Decades later, debunking a literary ‘secret’
For many fans of the New Yorker magazine, Joseph Mitchell is a revered literary figure and his 1964 New Yorker story, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” nothing short of a masterpiece.
Even Jill Lepore, a staff writer at the magazine, counts herself among his devotees. But her devotion doesn’t prevent her, in her new book, Joe Gould’s Teeth, from convincingly dismantling both that story and a story Mitchell published 22 years earlier, “Professor Sea Gull.” It was this first article that introduced the world to Gould, a rabble-rousing, foul-mouthed and foul-smelling man who claimed to have written a nine-million-word opus called The Oral History of Our Time.
The “secret” Mitchell wrote about in 1964, was that Gould’s work was a figment of Gould’s imagination. Lepore, though she never does find Gould’s Oral History, discovers enough to know that more of it existed than Mitchell had ever thought.
She also discovers, going through Mitchell’s papers, that a few people had written to him after his 1964 article saying they had read parts of it. On the one hand, Mitchell wrote that it didn’t exist, on the other that it did. What gives?
Lepore doesn’t just focus on Mitchell’s tendency to invent. She also fleshes out Gould and reveals him to be not the harmless, if annoying, character Mitchell portrayed, but rather a man who stalked, and possibly even sexually assaulted, a sculptor by the name of Augusta Savage. “He was mean,” Lepore writes. “He was vicious. He was scary.”
Like Gould himself, Lepore’s book can feel disjointed — hopping from one place to the next, one subject to the next. Still, this doesn’t take away from what is an absorbing literary detective story, one which, nearly 60 years after his death, will likely be the last we shall hear of Joseph Ferdinand Gould. This is not a bad thing. James Macgowan is a frequent contributor to The Star’s book section.