1. Gould wrote about this fear all his life but see, for example, Gould to Ezra Pound, May 6, 1933, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
2. Regarding buying supplies at five-and-dimes, see diary entry for July–August 1945, Gould Diaries.
3. Gould to George Soule, April 12, 1934, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000. Soule was The New Republic’s staff economist.
4. Gould to Edmund R. Brown, May 5, 1935, Brown Papers, Barrett Minor Box 10.
5. Gould to Marianne Moore, December 12, 1928, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.
6. Moore to Gould, December 17, 1928, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.
7. Gould to George Sarton, March 1931, George Sarton Additional Papers, MS Am 1803 (655), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
8. Horace Gregory, “Pepys on the Bowery,” New Republic, April 15, 1931.
9. Gould to Pound, January 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
10. On this movement, see Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
11. “Writer Honors 7,300,000th Word by Party,” New York Herald Tribune, March 2, 1936.
12. Charles Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It,” PM Weekly, August 24, 1941.
13. Gould to Pound, May 30, 1938, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
14. Cummings to Pound, May 1935, Pound/Cummings, 69.
15. Dwight Macdonald, Statement on Joe Gould, unpublished eleven-page typewritten essay, Macdonald Papers, Box 78, Folder 142.
16. Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It.”
17. William Saroyan, “How I Met Joe Gould,” Don Freeman’s Newsstand 1 (1941): 25, 27.
18. Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull,” New Yorker, December 12, 1942.
19. Barbara C. Kroll to Joseph Mitchell, March 10, 1968, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Kroll was recalling reading “Professor Sea Gull,” as a college student, in 1942.
20. Ved Mehta to Joseph Mitchell, undated, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. This is after “Joe Gould’s Secret” appeared.
21. Calvin Trillin, foreword to McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, by Joseph Mitchell (New York: Pantheon, 2001).
22. The comparison to Joyce was commonly made. See, e.g., “I felt I was truly immersed in the American Ulysses”: Sherman Chickering to Joseph Mitchell, October 23, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1 (Chickering was describing reading “Joe Gould’s Secret”).
23. Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.”
24. Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould’s Oral History: Art,” Exile, November 1927, 116.
25. Edward J. O’Brien, letter of recommendation for Joe Gould, 1934, Gould Guggenheim Files; Pound, Editor’s Note, Exile, November 1927, 118–19; Gould to Pound, January 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
26. Gould to Williams, August 7, 1947, Cummings Papers, Folder 490; Diary entry for July 26, 1943, Gould Diaries; Gould to Cummings, December 2, 1947, Cummings Papers, Folder 490; Cummings to Pound, March 1, 1930, Pound/Cummings, 18.
27. Gould to Williams, December 16, 1932, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243; Gould to Lewis Mumford, January 1941, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906; Cummings to Elizabeth Cummings Qualey, March 9, 1950, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 23; Gould to Mumford, December 22, 1941, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
28. Diary entry for May 8, 1943, Gould Diaries. Gould fell in January 1943 and was unable to write about it until after his recovery. And see Slater Brown to Joseph Mitchell, April 8, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
29. Diary entry for March 23, 1944, Gould Diaries.
30. Linda [no last name], undated but 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
31. Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” New Yorker, September 19 and 26, 1964.
1. Diary entries for August 6, 1945; April 11, 1945; December 5, 1944; December 17, 1944; January 30, 1945; and February 3, 1945, Gould Diaries. On stealing ink from the post office, see Mitchell’s 1942 research notes, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
2. Gould, “Meo Tempore: A Selection from Joe Gould’s Oral History,” Pagany 2 (1931): 96–99; quotation from 97.
3. Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret (New York: Vintage, 1965; New York: Modern Library, 2000).
4. Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.”
5. Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret.”
6. Gould to William Braithwaite, October 14, 1911, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould.
7. Alice W. Barker to Mitchell, August 16, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
8. “She hated him then,” Hilda Gould’s daughter told Mitchell, decades later, “and she still hates him.” Colleen Chassan interview, August 3, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
9. Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.” An essay titled “Why I Am Called Professor Sea Gull” is one of the very last things Gould ever wrote. See Gould to Williams, May 1949, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243. After Gould’s death in 1957, Chris Cominel, a staff writer for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, spent a day looking for Gould’s Oral History; all he was able to find was this essay. Chris Cominel, “Gould Saved from Potter’s Field but His History Is Lost,” New York World-Telegram and Sun, August 22, 1957.
10. I have tried to avoid diagnosing Gould, because, on evidentiary grounds, it’s impossible and because, as a matter of historical method, it’s unsupportable. But I did consult with two psychiatrists at Harvard Medical School, Robert J. Waldinger and Alfred S. Margulies, and both offered invaluable advice. Robert Waldinger, email to the author, May 17, 2015; Alfred Margulies, email to the author, June 1, 2015.
11. Gould, “My Life,” 1.
12. He mentions this in his application to work at the Eugenics Record Office: Eugenics Record Office Papers, Joseph F. Gould File. There was a public telephone (one of six in the town of Norwood) at 483 Washington Street, across the street from the Goulds’ house at 486 Washington Street. New England Telephone & Telegraph Co., advertisement, Resident and Business Directory of Norwood and Walpole, Massachusetts, 1906 (Boston: Boston Suburban Book Co., 1906), 32; Gould’s father also had a private telephone in his office, on the first floor of his house, at a time when very few people in Norwood had a private line (see the listing in that same directory): “GOULD, CLARKE S., physician and surgeon, 486 Washington, h.do. Office hours from 1 to 3 and 6 to 9 p.m. Tel. 51-3.” Gould also later explained that the Oral History would draw from “diaries of the period when I was in charge of the telephone service at Squantum.” Gould, “Synopsis,” 6. He is referring here to the Harvard Aviation Field, founded at Squantum Point in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1910; in 1917 it became the Naval Air Station Squantum. Gould said the Oral History would include “accounts of the two Harvard Aviation Meets in 1910 and 1912.”
13. Gould, entrance exam record, Gould Harvard Files.
14. Gould, “Myself,” 2.
15. Gould, “My Life,” 2.
16. [Dean Byron S. Hurlbut] to Clarke S. Gould, February 21, 1908; [Hurlbut] to Joseph F. Gould, February 29, May 26, and November 8, 1908; Mr. L. Allard [to Hurlbut], February 8, 1908; [Hurlbut] to Clarke S. Gould, March 4, 1908; and Robert Matteson Johnston to [unspecified dean], January 11, 1913 (“I saw Joseph F. Gould this morning, who wanted to complete History 27, which he failed to complete in 1910–11, simply by a thesis”), Gould Harvard Files. History 27 was “The Historical Literature of France and England Since the Close of the Eighteenth Century.” Harvard University Catalogue, 1910–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1910), 334.
17. Hurlbut to Gould, November 3, 1909; Hurlbut to Gould, October 17, 1910; E. H. Wells to Clarke Storer Gould, July 10, 1911, Gould Harvard Files.
18. Clarke Storer Gould to E. H. Wells, August 1, 1911, Gould Harvard Files.
1. Gould, “Synopsis.”
2. Mitchell’s interview notes with Gould, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
3. Charles Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It,” PM Weekly, August 24, 1941.
4. O’Brien, letter of recommendation for Joe Gould, 1934, Gould Guggenheim Files.
5. Gould, “My Life,” 2.
6. Brown and Gould had known one another as children, and during Gould’s junior year of college he lived with Brown’s family in Cambridge, on Rutland Street. Gould, “My Life,” 1–2. Gould reports that in 1905 he worked with Brown as assistant editor of a little magazine called Freak.
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). And see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
8. Gould, “How Does Race Prejudice Affect Race Purity?,” Boston Globe, June 25, 1911. The essay was part of a forum on the subject. Another contributor was the white supremacist William Benjamin Smith, professor of philosophy at Tulane, who argued that miscegenation was a grave threat to humanity. William Benjamin Smith, “Lower and Higher Races,” Boston Globe, June 25, 1911. And see Smith, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905).
9. “Such a feeling seems confined to rather nervous people, or those with intellectual specialization.” Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, Davenport Papers. “I have had quite a correspondence with Doctor Charles Eastman,” Gould later wrote. I have not been able to find that correspondence. Gould to Davenport, August 29, 1915, Davenport Papers.
10. Gould to Braithwaite, October 14, 1911, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould; Gould, “Synopsis,” 4–5; Diary entry for October 5, 1945, Gould Diaries.
11. Gould to Hurlbut, January 22, 1912, Gould Harvard Files. Under pressure from Gould’s father, the university had relented and allowed for the presentation of such a petition. E. H. Wells to Clarke Storer Gould, September 26, 1911. Gould’s behavior was bizarre. He asked at least one professor for money. Gould to Hurlbut, January 26, 1912, Gould Harvard Files. “J.F. Gould is engaged in literary work,” he reported to Harvard in 1912 when he got back to Massachusetts. Secretary’s First Report, Harvard College Class of 1911 (Cambridge, MA: Crimson Printing Co., 1912).
12. Joseph F. Gould, “Report of Census Enumerator,” 42nd Annual Report, Town of Norwood, Year Ending December 31, 1913 (Norwood, MA, 1914), 327, and “Report of Census Enumerator,” 43rd Annual Report, Town of Norwood, Year Ending December 31, 1914 (Norwood, MA, 1915), 219. Joseph F. Gould, “Racial Survey of Norwood, Parts I–IX,” Norwood Messenger, July 5, 12, 19, and 26, 1913; August 2, 9, and 16, 1913; September 20, 1913; and October 4, 1913. (My thanks to Patricia Fanning of the Norwood Historical Society for sharing these with me.) On the lecture, see the printed postcard announcing Mr. Joseph F. Gould’s lecture at the Boston Scientific Society, November 26, 1912, Joseph F. Gould, Quadrennial File, Harvard University Archives. The biography of Gould offered here is: “Mr. Gould, a Contributing Editor of the Four Seas is a Harvard man who has taken much interest in conditions of men. He has studied them in their own environment having made a walking tour of five hundred miles in Canada studying Lumberjacks, Indians and other types. He is president of the Race Pride League.”
13. [Hurlbut or Wells] to Gould, January 23, 1913; Gould to Hurlbut, May 15, 1913; Gould to Hurlbut, November 30, 1913. He may have expected to extract a certain vengeance in the Oral History, which, he later said, would include much material on the Harvard faculty: “I have a good chapter on President Lowell of Harvard. In time I expect to add chapters on other members of the Harvard faculty.” Gould, “Synopsis,” 7.
14. Poetry Journal 1 (1912): 1, and Poetry Journal 3 (1914): 183.
15. Gould to Nino Frank, December 29, 1929, Bifur Archive, Box 1, Folder 13; and Pound. Gould to Pound from Hotel Bradford, January [or June?], 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. O’Brien died in 1941. “When he died, his executor and secretary destroyed almost everything.” Ingeborg O’Brien, email to the author, April 26, 2015.
