Ketchup for Breakfast

     

     At an Idaho conference a few years back, a woman asked me who had most influenced my writing. I had no idea, but I said it was probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, inventor of Tarzan, because he could make a reader believe that a child could be raised by apes and never grow a beard as an adult. Since then, I have given some thought to her question and realized that Joe the Birdman Gould influenced my way of life if not my writing. 

     Joe Gould was born in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1890 and graduated from Harvard with the Class of 1911.  Of his college experience Joe said, "I did not want to go. It had been my plan to stay home and sit in a rocking chair and brood. I was an undistinguished student."  Upon receiving his bachelor's degree, when asked by his mother what were his intentions, Joe replied, "I intend to stroll and ponder."

     Stroll and ponder he did. The only socially recognized job that Joe Gould ever held, in 72 years of life, was during the winter of 1915 when he worked under a grant from the Carnegie Institution measuring the heads of fifteen hundred Chippewas and Mandans in North Dakota. When asked why he was measuring heads, Joe replied "The whole matter is a deep, scientific secret."  Of the Indians he said, "They are the only true aristocrats I've ever known. Nothing in God's world ever surprises them. They ought to run the country, and we ought to be put on the reservations."

     When Joe ran out of funding for his head-measuring project he strolled into New York City and lived there the rest of his life. In 1917 he began his life's work, a literary work, which he called An Oral History of Our Time. Of this project he said, "Since that fateful morning, the Oral History has been my rope and 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."

      By 1943, Joe claimed the history was eleven times as long as the Bible. It was composed entirely of conversations overheard, of interviews, (His opening question of anyone was always "Did you ever have a painful operation or disease?") and of stories he gleaned from the back alleys and barrooms of Manhattan. "I have fully covered what might be termed the intellectual underworld of my time." All of this was written, margin-to-margin, both sides of the page, in thousands of little spiral-bound nickel notebooks, the sort that fit in a shirt pocket. Joe didn't believe in typewriters. "William Shakespeare didn't sit around pecking on a dirty, damned, ninety-five-dollar doohicky, and Joe Gould doesn't either."

     Joe panhandled for his food and drink, and for the notebooks and the pencils that were the building blocks of his art.  He didn't want money for himself.  He said "I'm the foremost authority in the United States on the subject of doing without.  I live on air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup."

     Joe has been gone since the early 1960’s, but there are still stories running around the East Village about how the countermen at the diners in that end of New York City would hide the ketchup when they saw Joe coming down the street because it was his practice to order a fried-egg sandwich, eat it, then dump a bottle of ketchup on his plate and eat that with a spoon.  Joe said. "I don't particularly like the stuff, but I make it a practice to eat all I can get.  Ketchup is the only grub I know of that is free of charge."

     The manuscript of the Oral History has vanished.  There are some scholars who maintain that it never existed. I believe it did and that it lives on a shelf in some academic tomb. In his pocket, in a ratty envelope, Joe always carried a will, bequeathing two thirds of the manuscript to the Harvard Library, and the other third to the Smithsonian Institution.  

     Here are a couple of quotes that we can attribute to Joe Gould, excerpted from pieces of the Oral History that were published between 1932 and 1962: 

     “Nearly everyone is perplexed by the human instinct to either lord it over other people or bow down to them. In the eyes of the Infinite, all pride is dust and ashes.”

     “When I had all the sunlight that filtered through Western mountain peaks I had moods when I wanted the gloomy coolness of libraries. When I was gorging myself to repletion with facts sufficiently useless to be interesting I would all of a sudden be seized with an intense longing to be again on horseback speeding into the sunset when the ice was breaking up in the Missouri river.”

     Very little of Joe's personal thoughts survived to be written down.  His moniker, Professor Sea Gull, was given to him because he claimed to have translated the entire works of Longfellow into the sea gull language, which he recited daily, "so the birds will have an equal chance to investigate human folly."  If you listen closely, you can still hear sea gulls quoting Longfellow.

    Joe wrote one poem in English and it expresses the essence of the writer's quest. I have attempted to live my life by its tenets.

 

 “In the summer I am a nudist,

In the winter I am a Buddhist.”