Knowing Our Place

(Editor’s note: Today we welcome back Matthew Fleagle, who works as a technical writer at a small software company in Seattle, Washington. Fleagle wrote recently and quite eloquently on this page about longtime New Yorker contributor Joseph Mitchell. Below, he offers us the results of his interview with another New York author [and occasional blogger], Robert Sullivan.)

Author Robert Sullivan (photo © Myrna Copaleen)

Manhattan-born Robert Sullivan is well known as the author of several non-fiction books, including 1998’s The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and 2004’s best-selling Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants.

Reading those works made me certain that Sullivan must be a fan of Joseph Mitchell, a favorite New York writer of mine. So when, not long ago, I was putting together a two-part article about Mitchell for January Magazine, I sought out Sullivan for some insight -- in the process discovering that he himself had a new book being readied for release: My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In this latest offering, Sullivan laces up his history boots and seeks out some less-remembered landscapes of the American Revolution, places in New York and New Jersey where General George Washington and his ragtag Continental Army waged a long and mostly losing war against the British.

But this is not an account of the American Revolution; it’s a personal re-enactment of parts of the story as they reveal themselves in the folds of the land. Sniffing out rivers and mountains that are almost invisible in the urban topography of today, Sullivan connects the stations of his journey of rediscovery by means of several different narrative tools -- crossing a river and crossing time, signaling from hilltops, and re-entering the past through today’s local weather -- and comes home to his writing desk with a rucksack full of the kind of historical treasures that made me a fan of his books in the first place. To me, My American Revolution is about how we as a culture remember events that are sacred to us, and how the land remembers, and about how our memory succeeds and fails in connecting us with the past.

Sullivan is a contributing editor to Vogue, but his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. I consider Sullivan a kind of kindred spirit, the way he sees historical layers beneath current landscapes, and I wanted to find out ... well, how he got to be that way and how he views his writing processes. What follows are the results of our recent conversation.

Matthew Fleagle: In My American Revolution, you quote the 19th-century author Thomas F. DeVoe as saying that his fascination with history is a “dreadful disease” and you refer to his “history problem.” When did you realize that you, too, had a history problem? Was history your thing as a kid, or did the love of it dawn on you gradually?

Robert Sullivan: I always remember liking history, or what I thought of as history, as a kid. Specifically, I liked watching old World War II movies with my pop. He was in the army; I got to hear a little critique of how things were in the army in the movies versus in real life. I think asking about history and politics was a way to sit at the table, to talk with older relatives. When I was a newspaper reporter, after college, I got to cover small towns and then big cities in New Jersey, and the history of these places was not just interesting but important, crucial to understanding what was going on at the moment.

I would hate to think how many dozens of bad “Talk of the Town” pieces I submitted to The New Yorker before having my first one accepted a little over 20 years ago, but I know that most of them were obsessive looks at the history of people and places in the city, things that seemed to be fading away -- and now of course are gone. I remember a guy from North Carolina who raised chickens in an automotive garage in Hell’s Kitchen, all the birds sleeping in the rafters, as protection against roving bands of rats. He was a wonderful guy, gentrified away -- even the name Hell’s Kitchen is gone -- and the garage is gone, replaced by a mania for locally harvested eggs.

MF: I’ve had the pleasure of reading two of your previous books, The Meadowlands and Rats. The former book found you digging for Jimmy Hoffa’s body in a garbage dump, while Rats had you spying on rodents in a Lower Manhattan alley for a year of nights. Before this new book is over, you’ve retraced a 30-mile rebel march from Princeton to Morristown, New Jersey, in freezing weather, aggravating your back in the process. You do history with your boots on. What pushes you outside?

RS: Probably typing pushes me outside. I would rather be out walking than trying to come up with a paragraph -- until that is, I have a paragraph, and I begin to rework it, an act that causes me to lose track of time. I guess I feel as if the land is charged, as if street corners are filled with ghosts -- that you can hear things and see things and get help imagining things in the landscape. If I stand on a chair in our apartment, I can just see one patch of New York Harbor, one little dollop of blue or gray or gray-blue or steel-blue, depending on the sky. I can see far-off hills in New Jersey, I can see the shape of the city through the tops of buildings. It seems as if the physical shape of the city has made us who we are, causes us to go where we go in the ways that we do. There are stories outside, in other words. I’m sure this sounds crazy, but to me it seems as if the world is always talking.

Washington Crossing the Delaware, an 1851 oil-on-canvas painting by German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.

MF: My American Revolution seems to be less about the events of the American Revolution than about how we remember or misremember -- or even fail to remember -- those events, how we carry them forward through time. And you seem at least as interested in the ways we get it wrong -- such as Emanuel Leutze’s painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River -- as in how we get it right. Why is this so interesting to you? Is there really any hope of getting history right? At least in any way that’s meaningful to you?

RS: I don’t know if people get things wrong, when it comes to history, or if all of human history is like a giant game of telephone. How can you transmit an idea without tainting it? On the flipside, what are the essential elements of stories that are passed on despite our deficiencies and failures, and misunderstandings or varied perspectives? I think the book is about the history of histories, a history of various remembrances, and styles and methods of remembering. Or maybe the book is an art project -- something I’m hoping will cause people to consider or reconsider their engagements with the past.

A [historical] re-enactment is a way of engaging with the past that, once you examine one in depth, begins to seem a lot like a ritual, and when I took apart the annual re-enactment of the Crossing of the Delaware in New Jersey, I realized it began with having a lot to do with the Leutze painting, and ended up having even more to do with the river. The river makes the call every year as to whether the re-enactment will go on or not go on. So an important player, to look at it from the river’s point of view, is the Delaware watershed, which is to say rain in the Catskill Mountains.

Which brings me to the idea of the seasons being re-enactments. I can look at the winter stars and see the stars that Washington saw. (In fact, the stars on the U.S. flag are rooted in the sighting of a comet at around the time of the Boston Massacre, a comet that was perceived as a good omen for Americans.) The revolution I am referring to in the title is not the one that people think of as the war, but the revolution of the planet that causes a year, that brings us remembrances and understandings. The revolution is everywhere, all the time.

MF: You point out that while more of the Revolutionary War action happened in New York and New Jersey than anywhere else, this history has been neglected in favor of places where the rebels didn’t get their butts kicked so much. Why is that? Do you think that this points to an immaturity in Americans as history-keepers? How much of a barrier is “defeat” to Americans’ willingness to explore Revolutionary history where it really took place, or are there other things keeping them ignorant of it? By contrast, you’ve said you like reflecting on defeat and loss. Can you elaborate on the value of such reflection?

RS: Butts kicked is right, and butt-kicking is always something that people would just rather move beyond. I would argue that there are good reasons, as far as personal emotional maintenance, to look at losses and defeats, but those are hopefully pretty clear to most people. I know that if you go to a military college you are taught to examine, closely, losses as a matter of prevention -- officers-to-be go on site visits to look for lessons in the landscape.

