Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘Joe comes up here every few days and hits me for a handout, or what he calls a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund, and if he happens to have a finished composition book with him he goes over and tosses it in the closet,’ Siskind told me as I looked through the books. ‘He’s been doing that for quite a long time now. He leaves the books in the closet until anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen or so have accumulated, and then, one day, he gathers them up and puts them in his portfolio and takes them away. By and by, he starts a new accumulation. He used to ask me to read them, and I would, but I don’t anymore. He writes on the same subjects over and over again, and I’m afraid I’ve lost interest in the death of his father and the death of his mother and the dread tomato habit and the Indians out in North Dakota and all that. He seems to be a perfectionist; he seems to be determined to keep on writing new versions of each of his subjects until he gets one that is absolutely right. One cold day last winter, he came up here and sat by the radiator and started correcting and revising one of his books. He went through it once, changing a word here and a word there and scratching out sentences and writing new ones in. Then he went through it again and changed some more words and scratched out some more sentences. Then he went through it again. Then he tore the whole thing up and threw it in the wastebasket. “Jesus, Joe!” I said. “You certainly improved that one. You improved it right out of existence.”’

  ‘When he gathers up his composition books and puts them in his portfolio, where does he take them?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s always been kind of vague and remote about that.’ Siskind said. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve never really understood why he takes them away in the first place. I’ve often told him that he can leave them here as long as he likes, and that he can have the whole closet to himself if he wants it. He’s such a perfectionist I wouldn’t be surprised if he tears them up and throws them in the first trash basket he comes to. Then he starts all over again. Starts fresh. Oh, I guess he has some secret place or other where he takes them and stores them away.’

  The next night, I went into Goody’s again. Gould was sitting at a table across from the bar. There was an empty beer glass in front of him. He was wearing the same dirty seersucker suit that he had been wearing at our first meeting, only now it was much dirtier and had a bad rip at the shoulder. It looked as if somewhere along the line someone had given his left sleeve an angry jerk, ripping it half off at the shoulder. I went over and sat down and returned the composition books and the little magazines that I had got from him, and thanked him for letting me read them.

  ‘You were disappointed,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said.

  ‘Yes you were,’ he said. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I was. I understood from what you told me that the Oral History was mostly talk, but there wasn’t any talk in the chapters you lent me or in the ones I saw at Siskind’s.’

  Gould threw up his hands. ‘Naturally there wasn’t.’ he said. ‘There are two kinds of chapters in the Oral History – essay chapters and oral chapters. As it happens, all those you read were essay chapters.’

  This remark instantly cleared up my puzzlement about the Oral History; it seemed to explain everything. I took Gould’s empty glass over to the bar and got him a beer. Then, sitting down, I told him I would like very much to read some of the oral chapters.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ Gould said. ‘Since we’ve gone this far, there’s something about the Oral History I’ll have to tell you – something about its present whereabouts. I was hoping I could keep it quiet, but I can see now I would’ve had to let people know about it sooner or later anyhow.’ He frowned and cocked his eyes at the ceiling and stroked his bearded chin and seemed to be casting around in his mind for the simplest way to tell about something that was extraordinarily involved. ‘Oh, well, to go back a little,’ he said, ‘a woman I know who used to work in the main branch of the Public Library retired several years ago and bought a duck-and-chicken farm on Long Island, and last Thanksgiving she invited me out there. I’m not going to tell you her name or the exact location of her farm, so don’t ask me any questions. It’s an isolated place, out on a dirt road. Huntington is the nearest railroad station, but it’s a considerable distance from Huntington. There are two houses on the place. One is a frame house, and a Polish farmer and his wife live in it and look after the ducks and chickens. The other is an old stone house, and my friend and a niece of hers live in it. My friend showed me over the house, including the cellar. The cellar was snug and dry and whitewashed, and it was partitioned into one large room and three small rooms. The small rooms were built to be used for storage, and had good strong doors. And the doors had locks on them – set-in locks, not padlocks. Now, early in January of this year, a month and a half or so after I was out there, a painter friend of mine told me that an art dealer had told him that the Metropolitan Museum was moving a good many of its most precious paintings to a bombproof location outside the city for the duration of the war, and I decided I’d better get busy and do something about the Oral History. I immediately thought of those rooms in my friend’s cellar, and it seemed to me that one of them would be an ideal place for the Oral History. So I wrote to my friend and inquired into the possibility. She didn’t think much of the idea at first – didn’t want the responsibility – but I wrote to her again and said that a good librarian such as herself ought to be able to understand the importance to posterity of what I was asking her to do, and I promised her that generations yet unborn would be grateful to her and rise up and call her blessed, and finally she wrote and said for me to get the Oral History together and wrap it in two layers of oilcloth and tie some ropes around it – in other words, bale it up. I did so, and the following Sunday she and her niece drove in and picked it up and took it out and deposited it in her cellar. And that’s where it is. And if you’ll pay my train fare out to Huntington and back and my taxicab fare from the station out to her place and back and give me money enough to buy her a box of candy for a present, I’ll take a run out there early next week and open the bale and select a couple of dozen representative chapters – oral ones, that is – and bring them in.’

