12

We over estimate the past because only the permanent things remain.

—JOSEPH F. GOULD

He stopped writing. Something had finally stayed his pen.

He spent the last years of his life in Pilgrim State Hospital in Islip, the largest mental hospital in the world.1 I don’t know what was done to him there. When I asked the hospital for his medical records, citing a federal law that releases those kinds of records fifty years after the patient’s death, the hospital declined my request, citing a New York State policy that effectively protects not Gould’s privacy but the hospital’s.2

Gould’s confinement at Pilgrim State coincided with the most troubling era in the troubling history of the treatment of mental illness. He was in terrible shape to begin with, and he had no one to defend him against a series of remarkably disastrous medical experiments.3

Pilgrim State Hospital opened in 1931.4 Its staff began administering electroshock treatments in 1940, and within four months had performed 1,610 procedures. Patients suffering from manic depression responded best, the hospital’s director, Harry J. Worthing, reported, psychotics less well; the longer the patient had been afflicted with a mental disorder, the less successful the treatment, but it was nevertheless used for years on those for whom “recovery cannot be anticipated,” because “electric shock therapy is cheap and easy to perform” and leaves difficult patients “quieter and more manageable.”5 In 1945, doctors at Pilgrim began conducting prefrontal lobotomies and launched a formal two-year study in 1947. Their research set the standard for the procedure. By the end of the study, 350 patients had been lobotomized. Sixty-seven had gone home; the rest were either still in the hospital or dead. But this counted as success, since what Worthing reported was relief from the previous treatment (“chronic sedation and restraint”) and a mitigation of pain: after the surgery, patients suffered less, because they felt less.6 “Cases are chosen primarily on the basis of their intractable course and the resistance to the usual procedures,” Worthing explained, and those chosen included patients who were considered “shock-resistant”; that is, they “showed rapid regressive and withdrawal symptoms with massive content and emotional loss of a malignant pattern after failure of adequate shock.”7 These patients, though, tended to be the most undone by the surgery:

Following the operation, there is normally some degree of torpid restfulness and slowness to initiate action. This is more marked and continues longer in regressed schizophrenics. Such a regressed patient may for days or even weeks, when seated before a tray of food, merely stare at it; but, if his hand is guided to start the process of eating, he will continue and even eat excessively in a rather automatic fashion.8

As with electroshock treatment, lobotomy was recommended even for patients for whom no recovery was expected, since it made them easier to manage.9 By 1948, doctors at Pilgrim were lobotomizing more than two hundred patients a year.10 The American Psychiatric Association honored Worthing for his “Successful Inauguration of Enlightened Psycho-Surgical Treatment and Rehabilitation Programs for Patients Formerly Considered Incurable.”11

Gould would almost certainly have been given electroshock treatments, and when that failed, the next step would have been a lobotomy.12 The consent of the patient was not required; a lobotomy, like electroshock, could be conducted by force. Worthing reported the case of a man who was exactly Gould’s age, and very much meets his description:

Case No. 231. Aged 57, this man was diagnosed dementia praecox, paranoid, onset “more than 10 years ago.” There were delusions of persecution, economic incapacity, withdrawal from the family, letters to authorities. He was admitted to Pilgrim State Hospital in 1947. In the hospital, he was furiously resistive, actively hallucinated, resentful, grandiose, unapproachable. Attempts to administer electric shock resulted in such combat that cardiac collapse was feared, in view of his age. Finally, he went on a hunger strike for several months and resisted tube-feeding so violently that this procedure was undertaken very reluctantly. Death seemed likely. Lobotomy was done on February 8, 1949, followed by the immediate cessation of the hunger strike. The patient admitted that he had been “imagining things.” He became friendly and approachable. On close examination, residual psychotic content was noted. There was cessation of paranoid letter-writing. This man was released June 4, 1949. On first report, he was comfortable, but economically dependent. He was well-behaved. “No loss of intelligence in conversation” was observed, but “no will to work.”13

Was Case No. 231 Joseph Ferdinand Gould? On December 2, 1947, Gould had written to Cummings: “Bespectacled apologies!!!” In May 1949, he sent a pained letter to William Carlos Williams: “I am now slowly coming to life again. I will have to rewrite a great deal of my history. That scares me as I seem to have lost much of my initial urge.”14 Between those dates, no letter in his hand survives. After that, Gould wrote three letters and one postcard—all in 1949—and then, as far as I can tell, none ever again. There was cessation of paranoid letter-writing.

—

He didn’t remain out of the hospital for long. On close examination, residual psychotic content was noted. In February 1950, he was admitted to Bellevue. He listed Dwight Macdonald as his nearest relation.15

In October 1951, Colleen Chassan, the daughter of Gould’s sister, Hilda, who had grown up not knowing that she had an uncle, read about him in McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. She went to every place Mitchell had mentioned in “Professor Sea Gull,” trying to find Gould. Finally, she saw him. “He was very dirty, his suit was too large,” she remembered. “His nose was running, and he didn’t do anything about it.” He had difficulty speaking. She said, “I felt that I had come too late.”16

In 1952, Gould collapsed on the street. He was admitted to Columbus Hospital, and transferred to Pilgrim.17 He never left.

