In writing a profile of the curiously eccentric Bohemian Joe Gould, author Joseph Mitchell used two very different tactics. In his first profile, titled Professor Sea Gull, Mitchell’s writing style is fluid, artistic, formal, and full of dated vocabulary and terminology. “The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and a kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium- gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle…”, writes Mitchell. He also had a habit of connecting a series of ideas with “and”, a technique that may have crossed the line of rambling. For example, Mitchell writes, “In addition, he was nonsensical and bumptious and inquisitive and gossipy and mocking and sarcastic and scurrilous.” All in all, the first profile is a stiffly written biography about a unique man from a stranger’s point of view: curious, respectful, interested, and crammed with unique quotes from Gould that allow the reader to truly get a sense of the man.
In his second profile, written over 20 years later, Joseph Mitchell begins as he had written the first, yet eventually completely diverts from his plan. The beginning seems to mimic the original, as Mitchell juxtaposed uncomfortably short sentences (“On occasion, he stole.”) with impossibly and comically long sentences, simply toying with the reader:
“All through the years, nevertheless, a long succession of men and women gave him old clothes and small sums of money and bought him meals and drinks and paid for his lodging and invited him to parties and to weekends in the country and helped him get such things as glasses and false teeth, or otherwise took an interest-some because they thought he was entertaining, some because they felt sorry for him, some because they regarded him as sentimentally as a relic of the Village in their youth, some because they enjoyed looking down on him, some for reasons that they themselves probably weren’t at all sure of, and some because they believed that a book he had been working on for many years might possibly turn out to be a good book, even a great one, and wanted to encourage him to continue working on it.” (39)
After he finished lulling his readers to sleep and have them simply skim over paragraphs of writing, Mitchell abruptly changes to a fast paced, casual, and modern first person narrative. In it, not only does Mitchell fully describe and record Joe Gould’s life, but he also lends the reader a window into his personality, and his life. While Gould was once an attraction worthy of an audience, he is now a human being with a history, feelings and emotions. The incredibly detailed narratives written verbatim contain the background and clarification needed to present the random quotes from the first narrative. It is here that Mitchell openly expresses his opinion of Gould as the story progresses, rapidly shifting from curiosity, to sympathy, to respect, to resentment, and then gradually back to admiration. He clearly wrote the second profile which revealed the truth of the phony Oral History to illustrate a man’s struggle for identity, and to pay homage to a dear friend who had captured his loyalty. Although this rambling, overly- detailed, and at times incoherent piece is clearly not feature writing, its idiosyncrasies and touching storyline make it a classic.
