Book Review: What a novel this would have made: a search for the work of a mysterious, eccentric cum madman, destitute and homeless, compulsively writing one impossibly long book over 30 years, his opus scattered across city and state, ragged remnants pieced together as from an archaeological dig. A ragged, smelly, infested friend to the great writers of his time. Think some distant cousin of Ignatius J. Reilly. Or some nearly extra-terrestrial mashup of Vic Chesnutt, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Frederick Exley, and Harry Smith. But, stranger than fiction, Jill Lepore has written Joe Gould's Teeth, and it's better than we had any right to hope, given its fragmented source and history. Joe Gould, an alleged graphomaniac, was rumored to have written his masterwork, The Oral History of Our Time, from before the First World War till after the Second. Gould tried to copy down everything he heard from common people in everyday conversation, that was his mission. He knew Langston Hughes, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, and more leading lights of the time. He was "a corpse walking" who was writing a comprehensive history of average people through transcribing every conversation he ever had. He said things like "If we could see ourselves as we really are, life would be insupportable," and that much eminence is "due, it seems to me, not as much to inherited ability as to inherited opportunity." The tragedy of Gould's tormented and twisted life was an unrequited obsession with an African-American sculptor, or as Lepore puts it: "People fall in love across the color line and other people don't love them back." He was arrested for protesting the racist movie Birth of a Nation in 1915; it's unclear from Joe's Gould's Teeth whether his alleged anti-Semitism was merely a show for the insane and anti-Semitic Ezra Pound. It is clear that he groped women with some frequency, smelly and covered with sores, infested with lice and bedbugs, as he was. He could be vicious, stalking and harassing those who disappointed him. One psychiatrist found Joe Gould "not insane but just eccentric," while another did not believe he was a kindly eccentric, but "a psychopath." He may have written thousands of pages of his opus.
The author, Jill Lepore (author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman) fell into the chasm that was Joe Gould. The result is this well-researched and documented part memoir, mostly history. The memoir part is mostly handled tastefully until the somewhat indulgent Epilogue. But that's only a hiccup given the engaging first 147 pages of detailed and sourced information that virtually reads like the novel it could have been. The major sub-plot of the book is that of New Yorker magazine writer and Joe Gould popularizer, Joseph Mitchell, who had his own bagful of problems, and saw a fun-house mirror image of himself in Gould. Mitchell eventually concluded in the second of his Gould profiles (available in a bind-up called Joe Gould's Secret, well worth the read) that the masterwork never existed. While teaching Joe Gould's Secret, Lepore wondered whether the Oral History of Our Time had existed, and decided to spend a semester investigating. She decided that Mitchell had failed to do sufficient investigation, and her research led to tantalizing clues that there may have been more Joe Gould writings than were discovered at the time. Unfortunately, her findings also undercut the legend of the Oral History: one of the more persuasive writings was a Gould anecdote about President Taft. But this is a poor fit, as the Oral History was to be the words of the common people, not the high and mighty like Taft. Other indications suggest that earlier in his life Gould had written more, less later. I read this in two long sittings and have now studied more of the readings cited in Joe Gould's Teeth (a terrible name for a good book -- read the book for the meaning). My only complaint is that Lepore, as she accuses Mitchell, seems to have run out of time, energy, or interest by the close of the book, which made a disappointing end to an impressive rest of the story. It almost seemed that Lepore felt that because of his actions Joe Gould was not morally worthy of further research, which is an odd turn for a historian. This was my first encounter with Jill Lepore, but I will be reading more of her work. {Note: when I first read this I hadn't yet read Mitchell's writings. Reading Joe Gould's Secret gave me a different perspective on Joe Gould's Teeth. In a better world, the two books would be combined as one. My recommendation is to read Mitchell before reading Lepore, but read both.} [3.5 Stars].
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