What do you get when you combine a famous New Yorker staff writer from the 1950’s and ’60’s, a current New Yorker staff writer, Harvard Professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner, and a gnomish, bedraggled, man who died in 1957 in a New York State mental hospital who claimed to have written the “Oral History of Our Time”, an accurate hand-written record of all the conversations that he had had from the beginning of WWI through the end of WWII?

You get a wonderfully interesting and offbeat volume which, despite its 235 pages (25% of which were citations and index), I read cover to cover in one day.  The players in this quirky and fun book are Joseph Mitchell, Jill Lepore, and Joe Gould.

Mitchell was a renowned New Yorker writer who wrote two long profiles of Joe Gould, one in 1942 titled “Professor Sea Gull” and one in 1964 titled “Joe Gould’s Secret”.  The two were combined into a thick volume, “Up in the Old Hotel”, published in 1965.  According to legend, Mitchell never wrote another word after this book despite appearing everyday at The New Yorker’s offices and sitting in front of his typewriter at his desk.  After his death, it was discovered that Mitchell often played loose with the truth, making up dialogue and even events.

Lepore is an incredibly energetic and brilliant writer whose recent book on amending the Constitution won the Pulitzer Prize.  She was teaching a course on biography to Harvard undergrads several years ago when she became fascinated by Mitchell’s book about Joe Gould, and off she went digging into archives all over the country and interviewing dozens of individuals who knew Gould to try to find the often extolled but never seen manuscript that Gould had allegedly written.

And then there’s Joe Gould. Born in 1889 in Norwood, MA, the son and grandson of Harvard physicians, he appears to have been autistic with a very short attention span, bizarre mannerisms, and grandiose ideas and self-image.  He flunked out of Harvard, failed to be admitted to grad school, was turned down for a Guggenheim, and eventually ended up in several mental hospitals.  Befriended by literary giants like e.e.cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Lewis Mumford, Marianne Moore, and Malcolm Cowley, he was never able to successfully work or support himself and appeared to be beset by graphomania, the intense need to constantly be writing.

Did he ever actually write this “Oral History” or was it a figment of his deranged imagination?  Mitchell concluded the latter, and though LePore is more supportive of the poor Gould, she ends up concluding the same.  Refusing to spend any more time down that rabbit hole, she concludes her book with an epilogue that is quite “Gouldish”, writing a fantasy touching on all the elements in this colorful man’s life.  She writes about finding a notebook on whose cover is written, “Property of Gould, Joe” and below that “Meo Tempore, Third Version”.  She opens the notebook and reads, in his unmistakable hand:

“I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.”