16. Jack Levitz to Mitchell, November 13, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
17. Mitchell, note, November 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
18. Israel G. Young to Dr. Theodore Grieder, NYU Special Collections, November 18, 1967, and Theodore Grieder, “Joe Gould’s Notebooks,” unpublished five-page typescript, Fales Manuscript Collection, MSS 001, Box 71, Folder 1.
19. Diary entry for January 1, 1943, Gould Diaries.
20. Diary entry for May 21, 1943, Gould Diaries.
21. Diary entry for June 5, 1945, Gould Diaries.
22. Gould had written to Gregg to ask him to become a member of the Oral History Society, adding, “It is also possible that you might be able to help me find a better place for storing my manuscripts than I have at present. Twice they have been jeopardized by fire.” When Gregg was in New York, he made an appointment with Gould. Gould never showed up. Gould to Alan Gregg, 1940, Gregg Papers, and see Gould’s later diary entries about Gregg. Gregg was the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s medical sciences program. That a psychiatrist held this position suggests how much of American psychiatry became experimental in the 1930s and 1940s. Gregg, much influenced by Adolf Meyer, was essentially a psychobiologist. See Jack Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30–46.
23. Gould’s fixation on the question of whether it was normal or abnormal to be sexually attracted to people of other races had led him to write endless letters to the country’s best-known authorities on racial mixing, including Henry Goddard, a psychologist who advocated intelligence testing, and Charles Eastman, a Dakota Indian with European forebears. “Dr. Goddard writes me that race-prejudice is unknown among idiots. Primitive people seem not to have it. The Indian frequently shares the social prejudice against the Negro, but Dr. Charles A. Eastman tells me that as far as he knows the Indian has no real antipathy or ‘phobia’ for other racial groups.” Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, Davenport Papers. “I have had quite a correspondence with Doctor Charles Eastman,” Gould later wrote. I have not been able to find that correspondence. Gould to Davenport, August 29, 1915, Davenport Papers.
24. Gould to Franz Boas, misdated by an archivist as December 31, 1920, but plainly September 1920, Boas Papers. “No one has ever been able to make head or tail of the Albanian episode,” Malcolm Cowley said. Mitchell’s 1942 interview notes, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
25. Boas to Gould, September 21, 1920. Gould wrote again (undated but September 1920), at still greater length. Boas replied, on October 2, 1920, with a single sentence: “If you want to talk to me about this subject that interests you, I shall be glad to see you. Kindly telephone me so that we can make an appointment.” Boas Papers.
26. “Variation and Heredity” is described in the Harvard University Catalogue, 1910–1911. Gould got a C. Gould Harvard Files. Gould to Davenport, June 6, 1914, Davenport Papers.
27. Charles Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1910); and see Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1911).
28. Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, Davenport Papers.
29. Davenport to Gould, December 29, 1913; and Gould to Davenport, January 3, 1914, Davenport Papers.
1. Davenport to Gould, January 5, 1914, Davenport Papers.
2. Gould to Davenport, January 11, 1915, Davenport Papers.
3. Gould to Davenport, October 16, 1913, Davenport Papers.
4. Ibid.
5. Davenport’s proposed visit happened to fall on the day of a suffrage parade that Gould had pledged to attend. “It will be a valid excuse for reneging,” Gould wrote Davenport, delighted. “It seems to me that because biological specialization seems to increase sex-differences with increased civilisation that woman will need to enlarge her interests to keep the psychical gulf between the sexes from widening. So you see I might get into trouble in the parade.” Gould to Davenport, April 15, 1914, Davenport Papers.
6. The courses Gould tried to get into in 1914 were many. See Hurlbut’s letters to several instructors, May 1, 1914, and the replies to Gould, May 6, 1914. Professor Gustavus Howard Maynadier allowed him to take the examination in English 37, “The Story of King Arthur,” without attending a single lecture. Hurlbut to G. H. Maynadier, April 9, 1914, Gould Harvard Files. For the course, see the Harvard University Catalogue, 1913–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1913), 331. Gould passed the exam. Gould to Hurlbut, January 2, 1915, and Hurlbut to Gould, January 4, 1915, Gould Harvard Files.
7. Gould to Davenport, April 25, 1914, Davenport Papers. The Cosmopolitan Club was founded in 1908. John Reed was the founding president. After Reed graduated, the next president was D. C. Gupta, from Bengal. “Cosmopolitan Club Officers,” Harvard Bulletin, June 1909. See Henry Wilder Foote, letter to the editor, Harvard Bulletin, November 1907; Cosmopolitan Club, Harvard Bulletin, June 1908; Membership certificate, 1909, Cosmopolitan Club Papers; and “Cosmopolitan Club,” Harvard Bulletin, June 1910; “Harvard Cosmopolitan Club,” Harvard Bulletin, May 1911. Gould told people he had been a member. See, for example, Edward Nagel and Slater Brown, “Joseph Gould: The Man,” Broom 5 (October 1923): 145–46. But I have not been able to find Gould’s name on any list of members. Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, May 12, 1909, Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, Miscellaneous, HUD 3299, Harvard University Archives.
8. Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, and November 1, 1914, Davenport Papers.
9. “I am not going to assume any editorial task, but I am going to suggest to Prof. William E. Castle that he try and help the eugenics movement to some of the publicity of which it stands in need.” Gould to Davenport, January 11, 1915, Davenport Papers.
10. For example, Joseph F. Gould, “In Moslem Spain,” Crisis 7 (April 1914): 289–300.
11. Upton Sinclair, ed., The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1915); Sinclair acknowledges Gould for helping with the manuscript, 20.
12. “ONE PRISONER, A STUDENT OF RACIAL CONDITIONS,” Boston Herald, April 19, 1915.
13. Joseph F. Gould, “Equality of Opportunity Is the Chief Safeguard of Racial Opportunity,” Proceedings of the Sagamore Sociological Conference, Sagamore, Massachusetts, June 30–July 2, 1914 (Sagamore, MA, 1917), 57–58. Gould was on the Platform Committee, 33. “What is the race question?” Gould asked at Sagamore in 1914. “It seems to me a conflict between two ideals—the American ideal of democracy, and the instinctive desire of any specialized people to keep their racial integrity intact.” History, he said, shows that “there is least intermixture where two races meet on equal terms,” and therefore, “those who desire racial purity should put forth their efforts to abolish discrimination.”
14. Gould, “My Life,” 2. Perlstein spoke at the same Sagamore conference.
15. Gould to Davenport, January 11, 1915, Davenport Papers; Gould to Hurlbut, January 28, 1915, Gould Harvard Files; Gould to Davenport, September 24, 1915, Davenport Papers.
16. “ONE PRISONER, A STUDENT OF RACIAL CONDITIONS,” Boston Herald, April 19, 1915; Gould, “My Life,” 3.
17. Joseph F. Gould, application, examination, pedigree, and supporting materials, Eugenics Record Office Papers.
18. Davenport to Gould, September 14, 1915, Davenport Papers.
19. Milton Bradley, Elementary Color (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Co., 1895), 31–34. For a discussion of Davenport’s use of the top, see Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 89–100.
20. Gould to Davenport, October 19, 1915, Davenport Papers. And see Gould to Abbott Lawrence Lowell, November 22, 1915, Records of the President of Harvard University, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1909–1933, Box 79, Folder 857, Harvard University Archives, UAI 5.160. Gould also chronicled his time in the Dakotas in a set of detailed letters to the editor of his hometown newspaper. See Joseph F. Gould, “A Norwoodite in No. Dakota,” Norwood Messenger, March 23, 1916 (printing a letter to the editor dated February 25, 1916); “A Norwoodite in No. Dakota,” Norwood Messenger, April 1, 1916 (printing a letter to the editor dated February 27, 1916); and “A Norwoodite in No. Dakota,” Norwood Messenger, May 13, 1916 (printing a letter to the editor dated April 14, 1916). The letters are especially interesting because they’re written just after Gould began the Oral History and they are presumably a part of it. My thanks to Patricia J. Fanning of the Norwood Historical Society for sharing these letters with me.
21. Alfred Margulies, email to the author, June 1, 2015. Edward Shorter believes that the reason insane asylums got so crowded at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries is the spread of syphilis. Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 53–59. After symptoms appeared, general paresis of the insane was fatal, until, during the First World War, it was discovered that it could be treated by inducing a fever. Syphilitic patients were then injected with the blood of patients suffering from malaria. In the 1940s, penicillin replaced inoculation with malaria as the preferred treatment. Ibid., 192–96. See also Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 49–54. Locating an organic cause for insanity was revolutionary; it made psychiatry modern. “Syphilis is in a sense the making of psychiatry,” the head of a psychiatric hospital in Boston said (quoted ibid.,50).
22. “This would indicate, perhaps, a commonness of the practice.” Gould to Davenport, December 9, 1915, Davenport Papers.
23. Jerre Mangione, An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 110.
24. Gould to Davenport, December 24, 1915, and see also Davenport to Gould, January 7, 1916, Davenport Papers.
25. Gould to Davenport, December 9, 1915, Davenport Papers.
26. Gould’s work was under the supervision of University of Minnesota anthropologist Albert Ernest Jenks. Davenport to Gould, September 14, 1915. And see Jenks, Indian-White Amalgamation: An Anthropometric Study (Minneapolis: Bulletin of the University of Minnesota, 1916), v–vi. In the end, Gould’s work was too slow for Jenks’s purposes, as Gould reported to the Eugenics Record Office in November 1915: “my work will be done too late to be of any use in Prof. Jenk’s [sic] law cases.”
27. Gould to Hurlbut, October 28, 1915, from Elbowoods, North Dakota: “I am to live with an Indian family, and will be in a village where there are only three other white people. During this time I should like to have a Harvard catalogue to pore over, and see if I cannot find some half course that can be taken by correspondence….I am very anxious to get my degree, as there is a possibility of my getting a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, where Prof. A.E. Jenks is making some studies of racial amalgamation.”
28. Gould to Hurlbut, January 14, 1916; and see Hurlbut to Professor Wiener (who taught Tolstoy), January 21, 1916, Gould Harvard Files.
29. Gould to Hurlbut, April 2, 1915, Gould Harvard Files.
30. Gould, review of America’s Greatest Problem, by R. W. Shufeldt, Survey, November 27, 1915, 216; Gould, review of The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, by Carter G. Woodson, Survey, January 29, 1916, 521–22.
31. “Certain of the Indian’s problems are the same as those which beset the Negro.” Gould to Du Bois, February 27, 1916, Du Bois Papers.
32. “Joseph Gould, ’15, having completed his assignment among the Dakota Indians has been moving eastward by easy stages during the past month. On May 12 and 15 he spoke at Howard University, Washington, D. C., on ‘America not a Melting Pot’ and on ‘Race Prejudice.’ On May 26 he dropped into the ‘Office’ for a brief visit. He will remain for a time at his home in Norwood. Mass.” Eugenical News, June 1916.