New York is where the Continental Army faced off with the British for the first time after the signing of the Declaration of Independence; Washington lost. After that he avoided facing off with them. The evacuation -- or retreat -- of the American army from Brooklyn to Manhattan is a somewhat storied logistical feat that impressed even the British, a whole lot of local boats orchestrated by a bunch of seamen from Marblehead, Massachusetts, in a difficult tidal stretch that is difficult to maneuver at certain points in the tidal cycle to this day. (I’ve done it!) After being chased out of New York, through the New Jersey Meadowlands (with Tom Paine embedded), he made it to the other side of the Delaware, until the famed Christmas 1776 crossing. After that, the troops encamp in the Watchung Mountains.

From this ridge of the Watchung Mountains in New Jersey, General Washington could keep tabs on British troop movements back in 1777. Through the haze, you can see today’s New York City skyline. (Source: W2LG’s Blog)

The Watchungs are little known, and yet military strategists and American history-interested geologists will tell you that they were the strategic key to the war, the mountains that allowed Washington to win by not losing. What I got to see in my modern-day excursions is that the strategy of the landscape still matters and is surprisingly relevant. The New York landscape is a good place to think about these things, because we don’t have preconceived notions about what happened here during the Revolution. Or as many. Also, it is less cluttered with valiant biography. The war was won by the hills on a golf course in the Bronx that allowed a few riflemen to hold back the British army. The war was won by local boats and the typical late-summer winds and the tides. The war was crowd-sourced, by many Americans familiar with their places.

I was in Boston the other day talking about the Revolution, and someone thought I was going to say that New York’s landscape is somehow more important than Boston’s or Philadelphia’s landscape. This is not my point. I am one of a small number of New Yorkers who are touting their second place-ness, their non-center on the world. My point is that every place is very important, a point I take from a lot of people, especially Thoreau, who said that you ought to know the piece of land you are standing on. He was quoted by Emerson as saying, “I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.”

MF: How do you feel about the timing of a book on the Revolutionary War? I’m thinking that the United States has recently been at war longer than at any other time in its history. How do you understand Americans’ view of American wars?

RS: I guess I see the Revolutionary War as a struggle against an empire. I see that there were British generals who seem to have understood the American reasoning, but that the system itself -- the empire -- could not negotiate in subtleties. I see that, logistically speaking, a faraway country had to work against a small local force that eventually gained more and more support from local militias. I see that General Washington complained about the British prison ships in Brooklyn throughout the war -- 11,000 people died there, more than died in all the battles of the Revolution, their bones in a crypt in a now-trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn. I think that Americans think that wars did not happen here. But of course they did. They always have -- long before the Revolution, of course.

MF: I want to pause to ask about you and the writing craft. Your publisher called the Meadowlands book “a grunge north Jersey version of John McPhee’s classic The Pine Barrens [1968].” And in fact the books have some obvious parallels -- an infertile woodland within sight of the Empire State Building, a toxic swamp within sight of the Empire State Building -- as well as some less-obvious parallels, such as how you encountered and hung out with the old canoeist the way McPhee tagged along with the old Piney in his book. How much have McPhee and other literary journalists informed your passion for searching out and writing about the strange corners of your world? Besides McPhee, if he is one, who do you see as your influences, and what is it about their work that has stuck with you the most? How much do you let your literary heroes guide your hand?

RS: As is the case for many people, I imagine, John McPhee is a huge influence on me. I had been a newspaper reporter when I read his books. I wanted to try and write about things that I could not write about as a reporter, whole landscapes, regions. I was driving around the country a lot with my girlfriend, who became my wife, and just getting blown away by the country -- by everywhere, basically. I still feel that way, which is perhaps a sign of lasting immaturity. But when I sat down to write a book on the Meadowlands, I went and re-read a bunch of books that I loved that I thought applied to a book about a place. I was looking to quantify what exactly it was that I loved about these books. I had been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, after seeing his boyhood home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I read somewhere that before he sat down to write his first book, he outlined a bunch that he liked. I did the same, with a whole bunch of books by my favorite writers -- Graham Greene, John McGahern and Colm Tóibín. In the case of McGahern and Tóibín, I was especially interested in how they used dialogue in a spare and resonant way -- I was on the lookout for exchanges such as these in the world, life being like art, I suppose.

There are obvious parallels between The Meadowlands and The Pine Barrens, because when I was looking for a form to put my Meadowlands thinking and reporting into I tried to find the form of an intimate exploration of a place, such as The Pine Barrens. Additionally, my wife had given me a copy of Great Plains, by Ian Frazier, which I loved. I thought I could see influences between the two books, and then influences back to Joseph Mitchell, who had written similarly interesting and intimate profiles before them at The New Yorker. I was worried about being too close to their styles, except that, as opposed to exploring places that were pristine and faraway, I was exploring a landscape that was disgusting and close.

I am jealous of both McPhee’s and Frazier’s exacting and careful styles -- they both have a patience that I will never manage. I can’t seem to stay on one point. Then again, I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about a writer who seems to have fascinated Mitchell, at least -- James Joyce. Joyce, I would argue, uses a lot of tangents and gorgeously spiraling narrative trajectories to arrive at a few simple points. My wife gave me a bunch of her favorite books when we were married -- Edward Abbey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wallace Stegner -- and she sat and listened to The Meadowlands read aloud after I wrote it and just before I handed it in. I guess I am always hoping I will somehow impress her.

MF: How’s that going? Is it working yet?

RS: We are still married, is all I will say. She is a tough editor, and listens to way too much material that is, as a result of being aired, discarded, and we are still married. For this book we worked together, as seen here and here.

MF: Bruce Barcott called you “the rare non-fiction writer who maintains a catholic curiosity,” and I don’t know another writer who can pack so many diverse subjects into one narrative so seamlessly. Do you see yourself as part of any particular tradition as a writer, or as a trailblazer of a new writing ethos?

RS: I am always working on “seamless,” because I have a hard time seeing how things do not relate to each other. One of my theme songs is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, containing the line, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God ...” And you can take God or leave Him, but either way the big point is that the world is charged. It matters. It hears us and we hear it. Likewise, I see that individuals are defined by their community, by their associations. A place is us and we are a place. I also think a lot of things are sad and hard, as in difficult. I can’t imagine any tradition that would have me, and I am not so much trailblazing as trailing, always behind. I would like to have worked on anonymous texts in a Medieval Europe, maybe, where people didn’t know the author’s name, like the old “Talk of the Town” section. I could have been a copyist on a little island off Ireland or Scotland, if I was born a few centuries ago and had better handwriting.

MF: Is there any particular idea about “writing and history and place” that is trying to get out of you that you can identify? Does My American Revolution continue any kind of rational path in your publishing history? Or could any of your books have been your first book?

