Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  I stared at Gould, and Gould stared at me. His face was expressionless.

  ‘The woman who owns the duck-and-chicken farm doesn’t exist,’ I said. ‘And her brother who had the stroke doesn’t exist. And her niece doesn’t exist. And the Polish farmer and his wife who look after the ducks and chickens don’t exist. And the ducks and chickens don’t exist. And the cellar that the Oral History is stored in doesn’t exist. And the Oral History doesn’t exist.’

  Gould got up and went over to the window and stood there looking out, with his back to me.

  ‘It exists in your mind, I guess,’ I said, recovering a little from my surprise, ‘but you’ve always been too lazy to write it down. All that really exists is those so-called essay chapters. That’s all you’ve been doing all through the years – writing new versions of those chapters about the death of your father and the death of your mother and the dread tomato habit and the Indians out in North Dakota and maybe a dozen others or a couple of dozen others, and correcting them and revising them and tearing them up and starting all over again.’

  Gould turned and faced me and said something, but his voice was low and indistinct. If I heard him right – and I have often wondered if I did hear him right – he said, ‘It’s not a question of laziness.’ Then, evidently deciding not to say any more, he turned his back on me again.

  At that moment, one of the editors knocked on the door and came in with proofs of a story of mine. He said that some last-minute changes were having to be made in a story that had been scheduled to run in the next issue, and that because there might not be time enough to complete them, my story had been tentatively scheduled to run in its place, and that he would like to go over the proofs with me.

  ‘Does it have done to be done right now?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, as you might gather,’ he said, rather sharply, ‘we’re kind of in a hurry.’

  I saw that I couldn’t very well put this off, and I asked Gould if he would mind waiting in the reception room until I got through. He picked up his portfolio and went over and stood at the door. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I’ll wait. I think I’ll go on back downtown. The only reason I came up here today was to ask you for a contribution.’ I said that I would give him the contribution but that I wanted to ask him some questions about the Oral History first and that I hoped he would wait. He mumbled something and started down the hall toward the reception room.

  The proofs took around half an hour. The second I got through with them, I went out to the reception room. Gould wasn’t there. The receptionist said he had sat there for five minutes or so and had then left without saying a word. Well, anyway, I thought, I’ve got him off my back. God knows this wasn’t the way I intended to do it, but I’ve probably got him off my back for good.

  I returned to my office and sat down and propped my elbows on my desk and put my head in my hands. I have always deeply disliked seeing anyone shown up or found out or caught in a lie or caught red-handed doing anything, and now, with time to think things over, I began to feel ashamed of myself for the way I had lost my temper and pounced on Gould. My anger began to die down, and I began to feel depressed. I had been duped by Gould – I didn’t think there was much doubt about that – and so had countless others through the years. He had led me up the garden path, just as he had led countless others up the garden path. However, I had thought about the matter only a short while before I came to the conclusion that he hadn’t been talking about the Oral History all those years and making large statements about its length and its bulk and its importance to posterity and comparing it to such works as ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ only in order to dupe people like me but also in order to dupe himself. He must have found out long ago that he didn’t have the genius or the talent, or maybe the self-confidence or the industry or the determination, to bring off a work as huge and grand as he had envisioned, and fallen back on writing those so-called essay chapters. Writing them and rewriting them. And, either because he was too lazy or because he was too much of a perfectionist, he hadn’t been able to finish even them. Still, a large part of the time he very likely went around believing in some hazy, self-deceiving, self-protecting way that the Oral History did exist – oral chapters as well as essay chapters. The oral part of it might not exactly be down on paper, but he had it all in his head, and any day now he was going to start getting it down.

