The end of oral history
Anthony Rouse
JOE GOULD'S SECRET by Joseph Mitchell Cape, £9.99, pp. 186 This very good, sad and funny book is composed of two profiles of a quite dread- ful Greenwich village bum, Joe Gould, which appeared in the New Yorker. The first profile, 'Professor Seagull', was pub- lished in 1942. The second profile, 'Joe Gould's Secret', was written in 1964, seven years after Gould died. This contains an account of Gould's life after the first pro- file appeared and also reveals Gould's secret.
Gbuld came from a well-known Massachusetts family, went to Harvard and was expected to follow his father into medicine. Instead he decided to devote his energies to the cause of freeing Albania from the Turks. Then he got involved in eugenics and measured the heads of 1,000 Chippewas and 500 Mandans on Indian reservations in North Dakota. In 1916, he got a lowly newspaper job in New York city.
Finally, he found his true vocation as a layabout in Greenwich village — except that he appeared to be a layabout with a purpose. He would write down the conver- sations of the men and women he met on his wanderings:
The oral history [Gould said] has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation.
Mitchell met Gould in 1932, when Mitchell was a young reporter and, being a man of apparently limitless tolerance, kept in touch. By the 1940s, Gould was telling people that the oral history now amounted to more than nine million words filling 270 school composition books.
`I look upon Gould as a sort of Samuel Pepys of the Bowery,' a contemporary, the poet and critic Horace Gregory, told Mitchell. Gould was known in Greenwich village as Professor Seagull because of his habit at parties of imitating the bird, skip- ping about, cawing and flapping his arms. Alternatively or in addition, Gould would do what he said was a Chippewa Indian dance while singing a Salvation Army song, `There are flies on me, there are flies on you, but there are no flies on Jesus.' Gould also drank heavily and ate as much ketchup as possible, so that all ketchup bottles were hidden when he entered a familiar diner. He existed on hand-outs and slept in doss-houses.
After the first profile appeared, the inevitable happened. Letters began arriving for Joe Gould at the offices of the New Yorker. Gould himself took to turning up in reception two or three times a week and would stay for hours talking in poor Mitchell's office. In the end, Mitchell decided that the only way to get Gould out of his hair was to interest a publisher in Gould's mammoth work. Of this, Mitchell had seen only fragments. Most of the history, according to Gould, was stored for safety at the house of a friend in Long Island.
It was Gould's reluctance, and in the end flat refusal, to retrieve his history for a publisher that eventually made Mitchell realise that the book did not exist. That was Gould's secret. Mitchell kept that secret for another 22 years. This was just as well, for Gould's new public status as an oral histo- rian now assisted him. A woman acquain- tance finding him on the street in a bad way wrote round for help: Gould is using up time and energy which should be devoted to his oral history, to get- ting dimes and quarters to stay alive.
This led to Gould's getting free bed and board for three and a half years, until 1947. When that stopped he relied on hand-outs again, was put into hospital in 1952 and died in 1957. He'd survived to be 68 years old.
Acquaintances searched for the great work but of course did not find it. Mitchell admitted that the history had never existed in the second profile, published seven years after Gould died. Mitchell himself died last year. His book is old New Yorker journal- ism at its best.
`You're walking a disciplinary tightrope, Ian. Remember you're not that indispensable!'
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