Joe Gould's Teeth (9 page)

Two undergraduates, reporters for
The Harvard Crimson
who'd read “Professor Sea Gull,” went to New York to interview Gould. “They seemed naïve,” Gould wrote in his diary.
36
They weren't so very naïve. “One of these days, someone is going to write an article on Joseph Ferdinand Gould '11 for the Reader's Digest,” they wrote in the
Crimson.
“It will be entitled ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Met' and it will present Joe Gould as an unusual but lovable old man. Joe Gould is not a lovable old man.”
37

After
The New Yorker
printed “Professor Sea Gull” and readers told Joseph Mitchell that it was the best story ever written and Joe Gould became as famous as the Empire State Building, Augusta Savage left New York City. She abandoned her friends and her studio and her school, and moved to the small town of Saugerties, New York, a town whose black community had lived, for a century, on Nigger Road. She told a minister in Saugerties that she'd left New York to escape the pressure to become a recruiter for the Communist Party.
38
Millen Brand heard a rumor that she'd become an informant for the FBI. “Heard Augusta betrayed some people on the art project in Harlem,” Brand wrote in his diary. “Regretted it.”
39
I don't know if he meant that he regretted it or that she did. For a long time, I had a hard time believing it. I'd thought that Savage left New York only to get away from Joe Gould. But—and here's the trouble—from the moment I first learned about her, I knew that my likeliest error would be in thinking I understood Augusta Savage, as if she were me, when, really, I hardly know her at all. The error was mine: the rumor was true.
40

In Saugerties, she moved into a house on a small farm owned by the commissioner of public welfare. The house had no electricity. It had no plumbing. She used kerosene for light and wood for heat. She scratched together a hardscrabble living; she raised pigeons, and grew flowers, and mulled wine. Most of all, she raised chickens. It has taken me a very long time, my whole life, to learn that the asymmetry of the historical record isn't always a consequence of people being silenced against their will. Some people don't want to be remembered, or heard, or saved. They want to be left alone.

People in Saugerties told me she'd chosen their town to move to because the little boy in Harlem who'd been the subject of
Gamin
was from their town, and his family lived there.
41
Maybe it was his family that arranged for her to move into the Welfare Department's bare little house, on the side of a hill.

She took a job working at a research laboratory, taking care of the mice. The man who owned the laboratory built her a studio on that hill, and provided her with clay, year after year, so that she could still make art. A man who'd grown up next door told me he met Savage when he was five years old and that she taught him to fish. She'd cut down a cane, and tie a line, and they'd sit down at the beaver brook. When she got too old to fish, he'd go fishing and bring her his catch. A woman who lived across the street told me that friends of Savage's would take the bus up from New York, from Harlem, to visit. Late at night, in summer, Savage's neighbors would sit on their front porches to listen to the sounds coming from Savage's front porch. Their talk was like music. Their laughter was like fireworks.

Our records from so many sources, thorough, detailed, profound, make it possible for the lay person as well as the scientist to judge the extent to which psychoanalysis can help the seriously disturbed person.

—
MURIEL GARDINER
,
“The Wolf-Man”

I
n February 1943, while Joe Gould was playing polo in Keener 6, an FBI agent knocked on E. E. Cummings's door. “Apparently someone has to identify a certain ‘seditious' radio ‘voice,' broadcasting shortwaveishly from Italia, as EP's,” Cummings wrote to his sister. The U.S. Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, headquartered at Princeton, New Jersey, had been listening in on Radio Rome since 1942. (Princeton was a center for the study of radio. The Radio Research Project, launched there in 1937, is why Orson Welles's 1939
War of the Worlds
broadcast is set in Princeton.) “I said I'd do my best if necessary but hoped I wouldn't have to,” Cummings reported to his sister, although he told the FBI that he himself didn't have a radio, and wouldn't recognize even his own voice, no less Pound's. He also suggested that the FBI ask William Carlos Williams to do it instead; Williams, he thought, would be a “proper Judas.”
1
Someone did it. In July 1943, Ezra Pound was charged with treason in absentia.

Gould, who once wrote an essay titled “Why Princeton Should Be Abolished,” felt that he understood Pound.
2
“I will always feel some gratitude toward him although I disagree with him completely,” he wrote Williams. “I felt that he was obsessed to a degree beyond mental health. This was because he seemed to be obsessed with ideas that were not in character nor consistent with the man as I had pictured him. I know of many acts of kindness on his part to Jewish people. I therefore felt that he was off balance apart from his usual enthusiastic tendency to ride any hobby of the moment too hard. In other words I thought that at that time he was temporarily haywire. I believe he would have snapped out of it if the course of events had been different.”
3
Because he is me.

After Augusta Savage left New York, after Max Perkins cut him off, Gould staggered through the city, sicker and sicker. “I went to the clinic of Saint Vincents,” he wrote in his diary on February 22, 1944. “I had to pay a dollar fee. I had a brief examination.” Two days later: “Felt poorly. Went over to Rutherford, New Jersey.” (He went to Rutherford to see Williams, who was a physician.) February 24: “Oh hell.” February 29: “Augusta Savage's birthday.”
4
Leap year's day: her birthday came only once every four years.

