Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (81 page)

I first saw Gould in the winter of 1932. At that time, I was a newspaper reporter, working mostly on crime news. Every now and then, I covered a story in Women’s Court, which in those days was in Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, in Greenwich Village. In the block below the courthouse there was a Greek restaurant, named the Athens, that was a hangout for people who worked in the court or often had business in it. They usually sat at a long table up front, across from the cashier’s desk, and Harry Panagakos, the proprietor, sometimes came over and sat with them. One afternoon, during a court recess, I was sitting at this table drinking coffee with Panagakos and a probation officer and a bail bondsman and a couple of Vice Squad detectives when a curious little man came in. He was around five feet four or five, and quite thin; he could hardly have weighed more than ninety pounds. He was bareheaded, and he carried his head cocked on one side, like an English sparrow. His hair was long, and he had a bushy beard. There were streaks of dirt on his forehead, obviously from rubbing it with dirty fingers. He was wearing an overcoat that was several sizes too large for him; it reached almost to the floor. He held his hands clasped together for warmth – it was a bitter-cold day – and the sleeves of the overcoat came down over them, forming a sort of muff. Despite his beard, the man, in the oversized overcoat, bareheaded and dirty-faced, had something childlike and lost about him: a child who had been up in the attic with other children trying on grownups’ clothes and had become tired of the game and wandered off. He stood still for a few moments, getting his bearings, and then he came over to Panagakos and said, ‘Can I have something to eat now, Harry? I can’t wait until tonight.’ At first Panagakos seemed annoyed, but then he shrugged his shoulders
and
told the man to go on back and sit down and he would step into the kitchen in a few minutes and ask the chef to fix him something. Looking greatly relieved, the man walked hurriedly up the aisle between two rows of tables. To be precise, he scurried up the aisle. ‘Who in God’s holy name is that?’ asked one of the detectives. Panagakos said that the man was one of the Village bohemians. He said that the bohemians were starving to death – in New York City, the winter of 1932 was the worst winter of the depression – and that he had got in the habit of feeding some of them. He said that the waiters set aside steaks and chops that people hadn’t finished eating, and other pieces of food left on plates, and wrapped them in wax paper and put them in paper bags and saved them for the bohemians. Panagakos said that all he asked was that they wait until just before closing time, at midnight, to come in and collect the food, so the sight of them trooping in and out wouldn’t get on the nerves of the paying customers. He said that he was going to give this one some soup and a sandwich but that he’d have to warn him not to come in early again. The detective asked if the man was a poet or a painter. ‘I don’t know what you’d call him,’ Panagakos said. ‘His name is Joe Gould, and he’s supposed to be writing the longest book in the history of the world.’

Toward the end of the thirties, I quit my newspaper job and went to work for
The New Yorker
. Around the same time, I moved to the Village, and I began to see Gould frequently. I would catch glimpses of him going into or coming out of one of the barrooms on lower Sixth Avenue – the Jericho Tavern or the Village Square Bar & Grill or the Belmar or Goody’s or the Rochambeau. I would see him sitting scribbling at a table in the Jackson Square branch of the Public Library, or I would see him filling his fountain pen in the main Village post office – the one on Tenth Street – or I would see him sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square. I worked a good deal at night at that time, and now and then, on my way home, around two or three in the morning, I would see him on Sixth Avenue or on a side street, hunched over and walking along slowly and appearing to be headed nowhere in particular, almost
always
alone, almost always carrying a bulging brown pasteboard portfolio, sometimes mumbling to himself. In my eyes, he was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man. I never saw him without thinking of the Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman, or of a silent old man called Swamp Jackson who lived alone in a shack on the edge of a swamp near the small farming town in the South that I come from and wandered widely on foot on the back roads of the countryside at night, or of one of those men I used to puzzle over when I read the Bible as a child, who, for transgressions that seemed mysterious to me, had been ‘cast out.’