RS: My American Revolution is for me the end of a progression. It’s a little bit of a do-over, covering actual ground I covered in The Meadowlands. But this time I am going farther back in the story of the region, and this time I feel as if I have even better proof that places are important to us. You might not believe it, but when I am reading back pages, I really don’t want to hear too much about myself, except as a foil; but in this book I tried to link my own concerns about history and the past (and fatherhood, frankly, and what comes after) into the places that we all pass through in the world. That person in Boston said, “Oh, you are trying to say that New York is the center of the universe.” But no! As I say, I am trying to say the opposite -- that nowhere is the center of the universe, and thus everywhere becomes the center. Thus, the question becomes, “Can you see the universe, or any piece of it?”

MF: OK, back to our story. I found myself seeing this book in several ways that I’d like you to comment on. Maybe I’m all wet, but the first thing that struck me was that this book was like traveling a long river with many tributaries feeding into it, some of which you pursue a long way upstream and some not. The modern re-enactor St. John Terrell is a tributary we follow quite a ways, as is your patriotic friend Duke, who builds and launches an unlicensed, working replica of a Revolutionary War-era military submarine. By contrast, Anna Strong’s laundry, which signaled rebels about secret meetings, is a small creek that we merely wave at in passing. Your book is full of these historic and present-day characters whose stories feed the main story. How did you choose which streams to explore in the book? Did you withhold some of the more interesting tributaries for later books?

RS: I withheld many tributaries for sanity, for the sake of keeping the reader awake. I wish the book were shorter. I always hope to write short, and don’t -- a bad sign. The book starts with a river; crossing a river is crossing time, literally. There are things I missed: George Washington’s surveyor, a genius. I found out about him when it was time to shut the typing down. Books will kill you, and they will kill your family. If you are smart at all, you end them.

MF: How is crossing a river “literally” crossing time?

RS: A river is literally time, in my mind. In the Hudson, here in New York City, the river is yesterday’s rain in the Catskill Mountains upstate, and tomorrow’s Atlantic Ocean. The river is by definition change. Like time, it never stands still.

MF: I get it. Another way I saw My American Revolution was as the telling of a dream of loss or longing. You spend much of this book alone. A few friends and neighbors helped out or tagged along a few times, but this felt very much like a personal odyssey. The part where you run in circles in the snow until you are exhausted, trying to connect in some physical way with the not-very-good poet Philip Freneau, who froze to death nearby, I found particularly moving. It is one of the most beautiful moments in your book, I think, but it’s so far from the library, from the paths of scholarship. Do you see history as a lonely enterprise? There seems to be a kind of implicit sorrow in your tale that more people don’t appreciate the traces of history that are still present, just off the beaten path.

RS: I guess history is lonely sometimes. More often I find it inspiring to look back to see people struggling and even triumphing over the things we all struggle with. I see little happinesses, in letters, in pictures of the winter evening that, say, the Continental Army danced in the mountains of New Jersey, General Washington present -- a great dancer, apparently. Sorrow is not completely sorrowful for me. The heart is some kind of instrument, and as I see it you have to use all the notes in order to know the instrument’s full range. I feel bad for the kids who don’t grow up hearing sad old songs, who are sheltered entirely from disappointment. When things get bad in their adult lives, they will have a lot of catching up to do.

To answer more concisely, I find Freneau’s story to be incredibly sad, and at the same time beautiful, and I almost like his last poems.

MF: Finally, I saw your story as a hero’s journey, with a final redemption through reconnection -- specifically, a connection with the next generation (i.e., the future). I won’t spoil the ending, but I have to admit I got choked up there in the final pages where time is running out for the man who has become unstuck in time, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, and who is desperately trying to re-tether himself by signaling home. When you started your research, did you know that the hilltops and the signals would play the role they did?

RS: I wrote the first chapters over and over, screwing them up each time, but I kept plotting out my advance after each failure. Finally, I put the introduction aside and started marching ahead, crossing the Delaware and then marching through the mountains, at which point I knew that the signals on the mountains were my goal. I was so happy when I got to the end and was able to write the story of our signaling. I knew exactly what I was going to say. My editor helped me work the book over a couple more times -- I have always had amazing editors -- but the ending we kept as it was.

MF: At the end of the book you gripped the attention of a whole school full of kids. How has your recent book tour compared to that?

RS: I was not at the school -- I was 18 miles away, in the hills -- so I can’t really say. (I face the same situation vis-à-vis most history.) But the book tour is sort of sporadic -- little forays out into New England, and now the South and Texas. Sometimes I feel as if I am peddling false goods. Oh, you thought I was talking about the Revolutionary War. No, I was talking about the revolution of the earth around the sun, a calendar, a year! But people get it. In fact, people I read to make me feel not so crazy after all. It’s not just me. Places matter to everyone.

I’ll say it again, I don’t want people to think I am saying New York is better than any place else. I have been all over the country and I know that we are full of great places. I want people to explore their own places, to celebrate -- wherever they live -- the past, and thus more thoroughly the present. Huzzah!

His Own Sweet Time: Joseph Mitchell’s Omnibus 20 Years On, Part II

(Editor’s note: This is the second and concluding installment of Matthew Fleagle’s remembrance of author and New Yorker magazine writer Joseph Mitchell. Part I can be found here.)


Joseph Mitchell and his elder daughter, Nora, in the 1940s. (Photograph by Therese Jacobsen Mitchell, used courtesy of Elizabeth Mitchell and Nora Mitchell Sanborn.)

Joseph Mitchell’s writing evolved over the course of his career at The New Yorker, which is presented in Up in the Old Hotel pretty much as it unfolded. More than half of that anthology is taken up by the book McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which is his most famous book, though few scholars would call it his best. In McSorley’s Mitchell wrote mostly about oddballs or unusual places or events for their own sake. You don’t get the sense in these early stories, as you do later on in Old Mr. Flood and The Bottom of the Harbor, that Mitchell was picking his subjects for what they represented about disappearing traditions or forgotten lore. Or at least, if there was something of what Noel Perrin calls an “elegiac” aspect about his early subjects, Mitchell wasn’t emphasizing it. You do get a strong sense that he had a genuine regard for people who in the face of an apathetic world, or a hostile world, or even a world changing around them, grabbed hold of life with both hands and squeezed everything they could out of it. He let them speak for themselves and he didn’t judge them.

The most famous of those people (famous after Mitchell wrote about him, that is, since Mitchell had no interest in celebrities), and one who spoke volubly for himself, was Joseph Ferdinand Gould (1889-1957).

