Joe Gould's Secret

by Joseph Mitchell

  It was the same booth we had sat in when I had my first talk with him. His face and hands were as dirty as ever, but his color was good and his eyes were clear and he had put on a little weight. As usual, he had on a suit that was a size or two too big for him. It was somebody’s castoff—the ruins of a suit—but it was well cut and it was made of some kind of expensive, Scottish-looking material, and it had been a good suit in its time. He even had on the vest. He wore a hat whose sides were deeply dented and whose brim was turned up on one side and down on the other. It was an extraordinarily rakish hat, and almost any veteran Villager could have identified it at a glance; it was one of E. E. Gummings’s old hats. I told Gould that he looked the best I had ever seen him, and I was surprised at the smugness of his response.

  “Oh, I’m doing all right,” he said, smiling complacently. “I’m doing fine. I didn’t much care for the Maison Gerard at first, or the Maison G., as the inmates call it—it’s too out-of-the-way, the food is too starchy, and the stairs are a damned nuisance—but I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I’m quite happy there. I come down to the Village and make the rounds the same as ever and scratch around for contributions to the Joe Gould Fund, but it isn’t a life-and-death matter any longer. I’ve even stopped bothering with some people—the dime ones and the maybe-tomorrow ones. I just hit the ones I’m sure of, and I don’t hit them as often as I used to. A peculiar thing has happened. I thought I’d be ruined in the Village if the news got out that I had a patron who was paying for my room and board, and I tried to keep it under my hat, but I couldn’t; I told a few of my friends and they told others, and one by one all of them found it out, and what do you know—instead of reducing the amount of their contributions or refusing to give me anything at all anymore, they’ve become far more generous than they used to be. People who used to give me a quarter and give it grudgingly now give me fifty cents, and sometimes even a dollar, and give it willingly. You know the old fundamental rule: ‘Them as has gits.’ Sometimes, these days, I have three, four, five, six, seven dollars in my pocket. I don’t bum cigarettes any longer, let alone smoke picked-up butts; I buy my own. Sometimes I even drop in a place and order a drink and pay for it myself. And I’m taking better care of myself. Most mornings, if I don’t have a hangover, I get up around eleven and have a big breakfast, and then I walk up to the main branch of the Public Library and read the papers or look up something, or I might go to a few exhibitions in the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street and see if there are any good nudes, or I might take a run up to the Metropolitan or the Frick or the Museum of Natural History or the Museum of the American Indian, or I might just walk around the streets. After a while, I go back to the Maison G. and lie down for an hour or so, and then I have an early dinner, and then I get on the subway and go down to the Village. I knock around the Village until the bars close at 4 A.M. and everybody goes home, and then I head on back to the Maison G. Compared to the way things used to be, I’m living the life of a millionaire.” He hummed the tune of a bitter old Bessie Smith song and then sang a few words. “‘Once I lived the life of a millionaire,’” he sang in his squeaky, old-Yankee voice. “‘Spending my money, I didn’t care.…’

  “Of course,” he went on, “there’s one thing I do keep under my hat, and that’s the fact that I don’t know who my patron is. I don’t give a damn anymore who she is, but I have my pride. People keep asking me, and I tell them I’m not allowed to say. It’s a famous name, I tell them, and they’d recognize it if I mentioned it—one of the richest women in the world. I call her Madame X, and I hint that I have the inside track with her. You know how bohemians are. They profess to disdain money, but they lose all control of themselves and go absolutely berserk at the slightest indication of the remotest hint of the faintest trace of a smell of it. Ever since the word got out that I have a patron, and not only that, a woman patron, and not only that, a rich woman patron, the poets and the painters have been getting me aside and buying me drinks and asking me to tell Madame X about their work. I try to be as helpful as I can. ‘Let me have a few of your best poems,’ I say if it’s a poet, or ‘Let me have a few of your best sketches,’ I say if it’s a painter, ‘and I’ll take them up and show them to Madame X the next time I go up to see her in her huge town house just off Park Avenue.’ I take the poems or the sketches up to my room at the Maison G. and put them on the dresser and leave them there for a week or two, and then I take them back to the genius who produced them. ‘Madame X looked at your work,’ I tell him, ‘and she asked me to thank you very much for letting her look at it.’ ‘But what did she say about it?’ the genius asks. ‘She strictly forbade me to tell you,’ I say, ‘but we’ve been friends for a long time, and I know you too well and respect you too much to lie to you, and I’m going to tell you exactly what she said. She said that she couldn’t detect the slightest sign of any talent whatsoever in your work, and she said she feels it would be very wrong of her to encourage you in any way.’”

