For a time, Gould got back on his feet. Malcolm Cowley hired him as a regular reviewer for The New Republic, where his reviews appeared alongside essays by Edmund Wilson. But then he was arrested for assaulting two women. “Are you plunderable?” he would say to men, asking for money. But “Are you gropable?” was closer to the question he asked women, especially “colored girls,” except that he usually didn’t ask. Entries from his diary read like this: “I felt some breasts”; “I got two other women to kiss me.” Brand tried to protect Savage. Gould’s other friends, instead, protected Gould. Mitchell knew about this, and ignored it. In 1942, Horace Gregory told Mitchell that in 1930, after an “old maid” had Gould arrested, he and Edmund Wilson signed statements attesting to Gould’s sanity in order to keep him out of an asylum. (Cummings testified, too.) Gould was released.

This little fraternity then began attempting to get Gould publicity. The idea seems to have been that, if Gould were better known, he could get off the street, and he would either stop bothering women or (as would turn out to be the case) he could more easily get away with it.

“Some of my friends were rather worried about the threat to my liberty,” Gould wrote to Pound, “and as a result Horace Gregory placed an article on me with ‘The New Republic.’ ” Gregory’s essay, “Pepys on the Bowery,” appeared in April, 1931. “The history, a library in itself, is written in longhand on the pages of fifty to a hundred high-school copy books,” Gregory reported. “It is in its eighth definitive version.” In 1942, Gregory told Mitchell that he had read at least fifty of Gould’s notebooks and found them “extremely interesting,” with “flashes of New England wit” and “great clarity of expression,” but that much of it was unprintable “because of obscenity.” Mitchell set this aside.

Savage returned from Paris in September, 1931. “Something typical, racial, and distinctive is emerging in Negro art in America,” she said. She opened a school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. Her most important work, she always said, was as a teacher. She was named the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. She founded a club called the Vanguard, to talk politics and ideas. The F.B.I. began investigating her. Gould kept bothering her. Brand went to talk to Savage, in an attempt to patch things up between them. Brand wrote Mitchell, in a letter I read in Mitchell’s papers at the N.Y.P.L., “Her face clouded up and she hesitated, but angrily she seemed to decide to tell me what was really doing. Joe was making her life utterly miserable.” After Savage refused to see Gould, Gould asked Brand to deliver to her the chapters of the Oral History that concerned her. He wrote Brand that Savage, in denying that she and Gould had been intimate, was lying: “White women have had affairs with colored men, and then have accused them of rape to protect themselves, and she is doing something equally yellow.”

Brand told Gould to leave Savage alone. (“It was evident that as a Negro she hesitated to take court action,” Brand explained to Mitchell.) Gould then started calling Brand and his wife, the deaf poet Pauline Leader, in the middle of the night, shouting obscenities, and sending them endless letters: “These were of the most open depravity from end to end.”

I figured Brand must’ve saved those letters. I got on a bike and rode to Columbia, where, in an uncatalogued box of Brand’s papers, I found a thick folder marked with a note: “Not to be released for use until my death.” Inside the folder were four chapters of Gould’s Oral History, together with a clutch of horrible letters. “If I prefer to woo an American woman to a greasy neurotic Jewess with breath stinking of herring,” Gould wrote to Leader, “do I have to ask your approval?” At any rate, he now insisted, he didn’t want Savage anymore: “I would prefer not to marry her because she is sterile.”

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Brand saw a side of Gould he had never seen before. He went to the police and got a summons for Gould’s arrest—“I was not a Negro woman, and I wasn’t taking it,” he later wrote—but Gould begged him to drop the charges, “saying he had already been taken to court on a similar charge and had received a suspended sentence, but if I went through with this, he would certainly be put in jail and he needed careful treatment of his eyes and would probably go blind.” Brand backed down.

Gould applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Henry Allen Moe, the head of the Guggenheim Foundation, asked Gould to submit portions of the manuscript. Gould stalled, missed a deadline, and was rejected, twice. He began sending Moe vicious letters, yelling at him in public, asking for cash and then demanding it, and, meanwhile, attacking the foundation for discriminating against men of “old American stock . . . in favor of the predatory type of recent coolie immigrant such as the original Guggenheim.”

He was getting worse. He was sad; he was scary. Cowley fired him. He smelled; he was covered with sores and infected with bedbugs. He was terribly, terribly ill. E. E. Cummings made him sit on the windowsill so that he wouldn’t leave lice on the furniture. People would spray the room with a DDT gun as soon as he left. When the artist Erika Feist saw Gould coming up the stairs, she would call out to her husband, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!”

I’d head to this library or that, to photograph Gould’s letters and diaries, and I’d imagine that my camera was a can of Flit. I began to think, Joe Gould is contagious.

He lost his teeth. “The first thing they did with all patients was take out all their teeth,” the psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner wrote of her residency at a psychiatric hospital at the time. (The theory, she said, was that “mental illness of any sort was always the result of a physical infection.”) He lost his fakes. He went on the dole. Cummings, whose sister was a social worker, wrote to Pound, “My sister says that if Joe can only keep on relief for a few years he’ll have a new set of somebody’s teeth.”

In 1936, Gould got a job with the Federal Writers’ Project. He told the Herald Tribune that he was writing a biographical dictionary of New York’s earliest settlers. He said that he was doing it alone—“I’m a one-man project”—because he was a better writer than everyone else.

Augusta Savage worked for the W.P.A., too, as the assistant director of the Federal Arts Project. She helped found the Harlem Artists Guild, and organized an exhibit at the 135th Street branch of the public library, telling Arthur Schomburg that she wanted the world “to see Harlem through Harlem’s eyes.” She was commissioned to make a sculpture for the 1939 World’s Fair. She was featured in Life.

Gould was trying to get into national magazines, too. “GING to git you to git some of JOE’s oral HISTORY fer Esquire,” Pound wrote to Cummings. O’Brien proposed Vanity Fair. Or maybe he could get himself profiled in The New Yorker. Gould took to saying, “I make good copy.”

“YOU might write a nize lil piece say harft a page about Joe’s ORAL hizzery, And mebbe that wd/ start somfink IF you make it clear and EGGs plain WHY Joe izza hiz torian,” Pound suggested to Cummings in 1938. “The COUNTRY needs (hell yes) an historian,” he’d written to Cummings earlier. In 1939, Pound visited the United States. He had become a Fascist. He wanted to make an argument about history, which was that democracy was impossible, since the world was secretly run by Jews.