33. Earnest Albert Hooton, Up from the Ape (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 396–97, 501–2, 588–89, 594. This is what Hooton wrote in 1937; he may have had different ideas in 1916, when he was teaching Gould. Still, his convictions are very strong, and it’s hard to imagine that they represent a reversal. He was, for instance, quite vociferous in his opposition to IQ tests, which he said ought to be called “environment tests.”
34. Gould, review of The Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada, Volume III, by Henry M. Hurd, Survey, January 27, 1917, 497–98: “Especially encouraging is the exposure of evil conditions that formerly existed at the Manhattan State Hospital, and the present development of this same institution.”
1. Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret.”
2. Gould to Mitchell, January 13, 1946, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. “His quotations of me are rather inaccurate,” Gould complained in a letter to the editor, Harvard Crimson, May 11, 1945.
3. Mitchell, interview with Colleen Chassan, August 3, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
4. Gould to Mumford, July 1943, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
5. Gould to Mitchell, July 30, 1945, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. The anthology, a collection of humor, was H. Allen Smith, compiler, Desert Island Decameron (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1945).
6. Diary entry for April 17, 1945, Gould Diaries.
7. On Mitchell’s composite and invented characters like Mr. Flood of the Fulton Fish Market, the subject of two Reporter-at-Large pieces, and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the subject of Mitchell’s 1942 profile “King of the Gypsies,” see Thomas Kunkel, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (New York: Random House, 2015). Kunkel quotes a letter Mitchell wrote in 1961. “Insofar as the principal character is concerned, the gypsy king himself, it is a work of the imagination,” Mitchell wrote. “Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did.” Kunkel argues that blurring the line between fact and fiction had been common in the magazine, especially during its early years and while under the editorship of Harold Ross, who died in 1951.
8. Gould, letter to the editor, Harvard Crimson, May 11, 1945.
9. Mitchell quoted in Kunkel, Man in Profile, 233.
10. Stanley Hyman to Joseph Mitchell, September 27, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Hyman was a literary critic and the husband of Shirley Jackson. “Shirley adds her congratulations and love,” he signed off.
11. Francis Bacon, “Of Truth,” in Essays (London, 1597).
12. Mitchell’s 1942 research notes, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
13. Mitchell to G. A. Maclean, October 2, 1947, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
14. Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould’s Oral History: Art,” Exile, November 1927, 116.
15. Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.”
16. Gould, “Synopsis.”
17. Diary entry for April 13, 1946, Gould Diaries.
18. Ben Hellman to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. The library, “contrary to my expectations, proved a poor place to work,” Gould told Mitchell: it “reminded me that there were already more bks printed than any one person could hope to read.” Mitchell’s notes on Gould talking about the Oral History, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
19. Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret.”
20. Mitchell, typewritten note to himself while writing the second profile, undated but ca. 1962, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
21. Mitchell had held in his hands several different notebooks. In his notes from 1942, he lists their contents—they are essays, not “oral parts”—and indicates the dates the various sections were written, for example, 1921, 1923, etc. See Mitchell’s notes on Gould and the Oral History, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. He writes, for instance, after reading one notebook: “typical ending of an entry in the O.H.: ‘This is all that I will say about my theories of social position as I write these lines at 20 minutes of 10 in the evening of Monday, September 10, 1934, in the Lex. Ave. express uptown which is stopping at Moshulu Parkway station of the Lex. Ave. subway where I am being ragged (or nagged) by a loquacious drunk.” Mitchell’s discarded Gould interview notes from June 16, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Mitchell also copied and typed the entirety of the “Tomato Habit” essay. Gould, “The Tomato Habit,” typewritten by Mitchell, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
22. Mitchell’s miscellaneous research notes from 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
23. Mitchell’s Norwood notes, July 24, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
24. Carlo Sovello to Mitchell, October 19, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
25. Richard A. Hitchcock to Mitchell, November 11, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Gould mentioned his friendship with Hitchcock in a letter to Nino Frank, the editor of Bifur, March 1930, Bifur Archive, Box 1, Folder 13. He also mentions Hitchcock frequently in his diaries from the 1940s.
26. Mitchell to Richard A. Hitchcock, December 9, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
27. Florence Lowe to Mitchell, November 16, 1964, and March 13, 1965, and Mitchell to Lowe, December 3, 1964, and February 25, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Gould had first arrived in New York, in October 1916. Gould to Braithwaite, December 2, 1916, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould.
28. Joseph F. Gould, “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” unpublished manuscript, 1922, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
29. A further description of the oral parts of the Oral History came from Ruth Mooney, who knew Gould well in the 1920s; she was married to the poet Lew Ney. Mooney wrote Mitchell, “Once Joe did read me a chapter of the Oral History which was really oral. He assembled in one place all he had ever heard people say about Alfred E. Smith. It was a collection of trivia without anything to recommend it by way of either historical sense of style. All that sticks in my memory is the story (told about Mrs. Smith and the wives of six previous politicians) that the Queen of Belgium had said, on a visit here, ‘This is a wonderful city’ and Mrs. Smith had replied ‘You said a mouthful, Queen.’ I was surprised to hear that there never was an Oral History but am sure that, if there had been, it would have been on this level.” Ruth Mooney to Mitchell, March 11, 1964 [sic; corrected to 1965 by Mitchell], Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Lew Ney’s real name was Luther Widen. He took the name “Lew Ney” (pronounced “looney”) after he escaped from the Elgin Hospital for the Insane in 1916.
30. Gould, “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” 1922.
1. A version of Gould’s essay on insanity appeared in Pagany in 1931. But the version quoted here is the manuscript: “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” 1922, in the Joseph Mitchell Papers.
2. Regarding New York, “I describe clinics at the three largest insane asylums in the state which I attended while a student of the Eugenics Record Office.” Gould, “Synopsis,” 7.
3. Gregory described the oral chapters of the history this way: “In general the history is a record of nearly everything that Mr. Gould has heard (hence ‘oral’), seen or thought during his fifteen years of wandering. It includes his autobiography and the biographies of a few of his friends, data upon the insane asylums at Central Islip and King’s Park, notations scrawled on the walls of public latrines, reminiscences of a New England childhood, gossip overheard in Greenwich Village and Harlem, and rumors concerning public men that are retailed in and out of New York City, New England and Nova Scotia.” Horace Gregory, “Pepys on the Bowery,” New Republic, April 15, 1931.
4. Gould, “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” 1922.
5. Gould, “My Life,” 3.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Gould to Braithwaite, December 2, 1916, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould.
8. “If you wish you might add the information that I received a special mention in trying for the Menorah prize.” Gould to Hurlbut, November 8, 1918, Gould Harvard Files. The Menorah Prize was given for “the best essay by an undergraduate on a subject concerning the history and achievements of the Jewish people.” The prize was first awarded in 1908. Intercollegiate Menorah Association, The Menorah Movement for the Study and Advancement of Jewish Culture and Ideals: History, Purposes, Activities (Ann Arbor, MI: Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1914), 101–3.
9. “I am at present on the staff of the Evening Mail, as three attempts to volunteer for military service were unsuccessful.” Gould to Hurlbut, November 8, 1918, Gould Harvard Files. On his draft card, in 1917, Gould listed his occupation as “Journalist” and his employer as the Leslie Company. Joseph Ferdinand Gould, Registration Card, U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2005).
10. Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould’s Oral History: Art,” Exile, November 1927, 113.
11. Clarke Storer Gould died on March 28, 1919, of septicemia. “Memorial to Clarke Storer Gould, M.D.,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 180 (1919): 542–43; Gould, “My Life,” 4.
12. Gould to Maclean, March 15, 1921, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
13. Gould to Braithwaite, May 22, 1922, Braithwaite Papers, 428. And see Gould to Pound, January 4, 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
14. Gould to Braithwaite, April 1, 1922, Braithwaite Papers, 428.
15. Gould to Maclean, July 7, 1921, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
16. Gould to Maclean, 1923, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
17. The earliest biographical treatment is Eric Walrond, “Florida Girl Shows Amazing Gift for Sculpture,” Negro World, December 16, 1922, though it contains some factual errors. Other early accounts are Augusta Savage, “An Autobiography,” Crisis, August 1929; and Savage, Federal Arts Commission interview at her studio, June 20, 1935, Savage Papers, Box 1, Folder 2. Savage’s first husband was named John Moore. A brief biographical treatment with reproductions of some of Savage’s work is in Gary A. Reynolds and Beryl J. Wright, Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1989), 251–54. See also Unpublished Biography of Augusta Savage, November 20, 1928, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12. On the illiteracy of Savage’s mother, see Millen Brand’s diary entry for April 9, 1935, Journals, 1919–1943, Brand Papers, Box 76.
18. Du Bois, “The Technique of Race Prejudice,” Crisis 26 (August 1923): 152–54. See also Hugh Samson to Clyde J. Hart Jr., September 24, 1989, Hugh Samson Letters, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. And see, for example, “I do so want him to have one of my sister Irene’s old southern cooked dinners.” Savage to Countee Cullen, no date, Cullen Papers. Cullen was also an associate of Gould’s. In 1932, Gould listed Cullen among the sponsors of his Oral History Society. See Gould to Joseph Freeman, December 31, 1932, Joseph Freeman Collection, Box 25, Folder 10, Hoover Institution Archives. (Other sponsors included Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Horace Gregory, and Pauline Leader.)
19. “C’est une jeune femme mince, à la voix extraordinairement douce, d’une simplicité qui la rend immédiatement sympathique,” a reporter wrote about Savage when she was later studying in Paris. Paulette Nardal, “Une Femme Sculpteur Noire,” La Dépêche Africaine, August–September 1930, 4.
20. Gould, “My Life,” 5.
21. Savage, Application Form, May 17, 1929, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.
22. “Poet’s Evening,” New York Age, March 24, 1923.
23. Robert Lincoln Poston, “When You Meet a Member of the Ku Klux Klan” (1921), in African Fundamentalism: A Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance, ed. Tony Martin (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1991), 169.
24. “Color Line Drawn by Americans,” New York Amsterdam News, April 25, 1923.
25. “Miss Augusta Savage,” unpublished biography, November 20, 1928, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.
26. “Miss Savage Tells Story at Lyceum,” New York Amsterdam News, May 16, 1923.
27. Quoted in Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, Six Black Masters of American Art (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1972), 76–98. And see Du Bois, “The Technique of Race Prejudice.”
28. “Appeal Artists’ Race Ban,” New York Times, May 11, 1923.
29. For more on Savage, see Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 168–80; Denise Ellaine Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage: Her Art, Progressive Influences, and African-American Representation” (M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 1991); and Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
30. Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage,” 110.
