just that nut Joe Gould but that nut Joe Gould who may wind up being considered one of the great historians of all time. As great as Froissart. As great as John Aubrey. As great as Gibbon. I have even noticed a change in the Village radicals. One of them who has been cutting me dead for a long time spoke to me the other day. He was patronizing, but he spoke. ‘I know that you don’t intend any such thing,’ he said, ‘but the Oral History may very well turn out to be a sort of X ray of the soul of the bourgeoisie.’ ‘What makes you think you know what I don’t intend?’ I asked him. It may also interest you to learn that the countermen and waitresses in the Jefferson Diner have begun to kid around with me again. When I go in there now, they call me the Professor or the Sea Gull or Professor Sea Gull or the Mongoose or Professor Mongoose or the Bellevue Boy, just as they used to, and I don’t know why, but that pleases me. Sometimes, when they are kidding around, ignorant people like that have a kind of inspired audacity that is very cheerful and infectious. It lifts one’s spirits. Book ignorant, that is. On some matters, I wish I knew one-tenth as much as they know. I still make the rounds of the places on Sixth Avenue, but I
have a new hangout—the Minetta Tavern, at the corner of Macdougal Street and Minetta Lane, in the Italian part of the Village. The Minetta is an old-fashioned neighborhood bar-and-restaurant that attracts a few tourists now and then. The proprietor wants to encourage this, and he and I have reached what you might call an unspoken agreement. I sit at a table in there from late in the afternoon until around nine, ten, or eleven at night and work on the Oral History and give some Village atmosphere to the place. I am the resident bohemian, the house bohemian. In return, he sees to it that I get the table-d’hôte dinner free of charge so long as I order spaghetti and meat balls or something like that for the main course, and if I have to I can get by on one meal a day. Also, there are always people around who will buy me a beer or a glass of wine or if my need is great a Martini. Also, while talking to tourists and explaining the Oral History to them, I manage to pick up quite a few contributions to the Joe Gould Fund.…”