Beginning in 1954, lobotomy was supplanted by psychiatry’s modern regime: psychopharmacology. “Between 1945 and 1955, holes were drilled in the skulls of sixteen hundred intractably ill patients, in each of whom certain bundles of frontal brain fibres were severed,” the psychologist Morton M. Hunt reported in The New Yorker, in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a two-part series about the changes at Pilgrim:

One out of four patients so treated was later able to leave the hospital, though the operation rendered a small percentage of the discharged men and women doltish. The rest had to remain, but a third of them behaved considerably better than they had previously. And still the population of mental hospitals in New York, which had quadrupled in fifty years, kept growing—and growing so rapidly that the state was unable to keep pace by building new hospitals. Then, late in 1954…the state mental hospitals began testing chlorpromazine and reserpine, the first of the tranquilizing drugs, and found them remarkably effective in many cases. In 1955, the drugs started to be used widely, and the effect was immediate.18

Hunt told the story Pilgrim State Hospital wanted him to tell: the miracle of tranquilizers had made lobotomy obsolete. When Hunt visited Pilgrim, though, he did meet one patient who had been treated with both all of the old therapies (electroshock, lobotomy) and the new drugs (each of the tranquilizers) and yet remained insane. “He’s an interesting patient of a kind you don’t see much of any more,” a nurse named Preston told Hunt. “Would you like to meet him? He’s harmless, of course, and loves to talk about himself.” Everyone called him “Professor”:

He was wearing an ordinary green sports shirt and brown slacks, a Paisley scarf about his throat, an Indian headband with a single dirty white sea-gull feather sticking up out of it, and spectacles. After a moment, I noticed that his spectacles had no lenses, and that his mustache was white at the roots and had obviously been blackened with some homemade dye, perhaps shoe polish. “Good afternoon, Professor,” Miss Preston said. “I’d like you to meet one of our visitors.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” he declared, in a resonant, theatrical voice. “Would you like to hear about my garden?”

I said that indeed I would.

He then pointed to two wooden crosses, embellished with ornaments of rolled-up aluminum foil, paper, and sea-gull feathers, in the center of his garden. “Now, these,” he said, “I designed these myself.”19

This professor with his sea-gull feathers wasn’t Joe Gould. By the time The New Yorker published “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Gould was dead. But maybe this professor was Hunt’s memory of a man he’d once known, or even visited, with Joseph Mitchell.

Most of Gould’s old friends didn’t know where he’d gone, but Mitchell did. One night, Ed Gottlieb, managing editor of the Long Island Press, called Mitchell at home. “Said he had heard that Joe Gould was dead and wanted to verify it,” Mitchell wrote in his notes. “Told him Gould wasn’t dead but in a mental institution.” Gottlieb said he wanted to get in touch with him. Mitchell wrote in his notes, “Trying to put him off, told him that I didn’t know which mental institution but would find out.”20

At Pilgrim, Gould was very far gone. He wrote not a word.

“You solve the problem of escape by being an expatriate,” he’d once written Pound. “I am an extemporate.” He believed that he lived outside of time.21 He believed he’d escaped.

—

On Monday, August 19, 1957, Harry J. Worthing, M.D., director of Pilgrim State Hospital, sent a telegram to Slater Brown. Joseph Ferdinand Gould was no more. “IF YOU CAN CARE FOR THE REMAINS OR KNOW THE WHEREABOUTS OF HIS FAMILY PLEASE CONTACT HOS IMMEDIATELY.”22 He left no will.23 Mitchell got the news by telephone from Gottlieb:

We spoke for a few minutes about how sad it was, and then I asked him if Gould had left any papers.

“No,” he said. “None at all. As the man at the hospital said, ‘Not a scratch.’ ”24

On Wednesday, a writer friend of Gould’s went to see Mitchell at The New Yorker and asked him to deliver the eulogy at Gould’s funeral; Mitchell said he’d be out of town.25 On Thursday morning, black-bordered placards were posted in shopwindows all over Greenwich Village:

Announcement to

Friends of

JOE GOULD

His funeral will be held

in the chapel at

Frank E. Campbell’s

Funeral Home

81st Street and Madison Avenue

On Friday, August 23

At 11 A.M.26

That night, another friend of Gould’s called Mitchell at home and asked him, again, to deliver the eulogy; Mitchell again said no.27 The funeral was held the next morning.28 Time ran an obituary: “Gould had no known relatives but many friends, including Poet E. E. Cummings, Artist Don Freeman, Writers Malcolm Cowley and William Saroyan.”29 None of them showed up for his funeral.30