On March 4, 1944, Gould heard about a woman, “a wealthy refugee doctor, who loved to shell out,” who might be able to be convinced to pay his rent. “She thought she could publish my book.”
5
Her one stipulation was that Gould was never to know her name. Two weeks later, urged on by his friend John Rothschild and Rothschild's wife, the artist Erika Feist, Gould went into the hospital, voluntarily.
6
He had surgery on his bladder and stayed for a month. He wrote to Joseph Mitchell, “In some ways this place reminds me of Sing Sing from which, as you may remember, I was expelled for playing too rough in the polo game against Princeton.”
7

On April 13, 1944, Gould wrote in his diary about seeing a “Doctor Gardner,” a female doctor.
8
He had more appointments with her after he was discharged. The last time he went to see her was April 28.
9
On May 6, John Rothschild explained to Gould that he'd made an arrangement for him to be supported by an anonymous patroness:

I have a wealthy friend who knows about you and your work and who is considering subsidizing you for a while to the extent of providing board, lodging, and possibly laundry. The idea is to provide you with the bare essentials of healthy living so that you have a chance to bring your work to fruition. You will not receive cash; the bills will be paid for you….You will be under no obligation whatsoever. In fact, the lady bountiful prefers to remain anonymous.
10

When Gould got out of the hospital, his rent, at a place called Maison Gerard, was paid by this mysterious benefactor. He was desperate to discover her identity. He heard her last name began with “G.” For a while, he thought she was a Guggenheim. (He was wrong.) He kept sleuthing. It was a point of pride with Gould that no one could evade him for long. Joseph Mitchell once tried to get away from him by leaving the city without giving a forwarding address. Gould tried very hard to track him down. One day, he cornered the photographer Aaron Siskind. “He said he had seen Joe Mitchell, who was at work on a book. I said I will not ask his address as he seemed to want to keep it a military secret.” But, of course, he did more than ask; he demanded.
11

The person he was really looking for was the person he'd been hounding since 1923. No matter what he'd promised Millen Brand in 1934, or what he'd promised anyone since, or how often, or how tearfully, he never, ever left her alone. “Went to the Waldorf,” he wrote in his diary early in 1945. “Had a long talk with Bruce Nugent. He promised to get me Augusta's address.”
12

The name of Gould's benefactor was Muriel Gardiner. She was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
13
I am pretty certain she was the “Doctor Gardner” who examined him in the hospital. And I'm pretty sure, too, that her interest in him was clinical as much as philanthropic.

Muriel Morris was born in Chicago in 1901; her grandfather, a German Jew, had emigrated to the United States. She was the very wealthy heir of a meatpacking firm, Morris & Company. She went to Wellesley and then to Oxford, where she wrote a thesis about Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein.
She was briefly married to a man named Gardiner. Then she went to Vienna, to be analyzed by Freud, but was instead handed over to Freud's disciple, Ruth Mack Brunswick. Between 1910 and 1914, Freud had treated a Russian aristocrat named Sergei Pankejeff, who was three years older than Joseph Gould. (Freud referred to Pankejeff as the Wolf-Man, because of his childhood fear of wolves.) Freud's study of Pankejeff appeared in 1914 as “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” Gardiner met Pankejeff in Vienna in 1926; he taught her Russian. While Brunswick was analyzing Gardiner, she was also analyzing Pankejeff. (Brunswick's “A Supplement to Freud's ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis' ” appeared in 1928.) In 1926 and 1927, Gardiner lived in Greenwich Village. She might possibly have met Gould at that time; her closest friend was a sculptor, who may have known Augusta Savage.
14
Returning to Austria in 1931, she trained as an analyst and went to medical school at the University of Vienna. During the 1930s she worked underground for the resistance, securing false passports to help Jewish families escape from Germany and Austria. (She also hid Joseph Buttinger, the head of Austria's socialist underground, whom she later married.) In 1938, she managed to get Pankejeff out of Vienna and into the United States. Nearly all the analysts had fled Austria, and Gardiner believed Pankejeff urgently needed analysis: “he was as much in danger of destruction from within as were my Jewish friends from Nazi brutality at the concentration camps.” She and Buttinger moved to the United States in 1941. They set up a foundation, the New Land Foundation: Gardiner wanted to give away her money.
15
Buttinger headed an international aid organization, and Gardiner began a psychiatric internship in New Jersey.
16
She went by Muriel Buttinger socially but Muriel Gardiner professionally. She was zealous about her privacy.
17