31. Cummings was terribly fond of this poem and set it in dozens of different ways before settling on its final form. See E. E. Cummings, “as joe gould says in,” Cummings Papers, Additional I, folders 50 and 51, and also Cummings to Qualey, April 16, 1955, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 2, Folder 30.
32. A typescript edition with Cummings’s original drawings is E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room (1922; New York: Liveright, 2014), with an introduction by Susan Cheever. Matthew Josephson writes that Cummings delighted in humiliating Gould, quite cruelly. This doesn’t strike me as impossible, but I haven’t seen anyone else describe it this way. Josephson and Gould hated each other. Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists: A Memoir (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), 90–93, 272–73; see also 384–85.
33. Gould, “Social Position,” Broom 5 (October 1923): 147–49.
34. For example, “I was much less aware than I later became of the ph.d. candidate’s passion for footnotes and sources, but I knew a little about it, and I thought the book was, in effect, a parody, and a parody also of the H.G. Wells Outline of History and the Hendrik Willem Van Loon Story of Mankind, with Joe patiently tracing the history of the universe from its gaseous beginnings and documents each stage of the way by something somebody had told him.” Bob Cantwell to Mitchell, September 27, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. Robert Cantwell was a novelist and critic whose first novel, Laugh and Lie Down, was published in 1931. His criticism appeared in The New Republic; Cowley was his editor. See Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1980), 126–27 and 262–63; and T. V. Reed, Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left: A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
35. Norman, “Joe Gould Writes History as He Hears It.”
36. Edward Nagel and Slater Brown, “Joseph Gould: The Man,” Broom 5 (October 1923): 145–46, with a sketch by Joseph Stella.
37. See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Louis Menand, “The Pound Error,” New Yorker, June 9, 2008.
38. William Butler Yeats, “Rapallo” (March and April 1928), in A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), 5–6.
39. Pound, “Dr Williams’ Position,” Dial, November 1928, 396.
40. Joseph J. Boris, ed., Who’s Who in Colored America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Persons of Negro Descent in America, vol. 1 (New York: Phillis Wheatley Publishing Co., 1927). The editor in chief was Roscoe Conkling Bruce. The board of editors included Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson. See the letterhead in Helen L. Watts, Associate Editor, Phillis Wheatley Publishing Co., to Du Bois, February 16, 1926, Du Bois Papers.
41. Gould to Williams, January 16, 1925, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
42. Gould to Pound, February 15, 1930, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861, in which he also says, “I am tremendously pleased and obliged that you had my manuscript typed.” On Pound having Gould’s notebooks typed, see also Pound to Williams, November 5, 1929: “I at least sent off some of Gould’s stuff to a London typist.” Pound/Williams, 99. And: “You will be pleased to hear that Ezra Pound has typed some of my manuscript and has sent it to Hound and Horn. I asked him to send it to Bijur the French quarterly which had asked for some of it but quite characteristically he sent it elsewhere. He said the Hound and Horn paid better. If that magazine does take it, it will be very good luck for me. Other magazines watch the Hound and Horn as well as publishers of books.” Gould to Lachaise, February 1930, Lachaise Collection, Box 1. One trail in the search for the lost Oral History leads to the offices of Hound & Horn. In March 1930, Gould wrote to the novelist Nino Frank, the editor of Bifur, “None of my manuscript on this side of the ocean has been typed. I wrote Edward O’Brien and Ezra Pound who had some of it. O’Brien said he had sent it all to Ezra Pound. Pound wrote me and said that he had got quite a batch of my manuscript typed. He had sent it to Hound and Horn. This magazine is edited by a group of Harvard students. Apparently they are not very businesslike. I wrote to them and did not receive a reply. I do not know which chapters they have.” Bifur Archive, Box 1, Folder 13.
43. Gould to Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, December 5, 1927, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe Additional Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 524, 550.
44. Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould’s Oral History: Art,” Exile, November 1927, 112–16; quotation from 113–14.
45. On the Baltimore exhibit, see Hope Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage: Sculpting the African-American Identity” (M.A. thesis, City University of New York, 1990), 16.
46. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32, no. 6 (October 1927): 290–97. Lynn Igoe and James Moody, 250 Years of Afro-American Art: Annotated Bibliography (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), 294, where they identify Savage as the subject of Du Bois’s remarks.
47. Du Bois to Savage, April 20, 1926; Du Bois to Irene Di Robilant, April 20, 1926; and Savage to Du Bois, May 26, 1926, Du Bois Papers.
48. Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris, 176. And see “Harlem Soap Sculptors Win Praise,” Chicago Defender, February 2, 1929.
49. Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage,” 64; Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris, 176–77.
50. See, for example, Savage to West, August 19, 1935, West Papers, Box 2, Folder 13.
51. Savage to Cullen, February 27, 1931, Cullen Papers. On Cullen, see the introduction by Major Jackson to Countee Cullen, Collected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2013).
52. Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” here as quoted in Hinnant, “Sculptor Augusta Savage,” 50. For more on Savage’s presence and influence in Harlem, see the oral history interview with Norman Lewis, July 14, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
53. So far as I have been able to discover, not one word about their relationship ever made it into print. The sole mention I have found does not provide Savage’s name. In a history of the Federal Writers’ Project, Jerre Mangione alluded to Gould’s obsession with “a black sculptress.” Mangione wrote:
Behind this benign façade bubbled a volcano of bad temper which was apt to erupt when anyone crossed him. One of his victims, a black sculptress who had apparently spurned his advances, he attacked with a barrage of obscene phone calls and letters. When the novelist Millen Brand, a friend of the sculptress, tried to make him desist, Gould began bombarding him and his wife with obscene letters. Brand finally felt compelled to complain to the police, who issued a warrant for his arrest. As soon as the warrant was served Gould got in touch with Brand and begged him to drop the charge, confessing he had been similarly served on two other occasions; another time would mean going to jail. A kindly man, Brand agreed to withdraw the charge but not before making it clear that one more letter or phone call either to his family or to the sculptress would land him in jail.
Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 180–81. Mangione’s citation is to an interview with Millen Brand. My thanks to Phillip Koyoumjian, who looked for Mangione’s interview with Brand among Mangione’s papers at the University of Rochester; it is not there.
54. Gould to Cummings, September 20, 1926, Cummings Papers, Additional I, Folder 338.
55. Morris R. Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.
56. Gould to Pound, May 27, 1927, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. Gould also described his conflict with Liveright in 1929, in a letter to Nino Frank, December 1929, Bifur Archive, Box 1, Folder 13.
57. Gould to Pound, March 1928 and January 1931, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. At the time, Zukofsky was serving as guest editor of Poetry.
58. Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.
59. “He had his say, which was considerable, about the book, the author, and the subject, and there for him the matter ended.” Entry for Friday, February 15, 1924, in Burton Rascoe, A Bookman’s Daybook (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 206. A note with this typed on it is in Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
60. Gould to Moore, February 25, 1926, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80. Gould hated Scofield: “The gulf which yawns and yawns and yawns between the bumptious pretenses of the Dial and its slight performance is based upon the incongruity of a shoddy-miller trying to run a magazine.”
61. See Pound to Zukofsky, August 12, 1928, Pound/Zukofsky, 12, 15. Zukofsky looked out for Gould. See Zukofsky to Pound, December 5 and December 12–28, 1928, Pound/Zukofsky, 22–23.
62. Moore made this selection after reading Gould’s notebooks. Moore to Gould, December 4, 1928, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.
63. He didn’t mind her edits. “I consented readily,” he explained to Pound, “because I think of my book as substance rather than form. She was typically quietly and secretly afraid that she was bursting my literary conscience. I told her not to worry that one could do things to a whale without hurting it which one could not do to a humming bird. I meant, of course, merely that my work should be judged according to scale as one judges Froissart or Balzac and not that in literary merit had the jeweled cadence of a humming bird. I envy those who are able to publish every sentence but I have taken in too much history to be able to do this.” Gould to Moore, December 12, 1928, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80; Gould to Pound, December 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
64. Gould to Moore, December 28, 1928, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.
65. Moore also tried to get Gould to submit reviews, without success. Moore to Gould, December 17, 1928, Dial Papers, Box 2, Folder 80.
66. Gould, “From Joe Gould’s Oral History: Marriage,” Dial, April 1929, 319–21.
67. Gould refers to this in a letter to Brand, September 7, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
1. Gould, “My Life,” 7.
2. Gould to Pound, December 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
3. Gould to Pound, May 6, 1933, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
4. Macdonald said that Gould began writing the first version of the Oral History on October 1, 1914 (that would be right after he got back to Norwood from the Dakotas). “He started it all over again on January 1, 1915, and has since made a fresh start every January first since.” Macdonald, Statement on Joe Gould, unpublished eleven-page typewritten essay, Macdonald Papers, Box 78, Folder 142.
5. Savage to Arthur Schomburg, January 1935, quoted in Hope Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage: Sculpting the African-American Identity” (M.A. thesis, City University of New York, 1990), 29–30. “By 1934 Augusta Savage was considered the most influential artist in Harlem.” Deirdre L. Bibby, foreword to Augusta Savage and the Arts Schools of Harlem (New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1988), 8. An indication of Savage’s prominence in the Harlem arts movement: “Among the Negro artists of Harlem are Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthe, Charles Alston, E. Sims Campbell, Vertis Hayes, Bruce Nugent, Henry W. Barnham, Sara Murrell, Romare Beardon, Robert Savon Pious, and Beauford Delaney. Of these Aaron Douglas, painter and mural artist, Richmond Barthe, sculptor, Augusta Savage, sculptress, and E. Sims Campbell, painter and cartoonist, are the most prominent.” Federal Writers’ Project, New York Panorama: A Comprehensive View of the Metropolis (New York: Random House, 1938), 143. See also “Sculptress of the Negro People,” Daily Worker, December 24, 1937.
6. T. R. Poston, “Augusta Savage,” Metropolitan, January 1935. And see Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage,” chapter 2.
7. On the shoe-polish formula, see Hugh Samson to Clyde J. Hart Jr., September 24, 1989, Hugh Samson Letters, Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
8. For example: “I found several people who knew me. They kept buying me drinks. One was a Mrs. White who looked like [deliberate blank space] the colored sculpturess.” Diary entry for October 8, 1945. I entertained the possibility that Gould meant Selma Burke, another African American sculptor he knew. But when Gould writes about Burke, he uses her name; see his diary entry for July 20, 1946, Gould Diaries.
