Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  The day that I received this letter, I remembered, I had tried several times to call Miss Neel, but her telephone hadn’t answered, and I had filed the letter away and Gould had never brought the matter up again and I had forgotten all about it. This day, on an impulse, I called Miss Neel and got her, and she said that of course I could see the Gould portrait, and gave me the address of her studio. The address turned out to be a tenement in a Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhood on the upper East Side, and Miss Neel turned out to be a stately, soft-spoken, good-looking blond woman in her middle fifties. Her studio was a floor-through flat on the third floor of the tenement. Against a wall in one room was a two-tiered rack filled with paintings resting on their sides. The Gould portrait, she said, was on the top tier. She had to stand on a chair and take out several other paintings in order to get at it. As she took them out, she held them up for me to see, and commented on them, and her comments were so offhand they sounded cryptic. One painting showed an elderly man lying in a coffin, ‘My father,’ she said. ‘Head clerk in the per-diem department.’ ‘Excuse me,’ I said, wondering what a per-diem department was but not really wanting to know, ‘the per-diem department of what?’ ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia.’ Another was a painting of a young Puerto Rican man sitting up in a hospital bed and staring wide-eyed into the distance. ‘T.b.,’ she said. ‘Dying, but he didn’t. Recovered and became a codeine addict.’ Another was a painting of a woman in childbirth. Then came a painting of a small, bearded, bony, gawky, round-shouldered man who was strip stark naked except for his glasses, and this was the portrait of Gould. It was a fairly large painting, and Gould seemed almost life-size in it. The background was vague; he appeared to be sitting on a wooden bench in a steam bath, waiting for the steam to come on. His bony hands were resting on his bony knees, and his ribs showed plainly. He had one set of male sexual organs in the proper place, another set was growing from where his navel should have been, and still another set was growing from the wooden bench. Anatomically, the painting was fanciful and grotesque but not particularly shocking; except for the plethora of sexual organs, it was a strict and sober study of an undernourished middle-aged man. It was the expression on Gould’s face that was shocking. Occasionally, in one of his Village hangouts or at a party, Gould would become so full of himself that he would abruptly get to his feet and rush about the room, bowing to women of all ages and sizes and degrees of approachability, and begging them to dance with him, and sometimes attempting to embrace and kiss them. After a while, rebuffed on all sides, he would get tired of this. Then he would imitate the flight of a sea gull. He would hop and skip and leap and lurch about, flapping his arms up and down and cawing like a sea gull as he did so. ‘Scree-eek!’ he would cry out. ‘I’m a sea gull.’ He would keep on doing this until people stopped looking at him and resumed their conversations. Then, to regain their attention, he would take off his jacket and shirt and throw them aside and do a noisy, hand-clapping, breast-beating, foot-stamping dance. ‘Quiet!’ he would cry out. ‘I’m doing a dance. It’s a sacred dance. It’s an Indian dance. It’s the full-moon dance of the Chippewas.’ His eyes would glitter, his lower jaw would hang loose like a dog’s in midsummer and he would pant like a dog, and on his face would come a leering, gleeful, mawkishly abandoned expression, half satanic and half silly. Miss Neel had caught this expression. ‘Joe Gould was very proud of this picture and used to come and sit and look at it,’ Miss Neel said. She studied Gould’s face with affection and amusement and also with what seemed to me to be a certain uneasiness. ‘I call it “Joe Gould,”’ she continued, ‘but I probably should call it “A Portrait of an Exhibitionist.”’ A few moments later, she added, ‘I don’t mean to say that Joe was an exhibitionist. I’m sure he wasn’t – technically. Still, to be perfectly honest, years ago, watching him at parties, I used to have a feeling that there was an old exhibitionist shut up inside him and trying to get out, like a spider shut up in a bottle. Deep down inside him. A frightful old exhibitionist – the kind you see late at night in the subway. And he didn’t necessarily know it. That’s why I painted him this way.’ I suddenly realized that in my mind I had replaced the real Joe Gould – or at least the Joe Gould I had known – with a cleaned-up Joe Gould, an after-death Joe Gould. By forgetting the discreditable or by slowly transforming the discreditable into the creditable, as one tends to do in thinking about the dead, I had, so to speak, respectabilized him. Now, looking at the shameless face in the portrait, I got him back into proportion, and I concluded that if it was possible for the real Joe Gould to have any feeling about the matter one way or the other he wouldn’t be in the least displeased if I told anything at all about him that I happened to know. Quite the contrary.