In the 1940s, during the years when Muriel Gardiner was supporting Joe Gould, she was also translating a memoir written by Sergei Pankejeff. Very likely, Gardiner read “Professor Sea Gull” in 1942 or 1943. At the time, although she lived in New Jersey, she kept an apartment in New York.
18
She was close to both John Rothschild and Erika Feist. (Gardiner was a patron of Feist's work. “Dr. Buttinger has my work all over the house,” Feist said.)
19
It's not impossible that Gardiner also met Gould while treating psychiatric patients.
20
Gould often took the train to New Jersey when he was ill; he saw Williams there, and got medicine from him. In New Jersey, Gardiner found the care of patients in the state mental hospital appalling. What most distressed her was the removal of their teeth. “I read their charts,” she later said, “and some of them literally had had teeth, tonsils, appendix, uterus, every organ that you could live without removed for no apparent reason except because they were schizophrenic.” Did they get well? she was asked. No, she said. “None of them ever had got better.”
21

Gardiner supported hundreds of people, nearly always anonymously. She was a great patron of the arts. She also supported, for instance, Alice Neel.
22
But Gould was more like her patients than like the artists whose work she supported. If she hadn't met Gould in a hospital, she'd certainly met a great number of patients like him: declining, decaying, abandoned, toothless. She'd always been drawn to the hardest patients. “I was interested particularly in the very difficult patients who I had been wisely advised not to take, but I took them anyhow,” she said. “I was terribly interested, though they were terribly difficult.”
23
Gardiner later explained why she'd agreed to support Gould: “There is a type of alcoholic or psychopath who can go ahead and accomplish something if he has a little security.”
24
Also, she knew how much painting had meant to Pankejeff, how it held him together.
25
She cared about art. She wanted to rescue people, especially artists and writers. She wanted to save him.

Ezra Pound was arrested in Italy on May 8, 1945. Interviewed by an American reporter, he compared Hitler to Joan of Arc. He was jailed in an iron cage. On May 22, in Greenwich Village, Joe Gould began begging on behalf of Pound's defense.
26
On June 4, he wrote to Dwight Macdonald at
Politics:

Once lost now found

Poor Ezra Pound

Is not a hound.

His mind's unsound.

“You may print it if you wish.”
27

He began writing to everyone he could think of, asking for money for Pound's defense. “I want to write at least a hundred letters,” he told James Laughlin, the editor of New Directions.
28
He needed only money for postage. “I am beginning to be in good shape again and am being moderately guggenheimed to the extent of fifteen dollars a week,” he wrote Malcolm Cowley. “That keeps me going but is not enough to conduct as good a campaign for Ezra as I would like. If you feel that you can contribute a bit, I would appreciate it. I believe that a poet has as much right to be a damn fool as anyone else.”
29

In Pisa, Pound was examined by a team of psychiatrists, who found him mentally unstable. In November 1945, he was remanded to the United States and was committed to an insane asylum in Washington, D.C.

Apparently, Pound's confinement did not diminish his interest in getting Joe Gould's Oral History published. He and Gould corresponded. “I believe that Ezra Pound is doing all right,” Gould reported to Williams in October 1946. “He gets plenty of books and has occasional visitors.”
30
The next month, Pound wrote Cummings, “Joe G. still alive—have we between us force to git him printed?”
31

While Gardiner paid his rent, Gould put on weight. “Joe Gould now looks like a moderately sized Santa Claus,” Cummings wrote to his sister, “having been anonymously endowed per a female refugee.”
32
He had a roof over his head, and three meals a day. Still, he spent most of his time drinking and begging, saying he was raising money for Ezra Pound.

Then, suddenly, in October 1947, Gardiner informed Feist and Rothschild that she'd decided to cut Gould off at the end of the year. Cummings wondered why. “Parait que his erstwhile refugee-backess decided she'd put her dollars on the foreign poor, pourchanger perhaps,” he wrote Pound. “Or maybe Gould got fresh?”
33

Mitchell wondered, too. When he was researching “Joe Gould's Secret,” he found out that Gardiner had been Gould's patroness. She agreed to speak with him on condition that Mitchell never reveal her name. She told him that she'd never talked to Gould and didn't think she'd ever seen him. “I have a vague feeling that he was once pointed out to me in a restaurant in the Village,” she said, “but I'm not sure.”
34

I suspect Gardiner might have decided not to tell Mitchell what she knew about Gould. Strong evidence suggests as much. Feist told Mitchell that Gardiner knew a lot about Gould and that “she stopped giving Joe money because he didn't do anything with himself.”
35
And another Villager told Mitchell that “somebody who knew the dr ran across Gould in the Village, maybe at a party, maybe in a restaurant, and listened to him, and he or she told the dr: you're wasting your money on Joe Gould, he's not producing anything, he's not even trying.” Or “maybe the dr saw him herself.”
36
If Gardiner saw Gould, it would have been difficult not to notice that he was spending his time, and her money, to defend Ezra Pound.

Rothschild asked her to reconsider: “If you did read Professor Sea Gull, then you know why people love Joe Gould and want to see him continue to live, and why he has to be taken care of if he is going to survive.” He begged her. “He is growing old and would not survive long. And his misery would be unbearable to behold.”
37
Gardiner refused to reconsider. The money ran out in December 1947.

“The Oral History of Our Time” was never published. But it did start a movement.