Joe Gould's Secret

Admittedly, I knew nothing of Joe Gould when I decided to read Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell, and I intentionally kept away from finding out anything until I read the book. The experience couldn't have been better.
While I don't read much nonfiction, this is one of those books that makes me wonder why. Joe Gould's Secret isn't only stranger than fiction, but it offers real sustenance that sticks with a reader. Joe's story is like no other. During the time when Greenwich Village is filled with all varieties of artists and cool cats, Joe Gould walked and lived among them. An educated man, from an affluent family, he finds importance in the world around him, has no focus on materialism, and is using his life experiences to write an show more oral history on life.
The story is told in two parts, and true to the title there is a secret that is disclosed in the second part. May I urge you to investigate no further if you are like me and have limited knowledge of Joe Gould? There is a lot of information out there, as well as a film, which makes me a little ashamed that I didn't know of him, but at the same time love that I didn't.
Joe Gould's Secret is one of those books that challenged the way that I think, and left me just a little bit changed, which I believe to be the most meaningful and magical part of literature. show less

There are a lot of terms that might once had applied to noted Greenwich Village resident Joe Gould: he might have been called a character, an eccentric, a real personality, a bohemian. For better or worse,the term that would probably most apply to him now is "mentally ill." I'm not sure that this is a bad thing. Whatever his talents were, and Joseph Mitchell makes the case that he was a gifted raconteur, performer, con man and perhaps an interesting -- if disorganized -- thinker, as a twenty-first century reader, it's sort of hard to escape the impression that the guy wasn't all there. "Joe Gould's Secret" is well-written, in that clean crisp, exacting style that people have come to expect from the New Yorker, it but it's entirely show more possible that your appreciation for this book will depend on how well you deal with individuals like Joe Gould. One person's charming neighborhood personage is another's crazy, shameless, conniving alcoholic freeloader. I can understand that he may have been entertaining to both the artsy types that haunted the Village in those days and the tourists who came to gawk at them, but I finished this with much less fondness for it's subject than I did when I started it. The guy probably couldn't have gotten a quarter out of me.

There are some other reasons to read "Joe Gould's Secret." It describes a place and an era where a lot of people genuinely believed that art was a response to life's injustices and when Communism was still considered a tenable political philosophy among the intelligentsia. Mitchell's descriptions of New York's self-consciously eccentric bohemian population and the Bowery's population of drunks, transients, and assorted ne'er-do-wells will likely strike something of a nostalgic chord with some readers: the book's setting seems at once both quaint and seductive. Famous authors and poets seem to drop in and out of both Mitchell's and Gould's lives on a regular basis. There's also the strange, unsolvable mystery surrounding Mitchell's decades-long writer's block. In a sense, it's downright tempting to think that Gould, who seemed trapped in his own writing and whose graphomania led to very little indeed, may have sparked some unconscious fear or self-doubt in Michell himself that led him to shut up his typewriter forever. One can't know, but at the end of the book, they seem like opposite numbers: the mercurial, logorrheic, almost unpublishable vagrant and the buttoned-up literary figure who went silent shortly after publishing this one. For all of its contradictions, this is one I'd recommend. show less

Your heart can't help but go out to Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell makes a good-faith effort and succeeds (somewhat) in befriending Professor Seagull, ultimately learning that there's a deep ocean of emotional pain, isolation, and mental illness underneath the charming and entertaining eccentricities of the aging bohemian.

Readers today can more easily recognize Gould's mental health concerns and neurodiversity than Mitchell could back in the 1940s/1960s. As their relationship develops and unfolds, and we learn more about what Gould was writing (and not writing), it's hard not to feel a tender pang of sadness.

