Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell

I read Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell ~10/08, I think, alone in my room. It combines two essays published in the New Yorker in 1942/1964. It is about an unemployed homeless person in Manhattan ~5'0" tall, I think, who tells people he is writing a book that is currently ~9,000,000 words. The person is Joe Gould. Joseph Mitchell profiles Joe Gould for the New Yorker and Joe Gould uses the opportunity to talk to Joseph Mitchell ~10 hours/night ~10 nights, becoming very drunk each night, talking "nonstop" about himself while being served free alcohol, due to not having anyone to talk to normally that would listen to him with interest. At one point Joe Gould says he is aware Joseph Mitchell is being forced, in a way, to listen to him, and so he is taking advantage, by talking a lot. At one point I think Joe Gould sort of "pauses" for a moment from talking to ask Joseph Mitchell if he is annoyed at him for talking so much. Joseph Mitchell thinks about being polite, but then says "yes," he is annoyed, despite having chosen him to write a feature article on. Joe Gould seems unaffected and continues talking.

After the profile is published in 1942 (the first part of the book) Joe Gould continues talking to Joseph Mitchell by visiting his New Yorker office and calling him a lot (sort of on the pretext that he has no address and so has to get the letters addressed to him, due to the profile, via Joseph Mitchell via the New Yorker), and Joseph Mitchell becomes very annoyed (this is written about in the second part of the book, in the article published in 1964, after Joe Gould has died) and a little scared, because the more Joe Gould talks to him the more "common information" will exist between them, Joseph Mitchell knows, and the more attached Joe Gould will become to him. Then Joseph Mitchell thinks the only want to "get rid of" Joe Gould is to get a publisher interested in his ~9,000,000-word book. After some research Joseph Mitchell learns that the book doesn't exist.

There are two very emotional scenes. One is when Joseph Mitchell sort of finds out that Joe Gould has been lying about his ~9,000,000 word book. The other (I'm ~95% certain I "cried," to some degree, after reading this) is when Joe Gould, late in one of the ~10-hour talking sessions, drunk, says he thinks often about and has "never forgiven" his mother for something she once "did to him," referring to one time when she sat openly crying in front of him (when he was a small child) while saying something like "my poor son" (Joe Gould had problems as a child, was very small and got sick a lot, and other things). After the 1942 profile is published Joe Gould gets some benefactors for some time, but they eventually "abandon him." He says there are times when he feels that everyone in Manhattan whom he asks for money (his job is to just ask people for money) dislikes him. I don't think he had friends. At some point he is taken to a mental hospital and dies there.

Joseph Mitchell, over a few years, looks at Joe Gould's notebooks at different times (Joe Gould always had notebooks with him that he wrote in daily, writing his ~9,000,000-word "oral history" thing, he tells everyone) and sees that Joe Gould has been rewriting the same 3-4 essays for ~20 years in different notebooks, something like 100 times (and not working on his ~9,000,000-word, because it doesn't exist), with the same structure and details each time, but different "digressions." The same essays Joe Gould rewrote repeatedly, for ~20 years, were about his father's death, his mother's death, and a satire re liking ketchup a lot.

Here is something from Wikipedia:

Mitchell's account of Joe Gould's extravagantly disguised case of writer's block, published as Joe Gould's Secret (1964), presaged the last decades of Mitchell's own life. From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything significant again. In a remembrance of Mitchell printed in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, his colleague Roger Angell wrote: "Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained."

The prose style and tone and focus of the 1942 section are different in the 1964 section. The 1964 section is more detached and concrete, with not many idioms/cliches, and long sentences sometimes. I liked it. The 1964 section is much more "personal" than the 1942 section. The two sections' different tones created, to me, a non-sequitur feeling that seemed emotional/complex in terms of Joseph Mitchell. The book seems emotional both in terms of Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould. According to Amazon it is 46,624 words. This cover makes it seem something like "a delightful comedy about overcoming shortcomings to find peace and joy in life," which is maybe the opposite of what it's like, in my view.