Joe Gould's Secret Read Free Page B

free love, psychoanalysis, Christian Science, Swedenborgianism, vegetarianism, alcoholism, and different political and art isms. “I have fully covered what might be termed the intellectual underworld of my time,” Gould says. There are detailed descriptions of night life in scores of Village drinking and eating places, some of which, such as the Little Quakeress, the Original Julius, the Troubadour Tavern, the Samovar, Hubert’s Cafeteria, Sam Swartz’s T.N.T., and Eli Greifer’s Last Outpost of Bohemia Tea Shoppe, do not exist any longer.
    Gould is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets—descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. “I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all,” he says, “but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.” A great deal of the Oral History is in diary form. Gould is afflicted with total recall, and now and then he picks out a period of time in the recent past—it might be a day, a week, or a month—and painstakingly writes down everything of any consequence that he did during this period. Sometimes he writes a chapter in which he monotonously and hideously curses some person or institution. Here and there are rambling essays on such subjects as the flophouse flea, spaghetti, the zipper as a sign of the decay of civilization, false teeth, insanity, the jury system, remorse, cafeteria cooking, and the emasculating effect of the typewriter on literature. “William Shakespeare didn’t sit around pecking on a dirty, damned, ninety-five-dollar doohickey,” he wrote, “and Joe Gould doesn’t, either.”
    The Oral History is almost as discursive as “Tristram Shandy.” In one chapter, “The Good Men Are Dying Like Flies,” Gould begins a biography of a diner proprietor and horse-race gambler named Side-Bet Benny Altschuler, who stuck a rusty icepick in his hand and died of lockjaw; and skips after a few paragraphs to a story a seaman told him about seeing a group of lepers drinking and dancing and singing on a beach in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; and goes from that to an anecdote about a demonstration held in front of a moving-picture theatre in Boston in 1915 to protest against the showing of “The Birth of a Nation,” at which he kicked a policeman; and goes from that to a description of a trip he once made through the Central Islip insane asylum, in the course of which a woman pointed at him and screamed, “There he is! Thief! Thief! There’s the man that picked my geraniums and stole my mamma’s mule and buggy”; and goes from that to an account an old stumble-bum gave of glimpsing and feeling the blue-black flames of hell one night while sitting in a doorway on Great Jones Street and of seeing two mermaids playing in the East River just north of Fulton Fish Market later the same night; and goes from that to an explanation made by a priest of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is on Mott Street, in the city’s oldest Little Italy, of why so many Italian women always wear black (“They are in perpetual mourning for our Lord”); and then returns at last to Side-Bet Benny, the lockjawed diner proprietor.
    Only a few of the hundreds of people who know Gould have read any of the Oral History, and most of them take it for granted that it is gibberish. Those who make the attempt usually bog down after a couple of chapters and give up. Gould says he can count on one hand or on one foot those who have read enough of it to be qualified to form an opinion. One is Horace Gregory, the poet and critic. “I look upon Gould as a sort of Samuel Pepys of the Bowery,” Gregory says. “I once waded through twenty-odd composition books, and most of what I