Joe Gould's Teeth (15 page)

47.
Du Bois to Savage, April 20, 1926; Du Bois to Irene Di Robilant, April 20, 1926; and Savage to Du Bois, May 26, 1926, Du Bois Papers.

48.
Leininger-Miller,
New Negro Artists in Paris,
176. And see “Harlem Soap Sculptors Win Praise,”
Chicago Defender,
February 2, 1929.

49.
Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage,” 64; Leininger-Miller,
New Negro Artists in Paris,
176–77.

50.
See, for example, Savage to West, August 19, 1935, West Papers, Box 2, Folder 13.

51.
Savage to Cullen, February 27, 1931, Cullen Papers. On Cullen, see the introduction by Major Jackson to Countee Cullen,
Collected Poems
(New York: Library of America, 2013).

52.
Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” here as quoted in Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage,” 50. For more on Savage's presence and influence in Harlem, see the oral history interview with Norman Lewis, July 14, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

53.
So far as I have been able to discover, not one word about their relationship ever made it into print. The sole mention I have found does not provide Savage's name. In a history of the Federal Writers' Project, Jerre Mangione alluded to Gould's obsession with “a black sculptress.” Mangione wrote:

Jerre Mangione,
The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project,
1935
–
1943
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 180–81. Mangione's citation is to an interview with Millen Brand. My thanks to Phillip Koyoumjian, who looked for Mangione's interview with Brand among Mangione's papers at the University of Rochester; it is not there.

54.
Gould to Cummings, September 20, 1926, Cummings Papers, Additional I, Folder 338.

55.
Morris R. Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.

56.
Gould to Pound, May 27, 1927, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. Gould also described his conflict with Liveright in 1929, in a letter to Nino Frank, December 1929,
Bifur
Archive, Box 1, Folder 13.

57.
Gould to Pound, March 1928 and January 1931, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. At the time, Zukofsky was serving as guest editor of
Poetry.

58.
Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.

59.
“He had his say, which was considerable, about the book, the author, and the subject, and there for him the matter ended.” Entry for Friday, February 15, 1924, in Burton Rascoe,
A Bookman's Daybook
(New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 206. A note with this typed on it is in Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

60.
Gould to Moore, February 25, 1926,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80. Gould hated Scofield: “The gulf which yawns and yawns and yawns between the bumptious pretenses of the Dial and its slight performance is based upon the incongruity of a shoddy-miller trying to run a magazine.”

61.
See Pound to Zukofsky, August 12, 1928,
Pound/Zukofsky,
12, 15. Zukofsky looked out for Gould. See Zukofsky to Pound, December 5 and December 12–28, 1928,
Pound/Zukofsky,
22–23.

62.
Moore made this selection after reading Gould's notebooks. Moore to Gould, December 4, 1928,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.

63.
He didn't mind her edits. “I consented readily,” he explained to Pound, “because I think of my book as substance rather than form. She was typically quietly and secretly afraid that she was bursting my literary conscience. I told her not to worry that one could do things to a whale without hurting it which one could not do to a humming bird. I meant, of course, merely that my work should be judged according to scale as one judges Froissart or Balzac and not that in literary merit had the jeweled cadence of a humming bird. I envy those who are able to publish every sentence but I have taken in too much history to be able to do this.” Gould to Moore, December 12, 1928,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80; Gould to Pound, December 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

64.
Gould to Moore, December 28, 1928,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.

65.
Moore also tried to get Gould to submit reviews, without success. Moore to Gould, December 17, 1928,
Dial
Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.

66.
Gould, “From Joe Gould's Oral History: Marriage,”
Dial,
April 1929, 319–21.

67.
Gould refers to this in a letter to Brand, September 7, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.

1.
Gould, “My Life,” 7.

2.
Gould to Pound, December 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

3.
Gould to Pound, May 6, 1933, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

4.
Macdonald said that Gould began writing the first version of the Oral History on October 1, 1914 (that would be right after he got back to Norwood from the Dakotas). “He started it all over again on January 1, 1915, and has since made a fresh start every January first since.” Macdonald, Statement on Joe Gould, unpublished eleven-page typewritten essay, Macdonald Papers, Box 78, Folder 142.

5.
Savage to Arthur Schomburg, January 1935, quoted in Hope Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage: Sculpting the African-American Identity” (M.A. thesis, City University of New York, 1990), 29–30. “By 1934 Augusta Savage was considered the most influential artist in Harlem.” Deirdre L. Bibby, foreword to
Augusta Savage and the Arts Schools of Harlem
(New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1988), 8. An indication of Savage's prominence in the Harlem arts movement: “Among the Negro artists of Harlem are Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthe, Charles Alston, E. Sims Campbell, Vertis Hayes, Bruce Nugent, Henry W. Barnham, Sara Murrell, Romare Beardon, Robert Savon Pious, and Beauford Delaney. Of these Aaron Douglas, painter and mural artist, Richmond Barthe, sculptor, Augusta Savage, sculptress, and E. Sims Campbell, painter and cartoonist, are the most prominent.” Federal Writers' Project,
New York Panorama: A Comprehensive View of the Metropolis
(New York: Random House, 1938), 143. See also “Sculptress of the Negro People,”
Daily Worker,
December 24, 1937.

