The English pride themselves on the quality of their eccentrics, but New York can throw up arcane individuals of a high order, and one such was Joe Gould, a drinker, dreamer and down-and-out who frequented the bars, restaurants and occasionally the society parties of Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Joseph Mitchell wrote two profiles of Gould for the New Yorker, one of which was originally published in 1942 and the second in 1964: the story is bizarre and sad, and might, in the hands of a lesser writer, emerge as self-obsessed and seedy, but Mitchell is an aristocrat, and makes of this strange little tale an urbane meditation on urban survival.