Joe Gould was a Harvard drop-out, a homeless, seldom-washed Bohemian who claimed to be able to speak the language of sea gulls and trawled the streets of Greenwich Village looking for friends to hit up for “contributions” toward the finishing of his opus, a closely guarded manuscript he claimed was already nine million words long, “eleven times as long as the Bible,” a book he called An Oral History of Our Time. The opposite of “formal” histories of generals and politicians and kings, which Gould considered “largely false,” the Oral History would be what he termed “the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude.” It contained things that everyday people said to each other. In Mitchell’s words, it was “a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey.” Gould believed that what regular people said every day was a truer history, and it has been pointed out by many observers that this is a belief that might have been voiced by Mitchell himself, that in fact Mitchell’s writing was that very credo put into practice. If Gould had not been verifiably real (an essay and a poem or two by Gould were actually published, Malcolm Cowley and William Saroyan admired him, and E.E. Cummings was Gould’s close friend and wrote a poem about him that began, “little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where to find them”), you might be tempted to think Mitchell made him up because he was such a good idea, such a great vehicle for Mitchell’s own themes. Mitchell first profiled Gould in 1942 in a New Yorker story called “Professor Sea Gull.”

Gould is also the subject of Mitchell’s last published piece, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” which appeared as a two-part profile in The New Yorker in 1964 and as a book of that same name the next year. In this second profile of Gould, which he waited to write until after his subject had passed away in 1957, Mitchell reveals what he himself only learned some years after profiling Gould the first time: that despite all of Gould’s talk about the Oral History--how he kept parts of it stashed in friends’ apartments all over town, for example--not a single word of it had ever been written down. This was a shock to Mitchell, who felt betrayed and, from a journalistic standpoint, guilty of being an accessory to a big lie. But he didn’t have the heart to expose the already humble Gould while the man lived, and he wrestled with his conscience as to whether to disclose the secret at all.

(Left) Joe Gould, aka “Professor Sea Gull,” in a photo from a 1947 edition of Collier’s magazine.

The story line of Joe Gould’s Secret follows Mitchell’s growing suspicion over the years that Gould has never written down a word of his now famous Oral History, a confrontation between author and subject in which Mitchell accuses Gould of deception and laziness, the subsequent fall-out in the relationship between the two men, and a comparison of Gould’s unwritten masterpiece with a semi-autobiographical novel that Mitchell himself had carried around in his own head for decades and never committed to paper. That novel, whose storyline Mitchell unfurls in startling depth, is about a southerner who comes to New York City, has a crisis of faith and finds a kind of redemption, or more accurately a release, in the words of a black Harlem preacher. The synopsis is so thorough, interrupting the story of Gould for more than two full pages, that it becomes instantly clear that Mitchell is divesting himself of the option to ever write the story down in full. It’s a moment in Joe Gould’s Secret that reaches out of the book into real life, like a bomb in a painting exploding and destroying the room it hangs in. Given that this was the last new article Mitchell ever published, the implications of this passage are enormous. We become unable, as Mitchell did, to see a difference between the drunkard Gould and “normal” or “decent” people. The thought that any of us is just a change of clothes and a missed bath away from being Joe Gould is a horror that Mitchell’s “narrator-I” (if not his “author-I”) must confront.

The fact that the book has such a thunderous dramatic pulse was unprecedented in Mitchell’s work for The New Yorker to that point, and it makes for a different kind of story. Gould’s portrait is painted more fully here, for one thing; he comes across as much less charming than he appeared in Mitchell’s initial, 1942 article about him, even taking on a disgusting cast. For another, Mitchell actually struggles visibly as a character in the piece. And for a third, it’s uncomfortable; Gould’s antics and posturing amounts to daring the civilized world to look at his reactionary, exuberantly indecorous existence, and when Mitchell does so, he falls into Gould’s life and can’t get out, discovering that it is his own.

The opening of Joe Gould’s Secret, in which Mitchell (played by Stanley Tucci) meets the eccentric Mr. Gould (Ian Holm).

I’ve been surprised to learn that many Mitchell scholars regard Joe Gould’s Secret to be a step down from The Bottom of the Harbor and even from Old Mr. Flood. I know what they mean in terms of the craft--it seems less controlled, more emotional, not as subtle or nimble--but I would argue that Joe Gould’s Secret is the logical outcome of what Mitchell was doing all along. He wrote about other people and used their stories to express his own appetites and sorrows and enthusiasms, however discreetly. Joe Gould was the subject that turned on Mitchell, a tar baby that he couldn’t escape because, as he said, “Gould became me.” Joe Gould’s Secret is brilliant in a kind of accidental way, as though the author of a book got trapped inside it. As a story, it is hugely compelling and unlike anything else. It was compelling enough that the actor and director Stanley Tucci made a movie out of it in 2000 starring Ian Holm as Gould and himself as the southern-born writer.

The Bottom of the Harbor is generally regarded as Mitchell’s masterwork. “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” and “The Rivermen” are two stories from that collection often cited as examples of how Mitchell somehow removed “the marks of writing from the page,” as Calvin Trillin put it. These stories feel effortless, as though all Mitchell did was type them up. He often appears to be merely serving as a conduit for the monologues of other people in these pieces, although the details of both the monologues and the narrative suggest worlds beyond the bare facts and events. The filtration process is often invisible on the first read-through, but in the subsequent readings in which Mitchell fans often indulge, you can begin to see another, subtler narrative in his choices of what to include. A pages-long quote by 87-year-old George H. Hunter about the black families who founded his little Staten Island community, one of the longest monologues in Mitchell’s oeuvre, is interrupted only by two short sentences in which the old man swats and kills a fly that has been hanging around. Then he continues talking where he left off. This is the Mitchell graveyard humor in spades, and you can imagine him chuckling about it as he writes. The fly reminds us of the death and decay that we can’t escape. But you can still make comedy of it, and in Mitchell’s worldview, you must.

Dan Frank, who was an editor of non-fiction at publisher Pantheon in 1992 and is now its editor in chief--and for whom the publication of Up in the Old Hotel “remains certainly one of the highlights of my publishing life”--told me during a recent phone call that Mitchell took 400 pages of handwritten notes for “Mr. Hunter’s Grave.” ”Those notes represented maybe 50 trips out there [to Staten Island]. He had enough notes for a book-length story.” The fact that Mitchell presents the story as having occurred over just two days doesn’t bother Frank any more than does the reconstruction and splicing-together of quotes that Mitchell must obviously have done in an age before handheld recording devices. “What you’re sure of,” I was glad to hear Frank say, “is that they said these things.”

Mitchell said he’d always been pretty pleased with “Mr. Hunter’s Grave.” “I just stumbled on that story,” he told an interviewer with The New York Times in 1992. “When someone’s willing to talk, you can let it lead wherever.” “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is my own favorite Mitchell story, and The Bottom of the Harbor is my favorite collection of this author’s works. It contains the stories “Up in the Old Hotel” and “The Bottom of the Harbor,” two pieces that are ostensibly about an old building and the Hudson’s riverbed, respectively, but are really about the things that lie unremembered in dark places and the fact that nothing lasts. Death haunts all of the stories in The Bottom of the Harbor. In the first paragraph of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” are these lines:

When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries there. … Invariably, for some reason I don’t know and don’t want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk.

