A couple of generations after I’m dead and gone … the Ph.D.s will start lousing through my work. Just imagine their surprise. “Why, I be damned,” they’ll say, “this fellow was the most brilliant historian of the century.”
Mitchell’s first profile of Gould, “Professor Sea Gull,” was an intriguing and memorable piece of journalism. His second, written more than two decades later, was a masterpiece. “Joe Gould’s Secret,” published in The New Yorker in 1964 and then brought out the following year, along with “Professor Sea Gull,” as a book, is one of the greatest pieces of nonfiction of the twentieth century, and in its psychological acuity and narrative mastery it stands alongside the works of Joseph Conrad and Henry James.
“Joe Gould’s Secret” is framed as a confession. Gould had died in 1957 and only now, Mitchell tells us, can he reveal the truth he’d learned about the man he’d made famous more than two decades earlier. Mitchell relates how, after the publication of “Professor Sea Gull,” Gould begins to show up regularly at The New Yorker offices to ask for money—what he called “contributions to the Joe Gould Fund”—and to hold court for hours at a time. Mitchell, initially tolerant of Gould’s erratic behavior, becomes increasingly frustrated as various attempts to get the Oral History published come to naught. Eventually, after Gould sabotages a series of meetings with book editors, Mitchell snaps:
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