6.
T. R. Poston, “Augusta Savage,”
Metropolitan,
January 1935. And see Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage,” chapter 2.

7.
On the shoe-polish formula, see Hugh Samson to Clyde J. Hart Jr., September 24, 1989, Hugh Samson Letters, Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

8.
For example: “I found several people who knew me. They kept buying me drinks. One was a Mrs. White who looked like [deliberate blank space] the colored sculpturess.” Diary entry for October 8, 1945. I entertained the possibility that Gould meant Selma Burke, another African American sculptor he knew. But when Gould writes about Burke, he uses her name; see his diary entry for July 20, 1946, Gould Diaries.

9.
Undated typewritten excerpt from Joe Gould's Oral History, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.

10.
Mitchell's interview notes with Gould, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

11.
Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

12.
Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

13.
Brand and Leader married on November 10, 1931: Millen Brand, Journal 1930–31, Brand Papers, Box
76.

14.
Pauline Leader,
And No Birds Sing
(New York: Vanguard, 1931), 82, 153, 174–89, and 214.

15.
Gould, “My Life,” 8.

16.
Pauline Leader, “Two Poems,”
Poetry
31 (1928): 256–57; and “Poem to Emily Dickinson,”
Poetry
36 (1930): 85.

17.
Horace Gregory, “Hard, Bitter and Courageous,”
New York Herald Tribune,
June 28, 1931.

18.
Brand,
The Outward Room
(1937; New York: New York Review Books, 2010), afterword by Peter Cameron.

19.
American psychiatry and psychoanalysis lagged behind their European counterparts, and, in any case, the field of psychiatry had been more or less in crisis since about 1900, when, as Edward Shorter argues, “psychiatry had reached a dead end. Its practitioners were for the most part in asylums, and asylums had become mainly warehouses in which any hope of therapy was illusory.” Edward Shorter,
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 65. In Europe, the movement then turned to biology; this happened more slowly in the United States (ibid., chapter 3).

20.
David J. Rothman calls this “the decline from rehabilitation to custodianship.” Rothman,
The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 239. For more on the displacement of the asylum with the mental hospital, see Elizabeth Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 22; on the role of routine, see 163–65. As Shorter writes, the first asylum in the United States that simply gave up the pretense that anyone would ever be cured was the Willard State Hospital, founded in 1869. Shorter,
History of Psychiatry,
46. Shorter calls the rise in numbers “the great nineteenth-century lockup” (48).

21.
The Outward Room
was a critical sensation and also sold more than half a million copies. See the afterword by Peter Cameron, 234–37; quotation from 42. For more about Brand, see his obituary: Eric Pace, “Millen Brand, Writer and Editor Known for Works on Psychiatry,”
New York Times,
March 22, 1980. Brand had a full draft of the novel by 1933, which is right after his encounter with Gould over Savage. That year, he asked a psychiatrist to review the manuscript and received extensive feedback. See the letters of Louis J. Bragman, M.D., to Brand, Brand Papers, Box 1.

22.
Brand to Jerre Mangione, May 4, 1965, Brand Papers, Box D.

23.
Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

24.
Brand to Mitchell, October 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

25.
George Arthur to Savage, May 28, 1930, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.

26.
Cullen to West, October 10, 1929, and July 3, 1931, West Papers, Box 2, Folder 7; Du Bois to Cullen, telegram, 1929, Du Bois Papers.

27.
Gould, “My Life,” 9.

28.
Savage to George Arthur, June 15, 1930, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.

29.
Cummings quotes this as one of Gould's sayings in Cummings to Qualey, February 12, 1945, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 17.

30.
“Augusta Savage Gives Her Views on Negro Art,”
Pittsburgh Courtier,
September 26, 1936.

31.
Savage to Du Bois, May 26, 1926, Du Bois Papers.

32.
See especially Paulette Nardal, “Une Femme Sculpteur Noire,”
La Dépêche Africaine,
August–September 1930, 4. On the general question of the loss and neglect of Savage's work, and her vanishing from history, see also Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage,” 1.

33.
“Young Sculptress Defies Adversity,”
New Journal and Guide,
October 19, 1929. Du Bois also made various introductions for her there, etc. See, for example, Du Bois to Henry O. Tanner, August 27, 1929, Du Bois Papers. On Savage in Paris, see also Theresa Leininger-Miller, “ ‘Heads of Thought and Reflection': Busts of African Warriors by Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, African American Sculptors in Paris, 1922–1934,” in
Out of Context: American Artists Abroad,
ed. Laura Felleman Fattal and Carol Salus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 93–111; Krista A. Thompson, “Preoccupied with Haiti: The Dream of Diaspora in African American Art, 1915–1942,”
American Art
21, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 74–97; and Augusta Savage,
Mourning Victory,
ca. 1930, Special Collections, Fisk Library.

34.
Mitchell's interview notes with Gould, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

35.
Gould to Williams, August 1929, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.

36.
Mitchell later entertained this possibility. About 1959, when he was typing up a set of Gould interview notes from June 16, 1942, which he marked as “saved from several pages that I discarded,” he wrote this note to himself: “possibility that during his disappearance from the Village ref to in the profile [‘Professor Sea Gull'] he was in Bellevue or some other hospital.” Mitchell, discarded Gould interview notes, June 16, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.