Joe Gould's Secret

Joseph Mitchell

Sometimes I go in a place and order a cup of tea, he said confidingly, and I drink it and pay for it, and then I ask for a cup of hot water. The counterman thinks I'm going to make a second cup of tea with the same tea bag, which he doesn't mind: that's all right. Instead of which, I pour some ketchup in, and I have a very good cup of tomato bouillon free of charge. Try it sometime.

There was the way the principal of the school in Norwood had seen him--a disgusting little bastard. There was the way Ezra Pound had seen him--a native hickory. There was the way the know-it-all Village radical had seen him--a reactionary parasite. There were a great many of these aspects, and I began to go over them in my mind. He was the catarrhal child, he was the son who knows that he has disappointed his father, he was the runt, the shrimp, the peanut, the half-pint, the tadpole, he was Joe Gould the poet, he was Joe Gould the historian, he was Joe Gould the wild Chippewa Indian dancer, he was Joe Gould the greatest authority in the world on the language of the sea gull, he was the banished man, he was the perfect example of the solitary nocturnal wanderer, he was the little rat, he was the one and only member of the Joe Gould Party, he was the house bohemian of the Minetta Tavern, he was the Professor, he was the Sea Gull, he was Professor Sea Gull, he was the Mongoose, he was Professor Mongoose, he was the Bellevue Boy.

Yes, you're right, he once said to a detractor of the Oral History. It's only things I heard people say, but maybe I have a peculiar ability-maybe I can understand the significance of what people say, maybe I can read its inner meaning. You might listen to a conversation between two old men in a barroom or two old women on a park bench and think that it was the worst kind of bushwa, and I might listen to the same conversation and find deep historical meaning in it.

I decided right then and there that I couldn't possibly continue to hold my job, because it would take up time that I should devote to the Oral History, and I resolved that I would never again accept regular employment unless I absolutely had to or starve but would cut my wants down to the bare bones and depend on friends and well-wishers to see me through. The idea of the Oral History occurred to me around half past ten. Around a quarter to eleven, I stood up and went to a telephone and quit my job.
A throbbing quality had come into Gould's voice.
Since that fateful morning, he continued, squaring his shoulders and dilating his nostrils and lifting his chin, as if in heroic defiance, the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.

I really do feel a strong kinship with the abysmal Joe Gould. Not something to which one should aspire, I know; not something that one should admit to one's friends, I am learning. But Gould will always break past the walls I put up for most others to encounter. His outlook on tomato bouillon alone would have endeared him to me. But the sad truth behind his great and majestic work, Joe Gould's Oral History, is the sadness, I think, in which millions and millions of people in this world dwell. Gould just couldn't (or didn't) hide his sadness.
I think that more than the truth that everyone is an artist, I have been witnessing the truth that most people are artists who stopped thinking of themselves that way. Whether from exhaustion, business, pressure, disbelief, worry, ambition, or pride--all things that might be labeled with the heading "reality"--the general trend is that artists falter, cry, and peering about to see if anyone noticed, quickly disavow their artistic claims. This means there is a whole lot of bastard art out there.
Haven't we all met the person who used to draw or used to write or used to play or used to paint or used to dance or used to be working on that great project? Most artists are too afraid to even tell others their dream products, except of course as silly conjectures or knowing jokes. So time goes by, life lives on, and artists make bastards out of their art.
This is where Joe Gould comes in. He was crazy enough to keep on taking himself serious, even though he had no "real" right to claim artistry. The Oral History, unreal as it may or may not have been, at least wasn't abandoned, orphaned. So the lesson goes out to all the people who used to be artists out there: don't stop.