Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (10 page)

Gould is a native of Norwood, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He comes from a family of physicians. His grandfather, Joseph Ferdinand Gould, for whom he was named, taught in the Harvard Medical School and had a practice in Boston. His father, Clarke Storer Gould, was a general practitioner in Norwood. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps and died of blood poisoning in a camp in Ohio during the First World War. The family was well-to-do until Gould was about grown, when his father invested unwisely in the stock of an Alaska land company. Gould says he went to Harvard only because it was a family custom. ‘I did not want to go,’ he wrote in one of his autobiographical essays. ‘It had been my plan to stay home and sit in a rocking chair on the back porch and brood.’ He says that he was an undistinguished student. Some of his classmates were Conrad Aiken, the poet; Howard Lindsay, the playwright and actor; Gluyas Williams, the cartoonist; and Richard F. Whitney, former president of the New York Stock
Exchange
. His best friends were three foreign students – a Chinese, a Siamese, and an Albanian.

Gould’s mother had always taken it for granted that he would become a physician, but after getting his A.B. he told her he was through with formal education. She asked him what he intended to do. ‘I intend to stroll and ponder,’ he said. He passed most of the next three years strolling and pondering on the ranch of an uncle in Canada. In 1913, in an Albanian restaurant in Boston named the Scanderbeg, whose coffee he liked, he became acquainted with Theofan S. Noli, an archimandrite of the Albanian Orthodox Church, who interested him in Balkan politics. In February, 1914, Gould startled his family by announcing that he planned to devote the rest of his life to collecting funds to free Albania. He founded an organization in Boston called the Friends of Albanian Independence, enrolled a score or so of dues-paying members, and began telegraphing and calling on bewildered newspaper editors in Boston and New York City, trying to persuade them to print long treatises on Albanian affairs written by Noli. After about eight months of this, Gould was sitting in the Scanderbeg one night, drinking coffee and listening to a group of Albanian factory workers argue in their native tongue about Balkan politics, when he suddenly came to the conclusion that he was about to have a nervous breakdown. ‘I began to twitch uncontrollably and see double,’ he says. From that night on his interest in Albania slackened.

After another period of strolling and pondering, Gould took up eugenics. He has forgotten exactly how this came about. In any case, he spent the summer of 1915 as a student in eugenical field work at the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. This organization, endowed by the Carnegie Institution, was engaged at that time in making studies of families of hereditary defectives, paupers, and town nuisances in several highly inbred communities. Such people were too prosaic for Gould; he decided to specialize in Indians. That winter he went out to North Dakota and measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and of five hundred Mandans on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Nowadays, when Gould is asked why he
took
these measurements, he changes the subject, saying, ‘The whole matter is a deep scientific secret.’ He was happy in North Dakota. ‘It was the most rewarding period of my life,’ he says. ‘I’m a good horseman, if I do say so myself, and I like to dance and whoop, and the Indians seemed to enjoy having me around. I was afraid they’d think I was batty when I asked for permission to measure their noggins, but they didn’t mind. It seemed to amuse them. Indians are the only true aristocrats I’ve ever known. They ought to run the country, and we ought to be put on the reservations.’ After seven months of reservation life, Gould ran out of money. He returned to Massachusetts and tried vainly to get funds for another head-measuring expedition. ‘At this juncture in my life,’ he says, ‘I decided to engage in literary work.’ He came to New York City and got a job as assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the
Evening Mail
. One morning in the summer of 1917, after he had been a reporter for about a year, he was basking in the sun on the back steps of Headquarters, trying to overcome a hangover, when the idea for the Oral History blossomed in his mind. He promptly quit his job and began writing. ‘Since that fateful morning,’ he once said, in a moment of exaltation, ‘the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.’

Gould says that he rarely has more than a dollar at any one time, and that he doesn’t particularly care. ‘As a rule,’ he says, ‘I despise money.’ However, there is a widely held belief in the Village that he is rich and that he receives an income from inherited property in New England. ‘Only an old millionaire could afford to go around as shabby as you,’ a bartender told him recently. ‘You’re one of those fellows that die in doorways and when the cops search them their pockets are just busting with bankbooks. If you wanted to, I bet you could step over to the West Side Savings Bank right this minute and draw out twenty thousand dollars.’ After the death of his mother in 1939, Gould did come into some money. Close friends of his say that it was less than a
thousand
dollars and that he spent it in less than a month, wildly buying drinks all over the Village for people he had never seen before. ‘He seemed miserable with money in his pockets,’ Gordon, the proprietor of the Vanguard, says. ‘When it was all gone, it seemed to take a load off his mind.’ While Gould was spending his inheritance, he did one thing that satisfied him deeply. He bought a big, shiny radio and took it out on Sixth Avenue and kicked it to pieces. He has never cared for the radio. ‘Five minutes of the idiot’s babble that comes out of those machines,’ he says, ‘would turn the stomach of a goat.’

