Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell (1996)

A compilation of two New Yorker Profiles written by legendary journalist Joseph Mitchell about Greenwich Village bohemian and eccentric, Joe Gould (1889-1957).

Book Review:  Unfortunately, I read Jill Lepore's book Joe Gould's Teeth (2016) prior to reading Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell. Actually, I read this because of Lepore's book, which was a response to Mitchell's articles. If you have the choice, read JG's Secret before reading JG's Teeth, and you'll have a better view of the whole picture here; in a better world, all three works would be reissued in a single volume. Joseph Mitchell wrote two New Yorker articles about Joe Gould. The first was "Professor Sea Gull," in 1942, which made Gould (at least locally) famous and enabled him to survive above a bare subsistence level. It described Gould as an odd but essentially harmless drunk and obsessive. Gould died in 1957, and in 1964 Mitchell published his second article, "Joe Gould's Secret," which described the aftermath of the first article, and the effect it had on both Gould and Mitchell himself. Joe Gould was a Harvard graduate and an alcoholic Greenwich Village "street person," cadging drinks and handouts for decades, accepted locally as a colorful eccentric and bohemian. Gould's claim to fame was as a writer, having published some excerpts of his "An Oral History of Our Time," which Gould asserted consisted of thousands of pages, perhaps nine million written words, it was mission in life. He claimed it consisted of things he had seen or heard, half of it conversations taken down: "What people say is history," said Gould. Gould may not have been a myth, but he was more than a rumor. In the first New Yorker Profile, Mitchell accepted and publicized Gould's claims, which brought him both fame and a patron who provided Gould a minimal but comfortable standard of living. After Gould's death in 1957, his friends launched a search for the apparently scattered Oral History, but not much of the opus was located. In 1964, Mitchell published his second article, about five times as long as the first, in which he revealed his opinion that the Oral History never existed, except for a few specific topics that Gould had been obsessively rewriting (and ranting about) for years. Joe Gould's Secret is well written and compelling. If this book was fiction, there would be raves about the quirky, somewhat charming, and pitiful character, think A Fan's Notes or a Confederacy of Dunces. In the end, Gould may have been a conman who managed to maintain his alcoholic (and mentally ill) life through what was left of his wits. Mitchell was intrigued because he saw some of his own curious life in Gould's. Worth reading for the style of writing, insight into psychoses disguised as quirks, a vision of New York City gone by, myth-making, and certainly if planning on reading Jill Lepore's book. Unfortunately Lepore's book colored my reading of this, as it shows facets of Gould's character that Mitchell didn't know or didn't share. Lepore takes Mitchell's writings to the next level, both good and bad. By the same token, having read this now, my view of Lepore's Joe Gould's Teeth has changed, too. [4 Stars]