Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard. At least half of it is made up of conversations taken down verbatim or summarized; hence the title. “What people say is history,” Gould says. “What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan—is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.” The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations. In it are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, accounts of the wanderings of seamen encountered in South Street barrooms, grisly descriptions of hospital and clinic experiences (“Did you ever have a painful operation or disease?” is one of the first questions that Gould, fountain pen and composition book in hand, asks a person he has just met), summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, testimonies given by converts at Salvation Army street meetings, and the addled opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants. For a time Gould haunted the all-night greasy spoons in the vicinity of Bellevue Hospital, eavesdropping on tired internes, nurses, orderlies, ambulance drivers, embalming-school students, and morgue workers, and faithfully recording their talk. He scurries up and down Fifth Avenue during parades, feverishly taking notes. Gould writes with great candor, and the percentage of obscenity in the Oral History is high. He has a chapter called “Examples of the So-called Dirty Story of Our Time,” to which he makes almost daily additions. In another chapter are many rhymes and observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms. He believes that these scribblings are as truly historical as the strategy of General Robert E. Lee. Hundreds of thousands of words are devoted to the drunken behavior and the sexual adventures of various professional Greenwich Villagers in the twenties. There are hundreds of reports of ginny Village parties, including gossip about the guests and faithful reports of their arguments on such subjects as reincarnation, birth control, 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 saw had the quality of a competent high-school theme, but some of it was written with the clear and wonderful veracity of a child, and here and there were flashes of hard-bitten Yankee wit. If someone took the trouble to go through it and separate the good from the rubbish, as editors did with Thomas Wolfe’s millions of words, it might be discovered that Gould actually has written a masterpiece.” Another is E. E. Cummings, the poet, who is a close friend of Gould’s. Cummings once wrote a poem about Gould, No. 261 in his “Collected Poems,” which contains the following description of the history:
… a myth is as good as a smile but little joe gould’s quote oral history unquote might (publishers note) be entitled a wraith’s progress or mainly awash while chiefly submerged or an amoral morality sort-of-aliveing by innumerable kind-of-deaths
Throughout the nineteen-twenties Gould haunted the office of the Dial, now dead, the most highbrow magazine of the time. Finally, in its April, 1929, issue, the Dial printed one of his shorter essays, “Civilization.” In it he rambled along, jeering at the buying and selling of stocks as “a fuddy-duddy old maid’s game” and referring to skyscrapers and steamships as “bric-a-brac” and giving his opinion that “the auto is unnecessary.” “If all the perverted ingenuity which was put into making buzz-wagons had only gone into improving the breed of horses,” he wrote, “humanity would be better off.” This essay had a curious effect on American literature. A copy of the Dial in which it appeared turned up a few months later in a second-hand bookstore in Fresno, California, and was bought for a dime by William Saroyan, who then was twenty and floundering around, desperate to become a writer. He read Gould’s essay and was deeply impressed and influenced by it. “It freed me from bothering about form,” he says. Twelve years later, in the winter of 1941, in Don Freeman’s studio on Columbus Circle, Saroyan saw some drawings Freeman had made of Gould for Don Freeman’s Newsstand, a quarterly publication of pictures of odd New York scenes and personalities put out by the Associated American Artists. Saroyan became excited. He told Freeman about his indebtedness to Gould. “Who the hell is he, anyway?” Saroyan asked. “I’ve been trying to find out for years. Reading those few pages in the Dial was like going in the wrong
direction and running into the right guy and then never seeing him again.” Freeman told him about the Oral History. Saroyan sat down and wrote a commentary to accompany the drawings of Gould in Newsstand. “To this day,” he wrote, in part, “I have not read anything else by Joe Gould. And yet to me he remains one of the few genuine and original American writers. He was easy and uncluttered, and almost all other American writing was uneasy and cluttered. It was not at home anywhere; it was trying too hard; it was miserable; it was a little sickly; it was literary; and it couldn’t say anything simply. All other American writing was trying to get into one form or another, and no writer except Joe Gould seemed to have imagination enough to understand that if the worst came to the worst you didn’t need to have