Joe Gould’s Secret

First Edition (from what I can tell – see picture of imprint page)
Joe Gould, perhaps the most renowned Greenwich Village bohemian of his time, was a member of an old Massachusetts family (“The Goulds were the Goulds,” he used to say, “when the Cabots and the Lowells were clamdiggers”), and a graduate of Harvard.
When Joseph Mitchell first met him, in 1942, Gould had been living in the Village for many years. He was a wildly improbable figure, with his long, disheveled hair, bushy beard, and hand-me-down clothes, invariably much too large for him (Gould was only five feet four).
Toothlessly he ate-and drank-on money cadged from both friends and strangers.
Sometimes his meal would consist of what he called tomato bouillon-a cup of hot water into which he had poured some ketchup. He said he could speak and understand the language of sea gulls and was quite prepared to demonstrate it. But Joe Gould was a writer: he had long been at work on a monumental book, “An Oral History of Our Time,” which he then estimated to be over nine million words long, or about a dozen times the length of the Bible, and still growing. And it was this that attracted the writer Joseph Mitchell to him.
“Professor Sea Gull,” Mitchell’s now famous Profile of Joe Gould, was published in The New Yorker in 1942. Twenty-two years later, Mitchell wrote another and much longer study of him, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1964, some seven years after Gould’s death. Now brought together for the first time in book form, in Joe Gould’s Secret the two pieces have been reworked by the author to form a single, stunning portrait of a remarkable individual.
It is Joseph Mitchell’s quest for the Oral History-handwritten by Gould in stained and spattered notebooks which he stored with trusted acquaintances in various parts of the city-that is at the heart of this fascinating investigation. A considerable change took place, not so much in Gould himself as in Mitchell’s view of him and his epic work, over the score of years this book covers; in the course of these years Mitchell came to suspect, and finally to know, Joe Gould’s secret. The unfolding of this secret, by means of a highly unusual device in which the same story is sometimes told twice, enables the author to develop with great subtlety the real, as opposed to the illusory, Joe Gould, as well as to examine his own often conflicting responses to this singular man. The result is a character study of the very highest order, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly realized.