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Hold court?

Joe Gould’s Teeth, Lepore’s eleventh book in 18 years, takes for its subject a man who could not stop writing, and who certainly thought of himself (despite much evidence to the contrary) as a great man. In Joseph Mitchell’s 1942 New Yorker profile “Professor Sea Gull,” Joe Gould is introduced as “a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century.” Gould was the scion of a wealthy New England family and had attended Harvard, but by the time Mitchell encountered him he was homeless, roaming the streets of New York, subsisting on plates of diner ketchup (“‘the only grub I know of that’s free of charge’”), and cadging drinks. “He sleeps on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery,” Mitchell writes.

What separated Gould from the rest of the city’s down-and-out was that he claimed to be working on a book called The Oral History of Our Time. The book was to be, in Mitchell’s words, “a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than 20,000 conversations.” Gould told Mitchell he had been working on the Oral History for 26 years, filling up composition books he then stashed with various friends around the city. He boasted that he was setting down “the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude” and believed he was destined for posthumous fame: