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History |
Summary
Summary
From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called "The Oral History of Our Time."
Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry." By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould's manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in "Joe Gould's Secret," a second profile, Mitchell claimed that "The Oral History of Our Time" had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould's imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out.
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.
Author Notes
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has written several books including Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Joe Gould's Teeth, and These Truths: A History of the United States.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This disjointed true-life detective tale from Lepore (The Secret History of Wonder Woman) digs into the story of Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village eccentric who was introduced to the world by Joseph Mitchell's 1942 New Yorker profile, "Professor Sea Gull." Gould befriended a group of artist and writers that included E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound, and told anyone who would listen that he was writing a book entitled The Oral History of Our Time. In 1964, following Gould's 1957 death in a mental hospital, Mitchell wrote what was to be his last New Yorker profile, "Joe Gould's Secret," which cast doubt on the existence of the Oral History. The ever-curious and intrepid Lepore sets out to discover whether Gould did indeed ever write a word of his oral history, digging deep into New York University and Harvard archives and leafing through the more than 800 surviving pages of Gould's diary. Lepore never finds definitive evidence, but the more she learns, the uglier the story gets-including Gould's fascination with "race pride" and his harassment of African-American sculptor Augusta Savage. She speculates that Gould's friends contrived his endearing persona as an attempt to save him from institutionalization. Lepore's book, which itself originated as a New Yorker article, unfortunately comes across as thin and overstretched, and its subject is unlovable and unsympathetic. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Intrepid historian and commanding writer Lepore (The Secret History of Wonder Woman, 2014) investigates the troubling story behind two celebrated New Yorker profiles by staff writer Joseph Mitchell about Joe Gould (1889-1957), a legendary, indigent eccentric who was taken up by the likes of e. e. cummings and Ezra Pound and who claimed to be writing a massive, groundbreaking book, The Oral History of Our Time. His mission was to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him, especially in Harlem, in the belief, as he explained, that the average person is just as much history as the ruler or celebrity. Mitchell concluded that Gould's manuscript didn't exist, that the project was mere fantasy, an assertion Lepore decided to challenge. Securing access to newly available archives, she discovered the sad and unsettling truth about Gould's struggles, Mitchell's failings, and the toxicity of their relationship. As she tracks Gould, born to a prominent family, to Harvard, bars, and psych wards, she unveils his disturbing fixation on sex and race, and casts light on two fascinating women, Augusta Savage, an African American artist with whom Gould was dangerously obsessed, and his secret benefactor, psychiatrist Muriel Morris Gardiner. A well-aimed hand grenade of a book, fiercely concentrated in its precision and unflinching in its revelations. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A RAGE FOR ORDER: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, by Robert F. Worth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) A masterly account of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, and the region's decline into violence and anarchy, by a former New York Times foreign correspondent. Our reviewer, Kenneth M. Pollack, called the book "a marvel of storytelling, with the chapters conjuring a poignancy fitting for the subject." THE MIRROR THIEF, by Martin Seay. (Melville House, $17.99.) Linked narratives brimming with delightful, esoteric detail unfold in three Venices: 16thcentury Italy; 1950s Venice Beach, Calif. ; and the Venetian casino in Las Vegas in 2003. A card counter, the man hired to track him down and an oblique book of poems weave through a series of schemes in this novel, with a structure that recalls David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." FREE SPEECH: Ten Principles for a Connected World, by Timothy Garton Ash. (Yale University, $22.) Protected speech is under siege on a wide front and is caught up in a number of modern controversies, from the role of government surveillance to the criminalization of hate speech and the prosecution of whistle-blowers. Garton Ash examines 10 such cases, framed with his call for "more free speech but also better speech." THE NEST, by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $16.99.) A $2 million trust fund is set aside for the Plumb siblings, who are each counting on their share to rescue them from financial straits. But months before they are set to receive the money, Leo, the eldest, squanders a majority of the sum after a car accident; the ensuing family drama of "firstworld problems proves to be an enjoyable comedy of manners as Sweeney artfully skewers family dynamics," our reviewer, Patricia Park, wrote. LAROSE, by Louise Erdrich. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) While hunting buck, Landreaux does the worst thing imaginable: He accidentally kills his best friend's child. As penance, he offers his own son, LaRose, to the grieving parents, setting in motion a powerful story of ancestry, justice and forgiveness. JOE GOULD'S TEETH, by Jill Lepore. (Vintage, $16.) Gould - a New York eccentric friendly with many of the early 20th century's bestknown artists - decided to record everything anyone said to him, aiming to "widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry." The project, known as "The Oral History of Our Time," acquired a near-mythic status - and then some wondered if it ever existed at all. Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian, sets out to discover the manuscript's fate.
Kirkus Review
A writer searches for a "holy grail" manuscript of endless words. This extended essay by New Yorker staff writer Lepore (The Secret History of Wonder Woman, 2014, etc.), originally published in the magazine last year, is about a wild goose chase and missing dentures. Joseph Ferdinand Gould (1889-1957), aka Professor Seagull, first became a public figure thanks to New Yorker staff writer Joseph Mitchell. His two essays about Gould were published together as Joe Gould's Secret (1964), which was made into a movie in 2000. The "secret" was his mysterious manuscript, an extensively detailed personal biography/history that was millions of words long and 7 feet high. Lepore describes his Oral History of Our Times as "plainspoken, arresting, experimental, and disorderedendless, and unremitting." She wonders: "It didn't exist. Or did it?" Gould was an eccentric, probably autistic, she believes, who "suffered from gramaphobia""he could not stop writing." Often homeless, drunk, or ill, he required little but had friendsEzra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and otherswho would help him out. His close friend, e.e cummings, wrote of him: "b jeezuz, never have I beheld a corpse walking." 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. Questions abound. The search led her to a key figure in the Gould mystery: Augusta Savage, an African-American artist who lived in Harlem. Gould knew her and apparently even proposed to her. Could he have given her the manuscript? 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 largemaybe. A fascinating, sharply written, thoroughly engaging jeu d'esprit. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Lepore (David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History, Harvard Univ.; staff writer, The New Yorker; The Secret History of Wonder Woman) tells the story of Joe Gould (1889-1957), a curious footnote of the American modernist literary movement, who long claimed to be working on a nine-million-word text, The Oral History of Our Time. Lepore's engaging book charts her adventures tracking down information about Gould and her fruitless search for the unpublished manuscripts (if they ever even existed). What emerges is the tale of a man from an important New England family who made friends and supporters (such as E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound) just as quickly as he made enemies and alienated people. In the pages of The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell elevated the Oral History to mythical status. Though renowned by the intelligentsia, Gould participated in the eugenics movement and sexually harassed women, including Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage. Lepore's ultimately sad account touches on racism, sexism, alcoholism, and how America's mental health institutions failed Gould, possibly subjecting him to a lobotomy and electroconvulsive therapy. VERDICT This book will delight readers interested in the people's history of literary modernism. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/16.]-Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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." Excerpted from Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.