Joe Gould's Teeth (11 page)

RE
:
JOE
GOULD
'
S
LOST
MMS
.

What was the largest number of Joe's note books you saw? ________

In crates, suitcases, bales, loose (check)

Did you examine and read any of the books? ________

Did you at any time own or store any of the books? ________

Date ________ Name ________
40

The last clue comes from Ezra Pound, in a letter he sent from St. Elizabeth's. On April 14, 1958, Pound wrote to Cummings, “am doin wot I kan to hellup yr friends edit Joe Gould.”
41
Edit what? Did Pound have the notebooks? Four days later, Pound was released.

Near the end, I found in the archives a chapter of Joe Gould's Oral History called “Why I Write.” It held an answer to the question I'd started with. “If one were to pick anyone up at random and study him intensely enough in all the ramifications of his life, we would get the whole story of man,” he wrote.
42

What is biography? A life in time.

Augusta Savage hid, and tried to erase every last trace of herself, but she never really got free of Joe Gould's hold. In 1960, a man walked into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, on 135th Street, and tried to walk out with the bust of W. E. B. Du Bois that Savage had made thirty-seven years before. Stopped at the door, he surrendered it. He said Savage had sent him. Later that year, the bust disappeared. It has never been found.
43

Augusta Savage died in poverty and obscurity in 1962.
44
Her work had been, at best, uneven. Counting only her best-known sculptures, she produced more than seventy major pieces. Later, when the Schomburg Center prepared to stage an exhibit, its curators could find only nineteen.
45
Some people believe she collected as much of her work as she could, and smashed it.

When
The New Yorker
published “Joe Gould's Secret” in 1964, it made many readers weep.
46
It made many others terribly, terribly curious. “It has occurred to me that when Gould collapsed on the street in 1952 and was taken to Columbus Hospital, he may have had the Oral History with him, and it may, to this day, be in the lockers there where patients' belongings are kept,” a nurse wrote to Mitchell, breathlessly, after reading the story. “I wonder if Columbus Hospital has been checked about the History. Also, he may have taken it with him to Bellevue—and it may still be there, molding away in some cupboard. Or it may be at Pilgrim State. If these hospitals haven't been checked, I think it well worthwhile to make such an effort, don't you?”
47

Shouldn't someone check?

Not me.

Instead, I went to Saugerties. Augusta Savage's farm is still there, and the ruins of her studio, and her scant remains: her chamber pot, her typewriter, and a book of poems inscribed to her by the author, “For my fellow artist Augusta Savage—in admiration and regard, James Weldon Johnson.”
Lift every voice.
Her Flit gun is still there, too, gathering dust, turning to rust, in a house not far from what's now called Augusta Savage Road. Outside her kitchen, dug into the ground, there's a cistern, deep enough to drown a man.

Summer came, and stillness. I packed my stacks of notes and photocopies into a box. His school transcripts. The Gould Family Pedigree. His Guggenheim application. The diaries, the letters, the letters, the letters. Photographs of Augusta Savage's work:
The New Negro, Mourning Victory.
A copy of Harry J. Worthing et al., “350 Cases of Prefrontal Lobotomy,” in
Psychiatric Quarterly.
I dragged the box into a closet. I carried my books back to the library: discharged.

I spoke on the telephone to an old man in a faraway land. He told me he had some of Gould's notebooks. I believed him. I did not call him again.

I still sometimes picture a door with the word “Archive” etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this. Allen Ginsberg is lurking in the hallway, muttering to himself in a haze of smoke, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.” I sneak past him; he doesn't notice. I open the door and shut it soundlessly behind me. I expect the room to be enormous, and empty, and silent, and it is very big, but cluttered and blaring. The walls had once been painted white and the floor had been covered with a linoleum as green as the sea, but I can see only trickles of white and hardly any green. Handwriting, in black ink, curls across the floor and crawls up the walls.

I kneel down to read what's written on the threshold:
The Race Question.
It's the title of a pedigree chart that, starting there, at the door, has been drawn on the floor. It begins in 1619 with the rape of an unnamed African woman by an Englishman named John Blye. Across the floor, circles hitched to squares beget circles and squares, darker, lighter, lighter, darker.

On one side of the room, an 1889 Edison phonograph rests on a sideboard, its cylinder turning, its brass trumpet blasting a single sound, over and over again:
Scree-eek!
Near the sideboard, hundreds of black-and-white composition books have been stacked to form an unsteady, tottering tower, seven feet high. I back away from the tower and almost fall over a cardboard box tied with string and marked “Norwood Dump.”