  Gould’s eyes flashed, and he giggled. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve put quite a few people in their places that way. I’ve settled quite a few old scores that way.”

  I found myself getting annoyed with Gould, not because of his gloating over the settling of old scores—that was all right with me; I believe in revenge—but because of his general air of self-satisfaction, and I asked him a malicious question. “How are you getting along on the Oral History?” I asked.

  “Fine!” he said, not batting an eye. “I’m making a lot of progress on it.” His portfolio was beside him in the booth, and he patted it. “I’ve added an enormous number of words to it lately,” he said. “It’s growing by leaps and bounds.”

  As time went on, Gould grew accustomed to having his room and board paid for by his unknown patron. He came to take it for granted and to look upon it as a permanent arrangement. One morning in November, 1947, after he had been living at the Maison Gerard for almost three and a half years, I had a telephone call from him, and the moment I heard his voice I knew that something was wrong. “Mrs. Marquié called me yesterday afternoon and asked me to come up to her gallery at once,” he said. “I went up there, and she broke the news to me that some weeks ago she had received word that Madame X was thinking of stopping her subsidy to me but that a man and a woman she knows who are old friends of Madame X were trying to persuade her to keep it going. She hadn’t wanted to tell me anything about it, she said, until she had found out for certain just what Madame X was going to do. Well, she found out for certain yesterday. Madame X sent word to her that she was putting a check for December in the mail but that that would be the last.” Gould paused for a moment and I heard him take a deep breath. “I asked Mrs. Marquié to tell me why Madame X had turned against me,” he said. “I begged her to tell me. She said she simply didn’t know.” He paused again. “Not knowing who she is was bad enough,” he said, “but not knowing why she’s turned against me is nerve-racking.” He paused once again. “It’s the worst news I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “I haven’t been able to keep anything on my stomach since I heard it.”

  Gould sounded hurt and bewildered and terribly forsaken, and he also sounded humiliated. There was something in his voice, a hint of panic, that stayed in my mind and made me uneasy. In the middle of the afternoon, I left the office and took a taxicab to the Maison Gerard. A porter vacuum-cleaning the carpet in the vestibule said that Gould had gone out but that he might have come back in. “Go on up and see,” he said. “His room’ll be open. He never locks it.” Gould wasn’t in Standing in the door and peering into his room, I saw some composition books on his dresser, and I went over and looked at them. There were five of them. I took the liberty of opening the one on top. On the first page was the old familiar title: “DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.” I went ahead and opened the second one. The title read, “THE DREAD TOMATO HABIT. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.” I opened the third one. The title read, “DEATH OF DR. CLA
RKE STOKER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.” I opened the fourth one. The title read, “DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.” I opened the fifth one. The title read, “DEATH OF DR. CLARKE STORER GOULD. A CHAPTER OF JOE GOULD’S ORAL HISTORY.” I put the books back the way they were and left the room. “God pity him,” I said, “and pity us all.”

