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A review by samarov
Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore
reviewed in the Chicago Reader
Joe Gould was a legendary nut. He was the kind of street person whose rants sometimes cohered into poetry. He couldn't stop writing, filling many dozens of cheap notebooks and stashing them with various friends and benefactors around New York City and elsewhere, a few of the books made it as far as Europe. He claimed to be writing “The Oral History of Our Time”. He expressed his ambition thus: “I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.”
Joe Gould was a legendary nut. He was the kind of street person whose rants sometimes cohered into poetry. He couldn't stop writing, filling many dozens of cheap notebooks and stashing them with various friends and benefactors around New York City and elsewhere, a few of the books made it as far as Europe. He claimed to be writing “The Oral History of Our Time”. He expressed his ambition thus: “I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.”
Was he an unrecognized mad genius or just another lost crackpot? He had long-lasting friendships with the poets Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings, had his portrait painted by Alice Neel, and was immortalized in two classic Joseph Mitchell New Yorker profiles (“Professor Sea Gull” and “Joe Gould's Secret”). Many eminent people fed, housed, and otherwise helped him. There were numerous attempts to publish his magnum opus. But the manuscript could never seem to be assembled in one place. Did it even exist outside a madman's mind?
In Jill Lepore's diverting new book Joe Gould's Teeth, she attempts to separate fact from fiction, but can't help but fall under the odd little man's spell, just like all the writers, philanthropists, cultural mavens, and curiosity-seekers who came before her. Still, as a responsible academic, she digs through the scattered archives of Gould's papers in an attempt to establish what he did and did not do. “I got to thinking that what had at first looked like contradictions weren't contradictions at all. Instead they were evidence of a pattern. The Oral History existed, and then it didn't; it didn't, and then it did. He wrote it; he lost it. He was a genius; he was a blind man.”
Unravelling the tangled threads of Gould's life, Lepore traces his peripatetic education at Harvard, his various but inevitably short-lived stretches of employment, and his involvement with luminaries of New York bohemia, the Harlem Renaissance, the eugenics movement, and an untold number of other odd conglomerations and associations. In his aimless wanderings the man had a talent for charming all kinds of people, insinuating himself into their lives, then inevitably overstepping his bounds by aggressively demanding contributions to “The Joe Gould Fund”, or, if his prey was a woman, by his lewdness and vulgarity. It is no accident that in Neel's great portrait she painted him with three penises.
Some of the best sections of the book concern a now mostly forgotten African-American sculptor named Augusta Savage. Gould pursued her relentlessly to the point that she had to flee the city to get away from him. Unlike the funny eccentric presented by his many admirers, this is a Gould who is obsessive and ugly. In this and many other points to which her research led, Lepore was forced to conclude that the definitive answers she hoped to uncover might never appear, “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.”
Joe Gould met his end alone as well. He died in a mental asylum, possibly lobotomized, most likely subject to multiple electric shock sessions. His Oral History has never been found. But the irresistible urge to search for it, to believe that at the back of some closet in a shuttered loony bin or a chicken farm on Long Island, volumes of a lost history lie waiting to be found, has not been sated even some 60 years after the man's passing. Lepore's book is as much about all the people, including herself, who project meaning and significance onto the work and personality of Joe Gould as it is about the man himself. Throughout history there have been peculiar characters who have captured the imagination of everyone they come into contact with, blinding them to obvious flaws and permitting all of us to imagine wonders just beyond what most of us can fathom. We owe Lepore a debt of gratitude for re-intoducing us to one of the strangest strangers to have ever walked among us.