His Story as History

This week I walked down past where the Bowery ends, to meet up with some young men of my generation before a red-bricked building on 15th Seventh street, at McSorely’s old Alehouse. The doorman allowed me in without looking at my i.d., saying in a soft Irish twang, that he trusted my face. When I walk in my senses were overwhelmed with the smell of men, sweating beer, hops, sawdust and history. The chandeliers above the wooden bar are covered in a thick past of black dust, and wishbones mark the lives of those who did not return to their local jaunt from the world’s wars. This is New York. It opened in 1864, and is New York City’s oldest saloon. My eyes are devouring the surrounding walls, aged pictures and glassy eyes of the men around the room. I see a framed book-cover, ‘McSorely’s Wonderful Saloon’ by Joseph Mitchell and I consider the way that he would describe the ever-raw setting with such a truthful, humble and human approach. I think of Joe Gould.

It was a true surprise to learn that after publishing Joe Gould’s secret Mitchell was not to write or publish anything more. Does this reveal a certain potency of their relationship over the course of 20 years? Was it Gould that challenged and betrayed Mitchell and the integrity of his story? Or did Gould act as a reflection of Mitchell, or some illustration of a quality that he should like to bring alive? I cannot be sure why Mitchell didn’t write anything after Joe Gould’s Secret, but I do see a connection in the coincidence, because Joe Gould both entrapped and liberated something inside Mitchell, the literary artist. I believe that Gould presented a sense of freedom that was enhanced by being outside of society; He didn’t owe anything to anyone, he said whatever he wanted, when he wanted, he went to and fro as he wished and he fabricated stories – creating his own reality. Mitchell indulged in Gould’s freedom, first only as a reporter, but quickly he was emotionally involved. Gould unlocked some part of Mitchell that would allow him to reflect on himself, while reporting on Gould. And because he published both the profile and it’s inclusion of his own personal account, his integrity as a journalist was stretched.

Journalism is supposed to be a verified account of the truth, who, what, when, where, why? And withholding the ‘What I think’ of personal opinion. The difficulty with the Mitchell’s reportage on Gould is that he became personally involved in the intricate, and fabricated truth of the ‘Oral History.’ Firstly, he was drawn into it because he wrote the first article, Professor Seagull introducing the Oral History as though it were tangible, yet it was purely on the account of old Joe Gould. It wasn’t until much later that he would discover that the Oral History was indeed only a mouthful of words, a few re-written essays of Joe’s life and not much else. So Mitchell had learned that his first article was fictitious in its telling of Gould’s work of art. Mitchell then feels a sense of duty to his work, but also an infusion of duty and pity for Joe Gould – which drives him to write the second article, ‘Joe Gould’s Secret.’ In the second article, Mitchell rewrites the story that we have already been told, except this time he withholds nothing, he shares all that he has discovered about old Joe Gould, including self reflections and challenges that he faced personally. Although some part of the Oral History and his relation to Gould left Mitchell in a written silence, it was the recording of Gould’s story, told by Mitchell that was an honest history of that time.

Fool's Gould?

This 1996 Virginia Quarterly Review article about Mitchell seems interesting, and I was going to recommend it to you. But I couldn't disagree more with his assessment of Joe Gould's Secret:

If The Bottom of the Harbor is Mitchell's finest book, its successor, Joe Gould's Secret, is his most disappointing....The book is unexpurgated information, much of it unsatisfying. Instead of a judiciously chosen and arranged fugue of facts, we're hauled off to every conversation Mitchell had with Gould, whose boring digressions within digressions are matched only by his capacity to talk for hours, night after night, about the same subject: himself. The book is an exhausting read; we feel only slightly less flayed alive by Gould's verbosity than Mitchell must have. The fascinating thing is that even though we're given the facts, and nothing but the facts, and they add up to a wholly different and in some ways more exact and accurate Gould than that profiled in "Professor Seagull," the end result is much less satisfying because it lacks a certain verity.