Joe Gould's Teeth

Joe Gould has always fascinated me, probably because he rejected so many things that I myself reject, and because he lived his own insights so full-heartedly.

Jill Lapore's new book, “Joe Gould's Teeth, takes him seriously, as I think he should be taken. She believes that Gould's “Oral History” really did exist despite what's said in Joseph Mitchell's book, “Joe Gould's Secret,” and it's film adaptation in 2000.

My first acquaintance and fascination with Joe Gould was through e. e. cummings' references in some of his poems to him.

There is a line that Gould wrote which has been in my mind for over fifty years and which was especially important to me in the years just after I first read it. He wrote this line following some remarks about losing illusions and having to follow his own essential purposes calmly:

“...I suppose I feel about it this way because I have delusions of grandeur – I believe myself to be Joe Gould.”

Lepore writes the following about Joe's confinement to the Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island:

It was likely at Central Islip, in 1929, that Joe Gould lost his teeth. “The first thing they did with all patients was to take out all their teeth,” wrote Muriel Gardiner, recalling her residency at a mental hospital in New Jersey at the time. This was on the theory, she explained, “that mental illness of any sort was always the result of a physical infection.” It didn't help. - p.83

There was more to this removal of teeth by psychiatrists than Lapore suggests by this short quote from Muriel Gardiner. Teeth have a large symbolism in dreams and mythology and the psychopathology of everyday life. I imagine it played into the old custom of having all one's teeth removed on reaching eighteen years of age.

Just the widespread dream of one's teeth falling out is a clue to the far-reaching and deep symbolism of teeth. I've read many different interpretations of that particular symbolism in dreams, of one's teeth falling out, and the interpretation that rings best for me is based on the view that teeth represent ideas. They are what enable us to get hold of something, to bite into something, to analyze something. I think that the tooth which a shaman sucks out from indigenous people's bloodstream is basically ridding the sufferers of a bad idea. A dream of one's teeth falling out could thus mean having one's ideas destroyed.

They pulled out all his teeth.

  

Joe Gould

Here is a poem cummings wrote about him:

little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where
to find them(and found a secondhand set which click)little
gould used to amputate his appetite with bad brittle
candy but just(nude eel)now little joe lives on air

Harvard Brevis Est for Handkerchief read Papernapkin no laundry
bulls likes People preferring Negroes Indians Youse
n.b. ye twang of little joe(yankee)gould irketh sundry
who are trying to find their minds(but never had any to lose)

and a myth is as good as a smile but little joe gould's quote oral
history unquote might(publishers note)be entitled a wraith's
progress or mainly awash while chiefly submerged or an amoral
morality sort-of-aliveing by innumerable kind-of-deaths

(Amérique Je T'Aime and it may be fun to be fooled
but it's more fun to be more to be fun to be little joe gould)