  When Gould’s subsidy ran out at the end of December, he told Gerard that he wanted to keep on staying at the Maison Gerard. He would give up the board part of his room-and-board arrangement, at least for a while, he said, and concentrate on trying to hold on to his room. It was obvious that he hoped to do this by redoubling his efforts in soliciting contributions to the Joe Gould Fund. However, he forgot the old fundamental rule that he had once referred to—“Them as has gits”—and made the mistake of telling his friends that he had lost his patron. Consequently, a good many of them, fearing that he would now become too dependent on them, began cutting down on their contributions. Before long, it became hard for him to get together three dollars in a lump sum for his weekly rent, and Gerard refused to let him pay by the night. “You are penalizing me because I don’t live the way most people do,” Gould told him. “Most people live on a week-to-week basis or on a month-to-month basis. I live on a day-to-day basis, and some days I live on an hour-to-hour basis.” “I know all that, and I would like to help you,” Gerard replied, “but the Maison Gerard is not a flophouse.” By the end of February, Gould was in debt to Gerard. He had set fire to his bed at the Maison Gerard several times by falling asleep while smoking. In March, he set fire to it again, and, using this as an excuse, Gerard asked him to leave. At that time, there was a cluster of cheap hotels around Tenth Avenue and Forty-second Street. In one of them, the Watson Hotel, at 583 Tenth Avenue, it was possible to get a room—that is, a narrow cubicle furnished with a metal cot—for thirty-five cents a night, and Gould began staying there. Late one night, leaving a barroom in the lower Village and feeling too tired to take the subway and go uptown to the Watson, he walked over to the Bowery and got a bed in a flophouse, and found himself right back where he had started from in May, 1944. Next day, he decided that he might as well keep on staying in Bowery flophouses, since the Bowery was so convenient to the Village, and from that time on almost every step he took was a step going down.

  It soon became apparent to people who had known Gould through the years that a change had taken place in him. “What’s the matter with you, Joe?” I heard one of the old bohemians in Goody’s say to him one night. “You don’t seem to be yourself.” “I’m not myself,” he answered. “I’ve never been myself.” He made the rounds in the Village as he always had, turning up during the afternoon and night in at least a dozen barrooms, cafeterias, diners, and dumps, but he began to look as if he didn’t belong in these places. More often than not, he was abstracted or gloomy or withdrawn or had a faraway look in his eyes. One night, I went into a place in the Village called Chumley’s for dinner. As I sat down in the dining room, I glanced through an archway at the bar, which was in an adjoining room, and there was a crowd of loud, laughing, joking, overstimulated men and women sitting or standing two deep along it, and down at the end of it I saw Gould’s somber, bearded face. He was standing by himself, holding a beer, observing the others, and he had on a ragged suit and an old dog’s bed of an overcoat, and he was all hunched up, and he looked remarkably separate and set off from everybody else. He looked like the ghost of Joe Gould come back to haunt the bar in Chumley’s. He looked like a zombie.

  He continued to go to the Minetta every night and sit for a few hours at his customary table and scribble in a composition book in full view of any tourists who might happen to be around, but when tourists came over and asked him what he was working on he rarely made big, bragging speeches any longer. His replies were more likely to be sarcastic or scurrilous or wearily offhand. Not that the tourists minded; they seemed to think that that was exactly the way a bohemian should behave, and they showed just as much interest in the Oral History and contributed just as much to the Joe Gould Fund as the ones he used to knock himself out trying, to impress.

  It began to take him longer and longer to get over the effects of drinking, and his drinking habits changed. While he was living at the Maison Gerard, he had got used to holing up in his room all day if he had a hangover and sleeping it off, but he couldn’t do that in flophouses, and he developed a dread of hangovers. Instead of drinking anything and everything every chance he got—the stronger the better, the hell with tomorrow—as he had been doing, he began sticking to beer. No matter how hard a party of tourists might try to persuade him to order something stronger, he would insist on beer. Even so, by spacing the beers out, he managed to stay in a fairly constant state of mild intoxication. In this state, he was easily irritated, and his speech became looser all the time, He began to make spiteful or uncomfortably frank remarks to old friends, and he began to tell people whom he had always pretended to like what he, really thought of them. Once, staring across a cafeteria table at a man he had known ever since they were young men in the Village together, he said, “You certainly sold out.” “You’re slipping,” he once told Maxwell Bodenheim. “You were a better poet twenty-five years ago than you are now, and you weren’t any good then.” On another occasion, he told Bodenheim that he wasn’t a real poet anyhow. “You’re only an artsy-craftsy poet,” he said. “A niminy-piminy poet. An itsy-bitsy poet. And you’re frightfully uneducated. You don’t know how to punctuate a sentence, and all you’ve ever read is Floyd Dell and Ethel M. Dell and the Rubáiyát.”

