I saw a brief clip of James Spader giving Jimmy Fallon a copy of Joseph Mitchell's "Up in the Old Hotel," and was intrigued, leading me to this. Really solid. I'll read the Hotel book soon, for sure. ( )

This is a fascinating story of a "bohemian" (as the homeless in NY used to be known) and the writer (who is also the author) who chronicled his story. The book is as much about the relationship between the two as it is about Joe Gould. ( )

Imagine Hamsun's emaciated artist taking his defiance to Greenwich Village and living hand to mouth for twenty years. No pawning of underwear and top coats here, the intellectual vagrant would require a different angle. He'd have to shuffle, he would need to embrace his humility. Such was what I initially divined to be at the core of Mitchell's book, an outgrowth of piece he wrote on Gould in the New Yorker in 1942. That isn't the case.

An expose lies at the heart of the tale, but the story of Joe Gould is a worthy diversion. Unfortunately a journalistic argot is employed. It feels like outtakes from Preston Sturges bent around the worst of Jimmy Breslin. This is not an illuminating glimpse into the bohemian life, but a sad character story.
( )

> Voir un extrait : https://books.google.fr/books?id=knBAEAAAQBAJ&hl=fr&printsec=frontcover&...

> « Avec son pardessus trop grand, sa tête nue et sa figure sale, l'homme, malgré sa barbe, avait un air enfantin,
égaré : un enfant qui se serait amusé avec des petits camarades à essayer des vêtements d'adulte au grenier. »
Devenu une sorte de légende urbaine, Joe Gould a hanté les cafés, les diners, les bars, les trous à rats de Greenwich Village. Il se vantait d'écrire une oeuvre totale, fruit de vingt mille conversations, dont les rares fragments publiés ont inspiré l'avant-garde littéraire des années 1920.
Quatre décennies plus tard, Joseph Mitchell, lui-même portraitiste de génie au New Yorker, se lance à la poursuite de ce manuscrit mythique et en tire son propre roman, Le Secret de Joe Gould, un livre culte, que l'on brûle encore de faire découvrir.
—Pauline Hamon (Culturebox)

> Son héros ou anti-héros est «le dernier des bohèmes», une sorte d'érudit qui a résisté à la mort et à la publicité et se trouve constamment «aux prises avec trois fléaux : l'absence de toit, la faim et la gueule de bois. [...] Il fait un mètre soixante-deux et pèse rarement plus de quarante-cinq kilos». Surtout, l'homme est un auteur qui renouvelle le genre du chef-d'oeuvre inconnu. Depuis vingt-six ans, dès le texte de 1942, il travaille «sur un livre sans forme passablement mystérieux qu'il intitule Une histoire orale de notre temps». Il y rassemble des conversations sur tout et rien dont son extraordinaire mémoire lui permet de se souvenir, qui passent souvent du coq à l'âne et n'ont aucun sujet stable, mais qui devraient permettre, mieux que n'importe quelle oeuvre, de le mettre au pinacle des historiens, tant l'époque dont il fut contemporain, ses présupposés et ses sous-entendus, y serait photographiée par le langage pour le profit de la postérité...
Salman Rushdie voit le Secret de Joe Gould comme «une merveille, à classer au même rang que les plus grands chefs-d'oeuvre de la littérature» et Martin Amis estime : «Voilà ce qu'aurait pu écrire Borges s'il avait été originaire de New York.» (Mathieu Lindon
—Libération du 10 janvier 2013)

> Une merveille, à classer au même rang que les plus grands chefs-d'oeuvre de la littérature.
—Salman Rushdie

> Voilà ce qu'aurait pu écrire Borges s'il avait été originaire de New York.
—Martin Amis

There are a lot of terms that might once had applied to noted Greenwich Village resident Joe Gould: he might have been called a character, an eccentric, a real personality, a bohemian. For better or worse,the term that would probably most apply to him now is "mentally ill." I'm not sure that this is a bad thing. Whatever his talents were, and Joseph Mitchell makes the case that he was a gifted raconteur, performer, con man and perhaps an interesting -- if disorganized -- thinker, as a twenty-first century reader, it's sort of hard to escape the impression that the guy wasn't all there. "Joe Gould's Secret" is well-written, in that clean crisp, exacting style that people have come to expect from the New Yorker, it but it's entirely possible that your appreciation for this book will depend on how well you deal with individuals like Joe Gould. One person's charming neighborhood personage is another's crazy, shameless, conniving alcoholic freeloader. I can understand that he may have been entertaining to both the artsy types that haunted the Village in those days and the tourists who came to gawk at them, but I finished this with much less fondness for it's subject than I did when I started it. The guy probably couldn't have gotten a quarter out of me.

There are some other reasons to read "Joe Gould's Secret." It describes a place and an era where a lot of people genuinely believed that art was a response to life's injustices and when Communism was still considered a tenable political philosophy among the intelligentsia. Mitchell's descriptions of New York's self-consciously eccentric bohemian population and the Bowery's population of drunks, transients, and assorted ne'er-do-wells will likely strike something of a nostalgic chord with some readers: the book's setting seems at once both quaint and seductive. Famous authors and poets seem to drop in and out of both Mitchell's and Gould's lives on a regular basis. There's also the strange, unsolvable mystery surrounding Mitchell's decades-long writer's block. In a sense, it's downright tempting to think that Gould, who seemed trapped in his own writing and whose graphomania led to very little indeed, may have sparked some unconscious fear or self-doubt in Michell himself that led him to shut up his typewriter forever. One can't know, but at the end of the book, they seem like opposite numbers: the mercurial, logorrheic, almost unpublishable vagrant and the buttoned-up literary figure who went silent shortly after publishing this one. For all of its contradictions, this is one I'd recommend. ( )