During the twenties and the early thirties Gould occasionally interrupted his work on the Oral History to pose for classes at the Art Students’ League and to do book-reviewing for newspapers and magazines. He says there were periods when he lived comfortably on the money he earned this way. Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the old
Tribune
, gave him a lot of work. In an entry in ‘A Bookman’s Daybook,’ which is a diary of happenings in the New York literary world in the twenties, Rascoe told of an experience with Gould. ‘I once gave him a small book about the American Indians to review,’ Rascoe wrote, ‘and he brought me back enough manuscript to fill three complete editions of the Sunday
Tribune
. I especially honor him because, unlike most reviewers, he has never dogged me with inquiries as to why I never run it. He had his say, which was considerable, about the book, the author, and the subject, and there for him the matter ended.’ Gould says that he quit book-reviewing because he felt that it was beneath his dignity to compete with machines. ‘The Sunday
Times
and the Sunday
Herald Tribune
have machines that review books,’ he says. ‘You put a book in one of those machines and jerk down a couple of levers and a review drops out.’ In recent years Gould has got along on less than five dolllars in actual money a week. He has a number of friends – Malcolm Cowley, the writer and editor; Aaron Siskind, the documentary photographer; Cummings, the poet; and Gordon, the night-club proprietor, are a few – who give him small sums of money regularly. No matter what they think of the Oral History, all these people have great respect for Gould’s pertinacity.

* * *

Gould has a poor opinion of most of the writers and poets and painters and sculptors in the Village, and doesn’t mind saying so. Because of his outspokenness he has never been allowed to join any of the art, writing, cultural, or ism organizations. He has been trying for ten years to join the Raven Poetry Circle, which puts on the poetry exhibition in Washington Square each summer and is the most powerful organization of its kind in the Village, but he has been blackballed every time. The head of the Ravens is a retired New York Telephone Company employee named Francis Lambert McCrudden. For many years Mr McCrudden was a collector of coins from coin telephones for the telephone company. He is a self-educated man and very idealistic. His favorite theme is the dignity of labor, and his major work is an autobiographical poem called ‘The Nickel Snatcher.’ ‘We let Mr Gould attend our readings, and I wish we could let him join, but we simply can’t,’ Mr McCrudden once said. ‘He isn’t serious about poetry. We serve wine at our readings, and that is the only reason he attends. He sometimes insists on reading foolish poems of his own, and it gets on your nerves. At our Religious Poetry Night he demanded permission to recite a poem he had written entitled “My Religion.” I told him to go ahead, and this is what he recited:

“In winter I’m a Buddhist
,

And in summer I’m a nudist.”

And at our Nature Poetry Night he begged to recite a poem of his entitled “The Sea Gull.” I gave him permission, and he jumped out of his chair and began to wave his arms and leap about and scream, “Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!” It was upsetting. We are serious poets and we don’t approve of that sort of behavior.’ In the summer of 1942 Gould picketed the Raven exhibition, which was held on the fence of a tennis court on Washington Square South. In one hand he carried his portfolio and in the other he held a placard on which he had printed:
‘JOSEPH FERDINAND GOULD, HOT-SHOT POET FROM POETVILLE, A REFUGEE FROM THE RAVENS. POETS OF THE WORLD, IGNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO
LOSE
BUT YOUR BRAINS!’
Now and then, as he strutted back and forth, he would take a leap and then a skip and say to passers-by, ‘Would you like to hear what Joe Gould thinks of the world and all that’s in it? Scree-eek! Scree-eek! Scree-eek!’

(1942)

A Spism and a Spasm

A GARRULOUS OLD
Southerner, the Reverend Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, is the greatest and the most frightening street preacher in the city. He is an Episcopal priest in good standing, but he hasn’t had a church since 1904. ‘The gutter is my pulpit,’ he says, ‘and the roaring traffic is my pipe organ. Halleluiah!’ He has preached in the streets and squares of Manhattan for twenty years. Before coming here, he had been, successively, a rector in several cottongin towns in Alabama, a convict-camp chaplain, and the superintendent of a nickel-a-meal, dime-a-flop mission for down-and-outs in Philadelphia. Hall used to preach in Wall Street at noon, in Madison Square or Union Square in the afternoon, and in Columbus Circle at night, but for the last seven years he has concentrated on the theatrical district, an area which he once described as ‘the belly and the black heart of that Great Whore of Babylon and mother of abominations, the city of New York.’ He has a little band of disciples, the majority of whom are elderly spinsters or widows, and they sometimes refer to him as the Bishop of Times Square.

