Joe Gould’s Secret is easily nothing short of an amazing read. Split in two parts, one a portrait of a verbose vagrant visionary, and the other part is about a man’s journey to understand a man that does not deserve mention in the lives of the average person. In 186 pages,
“Professor Sea Gull” is a typical New Yorker portrait that tries to make a denizen of this city interesting, fascinating, and exotic, and in this case, spellbindingly repugnant. The opening line itself is worthy of remembering by heart, as Mitchell uses precise and sharp words to tell us what kind of a man Joe Gould really is. Granted, we are given a picture of the eccentricities of what Hodgman-detailed hobo, prone to fantasies and claims of an expertise to a wildly obscure subject. What lies underneath this ball of contradictions and lies, is a sliver of truth. It is through this profile that Mitchell manages to make an untouchable fairly reachable in our grasps, and reminds the reader what he really is, one of many in the cosmos that is New York.
The second part of the book, his Secret, breaks down what Mitchell wrote 22 years before. In the writer’s journey to find the real Joe Gould, that somewhat mythic quality of that vagabond has not only been tarnished, but ripped apart. As Mitchell continues to rediscover Joe Gould, all of the idealized accounts, his dreams, his task of creating an Oral History of Our Time, turn out to be lies. It is because of this that Mitchell struggles to continue the lie or to reveal the secret that threaten what Joe Gould meant to all of his supporters. It is from this struggle and the subsequent decision that Mitchell reveals what he as a person truly is.
Despite the many references to a bygone era, in the vein of Here Is New York by White, Mitchell’s book remains emblematic of the type of world we New Yorkers live in, and what type of people we were and will be.