One morning in the summer of 1942, sitting in my office at
The New Yorker
, I thought of Gould – I had seen him on the street the night before – and it occurred to me that he might be a good subject for a Profile. According to some notes I made at the time – I made notes on practically everything I had to do with Gould, and I found these in the file drawer with the rest of the Gould memorabilia – it was the morning of June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. I happened to be free to start on something new, so I went in and spoke to one of the editors about the idea. I remember telling the editor that I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his Oral History, and not his bohemianism; in my time, I had interviewed a number of Greenwich Village bohemians and they had seemed to me to be surprisingly tiresome. The editor said to go ahead and try it.

I was afraid that I might have trouble persuading Gould to talk about himself – I really knew next to nothing about him, and had got the impression that he was austere and aloof – and I decided that I had better talk with some people who knew him, or were acquainted with him, at least, and see if I could find out the best way to approach him. I left the office around eleven and went down to the Village and began going into places along Sixth Avenue and bringing up Gould’s name and getting into conversations about him with bartenders and waiters and with old-time Villagers they pointed out for me among their customers. In the middle of the
afternoon
, I telephoned the switchboard operator at the office and asked if there were any messages for me, as I customarily did when I was out, and she immediately switched me to the receptionist, who said that a man had been sitting in the reception room for an hour or so waiting for me to return. ‘I’ll put him on the phone,’ she said. ‘Hello, this is Joe Gould,’ the man said. ‘I heard that you wanted to talk to me, so I dropped in, but the thing is, I’m supposed to go to the clinic at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and pick up a prescription for some eye trouble I’ve been having, and if it’s one kind of prescription it won’t cost anything but if it’s another kind it may cost around two dollars, and I’ve just discovered that I don’t have any money with me, and it’s getting late, and I wonder if you’d ask your receptionist to lend me two dollars and you can pay her back when you come in and we can meet any time you say and have a talk and I’ll pay you back then.’ The receptionist broke in and said that she would lend him the money, and then Gould came back on the phone and we agreed to meet at nine-thirty the next morning in a diner on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, called the Jefferson. He suggested both the time and the place.

When I got back to the office, I gave the receptionist her two dollars. ‘He was a terribly dirty little man, and terribly nosy,’ she said, ‘and I was glad to get him out of here.’ ‘What was he nosy about?’ I asked. ‘Well, for one thing,’ she said, ‘he wanted to know how much I make. Also,’ she continued, handing me a folded slip of paper, ‘he gave me this note as he was leaving, and told me not to read it until he got on the elevator.’ ‘You have beautiful shoulders, my dear,’ the note said, ‘and I should like to kiss them.’ ‘He also left a note for you,’ she said, handing me another folded slip of paper. ‘On second thought,’ this note said, ‘nine-thirty is a little early for me. Let us make it eleven.’

The Jefferson – it is gone now – was one of those big, roomy, jukeboxy diners. It was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, at the conjunction of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, Village Square, and Eighth Street, which is the heart and hub of the Village. It stayed open all day and all night, and it was a popular meeting place. It had a long counter with a row of wobbly-seated stools,
and
it had a row of booths. When I entered it, at eleven, Gould was sitting on the first counter stool, facing the door and holding his greasy old pasteboard portfolio on his lap, and he looked the worst I had ever seen him. He was wearing a limp, dirty seersucker suit, a dirty Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and dirty sneakers. His face was greenish gray, and the right side of his mouth twitched involuntarily. His eyes were bloodshot. He was bald on top, but he had hair sticking out in every possible direction from the back and sides of his head. His beard was unkempt, and around his mouth cigarette smoke had stained it yellow. He had on a pair of glasses that were loose and lopsided, and they had slipped down near the end of his nose. As I came in, he lifted his head a little and looked at me, and his face was alert and on guard and yet so tired and so detached and so remotely reflective that it was almost impassive. Looking straight at me, he looked straight through me. I have seen the same deceptively blank expression on the faces of old freaks sitting on platforms in freak shows and on the faces of old apes in zoos on Sunday afternoons.