9. Undated typewritten excerpt from Joe Gould’s Oral History, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
10. Mitchell’s interview notes with Gould, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
11. Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
12. Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
13. Brand and Leader married on November 10, 1931: Millen Brand, Journal 1930–31, Brand Papers, Box 76.
14. Pauline Leader, And No Birds Sing (New York: Vanguard, 1931), 82, 153, 174–89, and 214.
15. Gould, “My Life,” 8.
16. Pauline Leader, “Two Poems,” Poetry 31 (1928): 256–57; and “Poem to Emily Dickinson,” Poetry 36 (1930): 85.
17. Horace Gregory, “Hard, Bitter and Courageous,” New York Herald Tribune, June 28, 1931.
18. Brand, The Outward Room (1937; New York: New York Review Books, 2010), afterword by Peter Cameron.
19. American psychiatry and psychoanalysis lagged behind their European counterparts, and, in any case, the field of psychiatry had been more or less in crisis since about 1900, when, as Edward Shorter argues, “psychiatry had reached a dead end. Its practitioners were for the most part in asylums, and asylums had become mainly warehouses in which any hope of therapy was illusory.” Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 65. In Europe, the movement then turned to biology; this happened more slowly in the United States (ibid., chapter 3).
20. David J. Rothman calls this “the decline from rehabilitation to custodianship.” Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 239. For more on the displacement of the asylum with the mental hospital, see Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 22; on the role of routine, see 163–65. As Shorter writes, the first asylum in the United States that simply gave up the pretense that anyone would ever be cured was the Willard State Hospital, founded in 1869. Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 46. Shorter calls the rise in numbers “the great nineteenth-century lockup” (48).
21. The Outward Room was a critical sensation and also sold more than half a million copies. See the afterword by Peter Cameron, 234–37; quotation from 42. For more about Brand, see his obituary: Eric Pace, “Millen Brand, Writer and Editor Known for Works on Psychiatry,” New York Times, March 22, 1980. Brand had a full draft of the novel by 1933, which is right after his encounter with Gould over Savage. That year, he asked a psychiatrist to review the manuscript and received extensive feedback. See the letters of Louis J. Bragman, M.D., to Brand, Brand Papers, Box 1.
22. Brand to Jerre Mangione, May 4, 1965, Brand Papers, Box D.
23. Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
24. Brand to Mitchell, October 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
25. George Arthur to Savage, May 28, 1930, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.
26. Cullen to West, October 10, 1929, and July 3, 1931, West Papers, Box 2, Folder 7; Du Bois to Cullen, telegram, 1929, Du Bois Papers.
27. Gould, “My Life,” 9.
28. Savage to George Arthur, June 15, 1930, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.
29. Cummings quotes this as one of Gould’s sayings in Cummings to Qualey, February 12, 1945, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 17.
30. “Augusta Savage Gives Her Views on Negro Art,” Pittsburgh Courtier, September 26, 1936.
31. Savage to Du Bois, May 26, 1926, Du Bois Papers.
32. See especially Paulette Nardal, “Une Femme Sculpteur Noire,” La Dépêche Africaine, August–September 1930, 4. On the general question of the loss and neglect of Savage’s work, and her vanishing from history, see also Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage,” 1.
33. “Young Sculptress Defies Adversity,” New Journal and Guide, October 19, 1929. Du Bois also made various introductions for her there, etc. See, for example, Du Bois to Henry O. Tanner, August 27, 1929, Du Bois Papers. On Savage in Paris, see also Theresa Leininger-Miller, “ ‘Heads of Thought and Reflection’: Busts of African Warriors by Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, African American Sculptors in Paris, 1922–1934,” in Out of Context: American Artists Abroad, ed. Laura Felleman Fattal and Carol Salus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 93–111; Krista A. Thompson, “Preoccupied with Haiti: The Dream of Diaspora in African American Art, 1915–1942,” American Art 21, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 74–97; and Augusta Savage, Mourning Victory, ca. 1930, Special Collections, Fisk Library.
34. Mitchell’s interview notes with Gould, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
35. Gould to Williams, August 1929, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
36. Mitchell later entertained this possibility. About 1959, when he was typing up a set of Gould interview notes from June 16, 1942, which he marked as “saved from several pages that I discarded,” he wrote this note to himself: “possibility that during his disappearance from the Village ref to in the profile [‘Professor Sea Gull’] he was in Bellevue or some other hospital.” Mitchell, discarded Gould interview notes, June 16, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
1. “One of the chapters I will read from the magnum opus is the Proud Man and the Colored Singer.” Gould to Williams, August 1929, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
2. Gould, “The Proud Man and the Colored Singer,” originally written in 1929, Macdonald Papers. Gould notes that a version of the story was published in the Greenwich Villager in September 1933.
3. Gardiner Reminiscences, 43–44.
4. Cummings to Pound, March 1, 1930, Pound/Cummings, 18.
5. Wilson was The New Republic’s literary editor. For more on Cowley’s role at the magazine, see his autobiography, The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1964).
6. Contributors, New Republic, October 1, 1930, 188.
7. He also got into a fight there. “I was asked to sign the New Republic manifesto against humanism. I refused. I said I had to devote so much time and energy to my own work that I had no time for religious controversy.” Gould to Pound, April 10, 1930, Pound Papers, Box 7, Folder 169. Gould’s reviews are for the most part sensible and lively. Here are some from this period of lucidity: “Sound and Fury,” New Republic, June 4, 1930; “The Great Spirit,” New Republic, August 20, 1930; and review of Power for Profit, by Robert Collyer Washburn, New Republic, October 1, 1930.
8. Gould, “Synopsis,” 5.
9. Diary entries for May 6, July 13, August 2, and September 3, 1945, Gould Diaries.
10. Gould, “Freedom,” Pagany, 1931, 97.
11. Mitchell’s interview with Horace Gregory, typewritten notes, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Wilson missed what came next: he left New York at the end of 1930 to travel the country, doing the reporting that lies behind American Jitters (1932). In 1927, for Lew Ney’s National Poetry Exhibition, Gould wrote a poem about a woman taking a man to court for assault. It is called “Chivalry”:
It was only force of habit
That made the half-wit nasty in the Black Rabbit.
He said, “With many strange contortions,
That girl has had twenty-one abortions,”
And so Lew Ney the gentile parfaite tonight,
Was hauled to court by Peggy White.
The character witness was Emil Luft,
So the Justice thought he was being spoofed.
He said “We won’t let this case pester us,
You can’t do in New York, what you do in Texas.”
Graphic Arts Collection, Firestone Library, Princeton University. On Ney and the National Poetry Exhibition, see Julie Mellby, “The True and Honest Story of Lew Ney, Greenwich Village Printer,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 75 (2013): 65–96.
12. Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. Gould writes about Werner a lot in his diaries for 1943–1947. And see, for example, “I usually take breakfast with M.J. Werner once a week.” Gould to Cummings, August 23, 1943, Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
13. Gould to Pound, January 1931, recalling the events of the spring of 1930, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
14. Horace Gregory, “Pepys on the Bowery,” New Republic, April 15, 1931.
15. Mitchell’s interview with Gregory, typewritten notes, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. The publication of Gregory’s article also led to Gould announcing, once again, his plans to found an Oral History Association. See, for example, “Lachaise was very pleased with the article on me. It seems to me that now is the time to try and arouse interest in what I am doing. I am therefore forming an Oral Historical Society.” Gould to Edmund Wilson, May 26, 1931, Wilson Papers, Box 30, Folder 784.
16. “Where Poems Are Sold for Sandwiches,” Dallas Morning News, September 27, 1931.
17. Gould first raised the possibility of applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship in a letter to Henry Allen Moe, October 15, 1931, Gould Guggenheim Files, in which he explained that he had earlier been reticent, because “it happens that my family were among the small investors who were hurt in the amassing of the Guggenheim fortune” but that the response to his work—presumably through the Gregory article—had changed his mind: “I am surprised at the number of people who are interested in my work.” He then began writing to his possible recommenders. “You may be surprised to hear that I am trying to make friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness,” he wrote to Pound. “I am applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship to go to Geneva to collect material for my oral history. If I get this it will enable me to make contacts which should sell my book for me.” Gould to Pound, October 22, 1931, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861. This was right around when Pagany published two more chapters of the Oral History. Joe Gould, “Me Tempore: A Selection from Joe Gould’s Oral History,” Pagany 2 (1931): 96–99. The selections are two short essays, “I. Insanity,” and “II. Freedom.”
18. Gould, “Synopsis,” and Gould, fellowship application, Gould Guggenheim Files, 1932. And see André Bernard, email to the author, April 17, 2015.
19. Gould to Pound, October 27, 1931, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
20. Gould, fellowship application, November 30, 1931, and Moe to Gould, December 1, 1931, Gould Guggenheim Files. The deadline was November 30; Gould’s application did not arrive in Moe’s office until December 1.
21. Gould to Moe, December 17, 1931, Gould Guggenheim Files.
22. See, for example, Gould to Moe, August 9, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
23. Gould wrote contemptuously about Cowley. See, for example, Gould to Pound, December 22, 1932, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861; and Gould to “Dear Comrade,” November 7, 1932, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000.
24. Gould complained, “I knew the authors and helped them in their work in Harlem. In my junior year at Harvard I took courses in anthropology normally open only to undergraduates. Mr. Cowley’s knowledge of the subject is derived from the Daily Worker.” Gould to George Soule, August 12, 1934, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000. The Herskovitses’ book was called Rebel Destiny; Cowley reviewed it in The New Republic (“Primitive Peoples,” June 20, 1934).
25. Gould to Brand, undated but 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged papers, Box 1, Gould folder.
26. Gould, “Warpath,” New Republic, December 12, 1934.
27. Gould, “Belated May Day Poem,” New Republic, May 13, 1936.
28. “Joe Gould…got a dollar every Wednesday….Once or twice I tried giving him a book for review, but that was a failed experiment; I suspected that he had sold the books before reading them.” But then Otis Ferguson, the head of the book department, objected:
Otis laid down an edict: no weekly dollar except when Joe submitted something short for the correspondence page. The following Wednesday Joe appeared with a sheet torn from one of his notebooks. “Now you can give me my dollar,” he said as he passed it over. The sheet contained a couplet which Otis recited from memory:
Dear God, save Malcolm Cowley from harm,
Or at least break his neck instead of his arm.
Cowley, Dream of the Golden Mountains, 261–62, 293. Gould’s efforts in The New Republic during the latter part of the 1930s steadily declined in quality. See “Poet Among the Planets,” New Republic, May 20, 1936; “Song of the Glass-Conscious Intellectuals,” New Republic, June 3, 1936; “A Vote for Landon,” New Republic, October 28, 1936; “Restless Life,” New Republic, August 4, 1937; “Communism Is 20th Century Americanism,” New Republic, September 7, 1938 (but in the letters section). “The Third-Class Mailbox,” New Republic, October 3, 1939, which is simply a scrap, is introduced this way:
Joe Gould, who is growing a beard again, brought into the office a follow-up on his poem (“Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism”) in which Earl Browder was found to have switched from borscht to clam chowder:
Now Comrade Browder
Lieks Wienerworscht
Both in his chowder
And in his borscht.
