Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

When Gould got out of the hospital, his rent, at a place called Maison Gerard, was paid by this mysterious benefactor. He was desperate to discover her identity. He heard her last name began with “G.” For a while, he thought she was a Guggenheim. (He was wrong.) He kept sleuthing. It was a point of pride with Gould that no one could evade him for long. Joseph Mitchell once tried to get away from him by leaving the city without giving a forwarding address. Gould tried very hard to track him down. One day, he cornered the photographer Aaron Siskind. “He said he had seen Joe Mitchell, who was at work on a book. I said I will not ask his address as he seemed to want to keep it a military secret.” But, of course, he did more than ask; he demanded.11

The person he was really looking for was the person he’d been hounding since 1923. No matter what he’d promised Millen Brand in 1934, or what he’d promised anyone since, or how often, or how tearfully, he never, ever left her alone. “Went to the Waldorf,” he wrote in his diary early in 1945. “Had a long talk with Bruce Nugent. He promised to get me Augusta’s address.”12

—

The name of Gould’s benefactor was Muriel Gardiner. She was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.13 I am pretty certain she was the “Doctor Gardner” who examined him in the hospital. And I’m pretty sure, too, that her interest in him was clinical as much as philanthropic.

Muriel Morris was born in Chicago in 1901; her grandfather, a German Jew, had emigrated to the United States. She was the very wealthy heir of a meatpacking firm, Morris & Company. She went to Wellesley and then to Oxford, where she wrote a thesis about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She was briefly married to a man named Gardiner. Then she went to Vienna, to be analyzed by Freud, but was instead handed over to Freud’s disciple, Ruth Mack Brunswick. Between 1910 and 1914, Freud had treated a Russian aristocrat named Sergei Pankejeff, who was three years older than Joseph Gould. (Freud referred to Pankejeff as the Wolf-Man, because of his childhood fear of wolves.) Freud’s study of Pankejeff appeared in 1914 as “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” Gardiner met Pankejeff in Vienna in 1926; he taught her Russian. While Brunswick was analyzing Gardiner, she was also analyzing Pankejeff. (Brunswick’s “A Supplement to Freud’s ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’ ” appeared in 1928.) In 1926 and 1927, Gardiner lived in Greenwich Village. She might possibly have met Gould at that time; her closest friend was a sculptor, who may have known Augusta Savage.14 Returning to Austria in 1931, she trained as an analyst and went to medical school at the University of Vienna. During the 1930s she worked underground for the resistance, securing false passports to help Jewish families escape from Germany and Austria. (She also hid Joseph Buttinger, the head of Austria’s socialist underground, whom she later married.

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