* * *

It’s been suggested that editor Harold Ross hoped to capitalize on Mitchell’s prodigious output when The New Yorker imported him from the dailies, but if that’s true then he was soon to be disappointed. Mitchell immediately slowed down and started taking his time. (It might be worth noting that Mitchell did not include in McSorley’s any of the stories he wrote for The New Yorker before joining the magazine as a staff writer.) And the interval between his published pieces began to grow from weeks to months and then from months to years. The six stories collected in The Bottom of the Harbor were spread out over 15 years, from 1944 to 1959, during which period Mitchell published only four other stories.

After “Joe Gould’s Secret” in 1964, he published nothing new at all. He continued to go to work at the magazine every day when he was in New York (he spent a lot of time in Fairmont, especially after his parents died and he became holder of the deed of title to the family farm), and he clacked away on the typewriter in his little office located off what came to be called Sleepy Hollow--a quiet hallway in The New Yorker’s offices away from the main bustle--and once someone reported that he had a manuscript laid out all over the room. But the years went by and the work never emerged. None of his fellow writers asked him what he was doing. The culture at The New Yorker respected the sanctity of each writer’s process and even envied those who suffered longest over their work.

Every article you read about Mitchell will give you a different reason for his years-long silence. He was bereft at the loss of his friend A.J. Liebling in 1963 and his mother around the time of the second Gould piece. The business with Gould wounded him and wore him out. He was suddenly worried that his next piece would not live up to the reputation of his earlier work. He was unwilling to use people for his own gain anymore. The city changed on him. Most of these things he acknowledged himself, and there is much to ponder in this passage from “Joe Gould’s Secret”:

Suppose he had written the Oral History, I reflected; it probably wouldn’t have been the great book he had gone up and down the highways and byways prophesying it would be at all--great books, even halfway great books, even good books, even halfway good books, being so exceedingly rare. It probably would have been, at best, only a curiosity. A few years after it came out, copies of it would have choked the “Curiosa” shelves in every second-hand bookstore in the country. Anyway, I decided, if there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was books. When I thought of the cataracts of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that moment, only a very few of which would be worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading, I began to feel that it was admirable that he hadn’t written it. One less book to clutter up the world, one less book to take up space and catch dust and go unread from bookstores to homes to second-hand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes to still other second-hand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes ad infinitum.

Nevertheless, Mitchell was writing right up until the end of his life, and for me it is enough to imagine that this perfectionist, who had been in a sense spoiled by the total absence of deadlines since before the Second World War, was just taking his own sweet time, and he took it all the way.

Mitchell said in a 1989 interview that “I have continued working on a book, and one of these days if I am not terminally interrupted, I hope to finish it.” Among the interruptions were the numerous organizations and associations he became involved in during his last few decades. Mitchell was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch to the New York Landmarks Commission, a post he held for five years. He helped charter the South Street Seaport Museum. He served as vice president and secretary of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was vestryman for Grace Church in Manhattan, and according to Raymond J. Rundus’ thoroughly researched bibliography, Joseph Mitchell: A Reader’s and Writer’s Guide (2003), the Society of Architectural Historians and the Society of Industrial Archaeology and the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture and the British Gypsy-Lore Society and the Century Club of New York City all claimed portions of Mitchell’s time.


Even though he spent his whole adult life discovering New York City, Mitchell remained attached to the people and the land of Robeson County, North Carolina. Here he hoses down some local produce. (Photograph by Therese Jacobsen Mitchell, used courtesy of Elizabeth Mitchell and Nora Mitchell Sanborn.)

Nora Sanborn told me she’d recently gone to an event called “Joseph Mitchell’s Harbor,” a celebration of her father’s contributions, literary and otherwise, to the South Street Seaport, which was the location of Fulton Fish Market that Mitchell was so attached to. The panel was headed by the architect James Sanders and included the writers Luc Santé, Mark Kurlansky, Nathan Ward and Robert Sullivan. Sanborn said that when the panel was discussing what they thought Mitchell would have said about how access to Manhattan’s riverfront is gradually becoming a commodity for the new gentry--the upper classes can jog and ride bikes from the Battery to Fort Washington--while the poor and working classes can’t get near it, Sanborn raised her hand and said, “Well, I’m Joseph Mitchell’s daughter and I’ll tell you exactly what he would have said about it. He would have said ‘the g-- d-- sons of bitches.’” Sanborn told me that that was one of her father’s favorite phrases, and that it was his wonted response to pretension.

When she mentioned Sullivan’s name, I got excited. In my mind Sullivan, a Brooklyn-born New York writer and historian (he penned the acclaimed bestseller Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants and has a new book, My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78, coming out in September), is one of Mitchell’s literary heirs. The fact that he was on that panel supported my suspicion that he was a Mitchell fan.

I managed to get Sullivan on the phone and he corroborated Sanborn’s story. The appearance of Mitchell’s daughter among the seated attendees startled him; it was only the second time he’s spoken publicly about Joseph Mitchell and it’s the second time he’s had one of the author’s descendants turn up in the audience (last time it was a grandchild, which makes him worry that “you know, if you do the math, the next time Mitchell himself might appear”). Sullivan’s father had a printer’s shop down by Fulton Fish Market and knew the kind of people Mitchell wrote about (his father ate at Sloppy Louie’s, the setting for the story “Up in the Old Hotel”) and he was only too happy to talk with me about Mitchell. He spoke at length about how fascinated he was to discover Mitchell’s writing with its connection to his own father’s life, and we digressed happily into a conversation about how the printing trade and the shipping industry have always gone hand in hand (something that hadn’t occurred to me). But the thing he said that stuck out most for me was a remark tying Mitchell’s literary legacy with the work he did for all these groups later in his life.

“What you see in preservation movements these days,” said Sullivan, “is that the goal is not just restoring the structure--the physical building--but also the use of the building. And you can’t restore the use of a building if you don’t know how it was used. One of the things Joseph Mitchell did in his writing that is so important is that he showed us, in a very practical way, what the uses of these places were that he wrote about. You hear the word ‘folkways’ a lot now, and you could apply it here. We have used our harbor, we have used the river and this geography in certain ways, and Mitchell has captured those folkways for us, he’s preserved that knowledge of our use of places.”

* * *

Mitchell died in Manhattan on May 24, 1996, just long enough after the publication of his omnibus to see that it had done very well. He chose to be buried in a family plot back in Fairmont. Fortunately for all lovers of good writing and the folkways of New York and the Hudson River, Up in the Old Hotel is still in print in the Vintage paperback edition, and Vintage UK--a Random House sibling--released a British paperback version on July 5 of this year.

By the way, the anthology almost didn’t happen.

Mitchell had not allowed reprints of any of his books and he was reluctant even when the project was underway, according to Pantheon editor Frank. I’d called Frank to find out if he could tell me anything about why Mitchell had not wanted his books reprinted, and why he finally changed his mind, and how it all worked out.