29. Gould to Moe, August 9, 1932, and September 12, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
30. Gaston Lachaise, letter of recommendation for Gould, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
31. Gould, review of Scandinavian Immigrants in New York, 1630–1674, by John Olaf Evjen, Survey, October 21, 1916, 71: “The problems of New York state are essentially an exaggerated form of the great American problem of keeping unity among various racial stocks, without crushing the initiative of any ethnic group.”
32. John Olaf Evjen, letter of recommendation for Gould, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files. Evjen had read the “Synopsis.” He wrote, “The work he has outlined should prove a storehouse of fascinating material. It would have the charm of Well’s History, of Durant’s Philosophy, the works of Van Loon and of Ludwig. But I think Gould would exercise more restraint than any of these, and be more careful of scientific truth.”
33. Gould to Moe, November 21, 1932, and Moe to Gould, August 13, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files. Whatever manuscript Gould may ultimately have submitted—and it appears he did submit some unpublished material—was returned to him. On February 16, 1933, he signed a receipt acknowledging the return of all the materials he had submitted in support of his application. Gould Guggenheim Files.
34. Gould to Moe, August 28, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
35. The only parts he had that were typed were the parts he’d sent to O’Brien nearly a decade before. Gould to Pound, October 25, 1932. And see Gould to Lincoln Kirstein of the Hound & Horn, from Central Hotel, January 7 and January 13, 1933, Hound & Horn Records, Box 2, Folder labeled Joe Gould.
36. Gould to Moe, November 21, 1932, Gould Guggenheim Files.
37. Gould, “Synopsis,” 1–9.
38. Moe to Gould (letter of rejection), March 11, 1933, Gould Guggenheim Files; Gould to Edmund Brown, July 1934; February 4, April 1, May 5, and June 5, 1935, Brown Papers, Barrett Minor Box 10.
39. Pound to Williams, April 28, 1936, Pound/Williams, 180; Gould to Pound, November 1936, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
1. Gould to Cullen, November 28, 1931, Cullen Papers.
2. “Noted Sculptress Expects Distinct, but Not Different, Racial Art,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 29, 1936.
3. Savage to George R. Arthur, October 19, 1931, Rosenwald Archives, Box 445, Folder 12.
4. On the Vanguard, see the entry for Savage in Carey D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, eds., Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004).
5. McKay and Savage were close. In 1934, McKay lived with her. See Lawrence Patrick Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 68. On the FBI’s Racial Division, see William J. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
6. Gould does not have an FBI file. David M. Hardy, Record/Information Dissemination Section, Federal Bureau of Investigation, to the author, April 14, 2015.
7. A copy of Savage’s FBI file, the result of a Freedom of Information Act request made by David Garrow in the 1980s, is filed at the Schomburg Center in a manuscript collection called “Surveillance Files on African American Intellectuals and Activists Obtained from the FBI Archives via a Freedom of Information Act Request.” The file has been massively redacted. Thirty-two pages were deleted in their entirety; most of the rest have only two or three words left legible. A document titled “The Communist Party; National Professional Organizations and Organizations of Professionals,” dated October 13, 1936, includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and “The Vanguard (An association of Negro and white intellectuals for social study and protest),” which lists “Augusta Savage, Chairman.” Her name also appears on a list, dated March 4, 1941, of American artists who were members of the American Artists Congress. A memo dated December 3, 1941, describes the activities of the American Artists Congress. An internal letter to Hoover states, “Files of this office reflect that in 1941 AUGUSTA SAVAGE was a member of the Artists Congress and on the mailing list of New York Conference for Inalienable Rights.” An inter-office memo concerning Savage, addressed to Hoover, is dated April 10, 1951; its entire contents are redacted.
8. Gould to Savage, undated but 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
9. Gould, “My Life,” 9.
10. Alice Neel, Joe Gould, oil on canvas, 1933, on loan to the Tate Modern, London.
11. Phoebe Hoban, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), 94–97. As Hoban points out, Neel did not admire Mitchell’s writing about Gould, saying that it “had an O. Henry ending,” and that Mitchell was wrong to say the Oral History never existed. While researching her biography of Neel, Hoban discovered four chapters of Gould’s Oral History in Millen Brand’s papers at Columbia, along with documents concerning Gould’s relationship with Augusta Savage. In Alice Neel, Hoban mentions one of the chapters of Gould’s Oral History (94), but she does not mention any of the Savage material. I didn’t read Hoban’s biography of Neel until after I had completed my own research. Hoban wrote to me after my essay, “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” appeared in The New Yorker. My thanks to her for pointing me to her work on Neel.
12. Gould to Leader, October 13, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
13. Gould, “My Life,” 9.
14. See Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 175–76.
15. Gould to Brand, undated, ca. December 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
16. Brand to Mitchell, October 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
17. Gould to Brand, undated but 1934 and September 7 and 26, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
18. Gould to Brand, October 13 and September 7, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
19. Brand to Mitchell, October 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
20. Brand to Mitchell, October 3 and 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
21. Brand, note to the archivist, October 20, 1954, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
22. Gould to Leader, September 24, 1934, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
23. Gould to Jonathan Brand, January 8, 1935, Brand Papers, uncataloged Box 1, Gould folder.
24. Brand to Mitchell, October 3, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
25. Brand to Mitchell, October 10, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
26. Edward J. O’Brien, letter of recommendation for Gould, 1934, Gould Guggenheim Files.
27. Moe to Gould, March 14, 1935; Gould to Moe, February 20, 1936 (at the bottom of this letter, Moe has written “no!”); and Gould to Moe, no date, but marked as received April 21, 1939, Gould Guggenheim Files.
28. “Look, Joe, please don’t sit on the upholstered furniture, sit on the woolen chairs,” Marquie told Gould when he came to the gallery. “He didn’t mind, he understood, he said that E.E. Cummings made him sit on the window case.” Mitchell, interview notes with E. P. Marquie, May 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
29. Mitchell, interview notes with Erika Feist, June 24, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
30. Gould to Edmund Brown, January 5, 1934:
O’Brien thought I ought to delay my book until next fall. He said it would be built up more. He offered his assistant, but his principle [sic] idea was very flukey. He wants to sell me to the public as a sort of William Saroyan. He introduced me to Allan Seager, the editor of Vanity Fair. Seager saw some of my stuff. He said they could use oodles of it after my book is published. One of his suggestions was a “profile” in the New Yorker and another was that he could get me in the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame. Cowley thinks that Peggy Bacon may do a sketch of me for the New Republic and he could use his influence to get a profile of me published.
Brown Papers, Barrett Minor Box 10.
31. Pound to Cummings, April 28, 1935, Pound/Cummings, 65.
32. Although it apparently seemed as if they would: Cummings to Pound, “Bravo JoeGould—Esquire!!,” May 1935, Pound/Cummings, 69.
33. Cummings to Pound, May 1935, Pound/Cummings, 73–74. Cummings’s sister, Elizabeth Cummings Qualey, was a social worker in New York from 1926 to the summer of 1936. See Qualey, “Notes to assist in understanding letters from Estlin to Elizabeth,” July 1965, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.
34. “God pity the women he fell in love with,” Morris Werner wrote to Mitchell. “She came to me for advice when he kept bombarding her with letters and phone calls. I told her not to answer any of his letters and to make it clear to him sternly that he was not to bother her.” Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
35. Richard A. Hitchcock to Mitchell, November 11, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
36. Gould to Moe, February 20, 1936, Gould Guggenheim Files.
37. Millen Brand, April 4 and April 9, 1935, Journals, 1919–1943, Brand Papers, Box 76.
38. “Writer Honors 7,300,000th Word by Party,” New York Herald Tribune, March 2, 1936. Gould told Pound, “I was fired for a while because I got too much publicity.” Gould to Pound, May 30, 1938, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
39. “800,000-Word History Book Unlimbers Its Author for More,” New York Herald Tribune, April 10, 1937.
40. Savage to Arthur Schomburg, January 1935, quoted in Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage,” 29–30.
41. Edgar T. Bouzeau, “Augusta Savage Is Commissioned by World’s Fair,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 18, 1937. For more on the commission, see the materials in the Rosenwald Archives, Box 127, Folder 7.
42. “Negroes: Their Artists Are Gaining in Skill and Recognition,” Life, October 3, 1938, 55.
43. Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 177. They speculate that the commission itself may have been a way for her to be removed.
44. “The best judgment of everybody in a position to know was that Mr. Gould’s work was not essential.” Henry G. Alsberg to Cummings, March 7, 1939, Cummings Papers, Additional II, Folder 15.
45. He says that here: E. L. Hendel and M. S. Singer, “Joe Gould ’11, Poet, Dilettante, Bum, and Bohemian, Last of a Disappearing Species,” Harvard Crimson, March 16, 1945. And also earlier: “I am, as you know, a very cosmopolychromatic person. Whatever form the thing takes will be colorful and good copy.” Gould to Pound, December 22, 1932, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
1. “Artists Get New Inspiration from Augusta Savage Who Opens Gallery to Sell Their Work to the Public,” Chicago Defender, June 10, 1939.
2. Savage describes some of the work of her studio in a letter to Edwin R. Embree, March 4, 1936, Rosenwald Archives, Box 127, Folder 7. On the Uptown Art Laboratory, see Savage to Embree, no date, same folder. And for a discussion of the Uptown Art Laboratory in the context of similar efforts, and of the WPA itself, see Erin Park Cohn, “Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010), chapter 2.
3. Savage to Thomas Elsa Jones, January 10, 1939 or 1940, Thomas Elsa Jones Collection, Fisk Library, Box 8, Folder 6.
4. Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 177.
5. He did not see Gould during this visit. Gould later said, after Pound’s arrest for treason, that he hadn’t seen Pound then because he was out of political sympathy with him. Gould to Williams, February 8, 1946, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
6. Pound to Cummings, 1933, Pound/Cummings, 4.
7. Cummings to Pound, May 1940, Pound/Cummings, 149.
8. William Saroyan, “How I Met Joe Gould,” Don Freeman’s Newsstand 1 (1941): 25, 27. And: “William Saroyan has adopted a 75-year-old Greenwich Villager yclept Joe Gould. The ‘baby’ has been penning a tome called ‘The History of My Times from All Sources’ for the past 20 years.” Dorothy Kilgallen, “The Voice of Broadway,” Trenton Evening Times, March 27, 1941.
9. Pound, “England,” Broadcast #16, March 15, 1942, in “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 59.
10. Mitchell, in his notes, said that his first interview with Gould was on June 10, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
11. Cummings to Loren and Lloyd Frankenberg, July 2, 1942, Cummings Letters, Box 1.
12. Gould to Williams, October 1942, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
13. Gould to Mumford, October 1942, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
14. Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret.”