  I first saw Gould in the winter of 1932. At that time, I was a newspaper reporter, working mostly on crime news. Every now and then, I covered a story in Women’s Court, which in those days was in Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, in Greenwich Village. In the block below the courthouse there was a Greek restaurant, named the Athens, that was a hangout for people who worked in the court or often had business in it. They usually sat at a long table up front, across from the cashier’s desk, and Harry Panagakos, the proprietor, sometimes came over and sat with them. One afternoon, during a court recess, I was sitting at this table drinking coffee with Panagakos and a probation officer and a bail bondsman and a couple of Vice Squad detectives when a curious little man came in. He was around five feet four or five, and quite thin; he could hardly have weighed more than ninety pounds. He was bareheaded, and he carried his head cocked on one side, like an English sparrow. His hair was long, and he had a bushy beard. There were streaks of dirt on his forehead, obviously from rubbing it with dirty fingers. He was wearing an overcoat that was several sizes too large for him; it reached almost to the floor. He held his hands clasped together for warmth – it was a bitter-cold day – and the sleeves of the overcoat came down over them, forming a sort of muff. Despite his beard, the man, in the oversized overcoat, bareheaded and dirty-faced, had something childlike and lost about him: a child who had been up in the attic with other children trying on grownups’ clothes and had become tired of the game and wandered off. He stood still for a few moments, getting his bearings, and then he came over to Panagakos and said, ‘Can I have something to eat now, Harry? I can’t wait until tonight.’ At first Panagakos seemed annoyed, but then he shrugged his shoulders and told the man to go on back and sit down and he would step into the kitchen in a few minutes and ask the chef to fix him something. Looking greatly relieved, the man walked hurriedly up the aisle between two rows of tables. To be precise, he scurried up the aisle. ‘Who in God’s holy name is that?’ asked one of the detectives. Panagakos said that the man was one of the Village bohemians. He said that the bohemians were starving to death – in New York City, the winter of 1932 was the worst winter of the depression – and that he had got in the habit of feeding some of them. He said that the waiters set aside steaks and chops that people hadn’t finished eating, and other pieces of food left on plates, and wrapped them in wax paper and put them in paper bags and saved them for the bohemians. Panagakos said that all he asked was that they wait until just before closing time, at midnight, to come in and collect the food, so the sight of them trooping in and out wouldn’t get on the nerves of the paying customers. He said that he was going to give this one some soup and a sandwich but that he’d have to warn him not to come in early again. The detective asked if the man was a poet or a painter. ‘I don’t know what you’d call him,’ Panagakos said. ‘His name is Joe Gould, and he’s supposed to be writing the longest book in the history of the world.’

  Toward the end of the thirties, I quit my newspaper job and went to work for The New Yorker. Around the same time, I moved to the Village, and I began to see Gould frequently. I would catch glimpses of him going into or coming out of one of the barrooms on lower Sixth Avenue – the Jericho Tavern or the Vil
lage Square Bar & Grill or the Belmar or Goody’s or the Rochambeau. I would see him sitting scribbling at a table in the Jackson Square branch of the Public Library, or I would see him filling his fountain pen in the main Village post office – the one on Tenth Street – or I would see him sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square. I worked a good deal at night at that time, and now and then, on my way home, around two or three in the morning, I would see him on Sixth Avenue or on a side street, hunched over and walking along slowly and appearing to be headed nowhere in particular, almost always alone, almost always carrying a bulging brown pasteboard portfolio, sometimes mumbling to himself. In my eyes, he was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man. I never saw him without thinking of the Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman, or of a silent old man called Swamp Jackson who lived alone in a shack on the edge of a swamp near the small farming town in the South that I come from and wandered widely on foot on the back roads of the countryside at night, or of one of those men I used to puzzle over when I read the Bible as a child, who, for transgressions that seemed mysterious to me, had been ‘cast out.’

  One morning in the summer of 1942, sitting in my office at The New Yorker, I thought of Gould – I had seen him on the street the night before – and it occurred to me that he might be a good subject for a Profile. According to some notes I made at the time – I made notes on practically everything I had to do with Gould, and I found these in the file drawer with the rest of the Gould memorabilia – it was the morning of June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. I happened to be free to start on something new, so I went in and spoke to one of the editors about the idea. I remember telling the editor that I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his Oral History, and not his bohemianism; in my time, I had interviewed a number of Greenwich Village bohemians and they had seemed to me to be surprisingly tiresome. The editor said to go ahead and try it.

  I was afraid that I might have trouble persuading Gould to talk about himself – I really knew next to nothing about him, and had got the impression that he was austere and aloof – and I decided that I had better talk with some people who knew him, or were acquainted with him, at least, and see if I could find out the best way to approach him. I left the office around eleven and went down to the Village and began going into places along Sixth Avenue and bringing up Gould’s name and getting into conversations about him with bartenders and waiters and with old-time Villagers they pointed out for me among their customers. In the middle of the afternoon, I telephoned the switchboard operator at the office and asked if there were any messages for me, as I customarily did when I was out, and she immediately switched me to the receptionist, who said that a man had been sitting in the reception room for an hour or so waiting for me to return. ‘I’ll put him on the phone,’ she said. ‘Hello, this is Joe Gould,’ the man said. ‘I heard that you wanted to talk to me, so I dropped in, but the thing is, I’m supposed to go to the clinic at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and pick up a prescription for some eye trouble I’ve been having, and if it’s one kind of prescription it won’t cost anything but if it’s another kind it may cost around two dollars, and I’ve just discovered that I don’t have any money with me, and it’s getting late, and I wonder if you’d ask your receptionist to lend me two dollars and you can pay her back when you come in and we can meet any time you say and have a talk and I’ll pay you back then.’ The receptionist broke in and said that she would lend him the money, and then Gould came back on the phone and we agreed to meet at nine-thirty the next morning in a diner on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, called the Jefferson. He suggested both the time and the place.