The search for “The Oral History of Our Time” began straightaway. It went on for years. On August 20, the editor of the New York World-Telegram and Sun sent a letter to Cummings: “Gould always said that he wanted his Oral History of the World printed posthumously….Could you tell me perhaps where I could locate it?”31

Mitchell’s own, secret search began on September 10, 1957, when he ran into a man named De Hirsh Margules. They went out for coffee. Margules had known Gould. He was not unlike Gould. He told Mitchell that “he had been working on a poem for thirty-one years.” Mitchell went with Margules to his apartment on Christopher Street; Margules read him pages of the poem. One thing led to another. Mitchell saw Margules again a couple of weeks later. Margules told him to try the artist Vivian Marquie. “Mrs. Marquie gave me Rothschild’s number,” Mitchell wrote in his notes. “Rothschild gave me the Neel, Feist, and Buttinger numbers.” Through them, he found Muriel Gardiner.32

Gould’s niece, Colleen Chassan, hired a family friend named Mary L. Holman to help her find her uncle’s lost work.33 Holman sent queries to the Harvard Library and to the Smithsonian.34 Then, quietly, Mitchell took over Holman’s search. He searched for years. He must have been so haunted.

The public hunt for “The Oral History of Our Time” was led by Lawrence Woodman and James Nalbud, two fairly sketchy characters, who tried to recruit Mitchell and failed.35 (Woodman claimed to be related to Gould but was not; Nalbud’s name is his actual name, Dublan, spelled backward.) Nalbud tried to get the Ford Foundation to sponsor the search. “If I find the papers,” he told Mitchell, “maybe the foundation will give me a grant to put them in order for publication.”36 In April 1958, Nalbud sent a letter to The Harvard Crimson, inviting Harvard undergraduates to join a treasure hunt: “The search is for the resources of a legacy to your University which have been lost, strayed, or stolen. The value of this legacy is priceless.”37 The Harvard Library conducted an investigation and determined that no such gift had ever been arranged.38 Nalbud began posting flyers all over New York, offering a twenty-five-dollar reward for any leads.39 He sent letters asking recipients to fill out and return a form typed on a postcard:

RE: JOE GOULD’S LOST MMS.

What was the largest number of Joe’s note books you saw? ________

In crates, suitcases, bales, loose (check)

Did you examine and read any of the books? ________

Did you at any time own or store any of the books? ________

Date ________ Name ________40

The last clue comes from Ezra Pound, in a letter he sent from St. Elizabeth’s. On April 14, 1958, Pound wrote to Cummings, “am doin wot I kan to hellup yr friends edit Joe Gould.”41 Edit what? Did Pound have the notebooks? Four days later, Pound was released.

Near the end, I found in the archives a chapter of Joe Gould’s Oral History called “Why I Write.” It held an answer to the question I’d started with. “If one were to pick anyone up at random and study him intensely enough in all the ramifications of his life, we would get the whole story of man,” he wrote.42

What is biography? A life in time.

—

Augusta Savage hid, and tried to erase every last trace of herself, but she never really got free of Joe Gould’s hold. In 1960, a man walked into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, on 135th Street, and tried to walk out with the bust of W. E. B. Du Bois that Savage had made thirty-seven years before. Stopped at the door, he surrendered it. He said Savage had sent him. Later that year, the bust disappeared. It has never been found.43

Augusta Savage died in poverty and obscurity in 1962.44 Her work had been, at best, uneven. Counting only her best-known sculptures, she produced more than seventy major pieces. Later, when the Schomburg Center prepared to stage an exhibit, its curators could find only nineteen.45 Some people believe she collected as much of her work as she could, and smashed it.

When The New Yorker published “Joe Gould’s Secret” in 1964, it made many readers weep.46 It made many others terribly, terribly curious. “It has occurred to me that when Gould collapsed on the street in 1952 and was taken to Columbus Hospital, he may have had the Oral History with him, and it may, to this day, be in the lockers there where patients’ belongings are kept,” a nurse wrote to Mitchell, breathlessly, after reading the story. “I wonder if Columbus Hospital has been checked about the History. Also, he may have taken it with him to Bellevue—and it may still be there, molding away in some cupboard. Or it may be at Pilgrim State. If these hospitals haven’t been checked, I think it well worthwhile to make such an effort, don’t you?”47

Shouldn’t someone check?

Not me.

Instead, I went to Saugerties. Augusta Savage’s farm is still there, and the ruins of her studio, and her scant remains: her chamber pot, her typewriter, and a book of poems inscribed to her by the author, “For my fellow artist Augusta Savage—in admiration and regard, James Weldon Johnson.” Lift every voice. Her Flit gun is still there, too, gathering dust, turning to rust, in a house not far from what’s now called Augusta Savage Road. Outside her kitchen, dug into the ground, there’s a cistern, deep enough to drown a man.