Every fair evening, after a dinner which customarily consists of an onion, a bulb of garlic, and a head of cabbage, all raw, he leaves his flat in a tenement on Forty-fifth Street, just east of Ninth Avenue, and walks around for three or four hours, shouting at people and threatening them with the delirium tremens, the electric chair, potter’s field, and the blue and bubbly flames of hell. As a rule, he goes forth alone, carrying a couple of oilcloth banners, a batch of newspaper clippings about women suicides neatly pasted on pieces of cardboard, and a pocketful of tracts of his own composition. He has written and published scores of tracts; among them are ‘Seven Communists the Night Before DEATH,’ ‘A Conversation Between a Whiskey Flask and a Cigarette,’ and ‘The Cry of the Meat-eaters is “MORE HOSPITALS!”’ Hall is especially outraged
by
drunken women, and he edges up to every one he sees and hands her a suicide clipping. ‘It’s a souvenir of the Great White Way, sister,’ he told one woman not long ago, ‘a souvenir and a warning. Nay, nay! Don’t throw it down. Put it in your purse and read it the first thing in the morning. Are you an actress? I bet you’re an actress! You’re riding on the hell-bound train, sister, right up with the engineer. Next stop, the padded cell! Next stop, the Bellevue morgue!’ He despises the theatre and has an idea that most of the drunken women he encounters are actresses; the very word ‘actress,’ when he says it, sounds sinister.

Hall has a frantic voice. When lifted, particularly in a dimmed-out street, it is extraordinarily disquieting. ‘I can speak on any old subject, just about, and make my audience uneasy,’ he once said. ‘A street preacher’s job is to frighten people – shake them up, put the everlasting fear of God into them, and I reckon my voice is my best asset.’ He developed a quality of hysteria in it years ago in Alabama by going deep into a cypress swamp for an hour or so a day and screaming warnings of one kind or another at an imaginary crowd. ‘Look out! Look out!’ he would scream. ‘Here comes a mad dog running loose! Fire! Fire! The barn’s on fire!’ ‘After a while,’ he says, ‘I got so good I scared myself.’

His appearance is also an asset. He is tall and bony, with sunken cheeks, haunted eyes, a pale face, and a grim, cackling laugh. He is a bachelor. He likes to be asked his age. ‘I’m seventy-nine,’ he says. ‘No aches or pains, no pills or powders, no doctors or drugstores.’ His hair is white and unkempt, and he has a mustache and a goatee, both badly trimmed; he brags that he hasn’t put foot in a barber shop in twenty-some-odd years. He owns a set of barber’s tools which he ordered from Sears Roebuck, and once a month he and a colleague, an old colporteur from Staten Island, get together and cut each other’s hair. He disapproves of barber shops because he thinks they charge too much and because of what he calls ‘the shame and the disgrace of the manicure woman.’ ‘I won’t be seen in a place,’ he says, ‘that has a pretty woman a-sitting in there for the pure and simple purpose of holding hands with any man that’ll pay the price. No good can come of that.’

Hall is fully as opinionated on a number of other subjects. For example, he is opposed to the use of coffins (he calls them ‘boxes’ or ‘bone boxes’), and sometimes he puzzles a street audience by denouncing ‘the funeral-parlor trust.’ He thinks that people should be buried in winding sheets, as in Biblical times. Fifteen years ago he got the directors of the Elmwood Cemetery, in Birmingham, Alabama, in which he owns a plot, to sign a document permitting him, when the time comes, to be put away in this manner. ‘I’m not a reactionary,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t be against the coffin custom if they were made out of old packing cases and sold for two or three dollars. That would be all right. If coffins just
have
to be used, they should be stacked on top of each other, a whole family in one grave. Think of the saving in space! Otherwise, in a few more generations the U.S.A. will be one vast and widespread cemetery.’ Hall is also opposed to soda fountains. ‘First the sody fountain,’ he says. ‘Then comes the saloon. Ice water, milk shakes, ginger ale, beer, hot toddies, straight whiskey, the D.T.’s – those are the steps the drinker takes.’ He is a confident prohibitionist. He is convinced that, one way or another, liquor will be illegal within five years. He corresponds with other street preachers all over the country, and recently, to one of them, he wrote, ‘My dear brother in Christ: I am so sure of Prohibition I have quit fretting about it. I have a good, bedrock reason that if the Whiskey Trust knew about it they would be quite agitated. This is it. For years upon years every time I brought up the subject of Prohibition on the streets of New York the people would snicker and snort. Well, they do not snicker any more. Nay, nay. Quite the contrary. They look serious, and some nod their heads. Even the liquor-head sots, they know it’s coming. They feel it in their bones. Over a year ago Dr Gallup said that thirty-six per cent of the people were ripe and ready to vote for it. Facts and figures. And the per cent is rising, rising, rising, like water in a tub. Five more years, I estimate, and we’ll put King Whiskey in the tomb, R.I.P. And the first grand rascal that D-double-dares to open up a speak-easy – why, the good Christians will descend on him and pull him apart.’