15. Gould to Mumford, January 1943, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
16. He didn’t find out what happened next until May 8, when he finally got out of the hospital and got his diary back. He wrote, “I looked in on Cummings. He said that Rex Hunter had seen me bleeding, unconscious and drunk at 23 St. An ambulance took me to Saint Vincent where I was treated for concussion of the skull. I apparently was released from there before Bellevue.” Diary entries for January 13, 1943, and May 8, 1943, Gould Diaries. Hunter lived at Patchin Place. See Cummings to Qualey, January 16, 1947, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 19.
17. Cummings to Qualey, November 30, 1942, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 15. The reference is to Slater Brown’s 1942 book The Burning Wheel, published by Bobbs-Merrill.
18. Brown to Mitchell, April 8, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
19. Cummings to Qualey, March 13, 1943, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 15.
20. Brown to Mitchell, April 3, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. An alarming portrait of Wards Island at the time is Albert Deutsch, The Shame of the States (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948), chapter 6, “New York’s Isle of Despair.” On Bellevue, see chapter 11, “Bellevue ‘Psycho’—Famous and Forlorn.”
21. Gould to Mitchell, April 3, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
22. Gould to Mitchell, May 14, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. The publication of “Professor Sea Gull” did lead to the publication of a book by Gould, a chapbook of six very short poems: Joseph F. Gould, VI (Jacksonville-on-the-St-Johns, FL: Privately printed for John S. Mayfield, 1943).
23. Mitchell’s notes on Gould, April 3, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
24. Ibid. The category was far more capacious then. Alfred Margulies, email to the author, June 1, 2015. And see Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 65–69.
25. Mitchell’s notes on Gould, April 3, 1943; Brown to Mitchell, April 3, 1943; Gould to Mitchell, August 1, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
26. Cummings to Qualey, January 4, 1944, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 16.
27. Gould to Cummings, July 1943: “Joe Mitchell’s profile was reprinted in his book on McSorleys. (This is a place you and Nagel might remember. I don’t. I never left there conscious.) This book is to be played up in the next issue of Time, and they took in my photo for the review. This should not hurt me none.” Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
28. Diary entry for July 1, 1943, Gould Diaries.
29. Diary entry for July 30, 1943, Gould Diaries. And see also Gould to Cummings, August 23, 1943, Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
30. It was during this period that Gould sold Mitchell the dramatic rights to the story of his life. On New Yorker stationery, dated September 3, 1943, he wrote: “I, Joe Gould, for value received, give Mr. Joseph Mitchell permission to use or allow others to use creatively the material in his book ‘McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,’ in any stage or musical production.” Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
31. Gould (c/o Slater Brown) to Mitchell, October 27, 1943, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
32. Slater Brown interview, April 1960, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
33. Slater Brown, “Page 3,769,300, Oral History of Our Time,” one-page typescript, Cummings Papers, Folder 110.
34. Gould to Mumford, July 12, 1944, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.
35. Diary entry for March 4, 1945, Gould Diaries.
36. Diary entry for March 1, 1945, Gould Diaries.
37. E. L. Hendel and M. S. Singer, “Joe Gould ’11, Poet, Dilettante, Bum, and Bohemian, Last of a Disappearing Species,” Harvard Crimson, March 16, 1945. Gould asked for a retraction. “I met one of the Crimson boys there. He said that they had printed a partial copy retraction of their story.” Diary entry for June 12, 1945, Gould Diaries.
38. Rev. Herb Gibney to Clyde Hart, October 13, 1992:
Eventually Communist agents tried to use Augusta to influence young blacks with their political philosophy. When she refused, her life was threatened so she closed her studio and fled to the West. There she contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever and almost died. After her recovery she came back to the East, settled in Saugerties in the renovated hen house, and began to eke out a living raising chickens and selling their eggs. Eventually through a family in our church I was able to get her a job that gave her a sufficient income and thus permitted the continuance of her sculpturing.
This letter is in the possession of Karlyn Knaust Elia.
39. Millen Brand, Diary entry for February 26, 1942, Journals, 1919–1946, Brand Papers, Box 76.
40. In April and June 1941, Savage was questioned by the FBI in New York. She said she believed Gwendolyn Bennett to be “a Communist sympathizer” and recounted conversations the two women had had together while driving together to and from the National Negro Congress in Philadelphia in 1937. (In 1939, Bennett replaced Savage at the Harlem Community Arts Center, and Savage believed, correctly, that she was not allowed to have the job back because she herself wasn’t a Communist.) Frances Pollock, who knew both women, encouraged the FBI to dismiss anything Savage might have said about Bennett on the ground that Savage was known to get “emotional” about Communism. But Savage’s accusation, along with that of many other informants, proved damning; Bennett was fired. Gwendolyn Bennett File, Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Division of Investigation, June 19, 1941, case No. 5-NY-3717, especially pp. 6–8, 14. My great thanks to Patricia Hills for providing me with the FBI’s account of Savage’s testimony. Bennett’s own FBI file and the files of many other Harlem Renaissance figures are available at the FBEyes Digital Archive, http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/. For more on Bennett’s files, see William Maxwell, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 88–89.
41. Interviews with Karlyn Knaust Elia, Richard Duncan, John Finger, and Adrienne Nieffer, October 25, 2015. Heartfelt thanks to everyone in Saugerties who spoke with me.
1. “Ye FBI has just sent us a pleasant Finn (whose name—according to him—is pronounced ‘Illiterate’) to explore Ezra Pound’s right to anything, including death, for treason.” Cummings to Qualey, February 15, 1943, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 15.
2. Gould to Macdonald, January 9, 1945: “Could you possibly use my article on Why Princeton Should Be Abolished?” Macdonald Papers, Box 19, Folder 479. Macdonald had published a piece by Gould in Politics in 1944: Joe Gould, “What to Do with Europe,” Politics, May 1944, 111. It was sandwiched between “The Only Real Moral People…” by Irving Kristol and “The World of Moloch” by Daniel Bell. The contributors’ page (128) lists him this way: “JOE GOULD is the author of an ‘Oral History,’ compiled exclusively from personal hearsay, which is as yet unpublished. He lives in New York City mostly, and also in Connecticut and on the Cape. His article and picture are reprinted, with permission, from Don Freeman’s Newsstand.”
3. Gould to Williams from Maison Gerard, February 8, 1946, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
4. Diary entries, February 22, 24, 25, and 29, 1944, Gould Diaries.
5. Diary entry, March 4, 1944, Gould Diaries.
6. Diary entry, March 21, 1944, Gould Diaries.
7. Gould to Mitchell, April 20, 1944, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
8. Diary entry, April 13, 1944, Gould Diaries.
9. Diary entry, April 28, 1944, Gould Diaries.
10. Rothschild to Gould, May 6, 1944, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
11. Diary entry for May 11, 1943, Gould Diaries.
12. Diary entry for March 21, 1945, Gould Diaries. I unfortunately can’t make out the name of the person he talked to at the Waldorf.
13. On the 1940s triumph of psychoanalysis in the United States, see Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), chapter 5, especially 170–81.
14. On that friendship and others, see Gardiner Reminiscences, 180–81, 260.
15. Ibid., 230.
16. My biography of Gardiner is reconstructed from her 422-page oral history interview, Gardiner Reminiscences; her memoir, Muriel Gardiner, Code Name “Mary”: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); a biography, Sheila Isenberg, Muriel’s War: An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Muriel Gardiner, “Meetings with the Wolf-Man, 1938–1949,” in The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud. Invaluable short summaries of her life are Samuel A. Guttman, “Muriel M. Gardiner, M.D. (1901–85),” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 40 (1985): 1–7; and Fred B. Rogers, “Dr. Muriel M. Gardiner: Psychiatrist and Philanthropist,” New Jersey Medicine 86 (March 1989): 193–95. See also Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
17. Mitchell, interview with Gardiner, Princeton, June 30, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.
18. Gardiner Reminiscences, 190.
19. Mitchell, interview with Erika Feist, June 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
20. It’s also possible that Gardiner’s brother, who was born in 1891, knew Gould at Harvard. On her brother attending Harvard, see Gardiner Reminiscences, 7.
21. Gardiner Reminiscences, 43–45.
22. “Dr. Gardiner has always made available a very considerable portion of her annual income to literally hundreds of people and a large number of organizations.” Guttman, “Muriel M. Gardiner.” Gardiner began giving Neel $6,000 a year in 1964. Ann Harvey [Gardiner’s granddaughter], email to the author, June 19, 2015.
23. Gardiner Reminiscences, 257.
24. Mitchell, interview with Gardiner, Princeton, June 30, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. Rothschild told Mitchell that “she helped G simply because people she liked told her it was a good thing to do.” Mitchell’s interview with Rothschild, June 18, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
25. Gardiner, The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, 315.
26. This begins in the diaries on May 22, 1945, and continues. It’s also the subject of all of Gould’s letters from this point on, for months. See, for example, Gould to James Laughlin, June 2, 1945, New Directions Records, Folder 655.
27. Gould to Macdonald from the Maison Gerard, June 4, 1945, Macdonald Papers, Box 19, Folder 479. Also, from Gould’s diary, May 29, 1945: “I saw Dwight MacDonald. I explained about Pound. He gave me a dollar and some back issues.” Gould Diaries.
28. Gould to James Laughlin, June 19, 1945, New Directions Records, Folder 655.
29. Gould to Cowley, June 4, 1945, Cowley Papers, Box 106, Folder 5000. And, “Some amateur Guggenheim is subsidizing me.” Gould to Mitchell, May 1945, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
30. Gould to Williams, October 13, 1946, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243.
31. Pound to Cummings, November 20, 1946, Pound/Cummings, 201.
32. Cummings to Qualey, October 16, 1946, Cummings and Qualey Papers, Box 1, Folder 18.
33. Cummings to Pound, May 1948, Pound/Cummings, 231.
34. Mitchell, interview with Gardiner, Princeton, June 30, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.
35. Erika Feist, interview, June 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
36. Vivian Marquie, interview, May 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
37. John Rothschild to Muriel Gardiner, October 10, 1947, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
38. Reminiscences of Allan Nevins, 1963, Columbia Oral History Project, 169–70, 232, 235–42.
39. Louis Starr, “Oral History,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 43–44.
40. Gould to Sarton, 1931, George Sarton Additional Papers, MS Am 1803, Folder 655, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The letter to Sarton is the only one of these I’ve found in an archive, but Gould invariably sent identical letters to multiple recipients asking for money and support, as he did here. I find it difficult to believe he didn’t send a very similar letter to Nevins. The language Gould used in his letter to Sarton is the same as he had been using in describing the Oral History for several years; it was part of what was essentially a letter that he must have sent out en masse. On Nevins (and his great man theory of history), see Gerald L. Fetner, Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
41. Nevins issued his first public call in 1938, in The Gateway to History: “We have agencies aplenty to seek out the papers of men long dead. But we have only the most scattered and haphazard agencies for obtaining a little of the immense mass of information about the more recent American past—the past of the last half century—which might come fresh and direct from men once prominent in politics, in business, in the professions, and in other fields; information that every obituary column shows to be perishing.” Nevins is quoted in Starr, “Oral History,” 43–44. The project’s focus on great men in its early decades is well illustrated by the collections, and their use in books described at its twentieth anniversary, in Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Oral History: The First Twenty Years (New York: Columbia University, 1968). At just the moment of that anniversary, though, the political movements of the 1960s, alongside the resurgence of social history, transformed the collections. A very good description of that change is Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Oral History (New York: Columbia University, 1992).