  It was easy for me to see how this could be, for it reminded me of a novel that I had once intended to write. I was twenty-four years old at the time and had just come under the spell of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’ My novel was to be ‘about’ New York City. It was also to be about a day and a night in the life of a young reporter in New York City. He is a Southerner, and a good deal of the time he is homesick for the South. He thinks of himself as an exile from the South. He had once been a believer, a believing Baptist, and is now an unbeliever. Nevertheless, he is still inclined to see things in religious terms, and he often sees the city as a kind of Hell, a Gehenna. He is in love with a Scandinavian girl he has met in the city, and she is so different from the girls he had known in the South that she seems mysterious to him, just as the city seems mysterious; the girl and the city are all mixed up in his mind. It is his day off. He has breakfast in a restaurant in Fulton Fish Market, and then starts poking around the parts of the city that he knows best, gradually going uptown. As he wanders, he encounters and reencounters men and women who seem to him to represent various aspects of the city. He goes up Fulton Street and walks among the gravestones in St Paul’s churchyard, and then goes to certain streets on the lower East Side, and then to certain streets in the Village, and then to the theatrical district, and then to Harlem. Late at night, on Lenox Avenue, he joins a little group of men and women, some white and some Negro, who have just come out of a night club and are standing in a circle around an old Negro street preacher. He had seen the old man earlier, preaching at a street corner in the theatrical district, but had not listened to him. Now he listens. The old man is worldly wise and uses up-to-date New York City slang and catch phrases, but he also uses a good many old-fashioned Southern expressions, the kind that are mostly used by country people, and the young reporter realizes that the old man is also a Southerner, and, like himself, a country Southerner. His sermon is apocalyptic. There are fearful warnings and prophecies in it, and there are phrases snatched from bloody old Baptist hymns, and there are many references to Biblical beasts and fruits and flowers – to the wild goats of the rocks and to the pomegranates in the Song of Solomon and to the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin. The old serpent is in it, and the Great Whore of Babylon, and the burning bush. Like the Baptist preachers the young reporter had listened to and struggled to understand in his childhood, the old man sees meanings behind meanings, or thinks he does, and tries his best to tell what things ‘stand for.’ ‘Pomegranates are about the size and shape of large oranges or small grapefruits, only their skins are red,’ he says, cupping his hands in the air and speaking with such exactitude that it is obvious he had had first-hand knowledge of pomegranates long ago in the South. ‘They’re filled with fat little seeds, and those fat little seeds are filled with juice as red as blood. When they get ripe, they’re so swollen with those juicy red seeds that they gap open and some of the seeds spill out. And now I’ll tell you what pomegranates stand for. They stand for the resurrection. The resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and your resurrection and my resurrection. Resurrection in particular and resurrection in general. All seeds stand for resurrection and all eggs stand for resurrection. The Easter egg stands for resurrection. So do the eggs in the English sparrow’s nest up under the eaves in the “L” station. So does the egg you have for breakfast. So does the caviar the rich people eat. So does shad roe.’ The young reporter intends to stay for only a few minutes, but he is held fast by the old man’s rhetoric. Even though he feels that he has heard it all before a hundred times, he is enthralled by
it. The old man reminds him of the Fundamentalist evangelists who were powerful in the South while he was growing up and who went from town to town holding revival meetings in big tents. He had hated and feared these evangelists – their reputations were based on the hideousness of their descriptions of Hell; the more hideous the description and the wilder the sermon, the better the evangelist was considered to be – but nevertheless they had left him with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the oracular and the apocalyptic. He finds himself drawing oblique conclusions from the old man’s statements in order to make them have some bearing on his own spiritual state. ‘All you have to do,’ the old man says, ‘is open your eyes and see the light, the blessed gospel light, and you can enter into a new time. You can enter into it and live in it and dwell in it and reside in it and have your being in it. You can live in the three times in one time. At one and the same time, believing in Him, you can live in the time gone by, you can live in the time to come, and you can live in the now, the here and now.’ As the young reporter listens, it dawns on him that it is not the South that he longs for but the past, the South’s past and his own past, neither of which, in the way that he has been driven by homesickness to think of them, ever really existed, and that it is time for him to move out of the time gone by and into the here and now – it is time for him to grow up. When the sermon is over, he goes back downtown feeling that the old man has set him free, and that he is now a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world.

