Joe Gould's Teeth (12 page)

1.
Gould wrote about this fear all his life but see, for example, Gould to Ezra Pound, May 6, 1933, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

2.
Regarding buying supplies at five-and-dimes, see diary entry for July–August 1945, Gould Diaries.

3.
Gould to George Soule, April 12, 1934, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000. Soule was
The New Republic
's staff economist.

4.
Gould to Edmund R. Brown, May 5, 1935, Brown Papers, Barrett Minor Box 10.

5.
Gould to Marianne Moore, December 12, 1928,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.

6.
Moore to Gould, December 17, 1928,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.

7.
Gould to George Sarton, March 1931, George Sarton Additional Papers, MS Am 1803 (655), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

8.
Horace Gregory, “Pepys on the Bowery,”
New Republic,
April 15, 1931.

9.
Gould to Pound, January 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

10.
On this movement, see Benjamin Filene,
Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

11.
“Writer Honors 7,300,000th Word by Party,”
New York Herald Tribune,
March 2, 1936.

12.
Charles Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It,”
PM Weekly,
August 24, 1941.

13.
Gould to Pound, May 30, 1938, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

14.
Cummings to Pound, May 1935,
Pound/Cummings,
69.

15.
Dwight Macdonald, Statement on Joe Gould, unpublished eleven-page typewritten essay, Macdonald Papers, Box 78, Folder 142.

16.
Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It.”

17.
William Saroyan, “How I Met Joe Gould,”
Don Freeman's Newsstand
1 (1941): 25, 27.

18.
Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull,”
New Yorker,
December 12, 1942.

19.
Barbara C. Kroll to Joseph Mitchell, March 10, 1968, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Kroll was recalling reading “Professor Sea Gull,” as a college student, in 1942.

20.
Ved Mehta to Joseph Mitchell, undated, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. This is after “Joe Gould's Secret” appeared.

21.
Calvin Trillin, foreword to
McSorley's Wonderful Saloon,
by Joseph Mitchell (New York: Pantheon, 2001).

22.
The comparison to Joyce was commonly made. See, e.g., “I felt I was truly immersed in the American
Ulysses
”: Sherman Chickering to Joseph Mitchell, October 23, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1 (Chickering was describing reading “Joe Gould's Secret”).

23.
Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.”

24.
Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould's Oral History: Art,”
Exile,
November 1927, 116.

25.
Edward J. O'Brien, letter of recommendation for Joe Gould, 1934, Gould Guggenheim Files; Pound, Editor's Note,
Exile,
November 1927, 118–19; Gould to Pound, January 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

26.
Gould to Williams, August 7, 1947, Cummings Papers, Folder 490; Diary entry for July 26, 1943, Gould Diaries; Gould to Cummings, December 2, 1947, Cummings Papers, Folder 490; Cummings to Pound, March 1, 1930,
Pound/Cummings,
18.

27.
Gould to Williams, December 16, 1932, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243; Gould to Lewis Mumford, January 1941, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906; Cummings to Elizabeth Cummings Qualey, March 9, 1950, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 23; Gould to Mumford, December 22, 1941, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.

28.
Diary entry for May 8, 1943, Gould Diaries. Gould fell in January 1943 and was unable to write about it until after his recovery. And see Slater Brown to Joseph Mitchell, April 8, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

29.
Diary entry for March 23, 1944, Gould Diaries.

30.
Linda [no last name], undated but 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

31.
Mitchell, “Joe Gould's Secret,”
New Yorker,
September 19 and 26, 1964.

1.
Diary entries for August 6, 1945; April 11, 1945; December 5, 1944; December 17, 1944; January 30, 1945; and February 3, 1945, Gould Diaries. On stealing ink from the post office, see Mitchell's 1942 research notes, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

2.
Gould, “Meo Tempore: A Selection from Joe Gould's Oral History,”
Pagany
2 (1931): 96–99; quotation from 97.

3.
Joseph Mitchell,
Joe Gould's Secret
(New York: Vintage, 1965; New York: Modern Library, 2000).

4.
Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.”

5.
Mitchell, “Joe Gould's Secret.”

6.
Gould to William Braithwaite, October 14, 1911, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould.

7.
Alice W. Barker to Mitchell, August 16, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

8.
“She hated him then,” Hilda Gould's daughter told Mitchell, decades later, “and she still hates him.” Colleen Chassan interview, August 3, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

9.
Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.” An essay titled “Why I Am Called Professor Sea Gull” is one of the very last things Gould ever wrote. See Gould to Williams, May 1949, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243. After Gould's death in 1957, Chris Cominel, a staff writer for the
New York
World-Telegram and Sun,
spent a day looking for Gould's Oral History; all he was able to find was this essay. Chris Cominel, “Gould Saved from Potter's Field but His History Is Lost,”
New York World-Telegram and Sun,
August 22, 1957.

