There are many ways to look at Joe Gould (1889-1957), the eccentric New York City character and poet who has been profiled in numerous books and articles for over a century. He was often described as a bearded, disheveled bohemian slouching through Greenwich Village, sometimes homeless, scribbling in a notebook, and mooching off anyone who would give him a handout. He hung out at the Minetta Tavern and other bars and cafeterias, often scooping up free packets of tomato ketchup. He also had a darker side.
In 1957, The Daily News said he was the “outlandish figure in cast off clothes, who carried a battered portfolio of cigarette butts, ink, sour balls, and notebooks.” Some called him “Professor Seagull” due to his sometimes-vigorous arm flapping and screeching.
Gould was always writing and said he was writing The Oral History of Our Time, the longest book ever written, though few believed him.
He was profiled twice in the New Yorker by writer Joseph Mitchell in 1942 and in 1964. “There’s nothing accidental about me,” Gould was quoted saying in 1942. “I’ll tell you what it took to make me what I am today. It took old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard and twenty-five years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food.”
But Joe wasn’t always a seemingly homeless drunk in Greenwich Village – who was he really, and how did he become the eccentric madman who died in an insane asylum? In 2016, historian Jill Lepore wrote for the New Yorker about Gould, after conducting extensive research in archives throughout the country and discovered more of the truth, both the good and the bad. She later related his story in her book Joe Gould’s Teeth (Vintage, 2017).
Beginnings in Massachusetts
Joseph Ferdinand Gould was born in 1889 in Norwood, Massachusetts. His father Clarke S. Gould (1864-1919) was a Harvard University educated doctor, as was his grandfather Joseph Ferdinand Gould (1828-1885), who was a surgeon in the 4th Massachusetts Volunteers during the Civil War. Young Joe was expected to follow in these footsteps and become a physician, but he did not have an easy childhood.
As a boy Joe was apparently undersized and fidgety, he wrote all over his bedroom walls, and possibly had symptoms of what we today call autism. He didn’t do well in school but was good at small details. He also had a notorious temper.
In Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Joe stated that he never felt at home in Norwood, but always felt at home in Greenwich Village among the misfits. “I seem to be a changeling or a throwback or a mutation of some sort in a highly respectable old New England family,” he said.
Joe managed to get into Harvard as a legacy admittance, though he didn’t do well, getting mostly poor grades. He was obsessed with race, and was part of a panel in 1911 entitled “How Does Race Prejudice Affect Race Purity.”
In 1911, he had a breakdown during his Senior year at Harvard and didn’t graduate, according to information found by Jill Lepore in his college files. His parents then sent him on a walking tour through Canada.
Two years later found Joe back in Norwood, in an appointment as a census enumerator. Around this time he wrote a “Racial Survey of Norwood,” describing every ethnic group in town. According to the Bridgewater Review “It is surprisingly solid work that has stood the test of time and represents the first known study of Norwood’s extensive immigrant populations.”
Afterward, he was hired to do field work for the Eugenics Record Office, in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The Record Office used now discredited approaches to push for forced sterilization of native people, immigrants, the mentally ill, and those with other “undesirable” traits – including what is now understood to be autism and also promiscuousness in women.
The Record Office collected biological and social information about Americans, and was a center for the eugenics movement. Joe Gould’s application to the institute included a pedigree chart which traced his bad temper back three generations. Once hired, he was sent to North Dakota for six months to measure the heads of the Mandan and Chippewa people, for whom he gained a respect.
While at the Eugenics Office, he reviewed and condemned a book by the white supremacist ethnographer Robert Wilson Shufeldt, America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro.
In 1915 Gould, who according to the Boston Globe “made a special study of race problems,” gave a talk at Ford Hall in Boston, “America, Not a Melting Pot.” The next year, back in Norwood, he wrote an article about his westward experiences for the Norwood Messenger.
According to Jill Lepore he took one more course at Harvard and finally graduated, and then decided to move to Greenwich Village to write. He said he “graduated magna cum difficultate.”
At the arrival of American involvement in the First World War, Joe attempted to enlist in the US Army, but was rejected three times.
Instead, he became a reporter for the New York Evening Mail and began to talk about his idea of writing an oral history, a word for word account of ordinary people’s lives.
Gould had noble aspirations for writing and was full of curiosity and determination. However, he believed he was a brilliant historian and had grand illusions about his oral history, though it really was a hodge-podge of notes from overheard conversations, interactions with various people, observations, and bits of his own poetry.
He wanted to write about how common people lived and published some essays to that end in small literary journals. He filled countless notebooks, though many were lost or destroyed. Jill Lepore eventually determined that parts of Gould’s oral history does exist, although it’s not as grandiose as he had bragged.