Other institutions Hall disapproves of are laundries and cleaning and pressing establishments. ‘This is a democratic country,’ he says,
‘and
no able-bodied man should have the right to call on some other man to scrub his duds. If people in general, even the highly educated, even Nicholas Murray Butler, had to bend over a washtub once a week, it would give them some sense of proportion; it would keep them from getting biggity.’ Hall does his own washing and ironing, and now and then he takes a flatiron and puts some crooked creases in his trousers. He is shabbily dressed. He buys his suits in a Ninth Avenue rummage store. He paid $7.15 for his last one, and a hat he has worn for almost three years cost thirty-five cents. ‘It’s still as good as new,’ he says. He wears a clerical collar, a clerical shirt, and a gold cross. The cross was given to him by a group of converted highwaymen, safe-crackers, and cop-killers in Flattop, an Alabama convict camp, where he was once a chaplain. He keeps a celluloid badge with only a red question mark on it pinned to his left lapel. When asked what it signifies, he narrows his eyelids and says, ‘Friend, every step you take, Death walks right in behind you. No matter how fat and sassy you may be, you’re living every second on the lip of the grave. The question is, “Are you ready for the shroud and the box, are you ready for the Judgment Day?”’

Hall usually begins an evening’s work by delivering brief harangues – he calls them ‘halleluiah hypodermics’ – in the doorways of a dozen or so Eighth Avenue saloons. He never goes inside a saloon and he never tries to take up a collection; he just stands in the doorway and shouts. Bartenders are used to him. They address him as ‘Dad,’ ‘Reverend,’ or ‘Shadrach.’ One evening recently he stopped first at the Dublin Restaurant, a saloon just above Forty-second Street. He stuck his head in, cleared his throat, and cried out, ‘Distilled damnation and liquid death, that’s what you’re a-swilling and a-guzzling!’ Many of the people along the bar abruptly turned around. While they stared, he unrolled one of his oilcloth banners. Lettered on it in red was this message:
‘PUT DOWN THAT GLASS AND GO. THE SALOON IS THE GATE TO HELL. DREADFUL ARE THE MORNINGS OF A DRUNKARD. PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.’
(Hall is a good amateur sign-painter, and he makes his own banners.) Holding up the banner, Hall shouted, ‘Brothers! Sisters! That’s not the brass rail
you’re
resting your feet upon. Nay, nay! That’s the third rail! Whiskey and beer! Wrack and ruin! Death and destruction! The cup that stings, the frolic, the midnight brawl, the strait jacket! Hark to the destiny of the whiskey drinker: forsaken by his friends, his furniture seized, his wife broken-hearted, his babies starving, his liver a sieve, his mind a tangle, his nerves a snarl, not a shoe to his foot. Don’t you people ever sleep? Go home! Go to bed! Are you ready for the Judgment Day? You may be taken suddenly. On your way home, rooting and tooting, drunk and disorderly,
you may be taken!
You, sister, a-sitting there in that booth with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of distilled damnation in the other, a sorry sight, are
you
ready?’ Hall was interrupted by one of the bartenders, who walked up to the front end of the bar and said, ‘O.K., Dad, break it up. That’s enough racket for one night.’ ‘Why, howdy-do, young man, howdy-do,’ Hall said. ‘Haven’t seen you in quite some time. Have you been on the day shift? Be sure your sins will find you out. I’ll go, but I’ll be back.’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the bartender sadly, ‘I’m sure you will.’

Holding his banner aloft, Hall proceeded up the avenue. In an hour and a half, after making stops at O’Donnell’s, Kieran & Dineen’s, Larry’s, the Eagle Bar, Gilhuly’s, Pete Moran’s, the Ranch Bar, Morahan’s, McGreevy’s, Mickey Walker’s, and the Ringside, he reached Fiftieth Street, which is about as far uptown as he ever goes. En route he passed out a couple of dozen tracts. He came across one reeling woman and tried to make her take a suicide clipping, but she flung it down and said, ‘Get out of here, you old wolf. Go to hell, you old wolf.’ ‘You’ll have to excuse me, sister,’ Hall told her. ‘I’m not going your way.’