  In those years, I used to go downtown at night on the Fifth Avenue bus. I usually got off at my stop, at Tenth Street, around seven-thirty. Gould knew this, and about once a week he would be waiting for me. When I stepped off the bus, he would appear out of the shadows in the doorway of the Church of the Ascension, on the corner, and hurry over to the bus stop and join me. He would walk a little way up the street with me and I would give him a contribution, and then he would dart off into the night. Sometimes we would stand on the street and talk for a few minutes. One night in the summer of 1952, as we were standing talking, he told me rather hesitantly that he was worried about his health. He had been having dizzy spells, he said. “The other day,” he said, “I got on the subway at Fourteenth Street, intending to get off at the Twenty-third Street station, and a moment after I sat down, I had a kind of blackout, and when I came to, the train was pulling into the station at Seventy-second Street.” I told him that a doctor I knew had read the Profile of him with great interest, and often asked me questions about him and about the progress he was making on the Oral History. “He said one time that if you ever needed medical attention he’d be glad to, see you and wouldn’t charge you anything,” I told Gould. I asked him to let me call the doctor and make an appointment for him. Gould shook his head. “Ah,” he said, looking vaguely up the street, “what’s the use?”

  Around the middle of December of that year, I became conscious of the fact that I hadn’t seen Gould at the bus stop for several weeks, but I didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t at all unusual for Gould to disappear from the Village for a few days or a few weeks, or even a few months, and then suddenly reappear and give an odd explanation for his absence. “I went on a bird walk along the waterfront with an old countess,” he once said after such an absence. “The countess and I spent three weeks studying sea gulls.” Another time, after he had been away unaccountably for most of a summer, he told people that he had been on a cruise on a yacht. “J. P. Morgan’s yacht,” he said.

  In January, 1953, I went to a party at the house of a psychiatrist I had known ever since I was a young reporter and covered Belleyue Hospital and the Medical Examiner’s office. Among the other guests was a woman psychiatrist who was on the staff of Pilgrim State Hospital, which is out in Suffolk County, Long Island, at a place called West Brentwood. I had seen her several times before at my friend’s house and had al
ways enjoyed talking with her, not about psychiatry—we never talked about that—but about things like the feeding habits of striped bass; she was an obsessed surf caster. This evening, when I spoke to her, she told me that she was taking a leave of absence from the hospital to have a baby. Then she said she had something she wanted to tell me, and we walked over and stood by a window. “We have an old friend of yours out at Pilgrim State,” she said. “The man you wrote about who’s the author of ‘An Oral History of the World,’ or whatever it is he calls it. Joe Gould.” She said that Gould had collapsed on the Bowery one afternoon around the middle of November and that an ambulance from Columbus Hospital had picked him up. He was found to be suffering from “confusion and disorientation,” and Columbus, which doesn’t have a psychiatric service, had transferred him to the psychiatric division at Bellevue. Bellevue had kept him under observation until sometime around Thanksgiving, and had then transferred him to Pilgrim State.

  “What’s the matter with him?” I asked. “What do you call it?”

  “It’s nothing at all strange or unusual,” she said. “Arteriosclerotic senility. The same thing a lot of us will have if we live long enough. Only, in his case it hit him rather early—he’s only sixty-three. Also, he has something wrong with his kidneys. Also, since he’s been out at Pilgrim State he’s had a staggering number of minor ailments, one right after another. That often happens to men of his type, the Bowery type, once they finally get into a hospital. Among other things, he’s had the worst case of conjunctivitis I’ve ever seen, an acute attack of bursitis, a terrible boil on the back of his neck, a series of chills, a series of earaches, and a persistent pain of some kind in his stomach. And I suspect he’s just getting started.”