Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (38 page)

This aqueous quality is not surprising when you consider that, after a certain point, the man wrote mostly about fish and alcohol. To list the topics he shied away from—power, sex, money, youth, glamour, class, poli-tics—is one way of getting at his world-view's stubborn boundaries.

Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to the Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge, open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on pilings in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I
wander among the stands for an hour or so. Then I go into a cheerful restaurant named Sloppy Louie's and eat a big, inexpensive, invigorating breakfast—a kippered herring and scrambled eggs, or a shad-roe omelet, or split sea scallops and bacon, or some other breakfast specialty of the place.

So begins Mitchell's great essay “Up in the Old Hotel.” Typically, he alludes to his morbid cast of mind, but with such glancing swiftness as to invite the reader to take it ironically, then goes on to list the physical details of a grubby place he loves, where he finds anew the consoling, simple pleasures. Impossible to write better prose. You read a paragraph like that and think, “Why do I even bother?” But then, I tell myself, Joseph Mitchell spoke for those who know the names of things, every fish in the ocean and nautical rope; I'm going to speak for those who are ignorant, like me. He wrote unfailingly well; I'll write badly, or at least unevenly. There's room for both of us on the bookshelf.

It was a good try, but not enough to clean up my Joseph Mitchell problem. I still wanted to grapple with his achievement and ease out from under his shadow. So I sat down and reread his oeuvre, which, this time around, I liked much better, overall, albeit retaining some of my earlier reservations. I also came to the conclusion that I knew the man; this time he hadn't kept quite as hidden as I once thought. Whether or not I can convey this intuitive flash of knowledge on the page remains to be seen.

IN 1929, Joseph Mitchell arrived in New York City from North Carolina. He was twenty-one and determined to find a job on a newspaper, just as the Great Depression was dawning. For the next eight years he worked at the
World,
the
Herald Tribune,
and the
World-Telegram,
where he honed his skills as a crime reporter, celebrity interviewer, and feature writer. This newspaper work formed the basis for his first collection,
My Ears Are Bent
(1938), all of which he omitted from the big selected-prose volume that appeared shortly before his death,
Up in the Old Hotel,
explaining merely that “it was a different kind of writing.” So were several very weak short stories he chose to include in his selected prose, which suggests he would rather be known as a failed fiction writer than as a professional newspa
perman. In any case, the superb, energetic
My Ears Are Bent,
recently reissued by Pantheon Books, makes for delicious reading, especially in light of the author's later avoidance of the sensationalistic and racy. In these pieces on electrocuted murderers, strippers, anarchists, dope fiends, voodoo doctors, pickpockets, movie stars, and other journalistic staples of the day, Mitchell is more unbuttoned and forthcoming as a narrator, his comic impulse bobbing closer to the surface. (For instance, in his piece on voodoo, he cavalierly dismisses the ingredient known as “goofer-dust” as, “after all, only earth stolen from the fresh grave of an infant sometime around midnight.”)

Just as striking, and different from the later Mitchell mode, were his street scenes, composed of overheard conversations or notations of almost nothing, tenderly and artfully strung together: “In summer the East Side lives in the street. The young mothers are in love with the sun, but the old ones sit in the shade. The babies doze in their carriages and whimper and play with their toes. The old mothers mutter unceasingly, but the young ones sit in the sun in clean print dresses and read confession magazines.”

Such a verbal snapshot by a young, belletristic reporter high on lyrical urban detail is the literary equivalent of photographs by Walker Evans, Rudy Burckhardt, and Berenice Abbott. The thirties gave us an aesthetic of the Common Man. Suddenly it was enough just to catch the way ordinary people passed the time.

