Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Mr Hewitt leaned over and opened the stove door and spat on the red-hot coals. ‘To hear him tell it,’ he said, ‘he was hell on widows. He knew just what to say to them.’

  ‘Did this gentleman ever get married himself?’ asked Mr Townsend. He sounded indignant.

  ‘He was married twice,’ said Mr Hewitt. ‘A year or two before he died, he divorced his first wife and married a woman half his age.’

  ‘I hope some man came up to her in the cemetery when she was visiting his grave and got acquainted with her and sympathized with her,’ Mr Townsend said, ‘and one thing led to another.’

  Mr Hewitt had lost interest in this turn of the conversation. ‘It’s highly unlikely she ever visited his grave,’ he said.

  Mr Townsend shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘In that case.’

  Mr Hewitt got up and went over and scrutinized the photograph again. ‘I look a lot older now than I did when this picture was made,’ he said, ‘and there’s no denying that.’ He continued to scrutinize the photograph for a few more minutes, and then returned to his chair.

  ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘I had the idea death was for other people. It would happen to other people but not to me. That is, I couldn’t really visualize it happening to me. And if I did allow myself to think that it would happen to me, it was very easy to put the thought out of my mind – if it had to take place, it would take place so far in the distant future it wasn’t worth thinking about, let alone worrying about, and then the years flew by, and now it’s right on top of me. Any time now, as the fellow said, the train will pull into the station and the trip will be over.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Mr Townsend.

  ‘It seems to me it was only just a few short years ago I was a young man going back and forth to work,’ said Mr Hewitt, ‘and the years flew by, they really flew by, and now I’m an old man, and what I want to know is, what was the purpose of it? I know what’s going to take place one of these days, and I can visualize some of the details of it very clearly. There’ll be one twenty-five-dollar wreath, or floral design, or whatever they call them now, and there’ll be three or maybe four costing between twelve dollars and a half and fifteen dollars, and there’ll be maybe a dozen running from five to ten dollars, and I know more or less what the preacher will say, and then they’ll take me out to the Edgewater Cemetery and lay me beside my parents and my brothers and sisters and two of my grandparents and one of my great-grandparents, and I’ll lie there through all eternity while the Aluminum Company factory goes put-put-put.’

  Harry laughed, ‘You make the Aluminum Company factory sound like a motorboat,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t go to funerals any more,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘Funerals breed funerals.’

  ‘My grandfather used to like the word “mitigate,”’ Harry said. ‘He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. “You can’t talk your way out,” he’d say, “and you can’t buy your way out, and you can’t shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody – no, not one.”’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Mr Hewitt, ‘but what’s the purpose of it?’

  ‘You supported your wife, didn’t you?’ asked Harry. ‘You raised a family, didn’t you? That’s the purpose of it.’

  ‘That’s no purpose,’ said Mr Hewitt. ‘The same thing that’s going to happen to me is going to happen to them.’

  ‘The generations have to keep coming along,’ said Harry. ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘You’re put here,’ said Mr Hewitt, ‘and you’re allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit down and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there’s no purpose to it whatsoever. I try to keep from thinking such thoughts, but the last few years almost everything I see reminds me of death and dying, and time passing, and how fast it passes. I drove through Shadyside the other day, and I noticed that some of those factories down there are getting real smoky-looking and patched up and dilapidated, and the thought immediately occurred to me, “I’m older than most of those factories. I remember most of them when they were brand-new, and, good God, look at them now.” And to tell the truth, I’m pretty well patched up myself. I’ve maybe not had as many operations as some people, but I’ve had my share. Tonsils, adenoids, appendix, gall bladder, prostate. I wear false teeth, and I’ve worn them for years – “your dentures,” my dentist calls them; “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said to him, “I know what they are, and you know what they are.” And the last time I went to the eye doctor he prescribed two pairs of glasses, one for ordinary use and one for reading, and I can’t really see worth a damn out of either one of them. I’ve got varicose veins from walking around on wet cement floors in Fulton Market all those years, and I have to wear elastic stockings that are hell to get on and hell to get off and don’t do a damned bit of good, and I’ve got fallen arches and I have to wear some kind of patented arch supports that always make me feel as if I’m about to jump, and I’ve never known the time I didn’t have corns – corns and bunions and calluses.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Joe,’ said Harry. ‘Don’t you ever get tired talking about yourself?’

  A shocked look appeared on Mr Hewitt’s face. ‘I wasn’t talking about myself, Harry,’ he said, and his voice sounded surprised and hurt. ‘I was talking about the purpose of life.’

  Harry started to say something, and then got up and went out to the galley. It had become too warm, and I went over and opened the window. I put my head out of the window and listened for a few moments to the lapping of the water against the side of the barge. Two of Harry’s shad boats moored to stakes in the flats were slowly shifting their positions, and I could see that the tide was beginning to change. I heard the click of the refrigerator door in the galley, and then Harry returned to the bunkroom, bringing four cans of beer. He paused for a moment in front of Mr Hewitt. ‘I’m sorry I said that, Joe,’ he said. ‘I was just trying to get your mind on something else.’ Then he stood the cans on the bunkroom table and started opening them. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘the purpose of life is to stay alive and to keep on staying alive as long as you possibly can.’