any form at all. You didn’t need to put what you had to say into a poem, an essay, a story, or a novel. All you had to do was say it.” Not long after this issue of Newsstand came out, someone stopped Gould on Eighth Street and showed him Saroyan’s endorsement of his work. Gould shrugged his shoulders. He had been on a spree and had lost his false teeth, and at the moment he was uninterested in literary matters. After thinking it over, however, he decided to call on Saroyan and ask him for help in getting some teeth. He found out somehow that Saroyan was living at the Hampshire House, on Central Park South. The doorman there followed Gould into the lobby and asked him what he wanted. Gould told him that he had come to see William Saroyan. “Do you know Mr. Saroyan?” the doorman asked. “Why, no,” Gould said, “but that’s all right. He’s a disciple of mine.” “What do you mean, disciple?” asked the doorman. “I mean,” said Gould, “that he’s a literary disciple of mine. I want to ask him to buy me some teeth.” “Teeth?” asked the doorman. “What do you mean, teeth?” “I mean some store teeth,” Gould said. “Some false teeth.” “Come this way,” said the doorman, gripping Gould’s arm and ushering him to the street. Later Freeman arranged a meeting, and the pair spent several evenings together in bars. “Saroyan kept saying he wanted to hear all about the Oral History,” Gould says, “but I never got a chance to tell him. He did all the talking. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
As long as he can remember, Gould has been perplexed by his own personality. There are a number of autobiographical essays in the Oral History, and he says that all of them are attempts to explain himself to himself. In one, “Why I Am Unable To Adjust Myself To Civilization, Such As It Is, or Do, Don’t, Do, Don’t, A Hell Of A Note,” he came to the conclusion that his shyness was responsible for everything. “I am introvert and extrovert all rolled in one,” he wrote, “a warring mixture of the recluse and the Sixth Avenue auctioneer. One foot says do, the other says don’t. One foot says shut your mouth, the other says bellow like a bull. I am painfully shy, but try not to let people know it. They would take advantage of me.” Gould keeps his shyness well hidden. It is evident only when he is cold sober. In that state he is silent, suspicious, and constrained, but a couple of beers or a single jigger of gin will untie his tongue and put a leer on his face. He is extraordinarily responsive to alcohol. “On a hot night,” he says, “I can walk up and down in front of a gin mill for ten minutes, breathing real deep, and get a jag on.”
Even though Gould requires only a few drinks, getting them is sometimes quite a task. Most evenings he prowls around the saloons and dives on the west side of the Village, on the lookout for curiosity-seeking tourists from whom he can cadge beers, sandwiches, and small sums of money. If he is unable to find anyone approachable in the tumultuous saloons around Sheridan Square, he goes over to Sixth Avenue and works north, hitting the Jericho Tavern, the Village Square Bar & Grill, the Belmar, Goody’s, and the Rochambeau. He has a routine. He doesn’t enter a place unless it is crowded. After he is in, he bustles over to the telephone booth and pretends to look up a number. While doing this, he scrutinizes the customers. If he sees a prospect, he goes over and says, “Let me introduce myself. The name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a graduate of Harvard, magna cum difficultate, class of 1911, and chairman of the board of Weal and Woe, Incorporated. In exchange for a drink, I’ll recite a poem, deliver a lecture, argue a point, or take off my shoes and imitate a sea gull. I prefer gin, but beer will do.” Gould is by no means a bum. He feels that the entertainment he provides is well worth whatever he is able to cadge. He doesn’t fawn, and he is never grateful. If he is turned down politely, he shrugs his shoulders and leaves the place. However, if the prospect passes a remark like “Get out of here, you bum,” Gould turns on him, no matter how big he is, and gives him a shrill, nasal, scurrilous tongue-lashing. He doesn’t care what he says. When he loses his temper, he becomes fearless. He will drop his portfolio, put up his fists, and offer to fight men who could kill him with one halfhearted blow. If he doesn’t find an audience on the trip up Sixth, he turns west on Eleventh and heads for the Village Vanguard, in a cellar on Seventh Avenue South. The Vanguard was once a sleazy rendezvous for arty people, but currently it is a thriving night club. Gould and the proprietor, a man named Max Gordon, have known each other for many years and are on fairly good terms much of the time. Gould always hits the Vanguard last. He is sure of it, and he keeps it in reserve. Since it became prosperous, the place annoys him. He goes down the stairs and says, “Hello, Max, you dirty capitalist. I want a bite to eat and a beer. If I don’t get it, I’ll walk right out on the dance floor and throw a fit.” “Go argue with the cook,” Gordon tells him. Gould goes into the kitchen, eats whatever the cook gives him, drinks a couple of beers, fills a bag with bread crumbs, and departs.