10.
I have tried to avoid diagnosing Gould, because, on evidentiary grounds, it's impossible and because, as a matter of historical method, it's unsupportable. But I did consult with two psychiatrists at Harvard Medical School, Robert J. Waldinger and Alfred S. Margulies, and both offered invaluable advice. Robert Waldinger, email to the author, May 17, 2015; Alfred Margulies, email to the author, June 1, 2015.

11.
Gould, “My Life,” 1.

12.
He mentions this in his application to work at the Eugenics Record Office: Eugenics Record Office Papers, Joseph F. Gould File. There was a public telephone (one of six in the town of Norwood) at 483 Washington Street, across the street from the Goulds' house at 486 Washington Street. New England Telephone & Telegraph Co., advertisement,
Resident and Business Directory of Norwood and Walpole, Massachusetts,
1906
(Boston: Boston Suburban Book Co., 1906), 32; Gould's father also had a private telephone in his office, on the first floor of his house, at a time when very few people in Norwood had a private line (see the listing in that same directory): “
GOULD, CLARKE S
., physician and surgeon, 486 Washington, h.do. Office hours from 1 to 3 and 6 to 9 p.m. Tel. 51-3.” Gould also later explained that the Oral History would draw from “diaries of the period when I was in charge of the telephone service at Squantum.” Gould, “Synopsis,” 6. He is referring here to the Harvard Aviation Field, founded at Squantum Point in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1910; in 1917 it became the Naval Air Station Squantum. Gould said the Oral History would include “accounts of the two Harvard Aviation Meets in 1910 and 1912.”

13.
Gould, entrance exam record, Gould Harvard Files.

14.
Gould, “Myself,” 2.

15.
Gould, “My Life,” 2.

16.
[Dean Byron S. Hurlbut] to Clarke S. Gould, February 21, 1908; [Hurlbut] to Joseph F. Gould, February 29, May 26, and November 8, 1908; Mr. L. Allard [to Hurlbut], February 8, 1908; [Hurlbut] to Clarke S. Gould, March 4, 1908; and Robert Matteson Johnston to [unspecified dean], January 11, 1913 (“I saw Joseph F. Gould this morning, who wanted to complete History 27, which he failed to complete in 1910–11, simply by a thesis”), Gould Harvard Files. History 27 was “The Historical Literature of France and England Since the Close of the Eighteenth Century.”
Harvard University Catalogue,
1910
–
1911
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1910), 334.

17.
Hurlbut to Gould, November 3, 1909; Hurlbut to Gould, October 17, 1910; E. H. Wells to Clarke Storer Gould, July 10, 1911, Gould Harvard Files.

18.
Clarke Storer Gould to E. H. Wells, August 1, 1911, Gould Harvard Files.

1.
Gould, “Synopsis.”

2.
Mitchell's interview notes with Gould, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

3.
Charles Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It,”
PM Weekly,
August 24, 1941.

4.
O'Brien, letter of recommendation for Joe Gould, 1934, Gould Guggenheim Files.

5.
Gould, “My Life,” 2.

6.
Brown and Gould had known one another as children, and during Gould's junior year of college he lived with Brown's family in Cambridge, on Rutland Street. Gould, “My Life,” 1–2. Gould reports that in 1905 he worked with Brown as assistant editor of a little magazine called
Freak.

7.
W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903). And see Kwame Anthony Appiah,
Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

8.
Gould, “How Does Race Prejudice Affect Race Purity?,”
Boston Globe,
June 25, 1911. The essay was part of a forum on the subject. Another contributor was the white supremacist William Benjamin Smith, professor of philosophy at Tulane, who argued that miscegenation was a grave threat to humanity. William Benjamin Smith, “Lower and Higher Races,”
Boston Globe,
June 25, 1911. And see Smith,
The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn
(New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905).

9.
“Such a feeling seems confined to rather nervous people, or those with intellectual specialization.” Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, Davenport Papers. “I have had quite a correspondence with Doctor Charles Eastman,” Gould later wrote. I have not been able to find that correspondence. Gould to Davenport, August 29, 1915, Davenport Papers.

10.
Gould to Braithwaite, October 14, 1911, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould; Gould, “Synopsis,” 4–5; Diary entry for October 5, 1945, Gould Diaries.

11.
Gould to Hurlbut, January 22, 1912, Gould Harvard Files. Under pressure from Gould's father, the university had relented and allowed for the presentation of such a petition. E. H. Wells to Clarke Storer Gould, September 26, 1911. Gould's behavior was bizarre. He asked at least one professor for money. Gould to Hurlbut, January 26, 1912, Gould Harvard Files. “J.F. Gould is engaged in literary work,” he reported to Harvard in 1912 when he got back to Massachusetts.
Secretary's First Report, Harvard College Class of
1911
(Cambridge, MA: Crimson Printing Co., 1912).