  I had thought about this novel for over a year. Whenever I had nothing else to do, I would automatically start writing it in my mind. Sometimes, in the course of a subway ride, I would write three or four chapters. Almost every day, I would discard a few characters and invent a few new ones. But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it. Time passed, and I got caught up in other matters. Even so, for several years I frequently daydreamed about it, and in those daydreams I had finished writing it and it had been published and I could see it. I could see its title page. I could see its binding, which was green with gold lettering. Those recollections filled me with almost unbearable embarrassment, and I began to feel more and more sympathetic to Gould.

  Suppose he had written the Oral History, I reflected; it probably wouldn’t have been the great book he had gone up and down the highways and byways prophesying it would be at all – great books, even halfway great books, even good books, even halfway good books, being so exceedingly rare. It probably would have been, at best, only a curiosity. A few years after it came out, copies of it would have choked the ‘Curiosa’ shelves in every second-hand bookstore in the country. Anyway, I decided, if there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was books. When I thought of the cataracts of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that moment, only a very few of which would be worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading, I began to feel that it was admirable that he hadn’t written it. One less book to clutter up the world, one less book to take up space and catch dust and go unread from bookstores to homes to secondhand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes to still other second-hand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes ad infinitum.

  I suddenly felt a surge of genuine respect for Gould. He had declined to stay in Norwood and live out his life as Pee Wee Gould, the town fool. If he had to play the fool, he would do it on a larger stage, before a friendlier audience. He had come to Greenwich Village and had found a mask for himself, and he had put it on and kept it on. The Eccentric Author of a Great, Mysterious, Unpublished Book – that was his mask. And, hiding behind it, he had created a character a good deal more complicated, it seemed to me, than most of the characters created by the novelists and playwrights of his time. I thought of the variety of ways he had seen himself through the years and of the variety of ways others had seen him. There was the way the principal of the school in Norwood had seen him – a disgusting little bastard. There was the way Ezra Pound had seen him – a native hickory. There was the way the know-it-all Village radical had seen him – a reactionary parasite. There were a great many of these aspects, and I began to go over them in my mind. He was the catarrhal child, he was the son who knows that he has disappointed his father, he was the runt, the shrimp, the peanut, the half-pint, the tadpole, he was Joe Gould the poet, he was Joe Gould the historian, he was Joe Gould the wild Chippewa Indian dancer, he was Joe Gould the greatest authority in the world on the language of the sea gull, he was the banished man, he was the perfect example of the solitary nocturnal wanderer, he was the little rat, he was the one and only member of the Joe Gould Party, he was the house bohemian of the Minetta Tavern, he was the Professor, he was the Sea Gull, he was Professor Sea Gull, he was the Mongoose, he was Professor Mongoose, he was the Bellevue Boy.

  I was still adding to the list when the receptionist cracked my door open and put her head in. ‘Mr Gould has just come back,’ she said. ‘He was down at the lunch counter in the lobby all this time, having coffee.’

  ‘Bring him right in,’ I said. Then, for some reason – perhaps because of my new-found respect for Gould – I changed my mind. ‘No, don’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll go out myself and bring him in.’

  I stood up, and as I did so, a thought entered my mind that caused me to sit back down. If I asked Gould the questions I had planned to ask him, I suddenly realized, and if he came right out and admitted that the Oral History did not exist – that it was indeed a mare’s-nest – I might be put in the position of having to do something about it. I might very well be forced to unmask him. I found this thought painful. The Oral History was his life preserver, his only way of keeping afloat, and I didn’t want to see him drown. I didn’t want to blow the whistle on him. I didn’t want to tear up his meal ticket, so to speak, or break his rice bowl. I didn’t want to have to take any kind of stand on the matter at all. He wasn’t harming anybody. He lived off his friends, it was true, but only off crumbs from their tables. Given a long life, he might yet write the Oral History. It would be better for me to leave things the way they were – up in the air. This was probably cowardly, but if it was, so it was. I was thankful now that when I pounced on him he hadn’t admitted anything – he hadn’t said yea, he hadn’t said nay, he had said merely that it wasn’t a question of laziness. And there was no law that said I had to ask him questions and try to trip him up and pin him down and worm the pure truth out of him. Suppose he chose to deny everything, and suppose he turned on me and denounced me, leaving it up to me to make the next move. I might be pretty close to certain of this, that, and the other, but I might have a hell of a time proving it. While I was trying to make up my mind what to do, Gould walked in, not bothering to knock.

