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....
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.”
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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