Every so often
The New Yorker
would pluck some street-smart, salty newspaperman from the city's dailies and put him on staff. They did it with A. J. Liebling and John McNulty and Joseph Mitchell. McNulty was a hard-drinking, economical writer who wrote funny, poignant vignettes about barflies, taxi drivers, ambulance drivers, and nuns, capturing the common parlance of New Yorkers with a disjunctive, native surrealism that partly came out of the bottle. McNulty did not change his terse style much in transit from the New York
Daily News
to
The New Yorker,
but Mitchell took the opportunity to remake his subject matter and fine-tune his prose.

Over the years, Mitchell distanced himself from what he had called the “melodrama of the metropolis” and its cast of freaks (Olga the Bearded Lady would be his last such profile), shifting interest from the lurid to the stoical, from flamboyant extroverts to unsung artisans who did the world's
work, or retirees who viewed the passing scene
hors de combat.
Typically, he described these later subjects as “companionable but reserved,” “self-sufficient,” “sad-eyed,” lacking “an itch for money,” and rheumatically past caring about sex. His pieces, which grew longer and more complexly structured, thanks to
The New Yorker
's encouragement of serious investigation, tended to circle around knowledgeable professionals (a restaurant owner, a dragger captain, an exterminator, a detective) or tribes (Gypsies, Mohawks working in construction) or milieus (McSorley's saloon, the harbor). If something spontaneous had gotten lost in the transition from newspaperman to
New Yorker
regular—if his scrupulously fact-checked prose, with its careful descriptions of work processes, felt dry at times, like the soundtrack of an industrial documentary—it was also true that his writing on the whole had deepened, becoming fuller, wiser, and more reflective.

And Mitchell settled into his fundamental subject: inertia. In a world changing too fast, he sought out those who were through evolving, content to guard their posts (a harbor boat watching for poachers, a ticket-seller's cage) or reminisce about the old days. Ever the polite Southern son, he sat next to old codgers and drew out their expertise. The transcribed monologue became a perfect form for this purpose, emphasizing as it did patterns of repetition and monomania; many of his subjects seem gripped by an idée fixe. “I have been tortured by some of the fanciest ear-benders in the world,” he wrote in the preface to
My Ears Are Bent,
“and I have long since lost the ability to detect insanity.” Re-creating, wherever possible, the static atmosphere of a sleepy Southern square in the modern metropolis, he wheeled out his “opinionated and idiosyncratic” old men and women.

Mitchell's eccentrics have been compared—validly, it seems to me—with Charles Dickens characters: they have that Victorian consistency and one-sided frontality which fits E. M. Forster's famous definition of “flat characters” in
Aspects of the Novel.
A humorous writer, Mitchell practices what might be called the comedy of decrepitude, part of which is shown by a descent into rambling speech. (“Tonsils, adenoids, appendix, gall bladder, prostate,” enumerates Joe in “The Rivermen.” “… I've got varicose veins from walking around on wet cement floors in Fulton Market all those years, and I have to wear elastic stockings that are hell to get on and hell to get off and don't do a damned bit of good, and I've got fallen arches
and I have to wear some kind of patented arch supports that always make me feel as if I'm about to jump, and I've never known the time I didn't have corns—corns and bunions and calluses.”) Mitchell once listed his favorite authors as Twain (his favorite book was the peerless
Life on the Mississippi
), Dostoevsky, and Joyce; the first two delight in ranting monologues, the third in stream of consciousness.

Clearly the monologue is also a quick, practical way of establishing the character and biography of a profiled subject. But it had to be the monologue of someone who was going nowhere. Mitchell had little regard for tycoons or men of action. He listed, in
My Ears Are Bent,
his least favorite interview subjects as “industrial leaders, automobile manufacturers, Wall Street financiers, oil and steel czars, people like that…. After painfully interviewing one of those gentlemen you go down in the elevator and walk into the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work; you feel it would be better to cheat, lie, steal, stick up drugstores or stretch out dead drunk in the gutter than to end up like one of those industrial leaders with a face that looks like a bowl of cold oatmeal.” This is partly the young Mitchell talking, full of Great Depression populism, bohemian reverse-snobbism, and newspaperman swagger. Later, when he moved to
The New Yorker,
he would restrain his rhetorical dislike for high society. Still, toward those who had no interest in getting and spending, Mitchell continued to extend a courteous, warm interest bordering on sentimentality. These urban peasants had achieved the simple pleasures, paradise on earth. Their advanced age may have also indicated, for this death-haunted author, always fleeing “a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work,” that only by hunkering down and staying clear of ambition could you cheat the Grim Reaper, who would not think to look for you in such backwaters.