  (1959)

  Joe Gould’s Secret

  JOE GOULD WAS an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years. He was a member of one of the oldest families in New England (‘The Goulds were the Goulds,’ he used to say, ‘when the Cabots and the Lowells were clamdiggers’), he was born and brought up in a town near Boston in which his father was a leading citizen, and he went to Harvard, as did his father and grandfather before him, but he claimed that until he arrived in New York City he had always felt out of place. ‘In my home town,’ he once wrote, ‘I never felt at home. I stuck out. Even in my own home, I never felt at home. In New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might’ve-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home.’

  Gould 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 hotels. 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. As a rule, he wore a garment continuously until someone gave him a new one, whereupon he threw the old one away. He had his hair cut infrequently (‘Every other Easter,’ he would say), and then
in a barber college on the Bowery. He was a chronic sufferer from the highly contagious kind of conjunctivitis that is known as pinkeye. His voice was distractingly nasal. On occasion, he stole. He usually stole books from bookstores and sold them to second-hand bookstores, but if he was sufficiently hard pressed he stole from friends. (One terribly cold night, he knocked on the door of the studio of a sculptor who was almost as poor as he was, and the sculptor let him spend the night rolled up like a mummy in layers of newspapers and sculpture shrouds on the floor of the studio, and next morning he got up early and stole some of the sculptor’s tools and pawned them.) In addition, he was nonsensical and bumptious and inquisitive and gossipy and mocking and sarcastic and scurrilous. All through the years, nevertheless, a long succession of men and women gave him old clothes and small sums of money and bought him meals and drinks and paid for his lodging and invited him to parties and to weekends in the country and helped him get such things as glasses and false teeth, or otherwise took an interest in him – some simply because they thought he was entertaining, some because they felt sorry for him, some because they regarded him sentimentally as a relic of the Village of their youth, some because they enjoyed looking down on him, some for reasons that they themselves probably weren’t at all sure of, and some because they believed that a book he had been working on for many years might possibly turn out to be a good book, even a great one, and wanted to encourage him to continue working on it.

  Gould called this book ‘An Oral History,’ sometimes adding ‘of Our Time.’ As he described it, the Oral History consisted of talk he had heard and had considered meaningful and had taken down, either verbatim or summarized – everything from a remark overheard in the street to the conversation of a roomful of people lasting for hours – and of essays commenting on this talk. Some talk has an obvious meaning and nothing more, he said, and some, often unbeknownst to the talker, has at least one other meaning and sometimes several other meanings lurking around inside its obvious meaning. The latter kind of talk, he said, was what he was collecting for the Oral History. He professed to believe that such talk might have great hidden historical significance. It might have portents in it, he said – portents of cataclysms, a kind of writing on the wall long before the kingdom falls – and he liked to quote a couplet from William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

  The harlot’s cry from street to street

  Shall weave Old England’s winding-sheet.

  Everything depended, he said, on how talk was interpreted, and not everybody was able to interpret it. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he once said to a detractor of the Oral History. ‘It’s only things I heard people say, but maybe I have a peculiar ability – maybe I can understand the significance of what people say, maybe I can read its inner meaning. You might listen to a conversation between two old men in a barroom or two old women on a park bench and think that it was the worst kind of bushwa, and I might listen to the same conversation and find deep historical meaning in it.’

  ‘In time to come,’ he said on another occasion, ‘people may read Gould’s Oral History to see what went wrong with us, the way we read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” to see what went wrong with the Romans.’

  He told people he met in Village joints that the Oral History was already millions upon millions of words long and beyond any doubt the lengthiest unpublished literary work in existence but that it was nowhere near finished. He said that he didn’t expect it to be published in his lifetime, publishers being what they were, as blind as bats, and he sometimes rummaged around in his pockets and brought out and read aloud a will he had made disposing of it. ‘As soon after my demise as is convenient for all concerned,’ he specified in the will, ‘my manuscript books shall be collected from the various and sundry places in which they are stored and put on the scales and weighed, and two-thirds of them by weight shall be given to the Harvard Library and the other third shall be given to the library of the Smithsonian Institution.’

  Gould almost always wrote in composition books – the kind that schoolchildren use, the kind that are ruled and spine-stitched and paper-bound and have the multiplication table printed on the back. Customarily, when he filled a book, he would leave it with the first person he met on his rounds whom he knew and trusted – the cashier of an eating place, the proprietor of a barroom, the clerk of a hotel or flophouse – and ask that it be put away and kept for him. Then, every few months, he would go from place to place and pick up all the books that had accumulated. He would say, if anyone became curious about this, that he was storing them in an old friend’s house or in an old friend’s apartment or in an old friend’s studio. He hardly ever identified any of these old friends by name, although sometimes he would describe one briefly and vaguely – ‘a classmate of mine who lives in Connecticut and has a big attic in his house,’ he would say, or ‘a woman I know who lives alone in a duplex apartment,’ or ‘a sculptor I know who has a studio in a loft building.’ In talking about the Oral History, he always emphasized its length and its bulk. He kept people up to date on its length. One evening in June, 1942, for example, he told an acquaintance that at the moment the Oral History was ‘approximately nine million two hundred and fifty-five thousand words long, or,’ he added, throwing his head back proudly, ‘about a dozen times as long as the Bible.’