12.
Joseph F. Gould, “Report of Census Enumerator,”
42
nd Annual Report, Town of Norwood, Year Ending December
31
,
1913
(Norwood, MA, 1914), 327, and “Report of Census Enumerator,”
43
rd Annual Report, Town of Norwood, Year Ending December
31
,
1914
(Norwood, MA, 1915), 219. Joseph F. Gould, “Racial Survey of Norwood, Parts I–IX,”
Norwood Messenger,
July 5, 12, 19, and
26,
1913; August 2, 9, and 16, 1913; September 20, 1913; and October 4, 1913. (My thanks to Patricia Fanning of the Norwood Historical Society for sharing these with me.) On the lecture, see the printed postcard announcing Mr. Joseph F. Gould's lecture at the Boston Scientific Society, November 26, 1912, Joseph F. Gould, Quadrennial File, Harvard University Archives. The biography of Gould offered here is: “Mr. Gould, a Contributing Editor of the Four Seas is a Harvard man who has taken much interest in conditions of men. He has studied them in their own environment having made a walking tour of five hundred miles in Canada studying Lumberjacks, Indians and other types. He is president of the Race Pride League.”

13.
[Hurlbut or Wells] to Gould, January 23, 1913; Gould to Hurlbut, May 15, 1913; Gould to Hurlbut, November 30, 1913. He may have expected to extract a certain vengeance in the Oral History, which, he later said, would include much material on the Harvard faculty: “I have a good chapter on President Lowell of Harvard. In time I expect to add chapters on other members of the Harvard faculty.” Gould, “Synopsis,” 7.

14.
Poetry Journal
1 (1912): 1, and
Poetry Journal
3 (1914): 183.

15.
Gould to Nino Frank, December 29, 1929,
Bifur
Archive, Box 1, Folder 13; and Pound. Gould to Pound from Hotel Bradford, January [or June?], 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. O'Brien died in 1941. “When he died, his executor and secretary destroyed almost everything.” Ingeborg O'Brien, email to the author, April 26, 2015.

16.
Jack Levitz to Mitchell, November 13, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

17.
Mitchell, note, November 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

18.
Israel G. Young to Dr. Theodore Grieder, NYU Special Collections, November 18, 1967, and Theodore Grieder, “Joe Gould's Notebooks,” unpublished five-page typescript, Fales Manuscript Collection, MSS 001, Box 71, Folder 1.

19.
Diary entry for January 1, 1943, Gould Diaries.

20.
Diary entry for May 21, 1943, Gould Diaries.

21.
Diary entry for June 5, 1945, Gould Diaries.

22.
Gould had written to Gregg to ask him to become a member of the Oral History Society, adding, “It is also possible that you might be able to help me find a better place for storing my manuscripts than I have at present. Twice they have been jeopardized by fire.” When Gregg was in New York, he made an appointment with Gould. Gould never showed up. Gould to Alan Gregg, 1940, Gregg Papers, and see Gould's later diary entries about Gregg. Gregg was the director of the Rockefeller Foundation's medical sciences program. That a psychiatrist held this position suggests how much of American psychiatry became experimental in the 1930s and 1940s. Gregg, much influenced by Adolf Meyer, was essentially a psychobiologist. See Jack Pressman,
Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30–46.

23.
Gould's fixation on the question of whether it was normal or abnormal to be sexually attracted to people of other races had led him to write endless letters to the country's best-known authorities on racial mixing, including Henry Goddard, a psychologist who advocated intelligence testing, and Charles Eastman, a Dakota Indian with European forebears. “Dr. Goddard writes me that race-prejudice is unknown among idiots. Primitive people seem not to have it. The Indian frequently shares the social prejudice against the Negro, but Dr. Charles A. Eastman tells me that as far as he knows the Indian has no real antipathy or ‘phobia' for other racial groups.” Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, Davenport Papers. “I have had quite a correspondence with Doctor Charles Eastman,” Gould later wrote. I have not been able to find that correspondence. Gould to Davenport, August 29, 1915, Davenport Papers.

24.
Gould to Franz Boas, misdated by an archivist as December 31, 1920, but plainly September 1920, Boas Papers. “No one has ever been able to make head or tail of the Albanian episode,” Malcolm Cowley said. Mitchell's 1942 interview notes, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

25.
Boas to Gould, September 21, 1920. Gould wrote again (undated but September 1920), at still greater length. Boas replied, on October 2, 1920, with a single sentence: “If you want to talk to me about this subject that interests you, I shall be glad to see you. Kindly telephone me so that we can make an appointment.” Boas Papers.

26.
“Variation and Heredity” is described in the
Harvard University Catalogue,
1910
–
1911
.
Gould got a C. Gould Harvard Files. Gould to Davenport, June 6, 1914, Davenport Papers.

27.
Charles Davenport,
Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding
(New York: H. Holt & Co., 1910); and see Davenport,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
(New York: H. Holt & Co., 1911).

28.
Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, Davenport Papers.

29.
Davenport to Gould, December 29, 1913; and Gould to Davenport, January 3, 1914, Davenport Papers.