On Fiftieth Street, Hall headed east. Reaching the northeast corner of Broadway and Fiftieth, where most nights horse-race gamblers congregate along the curb to argue over the racing charts in the early edition of the
Mirror
, he got out his second banner and unrolled it. It said,
‘GAMBLERS ARE THIEVES AND WILL STEAL. SATAN AND THE GAMBLER WALK HAND IN HAND. SMOKING WILL KILL YOU. WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?’
Displaying both banners, he stood for about ten minutes in front of the Paddock Bar & Grill, a hangout of racing people, staring upward with a soulful expression
on
his face, not saying a word. Then, as is his custom, he started south on Broadway, a banner upheld in each hand, walking slowly and preaching, most of the time at the top of his voice.

To stay in one spot on Broadway and preach requires a Police Department permit; by keeping in motion, Hall gets along without one. He walks close to the building line, so that his banners can be read by the lights in the show windows. Even in the busiest blocks, he is seldom caught in a crowd; flustered by his voice, people give him plenty of room. He rarely plans a street sermon but depends upon whatever comes into his head. Occasionally he sings a snatch of a hymn or quotes a verse of Scripture, usually a chilly one from Job, the Revelation, or the Lamentations. Like Father Divine, he makes up words. Also like Divine, he frequently pairs words of similar meanings – ‘hoot and howl,’ ‘shudder and shake,’ ‘masses and multitudes,’ ‘swill and swig.’ He deeply accents the first syllable in many words; ‘disturbed and perturbed,’ for example, becomes ‘
dee
sturbed and
pee
turbed.’

He is profoundly discursive. This particular evening, in the course of one block, the block between Fiftieth and Forty-ninth, he made the following remarks: ‘A lost city, hungry for destruction, aching for destruction, the entire population in a fuss and a fret, a twit and a twitter, a squit and a squat, a hip and a hop, a snig and a snaggle, a spism and a spasm, a sweat and a swivet. Can’t wait for night to fall, can’t wait for day to break. Even the church bells sound jangly in New York City; they ring them too fast. And the women! Into
every
thing! Free livers! They’ve gone hog-proud and hog-wild. Wearing britches, wearing uniforms, straining their joints for generations to come with high-heel shoes. They’re turning into Indians. Their mouths smeared and smiddled and smoodled with paint,
and
their cheeks,
and
their fingernails. And what color do they pick? Old Scratch’s favorite. The mark of the beast, that’s what it is. And they’ve taken to painting their toenails! Why don’t they get a bucket of paint and turn it over on themselves, top to bottom, like a whooping red Indian, and be done with it? Save time and trouble. Oh, my! Tell you what I saw last Sunday! I visited St Bartholomew’s, and there was an old sister in the pew in front of me with her hair dyed
blue
, and I mean
blue!
Call the doctor!

‘My name is Daddy Hall, and I love you one and all. An old-time preacher, believes
every
thing in the Bible, including the crosses on the t’s, the dots on the i’s. I’m just a stranger here; heaven’s my home. Don’t claim to be a highly educated man, but I can still read Latin; used to read Greek. If put to the test, I can recite Shakespeare. No degrees but D.D. – Divine Dynamiter; S.S. – Shining Saint; M.A. – Mightily Altered. If your troubles are more than you can bear, give me a ring – Circle 6–6483, the sanctified telephone number. I’ll preach you a sermon on the telephone. I pray for you, and I warn you, but all you care for is gluttony, whiskey, movie shows, Reno divorces, cocaine dope, silk underwear, birth control, and stocks and bonds. That, and the almighty dollar; you can’t get enough. Like a fine old lady said to me, “The people this day and time, if the government was to let them back a ten-ton truck up to the front door of the U.S. Mint and haul off a bogging-down load from the million-dollar-bill department, that wouldn’t by no means satisfy them.” That it wouldn’t! Nay, nay! They’d be back next morning bright and early a-scratching on the door like a dog, a-begging and a-pleading for just one more load. The root of all evil. And what kind of music do you hear now days? “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” that’s what you hear. They play it in the saloons, and they dance to it! Blasphemous music, that’s what it is, blasphemous and brimstony! It’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. That big, stout, fool-faced man over yonder at the curb is a-laughing at me. He thinks I’m funny. Let him laugh! As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools. He probably thinks he’s highly educated. The big professors these days, the highly educated, they don’t believe in sin. Oh, no! It’s just your glands. Glands, indeed! Glib, glab, gloody-doody! Just wait until those glandy professors hit the fiery pit, the bottomless, shoreless pond of roaring fire; they’ll wish they’d kept off the subject of sin.