The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

September 12, 2015

September 12, 1889

Part of the appeal of Joe Gould (September 12, 1889 to August 18, 1957) is his situation in New York City's cultural life in the first part of the 20th century. Our information comes from a recent article on Gould in The New Yorker. This 2015 piece succeeds articles in 1942 ("Professor Seagull"), and 1964 (“Joe Gould’s Secret,”) by the famed New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell.

Marianne Moore published some of his writing in the Dial, specifically chapters from Gould's Oral History of Our Time. “[That]... 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, in 1931....

Gould knew or corresponded with, besides the names mentioned, Lewis Mumford, Don Freeman, Malcolm Cowley,  E. E. Cummings, William Saroyan, and Ezra Pound. Of Gould's literary output Ezra Pound said, "Mr. Joe Gould’s prose style is uneven.”

E. E. Cummings made a poem -- "little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where
to find them." 

This interest reflects the fascination and horror Gould inspired. This Harvard graduate, and son of the same, in the words of Jill Lepore, in the article referenced above, "was a toothless madman who slept in the street."

Gould wrote, “A couple of generations after I’m dead and gone....the Ph.D.’s will start lousing through my work. Just imagine their surprise. ‘Why, I be damned, they’ll say, ‘this fellow was the most brilliant historian of the century.’ ” This is every writer's dream, their fall-back position. And we cannot say Gould was wrong. The manuscript has been lost, scattered, or, some say, never really existed.

“Insanity is a topic of peculiar interest to me,” Gould once said. "He’d met a woman in a ward at Central Islip: sometimes she thought she was a cat, sometimes a mouse. “Is there really much difference between her and a sane person, after all?” Gould asked. “We all spend our lives chasing into darkness.”

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