  We figured out how much money he would need for the trip, and I gave it to him.

  He took his time about making the trip. I didn’t see him again until the following Thursday, when he came to my office and said that he had gone out to his friend’s farm the day before but hadn’t been able to get at the Oral History. ‘My friend wasn’t home,’ he said. ‘According to her niece, she’s been away a couple of months. She’s down in Florida. She has a brother who’s a retired high-school English teacher, a bachelor, and he was spending the winter in St Augustine, and sometime around the middle of April he had a stroke. She’s very attached to him, and she went down there to look after him. And just before she left, the niece said, she locked up half the place, including the three rooms in the cellar, and took the keys with her. This upset me, and I begged the niece to write her at once and ask her to send back the key to the room the Oral History is in. ‘Write her yourself,’ the niece said. ‘It’s none of my business.’ Then I decided it might be a lot wiser to telephone her, so the niece gave me the number of the place where she’s staying, and I’d appreciate it very much if you’d let me have money enough to make the call.’

  I said I could arrange for him to make the call right then, through the office switchboard.

  ‘That would be fine,’ he said, ‘except I’m not supposed to call her during the day. The niece told me I should call her at night, because she’s at the hospital during the day. If you’ll just let me have the money, I’ll call her tonight from the pay phone in Goody’s.’

  Next morning, shortly after I got to the office, Gould telephoned and said that after calling the woman person-to-person several times he had reached her around midnight. ‘She must be all tired out and nervous,’ he said, ‘because she scolded me severely. She reminded me that when she agreed to s
tore the Oral History she had made it clear that I couldn’t be taking it out and putting it back in but that I’d have to let it stay put for the duration of the war. “You wanted it in a safe place,” she said, “and it’s in a safe place, so just relax.” I asked her when she expected to return, but I didn’t get much satisfaction out of her. “It might be weeks,” she said, “and it might be months, and it might be years. And in the meantime,” she said, “quit bothering me.” I tried to reason with her, and she hung up on me.’

  ‘Would it do any good if I called her?’ I asked.

  ‘As soon as she found out what you were calling about,’ Gould said, ‘she’d hang up on you.’