I hope Mitchell revised his impression that Gould was lazy during his lifetime. The fact that Gould spent nearly every show more day writing in his composition books shows a dedicated work ethic. While Mitchell's exalted expectations of Gould's work were dashed, it's not difficult to see that the daily writing provided an outlet and the creation of a persona. This activity brought a sense of purpose and identity to a person who forever felt isolated and out of place in the world. show less

Admittedly, I knew nothing of Joe Gould when I decided to read Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell, and I intentionally kept away from finding out anything until I read the book. The experience couldn't have been better.
While I don't read much nonfiction, this is one of those books that makes me wonder why. Joe Gould's Secret isn't only stranger than fiction, but it offers real sustenance that sticks with a reader. Joe's story is like no other. During the time when Greenwich Village is filled with all varieties of artists and cool cats, Joe Gould walked and lived among them. An educated man, from an affluent family, he finds importance in the world around him, has no focus on materialism, and is using his life experiences to write an show more oral history on life.
The story is told in two parts, and true to the title there is a secret that is disclosed in the second part. May I urge you to investigate no further if you are like me and have limited knowledge of Joe Gould? There is a lot of information out there, as well as a film, which makes me a little ashamed that I didn't know of him, but at the same time love that I didn't.
Joe Gould's Secret is one of those books that challenged the way that I think, and left me just a little bit changed, which I believe to be the most meaningful and magical part of literature. show less

Joseph Mitchell virou referência pela qualidade de seu texto e por dar vida aos anônimos de Nova York nos longos perfis que escrevia. São essas as duas observações que mais se repetem sobre o autor, mas “O segredo de Joe Gould” também põe abaixo dois dogmas do jornalismo: o “compromisso com a verdade” e as fórmulas ortodoxas sobre como escrever uma reportagem. Isso, mais de 40 anos atrás. Fascinante.

Reading anything by Joseph Mitchell is worthwhile and reading "Joe Gould's Secret", a fascinating profile of a well-known Greenich village eccentric, is well worth your time. Joe Gould was, for upwards of thirty-five years, a homeless dropout living from day to day on his wits and handouts from any sympathetic ear, whether friends or strangers, surviving on a diet of fresh air, dog-ends, strong black coffee, fried egg sandwiches and bottles of diner-bar ketchup supped off a plate. ("the only food I know that's free of charge") The two parts of the book, headed Professor Seagull, and Joe Gould's Secret, first appeared in the New Yorker in 1942 and 1964.

The son of a medical practitioner, Harvard-educated Gould arrived in New York in 1916 show more and soon dismissed all thought of holding down a steady job when he had a flash of inspiration to write what he called "An Oral History of Our Time. Over many years, Gould would add daily to this work "in progress" even when badly hung over; loading his fountain pen in the Village post office, scribbling in grubby, dog-eared school exercise books in parks, doorways, cafeterias, Bowery flophouses, subway trains and in public libraries. Some of these hangouts also served as places to doss - alternatives to the floor of an artist friend's studio or a subway station. 270 filled notebooks had been stored in numerous drops for safekeeping until the work was completed.

Mitchell, intrigued by the "Oral History" idea, wrote a compassionate profile of Gould showing much patience and sensitivity in his dealings with his subject with whom he spent an inordinate amount of time. When a publisher friend of Mitchell asked to see Gould's material, with a view to publishing a book of selections, an indignant Gould declared that the material would either be published in its entirety or "not at all". Scruffy in appearance, wearing cast-offs, often unwashed for days at a time, all the time dogged by "homelessness, hunger and hangovers", ("I'm the foremost authority in the U.S.A. on the subject of doing without"). Gould's norm was to hang around bars and diners in the Village cadging food, money and drinks from friends, visiting tourists and other regular contributors to the "Joe Gould Fund". Once asked what made him as he is today, Gould answered it was all down to a strong distaste for material possessions, Harvard, and years on end of bad living on cheap booze and grub "beating the living hell out of my insides".

Gould died in 1957 whereupon Mitchell, who knew as much as anyone about the "Oral History", was persuaded to join a Committee set up to organise the collection of the mass of scattered material that made up "An Oral History of Our Times". Joe Gould's secret??? That's for you to discover when you read the book! If you enjoy "Joe Gould's Secret", read also "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon" and "Up In The Old Hotel", marvellous collections of profiles of old-time New York characters in a New York that is no longer. show less

I love this book. 3rd time read. One of my favorite works of nonfiction, up there with In Cold Blood and [b:Fear and Loathing|7745|Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream|Hunter S. Thompson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165639648s/7745.jpg|1309111] in Las Vegas. I've liked all of Mitchell's books--reports from New York at its cultural peak--but Gould goes to the next level, a unique peek into how people love an outsider artist, and the realities of his actual life. Seagulls everywhere would be proud.