“The anthology was very much his idea,” said Frank, “but it wasn’t a priority. During the time his wife was ill his life became more about taking care of her and so he wasn’t really thinking much about his past work. And there was a shyness about Joe. He didn’t want to be the focus of attention. It was Sheila McGrath, his companion during his last years, who convinced him to go ahead. I wasn’t privy to those conversations, but I understand that she told him, ‘Look, there are new generations of people who don’t know your work. Your writing needs to be available for them.’

(Right) A marker honoring “native son” Mitchell in Fairmont, North Carolina. (Click to enlarge)

“One of the reasons he was reluctant to have his work reprinted,” Frank added, “was that he felt people would ask the question, ‘What have you been working on since those early works?’ And that was a very uncomfortable question for him. In his mind he had never stopped writing, but he wasn’t satisfied with the work he was doing. Also, he felt there was a continuity to his work. Publishers had approached him over the years about doing just one of his books, and he wasn’t interested in that. He was close friends with another writer there at The New Yorker named Joseph Liebling [A.J. Liebling], who died in 1963. And he saw what happened, how various publishers would come out with one of Liebling’s books and it would be available in hardback for a short time and then in paperback, and then it would be out of print. That didn’t seem very satisfactory to him. He didn’t want that.”

I asked Frank whether Mitchell, or he himself, had worried that no one would remember Mitchell, and whether he recalled marketing Up in the Old Hotel in any particular way. “Publishing a book of previous work by an author who has fallen into some obscurity is a dicey proposition,” Frank admitted. “What we tried to suggest to people was that if you like reading John McPhee or Calvin Trillin, here’s the man who came before them.” (With regard to the self-proclaimed New Journalists, McPhee is reported to have said that Joseph Mitchell was creating artistic material through factual writing “when Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote were still in knee pants.”)

Frank told me that Pantheon did a first run of 8,000 to 9,000 copies of Up in the Old Hotel in hardback and sold 4,000 to 5,000 of them to bookshops right away. He said they did six or seven printings and eventually sold 35,000 hardcover copies. The book was released the second week of August, 1992, and reached the New York Times Best Sellers List on September 20 at spot number 12, which pretty much put “paid” to any doubts about whether Joseph Mitchell still had a place in the hearts of readers.

I asked whether Mitchell was pleased, and I imagined I could hear Frank’s smile suddenly widen.

“He was thrilled.”

(Copyright © Matthew Fleagle 2012)

READ MORE: “Joseph Mitchell, Chronicler of the Unsung and the Unconventional, Dies at 87,” by Richard Severo (The New York Times); “Joe Mitchell’s Secret,” by Clay Risen (The Morning News); “The Grammar of Hard Facts: Joe Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel,” by Tucker Carrington (The Virginia Quarterly Review); “The Collector of the Everyday,” by Sam Stephenson (The Oxford American); “Reporter Remembered,” by Amanda Munger (The Robesonian).

His Own Sweet Time: Joseph Mitchell’s Omnibus 20 Years On, Part I

(Editor’s note: This is the opening installment of a two-part feature looking back at the career of Joseph Mitchell, a renowned staff writer for The New Yorker, two decades after the release of his last collection of essays. The author of this piece is Matthew Fleagle, a technical writer at a small software company in Seattle, Washington. In a previous life, Fleagle contributed frequently to newspapers and magazines, but he explains that “This is the first article I’ve written specifically for publication in a dozen years.”)


Journalist-author Joseph Mitchell in 1959

Scott’s Bookstore was an independent shop that occupied 5,000 square feet of an old mill and granary built in 1907 in Mount Vernon, Washington, about an hour and a half north of Seattle. Before we had children, my wife and I used to drive up there on lazy Sundays and have brunch at the Calico Cupboard, a restaurant that occupied the rest of the building, and then we’d spend a long while browsing the books in Scott’s, which always seemed to be more interesting than those in the big chain stores. I hear Scott’s is gone now, but I haven’t been up there to look. The thought makes me too sad.

In addition to the fond memories I hold of less-hectic days with my wife, there is another reason why Scott’s Bookstore will always occupy a place of honor in my mind and heart.

It was there on one of those trips north that I came across the writing of Joseph Mitchell for the first time. His book was on a table near the entrance with other books the staff had written recommendations for by hand on vanilla-colored card stock. Whoever chose that book for the table, I’ll thank them forever. Thumbing through it I found this passage from a story called “Hit on the Head With a Cow,” in which Charles Eugene Cassell, “a relentless and indiscriminate collector” who runs Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People in a Harlem tenement basement, speaks to Mitchell while looking for something he’s mislaid:

“Look at this lunch bucket,” he said. “Use to belong to Al Smith when he was in Fulton Fish Market. Never used such a common thing myself. Always had money, never broke; had the chicken pox, had the sleeping sickness, had the dropsy, had the yellow johnnies, had the walking, talking pneumonia. Didn’t miss a thing in the medical line. My old man was a big man with shoulders like a mule, born on a farm in Nova Scotia, lived most of his life in Boston. He was born in a barn. When he went in a place he always left the door wide open. People would yell at him, ‘Shut the door! Were you born in a barn?’ and he’d say, ‘That’s right. How’d you guess it?’ He was biggity as sin. What you call a beachcomber. He did odd jobs on the fish docks, and he fed us on fish until the bones stuck out of our ears. Comb my hair in the morning, I’d comb out a handful of bones. It got so my stomach rose and fell with the tide. Fish, fish! I was almost grown before I found out people ate anything else.”

I had never heard of Joseph Mitchell before, although I should have. Mitchell left the rural swampland of North Carolina’s coastal plains in 1929 and came to the most urbanized spot in the world, documented the last remnants of 19th-century New York City in a new kind of reportage that astounded readers, continued to astound readers during a long and celebrated career as a staff writer at the world’s most pre-eminent city magazine, then stopped publishing at the peak of his craft and vanished from the public consciousness, never to publish another article. His silence became legendary. For decades Mitchell refused to allow the five books in which he had collected his stories to be reprinted, and people who wanted to read them had to root around for them in used book stores. His paper trail virtually disappeared.

(Right) Entrance to the National Association Building, where The New Yorker had its offices from 1935 to 1991.

Many readers of The New Yorker who had eagerly awaited each new Mitchell piece assumed after many years of his silence that he was dead, even though Mitchell continued to show up at his office for 30 years after the publication of his last article and was known to be working continually and determinedly on something big. Some of his younger colleagues at the magazine knew little of the older gentleman who always wore the Brooks Brothers suit and a fedora and kept a tidy office, until someone would hand them a hard-won copy of one of Mitchell’s out-of-print books and say “read the master.”