As the monologues became more and more freighted with background exposition and procedural information, they lost some of the quality of individual speech. (“As a rule, people that drown in the harbor in winter stay down until spring. When the water begins to get warm, gas forms in them and that makes them buoyant and they rise to the surface,” explains a Mr. Poole, helpfully if less than colloquially.) At a certain point,
Mitchell's goal of capturing character through the way a person talks came into collision with his desire to document physical processes. The speakers all began to sound the same, sanded down to a personality-less smoothness, or, rather, taking on what had become the classic Joseph Mitchell informant personality: patient, thorough, slightly ironic, and emotionally reserved.

What was often missing in these profiles—intentionally, even perversely so—was a sense of drama (for if everyone has settled into his or her rut, and no one is trying to achieve any new ambitions, even romantic ones, we are left with a fairly undynamic model of human behavior); what was being asserted in its place was a depressive's pastorale. It was as though Mitchell were trying to see how far you could go as a writer in sustaining interest without resorting to conflict. The burden was shifted to small comic effects, the textured pleasures of syntax and vocabulary, a boundless curiosity about how things worked, and a serene melancholy.

The denizens in one of Mitchell's most celebrated essays, “McSorley's Wonderful Saloon” (1940), are described as “insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old. ‘God be wit' yez,’ Kelly says as they go out the door.” Compare the kindly regard the author bestows on these rummies with another work from the same era, Eugene O'Neill's play
The Iceman Cometh
(1946), also set in a Bowery bar, but much harsher and less forgiving of the alcoholic's rationalizations. It was Mitchell's chivalric way to take people at their word—not to trip them up. Sometimes, as in his magnificent profile “Mr. Hunter's Grave” (1956), the interviewed subject, given enough rope and the force of his own honesty, leads the reader to a full comprehension of his tragically riven nature. But if the subjects themselves remained unaware of their contradictions, he was not going to be the one to force the issue. Nor did he interrogate in print his own role as regards slumming or exploiting his subjects. The result was a somewhat public, decorous presentation of human character, which barely acknowledged how divided, mendacious, or self-destructive people could be—it was almost pre-psychological in its refusal to recognize unconscious motives. In piece after piece, Mitchell gave the impression of guarding his subject's secrets.

With one exception, and that is his masterpiece, “Joe Gould's Secret.”
Here, for the first time, he was forced to admit that someone had been lying to him. In an earlier piece, “Professor Sea Gull,” Mitchell had fondly portrayed a derelict bohemian named Joe Gould, who cadged handouts in Greenwich Village by reciting scurrilous poems and imitating sea gulls. “Although Gould strives to give the impression that he is a philosophical loafer, he has done an immense amount of work during his career as a bohemian. Every day, even when he has a bad hangover or even when he is weak and listless from hunger, he spends a couple of hours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls ‘An Oral History of Our Time.’ He began this book twenty-six years ago, and it is nowhere near finished…. He estimates that the manuscript contains 9,000,000 words, all in longhand.” The problem was that it wasn't true. After the profile appeared, Mitchell finally realized that Gould had conned him and that the entire “Oral History” was a bluff. Why a man as worldly and intelligent as Mitchell, who knew the conditions under which serious writing generally occurs, should have taken so long to figure out that the manuscript didn't exist is the real mystery; but some of the reasons may lie in Mitchell's own fascination with oral history, and his ambitions along that line, which allowed him to imagine Gould as a sort of non-co-opted alter ego.