  When I got back to the office, I gave the receptionist her two dollars. ‘He was a terribly dirty little man, and terribly nosy,’ she said, ‘and I was glad to get him out of here.’ ‘What was he nosy about?’ I asked. ‘Well, for one thing,’ she said, ‘he wanted to know how much I make. Also,’ she continued, handing me a folded slip of paper, ‘he gave me this note as he was leaving, and told me not to read it until he got on the elevator.’ ‘You have beautiful shoulders, my dear,’ the note said, ‘and I should like to kiss them.’ ‘He also left a note for you,’ she said, handing me another folded slip of paper. ‘On second thought,’ this note said, ‘nine-thirty is a little early for me. Let us make it eleven.’

  The Jefferson – it is gone now – was one of those big, roomy, jukeboxy diners. It was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, at the conjunction of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, Village Square, and Eighth Street, which is the heart and hub of the Village. It stayed open all day and all night, and it was a popular meeting place. It had a long counter with a row of wobbly-seated stools, and it had a row of booths. When I entered it, at eleven, Gould was sitting on the first counter stool, facing the door and holding his greasy old pasteboard portfolio on his lap, and he looked the worst I had ever seen him. He was wearing a limp, dirty seersucker suit, a dirty Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and dirty sneakers. His face was greenish gray, and the right side of his mouth twitched involuntarily. His eyes were bloodshot. He was bald on top, but he had hair sticking out in every possible direction from the back and sides of his head. His beard was unkempt, and around his mouth cigarette smoke had stained it yellow. He had on a pair of glasses that were loose and lopsided, and they had slipped down near the end of his nose. As I came in, he lifted his head a little and looked at me, and his face was alert and on guard and yet so tired and so detached and so remotely reflective that it was almost impassive. Looking straight at me, he looked straight through me. I have seen the same deceptively blank expression on the faces of old freaks sitting on platforms in freak shows and on the faces of old apes in zoos on Sunday afternoons.

  I went over and introduced myself to Gould, and he instantly drew himself up. ‘I understand you want to write something about me,’ he said, in a chipper, nasal voice, ‘and I greet you at the beginning of a great endeavor.’ Then, having said this, he seemed to falter and to lose confidence in himself. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get home. That is, I didn’t get to the flophouse I’ve been staying in lately. I slept on the porch at St Joseph’s R.C. until they opened the doors for the first Mass, and then I went in and sat in a pew until a few minutes ago.’ St Joseph’s, at Sixth Avenue and Washington Place, is the principal Roman Catholic church in the Village and one of the oldest churches in the city; it has two large, freestanding columns on its porch, behind which, shielded from the street, generations of unfortunates have slept. ‘I died and was buried and went to Hell two or three times this morning, sitting in that pew,’ Gould continued. ‘To be frank, I have a hangover and I’m broke and I’m terribly hungry, and I’d appreciate it very much if you’d buy me some breakfast.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Fried eggs on toast!’ he called out commandingly to the counterman. ‘And let me have some coffee right away and some more with the eggs. Black coffee. And make sure it’s hot.’ He slid off the stool. ‘If you’re having something,’ he said to me, ‘call out your order, and let’s sit in a booth. The waitress will bring it over.’

  We took a booth, and the waitress brought Gould’s coffee. It was in a thick white mug, diner style, and it was so hot it was steaming. Even so, tipping the mug slightly toward him without taking it off the table, he bent down and immediately began drinking it with little, cautious, quick, birdlike sips and gulps interspersed with little whimpering sounds indicating pleasure and relief, and almost at once color returned to his face and his eyes became brighter and his twitch disappeared. I had never before seen anyone react so quickly and so noticeably to coffee; brandy probably wouldn
’t have done any more for him, or cocaine, or an oxygen tent, or a blood transfusion. He drank the whole mug in this fashion, and then sat back and held his head on one side and looked me over.

  ‘I suppose you’re puzzled about me,’ he said. His tone of voice was condescending; he had got some of his confidence back. ‘If so,’ he continued, ‘the feeling is mutual, for I’m puzzled about myself, and have been since childhood. I seem to be a changeling or a throwback or a mutation of some sort in a highly respectable old New England family. Let me give you a few biographical facts. My full name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, and I was named for my grandfather, who was a doctor. During the Civil War, he was surgeon of the Fourth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, and later on he was a prominent obstetrician in Boston and taught in the Harvard Medical School. The Goulds, or my branch of them, have been in New England since the sixteen-thirties and have fought in every war in the history of the country, including King Philip’s War and the Pequot War. We’re related to many of the other early New England families, such as the Lawrences and the Clarkes and the Storers. My grandmother on my father’s side was a direct descendant of John Lawrence, who arrived from England on the Arbella in 1630 and was the first Lawrence in this country, and she could trace her ancestry back to a knight named Robert Lawrence who lived in the twelfth century. She used to say that the Lawrence line, or this particular Lawrence line, was not only one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in New England but also one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in England itself, and that we should never forget it.’