As he described his life, he spent a large part of his time wandering around the city listening to people and taking down whatever he heard them say that seemed to him to have “an inner meaning.” He said he made use of this talk in a book that he had been working on since soon after he arrived in New York City and that he called “An Oral History of Our Time.” Some talk has an obvious meaning and nothing more, he said, and some, often unbeknownst to the talker, has at least one other meaning and sometimes several other meanings lurking around inside its obvious meaning. He wore hand-me-downs, he slept in flophouses, and he ate in greasy spoons. In 1916, oppressed by the knowledge that he was a disappointment to his father and by a general feeling of being out of place, he had left Norwood and had come to the Village “to engage in literary work.” During the twenty-six years that had gone by since then, he had got along, for the most part, by cadging small sums of money from friends and acquaintances. Clarke Storer Gould, a physician, had been a leading citizen and he was a graduate of Harvard. He was a member of one of the oldest families in New England he was a native of Norwood, Massachusetts, where his father, Dr.
Gould, a bummy-looking little red-eyed wreck of a man, was perhaps the best-known bohemian in the Village. On Saturday night, June 13, 1942, I went into a barroom in Greenwich Village called Goody’s (the proprietor’s name was Goodman) to keep an appointment with Joe Gould.