Throughout the nineteen-twenties Gould haunted the office of The Dial, now dead, the most highbrow magazine of the time. Finally, in its April, 1929, issue, The Dial printed one of his shorter essays, “Civilization.” In it he rambled along, referring to skyscrapers and steamships as “needless bric-a-brac,” and remarking that “the auto is unnecessary. If all the perverted ingenuity which was put into making buzz-wagons had only gone into improving the breed of horses humanity would be better off.” This essay had a curious effect on American literature. A copy of this issue of The Dial turned up three or four months later in a second-hand bookstore in Fresno, California, and was bought for a dime by William Saroyan, who then was twenty and floundering around, desperate to become a writer. He read Gould’s essay and was deeply impressed and influenced by it. “It freed me from bothering about form,” he says. Twelve years later, in the winter of 1941, in Don Freeman’s studio on Columbus Circle, Saroyan saw some drawings Freeman had made of Gould for Don Freeman’s Newsstand, a quarterly publication of pictures of odd New York scenes and personalities put out by the Associated American Artists. Saroyan became excited. He told Freeman about his indebtedness to Gould. “Who the hell is he, anyway?” Saroyan asked. “I’ve been trying to find out for years. Reading those few pages in The Dial was like going in the wrong direction and running into the right guy and then never seeing him again.” Freeman told him about the Oral History. Saroyan sat down and wrote a commentary to accompany the drawings of Gould in Newsstand. “To this day,” he wrote, in part, “I have not read anything else by Joe Gould. And yet to me he remains one of the few genuine and original American writers. He was easy and uncluttered, and almost all other American writing was uneasy and cluttered. It was not at home anywhere; it was trying too hard; it was miserable; it was a little sickly; it was literary; and it couldn’t say anything simply. All other American writing was trying to get into one form or another, and no writer except Joe Gould seemed to understand that if the worst came to the worst you didn’t need any form at all. All you had to do was say it.” Not long after this issue of Newsstand came out, someone stopped Gould on Eighth Street and showed him Saroyan’s endorsement of his work. Gould shrugged his shoulders. He had been on a spree and had lost his false teeth, and at the moment he was uninterested in literary matters. After thinking it over, however, he decided to call on Saroyan and ask him for help in getting some teeth. He found out somehow that Saroyan was living at the. Hampshire House, on Central Park South. The doorman there followed Gould into the lobby and asked him what he wanted. Gould told him. “Do you know Mr. Saroyan?” the doorman asked. “Why, no,” Gould said, “but that’s all right. He’s a disciple of mine.” “What do you mean, disciple?” asked the doorman. “I mean,” said Gould, “that he’s a literary disciple of mine. I want to ask him to buy me some store teeth.” “Come this way,” said the doorman, gripping Gould’s arm and ushering him to the street. Later Freeman arranged a meeting, and the pair spent several evenings together in bars. “Saroyan kept saying he wanted to hear all about the Oral History,” Gould says, “but I never got a chance to tell him. He did all the talking. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