Despite his shyness, Gould has a great fondness for parties. There are many people in the Village who give big parties fairly often. Among them are a rich and idiosyncratic old doctor, a rich old spinster, a famous stage designer, a famous theatrical couple, and numbers of painters and sculptors and writers and editors and publishers. As often as not, when Gould finds out that any of these people are giving a party, he goes, and as often as not he is allowed to stay. Usually he keeps to himself for a while, uneasily smoking one cigarette after another and stiff as a board with tenseness. Sooner or later, however, impelled by a drink or two and by the desperation of the ill at ease, he begins to throw his weight around. He picks out the prettiest woman in the room, goes over, bows, and kisses her hand. He tells discreditable stories about himself. He becomes exuberant; suddenly, for no reason at all, he cackles with pleasure and jumps up and clicks his heels together. Presently he shouts, “All in favor of a one-man floor show, please say ‘Aye’!” If he gets the slightest encouragement, he strips to the waist and does a hand-clapping, foot-stamping dance which he says he learned on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota and which he calls the Joseph Ferdinand Gould Stomp. While dancing, he chants an old Salvation Army song, “There Are Flies on Me, There Are Flies on You, but There Are No Flies on Jesus.” Then he imitates a sea gull. He pulls off his shoes and socks and takes awkward, headlong skips about the room, flapping his arms and letting out a piercing caw with every skip. As a child he had several pet gulls, and he still spends many Sundays on the end of a fishing pier at Sheepshead Bay observing gulls; he claims he has such a thorough understanding of their cawing that he can translate poetry into it. “I have translated a number of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems into sea gull,” he says.
Inevitably, at every party Gould goes to, he gets up on a chair or a table and delivers some lectures. These lectures are extracts from chapters of the Oral History. They are brief, but he gives them lengthy titles, such as “Drunk as a Skunk, or How I Measured the Heads of Fifteen Hundred Indians in Zero Weather” and “The Dread Tomato Habit, or Watch Out! Watch Out! Down with Dr. Gallup!” He is skeptical about statistics. In the latter lecture, using statistics he claims he found in financial sections in newspapers, he proves that “the eating of tomatoes by railroad engineers was responsible for fifty-three per cent of the train wrecks in the United States during the last seven years.” When Gould arrives at a party, people who have never seen him before usually take one look at h
im and edge away. Before the evening is over, however, a few of them almost always develop a kind of puzzled respect for him; they get him in a corner, ask him questions, and try to determine what is wrong with him. Gould enjoys this. “When you came over and kissed my hand,” a young woman told him one night, “I said to myself, ‘What a nice old gentleman.’ A minute later I looked around and you were bouncing up and down with your shirt off, imitating a wild Indian. I was shocked. Why do you have to be such an exhibitionist?” “Madam,” Gould said, “it is the duty of the bohemian to make a spectacle of himself. If my informality leads you to believe that I’m a rum-dumb, or that I belong in Bellevue, hold fast to that belief, hold fast, hold fast, and show your ignorance.”