In 1923 he wrote “I want to belong to the masses, not the classes.”
In the early 1920s Joe Gould met frequently with men he knew from Harvard, including writers E.E. Cummings, William Saroyan and Ezra Pound. It was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, and he began to spend time in Harlem and contributed to Who’s Who in Colored America, a biographical dictionary. He contributed an article on art to Ezra Pound’s The Exile and submitted his poem “Chivalry” for the National Poetry Exhibition in New York.
In Harlem he met African American sculptor Augusta Savage at a poetry reading. He later became obsessed with her, harassing her – sometimes violently – for two decades, according to Jill Lepore’s research. Gould was arrested several times for attacking women, and eventually diagnosed as psychopathic. Lepore believes that Augusta Savage eventually fled Gould’s threatening harassments by moving upstate to Saugerties.
When Savage rejected his marriage proposal, Gould’s breakdown caused him to be briefly institutionalized at Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane. It would be the first of many institutionalizations. During one of these hospitalizations, all his teeth were pulled, a fairly common practice during the 1930s and 1940s.
At Manhattan State Hospital Gould he wrote a story, “The Proud Man and the Colored Singer,” based on himself and Augusta Savage. In 1929, he wrote several pieces for Dial. In one them, “Civilization,” he wrote:
“I have never been able to adapt myself to civilization. It is too needlessly complex and too materialistic. My father’s death [in 1919] focused my attention upon that point. We build so many skyscrapers and steamships and automobiles that we think of life as consisting of such bric-a-brac. Therefore, we are sorry at the dissolution of the body, and do not realize that mind and soul continue to exist.”
In 1931 he wrote an essay for Pagany on insanity and also applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was rejected. In “Insanity” he wrote:
“Insanity is a topic of peculiar interest to me. Despite my theory that people with strong will-power and a sense of humor never go off their nuts, I almost have first-hand information about it. There have been times when the black mood was on me.
“I needed every bit of self-control that I possessed to refrain from shouting aloud or waving my hands in wild gestures that would have brought a curious crowd around me and eventually have landed me in the police-station. I could very easily imagine myself locked up as a maniac. Yet all the time, the real me was not in sympathy with these impulses. It made me feel that perhaps there was a basis of truth in the old idea that insanity was caused by forces external to the soul, such as witchcraft. Science affirmed this once. It may do so again.”
In the early 1930s he wrote “My Life” and “Why I Write” (now located at Columbia University). In why I write he said “I am making an attempt to get as much material as possible to illustrate the normal life of everyday people. In this respect I am doing for my day something similar to what was done by Pepys and Boswell. It seems to me obvious that the average person is just as much history as the ruler or celebrity.”
In 1935 he had a short stint with the Federal Writers’ Project, and in 1940 was living in boarding house. The census reported he was a”book reviewer.”
In 1942 Joseph Mitchell’s profile of Joe Gould, “Professor Seagull,” was published (here is an annotated edition) in which he proclaimed his minimalist philosophy. The article ignited a new interest in Gould. The press, member of the arts and bohemian communities attended his birthday party the follow year. He recited a poem of social unconsciousness, “The Barricades” and declared that Communists were too conservative to suit his tastes.
Later that year he fell down some stairs and was hospitalized at Manhattan State Hospital. When he was released, he began drinking more, and struggled with poor health. His diary for the years 1943-47 was found at New York University by Jill Lepore. It contains snippets of his everyday life and mundane events.
In part in an effort to get him off the street, a then secret benefactor, Muriel Gardiner, paid rooming house room and board for Joe in 1944. According to Lepore’s Joe Gould’s Teeth, she supported Joe because “there is a type of alcoholic or psychopath who can go ahead and accomplish something if he has a little security.” Joe desperately tried to learn her identity but was unsuccessful.
Gardiner’s support suddenly stopped in 1947 for unknown reasons, and Joe ended up in a flophouse. The 1950 Census lists Joe as a handyman in a shoe factory, living in cheap hotel on West 14th Street.
Two years later he was institutionalized again at Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, then the largest mental hospital in the United States, with nearly 14,000 patients; he would die there on August 18, 1957. He is buried in an unmarked grave Ferncliff Cemetery in Greenburgh, Westchester County.
His obituary in the New York Daily News was entitled “Farewell to Bohemia: Prof. Seagull Takes Flight.”
Illustrations, from above: Joe Gould later in life; Gould in 1947 (from Colliers); and performing “Joe Gould’s stomp” at his birthday party in 1942 from Bridgewater Review.