It was therefore a startlement to many of Mitchell’s old fans and an eye-opening discovery for new ones when in 1992--20 years ago this month--four of Mitchell’s books were reprinted in an omnibus edition called Up in the Old Hotel. The four books are McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1960) and Joe Gould’s Secret (1965). (A 1938 collection of features from his early days as a newspaper reporter, My Ears Are Bent, was excluded.) All of the stories in the four books represented in Up in the Old Hotel were originally published in The New Yorker.

Up in the Old Hotel is an anthology of profiles and other articles Mitchell wrote for the magazine from 1938 to 1964 and it’s the last book he published before he died in 1996. Within its 700-plus pages are 37 stories about, among other things, street preachers, fishermen, clammers, restaurateurs, bums and lunatics, bartenders, a bearded lady and the Mohawk Indians who worked untethered at the tops of skyscrapers being constructed in Manhattan. The stories paint a picture--a pathetic one in the truest sense of the word--of the city’s human heart, or one corner of it anyway. Mitchell sought out people and places that few other writers were paying any attention to. Not only were his subjects unusual for journalistic reportage at that time--everyone but the rich, famous and powerful--but he wrote about them in a style that foreshadowed the New Journalists by decades and that was never successfully appropriated by them.

Mitchell was known for his Olympian powers of observation and attention to detail, and for the dark sense of humor that drew him to the subjects he wrote about. “In going over these stories,” Mitchell explained in the introduction to Up in the Old Hotel, “I was surprised and pleased to see how often a kind of humor that I can only call graveyard humor turned up in them. In some of them it is what the story is all about. In some of them it lurks around in the background or in between the lines. It turns up often in the conversations between me and the people I interviewed, or in the parts of the conversations that I chose to quote. I was pleased to discover this because graveyard humor is an exemplification of the way I look at the world. It typifies my cast of mind.”

* * *

Joseph Quincy Mitchell was born on his grandparents’ farm at a place called Iona, North Carolina, in 1908 and grew up in nearby Fairmont, a tobacco market town. Mitchell’s ancestors on both sides, he said in the same introduction, had been farmers in that region since before the Revolutionary War. His father grew and traded tobacco, and when he wasn’t tagging along with his aunts Annie and Mary on trips to the Iona Cemetery (where he was tutored in their graveyard humor), Mitchell spent hours and hours at the tobacco market listening to his father and other men conduct business. Although the energy of the market thrilled him, he chose not to follow his father into the business, instead traveling to New York with the hope of becoming a political writer. He’d attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and written for the Chapel Hill Weekly and the Daily Tar Heel, and on the strength of a single article about the tobacco industry in Robeson County, which he sent unsolicited to the New York Herald Tribune and which that paper published in the summer of 1929, an editor there invited him to Manhattan and helped him find a job at the then-fading New York World, Joseph Pulitzer’s old paper.

Mitchell later wrote that he spent “eight long sorrowful years as a reporter” for newspapers in New York City, first phoning in to a rewrite man the details of a “murder, or stick-up, or wreck, or brawl, or fire, or whatever,” and eventually composing feature stories. His adventures on the daily broadsheets are the stuff of his first book, My Ears Are Bent. Mitchell wrote his first signed piece for The New Yorker in 1933, “They Got Married in Elkton,” a piece about two reverends in a New Jersey town who competed in a booming marriage industry. He came on staff in 1938, hired along with Abbott Joseph (“A.J.”) Liebling by St. Clair McKelway, who had been charged by the magazine’s creator, Harold Ross, with the task of building a stable of feature writers with reporters’ chops.

(Left) Mitchell debuted in the November 11, 1933, edition of The New Yorker.

Liebling and Mitchell, the two Joe’s, became close, lifelong friends. They often went out for lunch together at a place called the Red Devil near The New Yorker’s offices and ate seafood. They had much in common, but could not have been more different as writers. Mitchell was reserved and quiet, never showing his work before it was finished and never seeking to draw attention to himself or his writing. He wrote simple sentences that were complex in shade but not in grammar. Liebling was a big-bellied, happy gourmand who wrote Baroque sentences and enjoyed his own turns of phrase so much that after setting himself a-chuckle with something he’d just typed, he would yank it unfinished from the typewriter, run down the hall to Mitchell’s office and make his friend listen to it.

By this time, Mitchell had discovered Fulton Fish Market, a bustling trading center that opened in The Bronx in 1822, more than 100 years before Mitchell arrived in the city. It reminded him of the tobacco market back home and became a touchstone for him in a city that too often trampled people and history in its mad rush toward the future. The market was a crossroads of real people doing real work--venerable, honest work--as well as real sounds and smells. Mitchell begins the story “Up in the Old Hotel” (the anthology’s title track, as it were) this way:

Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to 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 piles 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.

Mitchell settled into life in the city. He married a photographer, Therese Dagny Jacobsen, and with her raised two daughters in the city, Nora and Elizabeth. But he never stopped returning to Fairmont (he held the title to the family farm until he died), and he never stopped feeling that he didn’t really quite fit in in either place. His father, Averette Nance Mitchell, never thought much of Mitchell’s journalism career, at one time asking him, “Son, is that the best you can do, sticking your nose in other people’s business?”


Mitchell just couldn’t stay away from graveyards. Here he takes notes from headstones--possibly those of his ancestors--in a cemetery in Iona, near Fairmont, North Carolina. (Photograph by Therese Jacobsen Mitchell, used courtesy of Elizabeth Mitchell and Nora Mitchell Sanborn.)

Mitchell’s father came up in conversation when I finally got ahold of the writer’s daughter Nora, whose last name is now Sanborn, on the phone. “He was a hard man,“ she said of her grandfather. “You couldn’t live up to what he expected.”

I had tracked down Sanborn, a retired probation officer, now 72 years old, to see if she’d talk with me. Even if just briefly. I knew she’d had an art gallery some years ago in Keyport, New Jersey, where she still lives, and that one of her first exhibits was a collection of images taken by her photographer mother accompanied by passages from her father’s writings.

After a number of e-mail exchanges Sanborn agreed to speak with me on the phone, and she eventually sent me some snapshots of her father, also taken by her mother. Sanborn told me that Mitchell was “undone” by his wife’s demise in 1980 after a long illness.

“He never got over my mother’s death,” she says. “They had a wonderful, long marriage and he was lost without her.”

Mitchell never married again, but a woman named Sheila McGrath, who worked at The New Yorker and whom he had known for years, became a friend and companion, and ultimately the executor of the author’s estate. McGrath never responded to a letter I wrote her in February of this year, asking her for help in writing this article, and Sanborn says she has also not responded to requests from Nora and her eight-years-younger sister, Elizabeth, who lives in Atlanta, to be granted access to their father’s papers, of which Sanborn says there are “oceans” in storage.

(Right) A.J. Liebling

“He had reams of notes about all kinds of things,” Sanborn says. “In his breast pocket he kept a sheet of the yellowish paper that all the New Yorker reporters used. It was unlined. He had a sheet of it folded once vertically and then once horizontally, so it formed a rectangle, and he took one of those wherever he went, for note-taking. He didn’t have a typewriter at home. He would take his notes to the office and type them up so they were neat.”

