Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore Read Free Book Online Page A

sphere of history
    as Walt Whitman did
    that of poetry.
    I close the book.
    I reach into my pocket for what I’ve brought. It feels like porcelain. It opens like a clam. And then I back out of that room, as soundlessly as I came, having left behind: Joe Gould’s teeth.

Acknowledgments
    This book, which I drafted over the course of a semester, could not have been written without the help of very many people. My students asked excellent questions. Generous archivists and librarians answered my many requests. I’m especially grateful to Nora Mitchell Sanborn, Joseph Mitchell’s daughter, and to the New York Public Library, for permission to see Mitchell’s papers. Karlyn Knaust Elia and Richard Duncan, owners of the Augusta Savage House and Studio in Saugerties, New York, very generously gave me a tour, and Savage’s neighbors kindly shared their memories. Thanks, too, to André Bernard at the Guggenheim Foundation, who uncovered Gould’s application materials, and to the Foundation for the fellowship that made it possible for me to revise the manuscript. Three of my current and former students helped out with transcription: Carla Cevasco transcribed Gould’s diaries, Emmet Stackelberg transcribed Gould’s correspondence with Charles Davenport, and Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey transcribed Savage’s correspondence at Fisk. Harvard colleagues guided me through disciplinary thickets. Anne Harrington helped me understand the history of psychiatry. Christina Davis at the Woodberry Poetry Room talked me through the history of sound. Robert Waldinger and Alfred Margulies, psychiatrists at the Medical School, read an early draft and provided invaluable advice about what might have afflicted Gould. Abundant thanks to all. Heartfelt thanks, too, to Adrianna Alty, to whom this book is dedicated, and to Tina Bennett, Dan Frank, Jane Kamensky, Leah Price, David Remnick, and Henry Finder.

Sources
    Gould’s papers are scattered in archives all over the country. As with any literary remains, they represent only a portion of the writing Gould produced. Because many people to whom Gould sent letters considered him an annoyance, or worse, most of the letters he wrote, and especially those he sent to strangers, were discarded. Even his friends and family, of course, threw his letters away. E. E. Cummings was one of his oldest friends. Most of Cummings’s exchanges with Gould were face-to-face—unrecorded oral history—but, since Gould was such a compulsive letter writer, he also wrote to Cummings. Cummings kept many of the letters Gould sent him, but not all of them. For instance, on August 1, 1938, Cummings described a typical letter from Gould in a letter to his sister, Elizabeth Cummings Qualey:
Our “little gentleman” recently honoured me with a letter worth anyone’s weight in led (not to mention Geld) beginning “Dear friend” and plunging into Ethiopia.
    This from Gould to Cummings does not survive. Nor do letters from Cummings to Gould survive, because those would have been in Gould’s possession, and everything Gould ever owned he lost. Far scarcer, though, are the literary remains of Augusta Savage. It appears that Savage destroyed the great bulk of her papers. Some of her artwork remains in private hands, while other works can be found among the holdings of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fisk University, the Schomburg Center, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
    ABBREVIATIONS
    Bifur
Archive    
Bifur
Archive, 1921–1930, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa
    Boas Papers    Franz Boas Papers, Mss.B.B61, American Philosophical Society
    Braithwaite Collection    William Stanley Braithwaite Collection, 1899–1928, MSS 8990, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library
    Braithwaite Papers    William Stanley Braithwaite Papers, MS Am 1444, Houghton Library, Harvard University
    Brand Papers    Millen Brand Papers,