  This put me in a predicament. Ever since my first interview with Gould, I had been tracking down friends and enemies of his and talking with them about him. Most of these people had known Gould for a long time and either were regular contributors to the Joe Gould Fund or had been in the past. In fact, several of them – E. E. Cummings, the poet; Slater Brown, the novelist; M. R. Werner, the biographer; Orrick Johns, the poet; Kenneth Fearing, the poet and novelist; Malcolm Cowley, the critic; Barney Gallant, the proprietor of Barney Gallant’s, a Village night club; and Max Gordon, the proprietor of the Village Vanguard, another Village night club – had been giving him a dime or a quarter or a half dollar or a dollar or a couple of dollars once or twice a week for over twenty years. Each person I saw had suggested others to see, and I had looked up around fifteen people and spoken on the telephone with around fifteen others. All of them had been willing, or more than willing, to tell what they knew about Gould, and I had got a great many anecdotes and a great deal of biographical information about him from them. I had read the clippings concerning him in the morgues of three newspapers. (The oldest clipping I found was dated March 2, 1934, and was from the Herald Tribune. In it, Gould told the reporter that the Oral History was 7,300,000 words long. In another clipping from the Herald Tribune, dated April 10, 1937, he said that the Oral History was now 8,800,000 words long. In one from PM, dated August 24, 1941, Gould was called ‘an author who has written a book taller than himself.’ ‘The stack of manuscripts comprising the Oral History has passed 7 feet,’ PM said. ‘Gould is 5 feet 4.’) At the suggestion of one of his classmates, I had gone to the library of the Harvard Club and hunted through the reports of his class – the class of 1911 – for references to him. I had spent a day in the genealogy room in the Public Library looking through New England genealogies and town and county histories for information about his ancestors and family connections, and had been able to verify most of the statements he had made about them. Now all I needed was one more thing, a look at the oral part of the Oral History, but that seemed to me to be essential. As far as I was concerned, the Oral History was Gould’s reason for being, and if I couldn’t quote from it, or even describe it first hand, I didn’t see how I could write a Profile of him. I could postpone further work on the Profile until the woman returned from Florida and let Gould into her cellar, but I knew from experience that postponing a project of this nature usually meant the end of it; I knew that my interest in it would fade as soon as I got involved in other matters, and that before long simply having it hanging over me would very likely cause me to turn against it. Furthermore, I was growing leery of Gould; I had begun to feel that, whatever the reason, he really didn’t want me to see the oral part of the Oral History, and that when the woman returned, some brand-new difficulty might very well present itself. I decided on the spur of the moment that the best thing to do was to abandon the project right then and there and go on as quickly as possible to something else.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Gould,’ I said, ‘but I think we’d better just drop the whole thing.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Gould said. His voice sounded alarmed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I have an abnormal memory. In fact, people have often told me that I probably have what the psychologists call total recall. I’ve lost chapters of the Oral History several times and reconstructed them entirely from memory. Once, I lost one and reconstructed it and then found the one I had lost, and a good many pages in the two of them matched almost word for word. If you’ll meet me in Goody’s tonight, I’ll recite some chapters for you. I’ll recite dozens of chapters. If you’ve got the patience to listen, I’ll recite hundreds. You’ll get as good an idea of the oral part of the Oral History that way as you would by reading it. Considering my handwriting, you may even get a better idea.’

  That night, around eight, Gould and I sat down at a table in a quiet corner in the back of Goody’s. First, he drank two double Martinis, doing so, he said, for a particular purpose. ‘I have found,’ he said, ‘that gin primes the pump of memory.’ Then he began telling the life story of a man he said he used to run into in flophouses who was a kind of religious fanatic and was called the Deacon, telling it in the first person, just as the Deacon had told it to him. The Deacon was a gloomy periodical drinker. He was a backslídden member of some schismatic Lutheran sect, he was under the impression that he had lost his soul, he believed that he had discovered hints in the Bible concerning the exact date – year, month, day, and time of day – of the end of the world, and he often saw things at night. One summer night, for example, while he was sitting in a doorway on Great Jones Street, near the Bowery, he smelled sulphur and looked up and saw the Devil walk past and felt the heat of Hell emanating from him. Later the same night, he saw two mermaids in the East River. They were off Pier 26, at the foot of Catharine Street, frolicking in the moonlight. ‘They weren’t exactly half women, half fishes,’ he told Gould. ‘They were more like half women, half snakes. When they saw me sitting on the pier looking at them, they held out their arms and wriggled and made certain other motions trying to tempt me to come in with them, and if I had done so they would’ve wrapped themselves around me and dragged me to the bottom.’

  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 qu
oting 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.’