I went over and introduced myself to Gould, and he instantly drew himself up. ‘I understand you want to write something about me,’ he said, in a chipper, nasal voice, ‘and I greet you at the beginning of a great endeavor.’ Then, having said this, he seemed to falter and to lose confidence in himself. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get home. That is, I didn’t get to the flophouse I’ve been staying in lately. I slept on the porch at St Joseph’s R.C. until they opened the doors for the first Mass, and then I went in and sat in a pew until a few minutes ago.’ St Joseph’s, at Sixth Avenue and Washington Place, is the principal Roman Catholic church in the Village and one of the oldest churches in the city; it has two large, freestanding columns on its porch, behind which, shielded from the street, generations of unfortunates have slept. ‘I died and was buried and went to Hell two or three times this morning, sitting in that pew,’ Gould continued. ‘To be frank, I have a hangover and I’m broke and I’m terribly hungry, and I’d appreciate it very much if you’d buy me some breakfast.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Fried eggs on toast!’ he called out commandingly to the
counterman
. ‘And let me have some coffee right away and some more with the eggs. Black coffee. And make sure it’s hot.’ He slid off the stool. ‘If you’re having something,’ he said to me, ‘call out your order, and let’s sit in a booth. The waitress will bring it over.’

We took a booth, and the waitress brought Gould’s coffee. It was in a thick white mug, diner style, and it was so hot it was steaming. Even so, tipping the mug slightly toward him without taking it off the table, he bent down and immediately began drinking it with little, cautious, quick, birdlike sips and gulps interspersed with little whimpering sounds indicating pleasure and relief, and almost at once color returned to his face and his eyes became brighter and his twitch disappeared. I had never before seen anyone react so quickly and so noticeably to coffee; brandy probably wouldn’t have done any more for him, or cocaine, or an oxygen tent, or a blood transfusion. He drank the whole mug in this fashion, and then sat back and held his head on one side and looked me over.

‘I suppose you’re puzzled about me,’ he said. His tone of voice was condescending; he had got some of his confidence back. ‘If so,’ he continued, ‘the feeling is mutual, for I’m puzzled about myself, and have been since childhood. I seem to be a changeling or a throwback or a mutation of some sort in a highly respectable old New England family. Let me give you a few biographical facts. My full name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, and I was named for my grandfather, who was a doctor. During the Civil War, he was surgeon of the Fourth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, and later on he was a prominent obstetrician in Boston and taught in the Harvard Medical School. The Goulds, or my branch of them, have been in New England since the sixteen-thirties and have fought in every war in the history of the country, including King Philip’s War and the Pequot War. We’re related to many of the other early New England families, such as the Lawrences and the Clarkes and the Storers. My grandmother on my father’s side was a direct descendant of John Lawrence, who arrived from England on the
Arbella
in 1630 and was the first Lawrence in this country, and she could trace her ancestry back to a knight named Robert Lawrence who lived in the twelfth century. She used to say that the Lawrence line, or this particular
Lawrence
line, was not only one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in New England but also one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in England itself, and that we should never forget it.’

Gould abruptly began scratching himself. He went about it unselfconsciously. He scratched the back of his neck, and then he thrust his hand inside his shirt and scratched his chest and ribs.

‘I should’ve been born in Boston,’ he continued, ‘but I wasn’t. My father, whose name was Clarke Storer Gould, was also a doctor. He was a Bostonian, but he had been prevailed upon to move out and practice in Norwood, Massachusetts, and he and my mother had been living there only a few months when I was born. Norwood is a fairly good-sized old Yankee town about fifteen miles southwest of Boston. It’s a residential suburb, and it also has some printing plants and some sheepskin tanneries and an ink factory and a glue works. I was born at high noon on September 12, 1889, in a flat over Jim Hartshorn’s meat market. In Norwood, by the way, that’s pronounced “Jim Hatson.” A year or so later, my father built a big house on Washington Street, the main street of Norwood. Four-eighty-six Washington Street. It had three stories and twenty-one rooms, and it had gables and dormers and ornamental balconies and parquet floors, and it was one of the show places of Norwood. There was a mirror in our front hall that was eight feet high and decorated with gold cherubim. There were beautiful terra-cotta tiles around the fireplaces. There were diamond-shaped windows at the stair landings, and they had red, green, purple, and amber panes.