42. Reminiscences of Allan Nevins, 242.
43. Gould to Cummings, December 2, 1947, Cummings Papers, Folder 490.
44. Omar Pound to Marion Cummings, December 8, 1947 (“Thanks for a most enjoyable evening, and the onions!…ps. met joe gould before i left”), Cummings Additional Papers II; Pound to Cummings, December 8, 1947; Cummings to Pound, December 1947, Pound/Cummings, 226.
1. Pilgrim State Hospital opened in 1931 with two thousand patients. Its one hundred buildings covered two thousand acres. Alfred Eistenstaedt photographed Pilgrim for Time in 1938. By 1950 it had eleven thousand patients. Jack Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 173–76. Pressman writes, “Pilgrim’s prefrontal lobotomy program had become its clinical showpiece” (174).
2. I requested Gould’s medical records from what is now the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center on April 15, 2015; my request was denied (Deborah Strube, Chairperson, Medical Records Access Review Committee, Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, to the author, April 17, 2015). I appealed that decision (author to Strube, April 29 and 30, 2015), and Pilgrim again declined my request (Strube, email to the author, May 15, 2015).
3. Chances are very good that Gould was treated with electroshock, and lobotomized, and, when that didn’t work, drugged into a stupor that ended only with his death. In some ways drug therapies were a response to the successful treatment of general paresis of the insane with the blood of malarial victims. Early, pre-1950 twentieth-century drug therapies included sedatives and barbiturates. On the early drug regimes, see Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 196–207; on electroshock, 218–24; on lobotomy, 225–29. Shorter quotes Gerard Grob: “By 1951, no fewer than 18,608 individuals had undergone psychosurgery since its introduction in 1936.” In 1949 alone, more than five thousand lobotomies were conducted in U.S. hospitals (228). The new generation of antipsychotic drugs did not debut until 1954 (228). Allen Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, was lobotomized at Pilgrim State in 1949, with Ginsberg’s consent; he was twenty-one. Naomi Ginsberg never left Pilgrim State and died there in 1956. Gould and Naomi Ginsberg overlapped at Pilgrim; they had also known one another much earlier in life, in the 1920s, and she claimed to have had an affair with Gould’s archnemesis, Max Bodenheim. Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet (1989; London: Virgin Books, 2010), 8.
4. Morton M. Hunt, “Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I,” New Yorker, September 30, 1961, and Hunt, “Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II,” New Yorker, October 7, 1961. An enlargement of Hunt’s two essays was printed as a book: Morton M. Hunt, Mental Hospital (New York: Pyramid Books, 1962), with a foreword by Robert H. Felix, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The book, like the articles, is a chronicle and celebration of the triumph of the new psychiatric regime. The back cover copy of the paperback reads, “The snake-pit is becoming non-existent!” (The Snake Pit was the title of a 1948 film about an insane asylum; the Oscar-nominated script was written by Millen Brand.) For a more recent vantage on Pilgrim, see a memoir by the daughter of a former patient: Jacqueline Walker, Pilgrim State (London: Sceptre, 2008). Walker’s mother, Dorothy Walker, was committed to Pilgrim State in 1949.
5. Harry J. Worthing, M.D., “A Report on Electric Shock Treatment at Pilgrim State Hospital,” Psychiatric Quarterly 15 (1941): 306–9. And see Worthing et al., “The Organization and Administration of a State Hospital Insulin-Metrazol-Electric Shock Therapy Unit,” American Journal of Psychiatry 99 (1943): 692–97.
6. Harry J. Worthing, M.D., Henry Brill, M.D., and Henry Widgerson, M.D., “350 Cases of Prefrontal Lobotomy,” Psychiatric Quarterly 23 (1949): 617–56. And see Henry Brill, “The Place of Neurosurgery in the Treatment Program of a Department of Mental Hygiene,” New York State Journal of Medicine 52 (October 15, 1952): 2503–7. Pressman argues that lobotomy was at the center, not the fringe, of medical practice, and that it emerged out of earlier practices. He also takes issue with popular accounts that demonize lobotomy, which is useful, although his efforts to rehabilitate the practitioners who conducted, for instance, more than five thousand lobotomies in 1949 alone is unpersuasive. See Pressman, Last Resort, 172–77.
7. Worthing et al., “350 Cases,” 626–27.
8. Ibid., 632.
9. Ibid., 645.
10. “Greatest expansion occurred in the surgical division. A total of 265 major operations were performed, including 205 prefrontal lobotomies. This compares with the figures of 112 for the previous year of which 33 were lobotomies.” And “the central shock therapy unit also provided special care to 124 patients (94 female and 30 male) following prefrontal lobotomy.” Pilgrim State Hospital, Annual Report (New York, 1948), 12–15.
11. Pressman, Last Resort, 180.
12. See Worthing et al., “350 Cases,” 626. In Gould’s case, either the hospital believed he had no family, or else they received consent from Chassan, Gould’s niece. Chassan was in agony about her uncle when Mitchell interviewed her after Gould’s death. And when “Joe Gould’s Secret” came out, Mitchell wrote to Chassan that he had decided not to mention anything she had told him; these were details concerning the family’s history of mental illness and psychiatric treatment (including Chassan’s own). Brill explained that patients suffering from dementia praecox (schizophrenia) tended not to respond well to shock, which is why they were the patients most likely to be lobotomized. Brill, “The Place of Neurosurgery,” 2503–4. Brill may have been involved in Gould’s lobotomy, as well as in that of Ginsberg’s mother. In October 1952 he reported, “The author’s experience with lobotomy was gained…when he worked with a series of 600 cases of lobotomy done at Pilgrim State Hospital, New York, between the years 1945 and 1950. (The number in this series now stands above 1,100.) Many of the patients had been known to him for periods of five years and longer; each was chosen for operation personally after discussion with the family and careful review of the record. Initiative was practically always taken by the hospital and in no case was a patient operated at the insistence of relatives when it seemed medically not indicated” (2505). The surgery itself was done by Henry Widgerson.
13. Worthing et al., “350 Cases,” 654.
14. Gould to Williams, May 27, 1949, Williams Papers, Box 7, Folder 243. During that period, though, Cummings did see him. “I’ve been seeing a lot of Joe G lately,” Cummings wrote to Pound in May 1948, Pound/Cummings, 231. This is explained, though, if Cummings visited Gould at that time.
15. Postcard stamped February 1950, sent to Macdonald by the Department of Hospitals, Bellevue Hospital. On one side are visiting hours and policies; on the other, a form filled out “Dear Sir or Madam: [handwritten ‘Joseph Gould’] has been admitted to Bellevue Hospital and has given your name as that of the nearest friend or relative.” Macdonald Papers, Box 19, Folder 479. “I was on Joe’s calling list in the later years; toward the end, I arranged with Dorothy Day to have him taken into a Catholic Worker of hospitality up the Hudson, he stayed there a while (a month maybe) but left—he’d become bored and the inhabitants also, with him—he needed a constant turnover audience, as you note, for his sake, and theirs.” Macdonald to Mitchell, on New Yorker stationery, October 15, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.
16. Chassan saw him once more, the next year: It was through Dorothy Day that Colleen Chassan “had her last contact with Joe Gould in 1952.” Mary L. Holman, Work Summary, October 23, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
17. Morris Werner sent Worthing five dollars, to pay for some cigarettes for Gould, but, Werner said, “I…expected and of course got no letter, as by that time he was too far gone.” Werner to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.
18. Hunt, “Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II.” In “Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I,” Hunt’s history of the rise of tranquilizers and their place in the history of psychiatric hospitalization is largely a transcription of a history given to him by Worthing’s successor, Henry Brill.
19. Hunt, “Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I.” And see Hunt, Mental Hospital, 42–44.
20. Notes about a phone call with Ed Gottlieb, June 20, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
21. Gould to Pound, 1928, Pound Papers, Box 19, Folder 861.
22. Harry Worthing, M.D., to Slater Brown, August 19, 1957, by telegram. Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
23. Michael Cipollino, Chief Clerk, Suffolk County Surrogates’ Court, to the author, May 12, 2015.
24. Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret.”
25. Mitchell, notes from August 21, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
26. Ibid.
27. Mitchell, notes from August 22, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
28. “Joe Gould Saved from Potter’s Field,” Washington Post, August 22, 1957. On the alleged Joe Gould scholarship at NYU, see Charles Hutchinson and Peter Miller, “Joe Gould’s Secret History,” Village Voice, April 4, 2000.
29. Time, September 2, 1957. And also “Joe Gould Dead; ‘Last Bohemian,’ ” New York Times, August 20, 1957. (The Time obituary is cribbed from the Times.)
30. Dan Balaban, “Last Rites for a Bohemian,” Village Voice, August 28, 1957.
31. Chris Cominel to Cummings, August 20, 1957, Cummings Papers, Folder 251.
32. Mitchell’s notes about interviewing Margules, September and October 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
33. That it was Chassan who hired Holman is revealed in Holman to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. And see Holman to Mitchell, September 30, 1957; Holman to Mitchell, October 23, 1957; telephone call with Holman, October 9, 1957; telephone call with Holman, May 21, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
34. Holman, “Work Summary,” October 23, 1957, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
35. See Mitchell’s interviews with Woodman, November 7, 1957, and with Nalbud, June 23, 1958, and May 20, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
36. Nalbud, May 20, 1959, interview, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
37. Nalbud, letter to the editor, Harvard Crimson, April 30, 1958, Nathan Pusey Papers, Harvard University Archives.
38. This produced a long chain of letters in the Pusey Papers, most of them from April and May 1958.
39. Nalbud, June 23, 1958, interview, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. And see the flyer itself.
40. James Nalbud, mass-mailed postcard, April 17, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.
41. Pound to Cummings, April 14, 1958, Pound/Cummings, 399.
42. Gould, “Why I Write.”
43. Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Art: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 180.
44. Obituaries include Chester Hampton, “Augusta Savage Dies,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 7, 1962.
45. On Savage’s fate, see the Hugh Samson letters, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 162. “Memories of Augusta Savage in Saugerties,” Auction Finds, October 14, 2010. Karlyn Knaust Elia, emails to the author, October 7, 10, and 22, 2015.
46. Richard A. Hitchcock to Mitchell, November 11, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Hitchcock’s is a long and detailed letter. Hitchcock is all over Gould’s diary.
47. Jane Magill, New York, to Mitchell, October 22, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1.