Joe Gould’s Secret
by Joseph MitchellVintage, 186 pp., $9.95 (paper)
In his long, if rather unprolific, career at The New Yorker, and even beforehand, at the Herald Tribune, Joe Mitchell proved his ability to quietly absorb, and best of all, to describe in dead-on, if meandering, prose, his subjects and their surroundings. Without ever overwriting, Mitchell wrote the hell out of every story he took on, and for this, he may be remembered as one of the finest literary figures of the 20th century. The beauty of New York City and its inhabitants will forever be preserved in his tales of the Fulton Fish Market and the oyster eaters and the oyster catchers and the gypsies and the drunks and the black rats and the brown rats and finally, Joe Gould.
The slim volume of Joe Gould’s Secret tells the life story, or rather two different versions of the life story, of a New York bohemian named Joe Gould. Both were written by Mitchell for The New Yorker. The first profile was published in 1942, the second 22 years later, seven years after Gould’s death. Mitchell had more to say, and he had finally decided it was time to say it.
Gould, whose great claim to fame other than being consistently broke and boozy and homeless and “the foremost authority in the United States,” as he put it, “on the subject of doing without,” was a formidable work-in-progress called “An Oral History of Our Time.”
According to Mitchell, “the Oral History consisted of talk [Gould] 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 talking for hours — and of essays commenting on this talk.” He details how Gould spent his time collecting bits and pieces of conversations to be published in what was by Gould’s estimation, at the time of publication of the first profile, a manuscript “eleven times as long as the Bible.”
The two men became acquainted over countless, seemingly endless conversations held in bars and luncheonettes in the Village in the early 1940’s. Gould, who claimed to subsist on “air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup,” weaseled quite a few breakfasts, beers, and contributions to the “Joe Gould Fund” out of Mitchell during the course of being a subject. But once the profile was published, Gould didn’t stop; until he died, he continued to seek out Mitchell’s time and attention and offerings, until Mitchell inadvertently, and exasperatedly, made some discoveries about Gould’s Oral History that he only decided to reveal some time after Gould’s death.
Almost 60 years later, it is ironically obvious that Joseph Mitchell was the true oral historian of the two; he collected the unraveling shreds of Joe Gould and wrote him down, which is a good thing, since Gould’s own book remains unpublished. And even in a man who must have been the most needy, annoying, self-aggrandizing profile subject of his time, Mitchell found worthiness, odd brilliance, and a tiny ripple of glee.
This article appears in April 28 • 2000.