  In 1952, Gould collapsed on the street and was taken to Columbus Hospital. Columbus transferred him to Bellevue, and Bellevue transferred him to the Pilgrim State Hospital, in West Brentwood, Long Island. In 1957, he died there, aged sixty-eight, of arteriosclerosis and senility. Directly after the funeral, friends of his in the Village began trying to find the manuscript of the Oral History. After several days, they turned up three things he had written – a poem, a fragment of an essay, and a begging letter. In the next month or so, they found a few more begging letters. From then on, they were unable to find anything at all. They sought out and questioned scores of people in whose keeping Gould might conceivably have left some of the composition books, and they visited all the places he had lived in or hung out in that they could remember or learn about, but without success. Not a single one of the composition books was found, or has ever been found.

  In 1942, for reasons that I will go into later, I became involved in Gould’s life, and I kept in touch with him during his last ten years in the city. I spent a good many hours during those years listening to him. I listened to him when he was sober and I listened to him when he was drunk. I listened to him when he was cast down and meek – when, as he used to say, he felt so low he had to reach up to touch bottom – and I listened to him when he was in moods of incoherent exaltation. I got so I could put two and two together and make at least a little sense out of what he was saying even when he was very drunk or very exalted or in both states at once, and gradually, without intending to, I learned some things about him that he may not have wanted me to know, or, on the other hand, since his mind was circuitous and he loved wheels within wheels, that he may very well have wanted me to know – I’ll never be sure. In any case, I am quite sure that I know why the manuscript of the Oral History has not been found.

  When Gould died, I made a resolution to keep this as well as some of the other things I had inadvertently learned about him to myself – to do otherwise, it seemed to me at the time, would be disloyal; let the dead past bury its dead – but since then I have come to the conclusion that my resolution was pointless and that I should tell what I know, and I am going to do so.

  Before I go any further, however, I feel compelled to explain how I came to this conclusion.

  A few months ago, while trying to make some room in my office, I got out a collection of papers relating to Gould that filled half a drawer in a filing cabinet: notes I had made of conversations with him, letters from him and letters from others concerning him, copies of little magazines containing essays and poems by him, newspaper clippings about him, drawings and photographs of him, and so on. I had lost a good deal of my interest in Gould long b
efore he reached Pilgrim State – as he grew older, his faults intensified, and even those who felt most kindly toward him and continued to see him got so they dreaded him – but as I went through the file folders, trying to decide what to save and what to throw out, my interest in him revived. I found twenty-nine letters, notes, and postal cards from him in the folders. I started out just glancing through them and ended up rereading them with care. One letter was of particular interest to me. It was dated February 12 or 17 or 19 (it was impossible to tell which), 1946; his handwriting had become trembly, and it always had been hard to read.

  ‘I ran into a young painter I know and his wife in the Minetta Tavern last night,’ he wrote, ‘and they told me they had recently gone to a party in the studio of a woman painter named Alice Neel, who is an old friend of mine, and that during the evening Alice showed them a portrait of me she did some years ago. I asked them what they thought of it. The young painter’s wife spoke first. “It’s one of the most shocking pictures I’ve ever seen,” she said. And he agreed with her. “You can say that again,” he said. This pleased me very much, especially the young man’s reaction, as he is a hot-shot abstractionist and way up front in the avant garde and isn’t usually impressed by a painting unless it is totally meaningless and was completed about half an hour ago. I posed for this painting in 1933, and that was thirteen years ago, and the fact that people still find it shocking speaks well for it. Speaks well for the possibility that it may have some of the one quality that all great paintings have in common, the power to last. I may have written to you about this painting before, or talked about it, but I am not sure. If so, bear with me; my memory is going. There are quite a few paintings in studios around town that are well known to people in the art world but can’t be exhibited in galleries or museums because they probably would be considered obscene and might get the gallery or museum in trouble, and this is one of them. Hundreds of people have seen it through the years, many of them painters who have expressed admiration for it, and I have a hunch that one of these days, the way people are growing accustomed to the so-called obscene, it will hang in the Whitney or the Metropolitan. Alice Neel comes from a small town near Philadelphia and went to the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia. She used to have a studio in the Village, but she moved uptown long ago. She is highly respected by many painters of her age and generation, although she is not too well known to the general public. She has work in important collections, but this may be her best work. Her best work, and it can’t be shown in public. A kind of underground masterpiece. I wish sometime you’d go and see it. I’d be interested to know what you think. She doesn’t show it to just anyone who asks, of course, but I will give you her telephone number and if you tell her I want you to see it I’m sure she will show it to you …’