  ‘Are you going to give me the contribution?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

  I gave him the money he wanted. He didn’t thank me but said what he usually said when someone gave him a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund – ‘This will come in handy.’ Then he went over and sat in the swivel chair and put his portfolio on the floor at his feet. ‘You said you had some questions you wanted to ask me,’ he said.

  ‘I did have,’ I said, ‘but I don’t now. There were some things I thought I wanted to know, but I guess I really don’t. Let’s just forget it.’

  A look of relief appeared on Gould’s face. Then, to my surprise, seeming to sense that I didn’t intend to go one bit further into the matter, he looked disappointed. I could see from his expression that he wanted very much to confide in me – it was that half-noble, half-fatuous expression that people put on when they have decided to bare their souls – and once again my attitude toward him changed. I became disgusted with him. I was doing my best to keep from unmasking him, and here he was doing his best to unmask himself. �
�Oh, for God’s sake,’ I felt like saying to him. ‘Don’t lose your nerve now and start confessing and confiding. If you’ve pretended this long, the only decent thing you can do is to keep right on pretending as long as you live, no matter what happens.’ Instead, I said, ‘Please forgive me, but you really must excuse me now. It’s getting late and I have some things I have to do.’

  This gave him the right to be huffy. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m ready to go. I’ve been ready to go for what seems like hours, but you held me up. After all, I’ve got things to do myself.’

  He picked up his portfolio and walked out without saying good-bye.

  For quite a while after that, Gould distrusted me. He continued to come to see me, but nowhere near as often and never just to talk. He came only when he wanted a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund, and only, I suspect, when he was stony broke and couldn’t run down any of his old reliables. He walked in and asked for what he wanted in as few words as possible and got it or some part of it and then stood around awkwardly for a few minutes and then hurried off. Although he continued to use The New Yorker as his mail address, he stopped asking for his letters the moment he came in, and, to preserve his dignity, waited for me to give them to him. Hoping to make things easier for him, I began forwarding letters to him at the Minetta. However, as an excuse to see how he was getting along, I would occasionally let a few accumulate and then go by the Minetta and give them to him. The first few times I did this, I behaved as if nothing had happened, and sat down at his table as I always had, no matter whether he was alone or others were there, but I soon found that if others were there my presence made him ill at ease. If someone asked him something about the Oral History, or even brought it into the conversation, he would glance at me uneasily and try to change the subject. I think he was afraid that at any moment I might stand up and announce that there was no such thing as the Oral History, that it was all imagination and lies. I made him self-conscious; I got in his way; I cramped his style. From then on, I never sat down with him unless he was alone. If others sat down, I would look at my watch, and pretend to be surprised at how late it was, and leave. Then, one evening, Gould suddenly became his old self again. I was sitting at his table when a couple of tourists, a man and his wife, came over from the bar and asked him a question about the Oral History. Without glancing at me and without any hesitation, he started describing the Oral History for them, and in no time at all was comparing himself to Gibbon – speaking of what he called ‘the fortunate immediacy’ of his position in relation to New York City as contrasted with what he called ‘the unfortunate remoteness’ of Gibbon’s position in relation to the Roman Empire. I was greatly relieved to hear him talking like this, not only because I could see that he had got over his distrust of me but also because I could see that he had got his mask firmly back in place. Furthermore, I couldn’t help admiring his spirit. He was like some down-on-his-luck but still buoyant old confidence man. He put his heart into his act. Right before my eyes, he changed from a bummy-looking little red-eyed wreck of a barfly into an illustrious historian. And the most he could hope to get out of the tourists was a few drinks and a dollar or two.