Sanborn says her father was “pretty canonical. He left for the office at nine and was home at six. That’s why church bells are so sad to me. We lived on Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth. The Church of the Ascension was on the corner. I would hear his keys in the door and that was the same time the church bells rang on the corner. Whenever I hear church bells I miss him and they make me sad. I can’t stand hearing them.”

* * *

Joseph Mitchell’s reputation as one of the best chroniclers of life along the Hudson River in the first half of the 20th century--if not one of America’s greatest journalists ever--is so uniform among his colleagues, his reviewers and literary historians that after a while it becomes a little disorienting to read about him.

Consider the superlatives: as early as 1943 Malcolm Cowley said that “in his own somewhat narrow field, which is that of depicting curious characters, Joseph Mitchell is the best reporter in the country”; in 1965, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called him “the paragon of reporters”; the scholar Noel Perrin considered two of the stories in Mitchell’s collection The Bottom of the Harbor “the best reporting I have ever read”; to his colleagues at The New Yorker Brendan Gill, Calvin Trillin and Alec Wilkinson, respectively, Mitchell was “the finest writer on The New Yorker,” “the New Yorker reporter who set the standard” and “the great artist/reporter of our century”; the author and critic William Zinsser said that The Bottom of the Harbor was “perfect--one of the best of all American nonfiction books.”

(Left) Mitchell’s “old hotel,” the New York waterfront’s former Fulton Ferry Hotel, in 1928.

All that while he yet breathed. After his death another New Yorker staff writer, Lillian Ross, referred matter-of-factly to Mitchell as having been “the greatest living reporter”; John Keenan reckoned he was “the finest staff writer in the history of the magazine, and one of the greatest journalists America has produced”; and in describing his influence at the magazine where Mitchell was a staff writer for nearly six decades, colleague and writer Charles McGrath, who’s now at The New York Times, said, “his reportage became the measure for those who followed him there.” McGrath (no relation to Sheila McGrath) also said, “if Joseph Mitchell wasn’t the single best writer who ever appeared in The New Yorker, then it was a tie between him and E.B. White.”

Now consider this: I live in a big city full of alert, well-read people, yet aside from booksellers and longtime subscribers to The New Yorker I have never met a single person who has ever heard of Joseph Mitchell.

Could it be that an author most people have never even heard of is truly worthy of so many bests and finests and greatests and standards and measures? Well, some might say, the majority of the people quoted above are or were, like Mitchell, writers for The New Yorker and the sort of people who would pick someone obscure to make their hero. But few reviewers I’ve ever read take the slightest issue with any of these encomia*, a fact that might seem strange to someone who had only encountered the accolades and never the writer’s work. And Mitchell wasn’t always obscure. Old-time readers of The New Yorker eagerly awaited each new piece to roll off of the platen of his typewriter, and before he joined The New Yorker staff his stories in the daily newspapers where he cut his reporter’s teeth were so popular that ads touting the latest Mitchell feature adorned the sides of the papers’ delivery vans. People knew who Joseph Mitchell was throughout the second third of the last century.

All of this might make the uninitiated suspect that Mitchell’s writing casts some kind of a whammy over people’s critical faculties when they are lucky enough or foolish enough to dust off his work and peer into it. Well, don’t look at me for a dissenting opinion about the man, or even a balanced one.

I am fully under the Joseph Mitchell spell.

* * *

Up in the Old Hotel found me the way a rescued puppy finds a new owner in an animal shelter. It caught my attention and when I regarded it, it beckoned to me in a deep and irresistible way. What drew me first was the cover, which depicted part of the façade of an old brick building, each of its eight visible windows occupying a unique state of dilapidation, each crooked and flaking sash catching sunlight and shadow in its own way, some with graying half-pulled shades behind them, some with three lights, some with eight lights, and some with 12. I instantly wanted to know what secrets this doughty Vintage paperback housed, so I picked it up and flipped it over and flipped through it. I’m a slow reader, and I feared I would never finish a book with so many words in it. But I knew it had to come home with me.

I read the book steadily over many months. I read or tried to read a few other things, but I kept finding myself back in the pages of Mitchell’s anthology, not only entertained by the characters and nurtured by the sense I got that the author valued things that I valued--old people with stories to tell, old buildings and things made to last, the details of how things used to be done and how things got to be the way they are--but also rocked into a kind of attentive stillness by the writing itself, the very sentences, the way they were put together. Mitchell took his time, utterly confident that I would abide, that I would follow the long lists of items and names as patiently as he had listened to someone else enumerate them. And I was surprised that he was right about me in this regard. He wasn’t writing to every reader, it seemed, certainly not to those who loved flamboyant prose. He was writing to his readers. He was writing to me, even though it took me a while to be able to hear his voice. At first I was distracted by the repetition, the fact that he didn’t take the obvious syntactic shortcuts that would have made his writing ... well ... more efficient. His sentences are like trains of fact, and yet at the same time they are somehow deeply resonant. Listen to this passage from a story in The Bottom of the Harbor called “The Rivermen”:

At least once a day, usually when the tide is at or around dead ebb, flocks of harbor gulls suddenly appear and light on the wrecks and scavenge the refuse that has collected on them during the rise and fall of the tide, and for a little while they crawl with gulls, they become white and ghostly with gulls, and then the gulls leave as suddenly as they came. The hulks of three ferryboats are out in the flats--the Shadyside, the George Washington, and the old Fort Lee. Nothing is left of the Shadyside but a few of her ribs and parts of her keel. There are old tugboats out there, and old dump scows, and old derrick lighters, and old car floats. There are sand-and-gravel barges, and brick barges, and stone barges, and coal barges, and slaughterhouse barges. There are five ice barges out there, the last of a fleet that used to bring natural ice down to New York City from the old icehouse section along the west shore of the river, between Saugerties and Coxsackie. They have been in the flats since 1910, they are waterlogged, and they sit like hippopotamuses in the silt.

It was the kind of writing I had been looking for and just hadn’t known it. I had been a journalist in my early days and had gradually moved into marketing writing and then technical writing, and while I missed the creativity in newspaper and magazine writing, I had grown tired of the cynical and even jaded style that seemed to me to be more and more entrenched in the business--from the pun in every headline and the same tired old lead paragraphs and the same precious, postmodern wit right through to the same non-committal, shrug-shouldered last lines.

Reading Mitchell, I felt as though I had discovered reading, and journalism, all over again. I felt I had found my narrative home.

(Part II is available here.)

* A notable exception is Jack Shafer’s humorless prosecution of Mitchell, H. L. Mencken and A.J. Liebling as prevaricators and fibbers in Slate, posted Thursday, June 12, 2003.

(Copyright © Matthew Fleagle 2012)