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Joe Gould's Teeth

Author Jill Lepore

Paperback

$17.00 US

Knopf | Vintage

5.2"W x 8"H x 0.7"D | 8 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Apr 18, 2017 | 256 Pages | 978-1-101-97179-6

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Cultural Destinations > Museums > History
History > More History...
History > United States History
Non-fiction > Biography & Memoir

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.”

Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

“A breezy, compulsively readable inquiry that touches on several big subjects, including what constitutes due diligence in journalism versus in history…No one could accuse Lepore of shoddy research: Undaunted by archives, she pores over reams of Gould’s letters and diaries, pans for gold in Mitchell’s boxes of notes at the New York Public Library, and corroborates her findings with extensive footnotes. . . . Joe Gould’s Teeth is more than just a fascinating footnote to a beloved literary landmark. Using the tools of her trade, Lepore ended up broadening her search for his lost notebooks to encompass trenchant questions about journalism, race, and mental illness. The result has bite.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

“A well-aimed hand grenade of a book, fiercely concentrated in its precision and unflinching in its revelations. Best-selling Lepore’s exciting approach to hidden and scandalous historical stories is drawing an enthusiastic, ever-growing readership that will be well primed for this thoughtful exposé.” —Booklist, *starred review*

“Engrossing. . . . Lepore’s book is as much about all the people, including herself, who project meaning and significance onto the work and personality of Joe Gould as it is about the man himself. Throughout history there have been peculiar characters who have captured the imagination of everyone they come into contact with, blinding them to obvious flaws and permitting all of us to imagine wonders just beyond what most of us can fathom. We owe Lepore a debt of gratitude for re-introducing us to one of the strangest strangers to have ever walked among us.” —Chicago Tribune

“Revelatory. . . . Lepore’s inquiry, which first appeared as a long New Yorker article, discovers richer depths to Gould’s character than Mitchell ever explored, even if Gould’s likability is a casualty . . . an impressive study of paradoxes. . . . Lepore, a young prolific academic at the other end of the productivity spectrum from Mitchell, has upended the subject and author of the New Yorker’s most-read article….she ends up with more to get your teeth into.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Marvelous. . . . Lepore has established herself as perhaps the most prolific, nimble and interesting writer of American history today, vigorously kicking at the past until she dislodges it from the ossifying grip of received wisdom. . . . As she brings to bear the methods of an ace historian at the top of her game, Lepore turns “Joe Gould’s Teeth” into a ripping detective story. . . . Of all the stories swirling around Gould’s, none interests Lepore so much as that of Augusta Savage, an African American sculptor and civil rights activist from Harlem who became the unreciprocated love of Gould’s life, an unwilling muse and, after she refused his offer of marriage, an object of outright harassment. No other writer has made this connection between Savage and Gould, and one of the central satisfactions of Joe Gould’s Teeth is the way it unexpectedly veers away from Gould to take Savage’s story on its own terms, delivering by Trojan horse, as it were, a gift-wrapped second biography, a personal history set against Gould’s in striking, illuminating relief.” —The Washington Post

“Lepore has taken up the mantle of literary resurrectionist, and in Joe Gould’s Teeth she succeeds despite the unsavory nature of her subject’s life and spurious literary legacy. Lepore shrewdly recounts her quest to find a near-mythical ‘lost’ manuscript by her subject, the New York eccentric who claimed to have written down nearly everything anyone ever said to him, starting before the outbreak of World War I. . . . A madman’s grossly engrossing tale.” —The New York Times

“Anyone who has read Lepore knows that, let loose in archives—library archives, archives of memory—she is crackerjack, squeezing into claustrophobic corners where the good stuff is found. . . . She surfaces with different riches, profiles of her own, of Gould, Mitchell and sculptress Augusta Savage, a subject of Gould’s uninvited advances. . . . Savage is a vital counterpoint here, and Lepore seemingly plucks her story from the air, a sculpted piece of African-American experience all its own, but you know she found it in those cobwebby archives. . . . It is easy to get a charge out of this parti-colored, flabbergasting tale, one that typifies what Lepore understands as ‘the asymmetry of the historical record.’ In the noise and silences, with only the evidence at hand, our sleuth must discern the card-carrying account.” —Star Tribune

“Like a detective, Lepore describes her mazelike quest, her clues, her dead ends, the many people she met and talked to, the dusty archives visited in a wonderful, sprightly prose lusciously filled with allusions and references. . . . Borges’ great short story about the fictional writer Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, comes to mind. Lepore is Borges to Gould’s Quixote, which was his life writ large . . . maybe. A fascinating, sharply written, thoroughly engaging jeu d’esprit.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Lepore’s first four sentences each have a separate footnote—this is nimble detective work. . . . Lepore is shrewd about the sticky ethics here, carefully documenting how little research Mitchell did, how much he preferred just listening to Gould.” —Los Angeles Times

“Lepore has written an ingenious puzzle book that works on multiple levels—as a straightforward account of a research query; a pocket history of at least a sliver of Modernism; a surprisingly dark biography; and, ultimately, an examination of what it means when we say that a story is true. It’s a powerful work, and it will resonate with, and perhaps even haunt, readers long after they’ve reached the last page.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“If Joseph Mitchell gently wrote the Greenwich Village eccentric into urban folklore, faults and all, Lepore, a fellow New Yorker writer, has produced a jolting reality check.” —SFGate, recommended reading list

“Lepore deserves credit for taking on the legend surrounding Gould and his oral history. Her prose is wonderful; her research unassailable….She shows us the true Joe Gould rather than the one so many people wanted him to be.” —The American Scholar

JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include the New York Times best seller The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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1

little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where

to find them

—e. e. cummings

For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth and years before he lost the history of the world he’d been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.