In a corner, there's an iron cage. Inside the cage is an old radio in a cabinet made of walnut, like a mantel clock. The radio is broadcasting Ezra Pound from Radio Rome. “Scree-eek!” says the phonograph.
“You let in the Jew…,”
says the radio. “Scree-eek!” says the phonograph.

In the middle of the room, beneath a vaulted glass ceiling, a gigantic white sheet covers something hulking. I lift off the sheet to unveil a sculpture made of plaster, sixteen feet high, and lacquered black: a harp, with each of its twelve strings capped by the head of a child, mouth open in song. The label reads:

Augusta Savage,
Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp),
1939. Made for the World's Fair. Destroyed in
1940,
due to lack of storage space.

I leave the sheet on the floor.

In the back of the room, a rickety bed leans along a wall, a cot, the size of an examination table, bare except for an old overcoat, tattered and stained and pocked with cigarette burns. I inventory the nightstand: a Flit gun; a bottle of whiskey; a pair of spectacles, shattered; and a book by Muriel Gardiner,
The Wolf-Man and Professor Sea Gull.

Shoved into the farthest, darkest corner of the room there's a heavy oak desk and an empty oak chair. On top of the desk sits Joseph Mitchell's typewriter and, curled in its roller, a piece of
New Yorker
stationery, blank. A Milton Bradley color top rests on a pile of newspapers and magazines: an old
Harvard Crimson,
a
New Republic.
Beside it is a bottle of ink, a fountain pen, and one last dime-store notebook, its black cover mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat. On its cover is written,
Property of
GOULD
,
JOE
, and below that,
MEO TEMPORE, THIRD VERSION
. I open the notebook and read, in his unmistakable hand:

I would like to widen

the sphere of history

as Walt Whitman did

that of poetry.

I close the book.

I reach into my pocket for what I've brought. It feels like porcelain. It opens like a clam. And then I back out of that room, as soundlessly as I came, having left behind: Joe Gould's teeth.

This book, which I drafted over the course of a semester, could not have been written without the help of very many people. My students asked excellent questions. Generous archivists and librarians answered my many requests. I'm especially grateful to Nora Mitchell Sanborn, Joseph Mitchell's daughter, and to the New York Public Library, for permission to see Mitchell's papers. Karlyn Knaust Elia and Richard Duncan, owners of the Augusta Savage House and Studio in Saugerties, New York, very generously gave me a tour, and Savage's neighbors kindly shared their memories. Thanks, too, to André Bernard at the Guggenheim Foundation, who uncovered Gould's application materials, and to the Foundation for the fellowship that made it possible for me to revise the manuscript. Three of my current and former students helped out with transcription: Carla Cevasco transcribed Gould's diaries, Emmet Stackelberg transcribed Gould's correspondence with Charles Davenport, and Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey transcribed Savage's correspondence at Fisk. Harvard colleagues guided me through disciplinary thickets. Anne Harrington helped me understand the history of psychiatry. Christina Davis at the Woodberry Poetry Room talked me through the history of sound. Robert Waldinger and Alfred Margulies, psychiatrists at the Medical School, read an early draft and provided invaluable advice about what might have afflicted Gould. Abundant thanks to all. Heartfelt thanks, too, to Adrianna Alty, to whom this book is dedicated, and to Tina Bennett, Dan Frank, Jane Kamensky, Leah Price, David Remnick, and Henry Finder.

Gould's papers are scattered in archives all over the country. As with any literary remains, they represent only a portion of the writing Gould produced. Because many people to whom Gould sent letters considered him an annoyance, or worse, most of the letters he wrote, and especially those he sent to strangers, were discarded. Even his friends and family, of course, threw his letters away. E. E. Cummings was one of his oldest friends. Most of Cummings's exchanges with Gould were face-to-face—unrecorded oral history—but, since Gould was such a compulsive letter writer, he also wrote to Cummings. Cummings kept many of the letters Gould sent him, but not all of them. For instance, on August 1, 1938, Cummings described a typical letter from Gould in a letter to his sister, Elizabeth Cummings Qualey:

Our “little gentleman” recently honoured me with a letter worth anyone's weight in led (not to mention Geld) beginning “Dear friend” and plunging into Ethiopia.

This from Gould to Cummings does not survive. Nor do letters from Cummings to Gould survive, because those would have been in Gould's possession, and everything Gould ever owned he lost. Far scarcer, though, are the literary remains of Augusta Savage. It appears that Savage destroyed the great bulk of her papers. Some of her artwork remains in private hands, while other works can be found among the holdings of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fisk University, the Schomburg Center, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.