Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  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 p
recious 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 hardbitten 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.’