“I have created a vital new literary form,” he announced. “Unfortunately, my manuscript is not typed.”

He’d sit and he’d write and then he’d wrap his black-and-white notebooks in brown paper, tie them with twine, tuck them under one arm, and tramp through the streets of New York, from Greenwich Village to Harlem. When he stopped, he’d untie his bundle, open a notebook, take out a pen, and begin again. He wore sneakers, a coat that didn’t fit, owl’s-eye glasses, and somebody else’s teeth. He was writing the longest book ever written. He smoked and he drank and he listened. He said he was writing down nearly everything anyone ever said to him, especially in Harlem. He wrote until his eyes grew tired. He’d take his glasses off and forget where he’d set them down. How he lost his teeth is another story.

He began before the start of the First World War and didn’t stop until after the end of the Second. He never finished. He called what he was writing “The Oral History of Our Time.” (The title, with its ocular O’s, looks very like a pair of spectacles.) In 1928, he told the poet Marianne Moore, who was editing a chapter of it for The Dial, that he’d come up with a better title. “meo tempore seems to me intrinsically a good title,” Moore wrote back, “but not better than the one we have.”

Joseph Ferdinand Gould is how he signed his name when he was feeling particularly grand, and when he was feeling even grander, he introduced himself as the most important historian of the twentieth century. “I believe you would be interested in my work,” he wrote to George Sarton, the Harvard historian, in 1931. “I have been writing a history of my own time from oral sources. I use only material from my own experience and observation and from the direct personal narratives of others. In short, I am trying to record these complex times with the technique of a Herodotus or Froissart.” Herodotus wrote his Histories in ancient Greece; Jean Froissart wrote his Chronicles in medieval Europe. Gould was writing his history, a talking history, in modern America.

“My book is very voluminous,” he explained to Sarton:

Apart from literary merit it will have future value as a storehouse of information. I imagine that the most valuable sections will be those which deal with groups that are inarticulate such as the Negro, the reservation Indian and the immigrant. It seems to me that the average person is just as much history as the ruler or celebrity as he illustrates the social forces of heredity and environment. Therefore I am trying to present lyrical episodes of everyday life. I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.

For a time, he was rather remarkably well known. Chapters of his work appeared in avant-garde magazines nose to nose with essays by Virginia Woolf and drawings by Pablo Picasso. He went to parties with Langston Hughes. He dined with E. E. Cummings. He drank with John Dos Passos. He was sketched by Joseph Stella, photographed by Aaron Siskind, and painted by Alice Neel. Gould was a modernist, a lover of the vernacular, and a fetishist of form. He was ragged and, then again, he was fussy. “The Oral History of Our Time” was plainspoken, arresting, experimental, and disordered. Most notably, it was endless, and unremitting. So was he. Neel, when she painted him, gave him three penises.

Writers loved to write about him, the writer who could not stop writing. “The history is the work of some fifteen years of writing in subway trains, on ‘El’ platforms, in Bowery flop houses,” the poet Horace Gregory wrote in The New Republic. “On Staten Island ferry boats, in smoking cars. In cheap and dingily exotic Greenwich Village restaurants, in public urinals.” And in Harlem, in crowded apartments, in smoky artists’ studios.

“I am trying to be the Boswell and Pepys of a whole epoch,” Gould liked to say. He was Jacob Riis; he was John Lomax. “I try to get the forgotten man into history,” he told a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. If he was Herodotus, he was also Sisyphus. He wanted to jot down each jibber and every jabber. He started before broadcasting began, but once it did, its ceaselessness made his work harder. “The radio is beginning to cramp my style,” he said. It was rumored (though Gould himself disputed this) that he once smashed one to bits.

Naturally, writing down everything he heard took up nearly all his time. Sometimes, he made a living writing book reviews. At the height of the Depression he worked for the Federal Writers’ Project; then he was fired. He began to starve. He was covered with scabs and infected with fleas. “Met Joe il y a quesques jours &, b jeezuz, never have I beheld a corpse walking,” Cummings wrote to Ezra Pound. Gould went on the dole. He lost his fake teeth. Cummings told Pound, “My sister says that if Joe can only keep on relief for a few years he’ll have a new set of somebody’s teeth.”

And what about the great work? In 1939, Dwight Macdonald, an editor of the Partisan Review, addressed the question of storage: “He has in 25 years managed to fill incalculable notebooks which in turn fill incalculable boxes.” He kept them in numberless closets and countless attics. “The stack of manuscripts comprising the Oral History has passed 7 feet,” a reporter announced in 1941. “Gould is 5 feet 4.” His friends wished to have that stack published. “I want to read Joe Gould’s Oral History,” the short-story writer William Saroyan declared:

Harcourt, Brace; Random House; Scribner’s; Viking; Houghton, Mifflin; Macmillan; Doubleday, Doran; Farrar and Rinehart; all of you—for the love of Mike, are you publishers, or not? If you are, print Joe Gould’s Oral History. Long, dirty, edited, unedited, any how—print it, that’s all.

But no one ever did. And no one knew, really, quite where it was.

“The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay,” Joseph Mitchell reported in The New Yorker in December 1942:

At least half of it is made up of conversations taken down verbatim or summarized; hence the title. “What people say is history,” Gould says. “What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan—is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put it down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.”

Mitchell’s profile of Gould is titled “Professor Sea Gull.” It made Gould famous the world over. “Professor Sea Gull” is one of the most influential literary essays ever published. People read it again and again. “I tasted every word,” one faraway reader wrote to Mitchell. The story was picked up by Time and was widely reprinted, including in a U.S. Armed Services Edition shipped to soldiers at the front. They tugged it out of their rucksacks and found they could not put it down. “Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve had a piece that one couldn’t stop reading?” a New Yorker editor asked Mitchell. “Since your last piece, that’s how long.”