by Joseph Mitchell
Modern Library, $13.50 hard Sometimes, beauty lies in
the back issues.
Such is the case with a pair of character pieces, originally published in
The New Yorker in 1944 and ’64 respectively — the latter bearing this
slim volume’s title — written by long- time
contributor to the noted weekly, Joseph Mitchell.
In the early 1940s, Mitchell became interested in a veteran Greenwich Village
lay- about;
a panhandling, homeless, highly eccentric “historian” by the name of Joe Gould.
A graduate of Harvard (magna cum difficultate, class of 1911) and lone
heir to a lineage dating back to Colonial New England, Gould had chucked it all
in 1916 for a life on the streets — cadging drinks, hustling “contributions”
for his ubiquitous “Joe Gould Fund,” and utilizing his extensive free time in
pursuit of a literary project he referred to as An Oral History of Our
Time.
This tome, Gould claimed, was 11 times longer than the Bible; a compendium of
family history, gossip, eavesdropped conversations and general miscellany
inscribed entirely in longhand on dimestore composition pads and stored away in
a basement on Long Island — active drafts, like The Death of Dr. Clarke
Storer Gould, a chapter of Joe Gould’s Oral History, cached away in
benefactor’s apartments. Fascinated, Mitchell befriended Gould and for the next
dozen or so years “wined,” dined, and generally endured his subject’s myriad
caprices and shenanigans in an attempt to actually view the legendary history,
which its author prophesied “…in time to come, people may read Gould’s oral
history to see what went wrong with us, the way people read Gibbon’s Decline
and Fall to see what went wrong with the Romans.”
Known variously as “The Professor,” “Bellevue Boy,” and “Sea Gulls,” this due
to his penchant for cross- translating,
and publically practicing “Seagullese” (“Longfellow translates perfectly in sea
gull,” Gould once remarked. “On the whole… I think he sounds better in sea
gull than he does in English.”), Gould caught the wave of “bohemians”
converging on the Village in the wake of WW I — like kids flooding the Haight
in the Sixties — functioning, for a time, among the peripheral literati,
actually influencing author and playwright William Saroyan with his typically
disjointed essay, “Civilization,” in the April 1929 issue of The Dial (“It freed me from bothering about form,” Saroyan later mused.”). In fact,
Gould is credited by some historians as having coined the term “oral history,”
though the jury’s still cloistered as to Studs Turkel’s acquiescence on the
subject. It almost goes without saying that e.e. cummings and Malcolm Cowley
were something of fans as well. But literature traditionally disappoints, and
Gould soon retreated into exclusive research for his epic, which, naturally,
included regular solicitation of drinks and “funding.” His became a hand- to-
mouth
existence, at best.
After finishing the first piece, Professor Sea Gull, I realized I knew
Gould — not the man, but most certainly the type. I worked in an infamous
“all-nite” eatery near Manhattan’s Bowery Mission in the early 1980s, and had
subsequently honed my urban disdain of panhandlers to a fine edge. One morning,
just before shift change, this character shows up at the counter — looked
about 70, filthy, bearded, cast- off
too- big
clothing, upright, old ladies’ shopping cart crammed with whatever passed for
his worldly belongings in tow behind him, the air around him yellowing
instantly as if he were projecting a visible aura.
I sauntered over lazily, my whole approach timed like I was about to swat an
exceptionally fat, lazy fly. The guy looked up at me with watery, rheumy eyes.
“Howza ’bout stakin’ a old sojer to a cuppa joe an’ a- piece-
a-
pie.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Get the hell outta here,” I snapped, sweeping a bar towel past him on the
counter.
His response was immediate. “Why you little sonuvabitch,” he rasped, rising up
on the balls of his feet to 5’6″ or so, “I built this town [when] you were
still a lump in yer daddy’s underwear.”
I ejected him, with no small amount of
consternation, and promptly forget
the matter. It’s only now I realize the guy was probably one of the last of a
breed — a breed making the likes of Austin’s dragworms look like a pack of
pussies. My casual impudence could well have been the final slap in the face to
an odd, aging old warrior; destined to die alone, drunk — if the elements,
crack-heads, or lunatics didn’t get him first. I felt ashamed.
Perhaps the biggest flaw of the second piece, Joe Gould’s Secret, is
said sense of shame lasts, maybe, 20 pages. By then, only the most distracted
of readers will not have discerned Gould’s “secret,” except the attitude of
both author and audience at this juncture has become one of “Who cares?”
Operating as a kind of synthesizer of influences and traditions — Somerset
Maugham, Damon Runyon, O. Henry, Henry James, and Guy de Maupassant, with John
Updike bringing up the rear (see A Critic at Large; Lana Turner, The
New Yorker, 2/12/96), Mitchell, with a stripped-down style not totally
devoid of emotional attachment and as capable of epiphanies as contemporary
writers Martin Chabon and — choke — Jay McInerney, all the while discretely
adhering to technique with an almost Carveresque resignation, manages to
transform what is essentially a glorified shaggy-dog story into a fable of
nobility against all odds. Nobility, granted, in the most abstract of milieus,
but nobility nonetheless.
With a sympathetic yet sardonic eye, the author views Gould without illusions,
with a fine enough lens as to render Saroyan’s raves as those of an untenured,
Grade Z, State U. dilettante. Indeed, it’s when Mitchell totally removes his
narrator’s rose-colored glasses and tosses them out the window, becoming
involved, personally, irrevocably, that the work begins to attain… well…
mythic status.
Gone is the clown asking for a free piece of pie, the nutcase begging drinks
in exchange for noisy harangues in sea gull, the trashed-out little bum peeing
in your backyard. Mitchell instead paints him, in his funny, loony-bird way, as
a real hero:
“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 put it on and kept it on.”
Here, Mitchell ventures, emotionally at any rate, into the oxymoronic world of
cynicism and romanticism where someone of Raymond Chandler’s ilk lies in
wait.
But the visit is fleeting as Gould and Mitchell attempt to skate around one
another on a sort of ethical ice patch. And when the sun finally appears, the
ice melting away to make further skating impossible, the author is confronted
with the kind of dilemma Chandler cherished.
Mitchell’s solution, however, bears little resemblance to Marlowe’s walk away
from Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye. The author instead opts for the
same choice foisted upon John Wayne in John Ford’s Fort Apache: that of
a perpetrator of myth — not one constructed of the foibles falling together to
constitute the myth, but rather as a torch-bearer of a distinctly shallow
flame: a lop-sided admiration based less on achievement than sheer tenacity.
Joe Gould’s Secret should go down as one of those nifty, highly
personal discoveries, like Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, one
feels privileged to have caught before the narrator finally bows out. The book
represents the apex of a mid-century observational literary style the current
generation’s crop of “new” writers ought to consider, seriously, for further
perusal.
— Tom Aiken
This article appears in July 5 • 1996 and July 5 • 1996 (Cover).