Joe Gould's Secret

It’s one of those Internet moments: I’ve come across a chapbook by Joe Gould and I’d love to fill in the story for all those who want to dig behind the wonderful movie about his “Secret” and get the poem itself. The chapbook in the Fales Collection at NYU isn’t copyrighted. What to do?...

I go to the terrific Joseph Mitchell essay collection, Up In the Old Hotel (Vintage, 1993 — compare prices to buy the book), which tells the story of this legendary proto-Beat Village boho and is the only source for Gould’s poetry in print. Mitchell is the other central character in the film Joe Gould’s Secret (Ian Holm plays Gould and Stanley Tucci, Mitchell). He wrote two profiles of Gould for The New Yorker, and the movie is a gentle evocation of their relationship, and of those bygone Village days. I loved it.

Three of the Gould poems in Mitchell’s book make it to the screen. In a scene reminiscent of “The Congo” cave hazing in another poetry film, Dead Poet’s Society, Gould leads a boho Village party conga line to the chant:

There are flies on me
There are flies on you
But there are no flies on Jesus

Another poem occurs when Joe crashes a society poetry gathering, where he reads:

My Religion

In the winter I’m a Buddhist
And in summer I’m a nudist

One of Joe’s performances revolved around his ability to speak seagull — he could translate any poem into seagull, flapping his wings and skreeking. He confided in Mitchell that the reason he was blackballed from the 50s lefty art world was a “proletarian poem” he recited called “The Barricades,” that closed in a satirical yuk:

This prissy hedge in front of the Brevoort
Is but a symbol of the coming revolution.
These are the barricades,
      The barricades,
            The barricades.
And behind these barricades,
      Behind these barricades,
            Behind these barricades,
The Comrades die!
      The Comrades die!
            The Comrades die!
And behind these barricades,
      The Comrades die —
            Of overeating.

The final poem of Gould’s in Mitchell’s writings is to the most renowned literary zine of the era, The Dial, which actually published Gould’s essay, “Civilization.” Here’s Joe’s last word on the publication that gave him his brush with credibility:

Who killed the Dial?
Who killed the Dial?
“I,” said Joe Gould,
“With my inimitable style,
“I killed the Dial.”

It was Joe Gould’s Oral History of the World, the longest book never written, that brought him fame, and was his secret, and makes him a hero in the US Oral History/Performance Poetry world. It’s time that his poems see print.

(The chapbook in the Fales Collection is called “VI by Joseph Ferdinand Gould/Privately Printed for John S. Mayfield/Jacksonville-on-the-Saint Johns/1943.” You can also find Mitchell’s Joe Gould writings in a beautiful slender volume called Joe Gould's Secret (Random House, 1999 — compare prices to buy the book).

~Bob Holman