The Literary Legacy of Joseph Mitchell

“It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves—and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. The clientele is motley. It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck-drivers from Wanamakers’s, internes from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, clerks from the row of secondhand bookshops north of Astor Place, and men with tiny pensions who live in hotels on the Bowery but are above drinking in the bars on that street…”  (from “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,” The New Yorker, 1943)

Another part of the clientele that day was Joseph Mitchell, a dapper man of medium height and build, likely wearing a dark suit, button-down shirt. And, always, a fedora. At some point, he would have removed from his inside jacket pocket paper that he has folded in half and in half again and then in thirds and, with a pencil, begun jotting some notes.

That extract captured much of what Mitchell represents: an interest in ordinary people, not celebrities or high society nabobs; a place echoing with history; telling details; gracefully formed and paced sentences that, like all great writing, read like they don’t take agonizing care to compose.

My introduction to Mitchell: In the late ’70s, I was in my 20s and in journalism school. On a trip to New York I ventured into Gotham Book Mart, once a used book mecca which was, at that time, at 41 West 47th Street in the Diamond District. A man who seemed to be the proprietor — was it the legendary Andreas Brown? — asked me if I was looking for anything in particular. I said I was a journalism student and he asked me if I knew Joseph Mitchell. No, I hadn’t heard of him. The man looked shocked, told me I couldn’t be a journalist and not know about Mitchell, and handed me a first edition (1938) copy of My Ears are Bent, an anthology of his early newspaper feature writing. (I couldn’t have afforded antiquarian prices so I suspect there were plenty of these in circulation.)

Who was Mitchell? Mitchell came from a family of successful cotton and tobacco growers in North Carolina. Instead of preparing to take over the family business, he studied journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and, at 21, arrived in New York determined to become a writer. (His father’s reaction: “Son, is that the best you can do, sticking your nose into other people’s business?”) Despite the Depression, he found work at newspapers — The World, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World-Telegram. One of his editors told him to get to know every nook and cranny of the city and he did that for the rest of his life. His feature writing for newspapers was impressive enough that he was hired by The New Yorker in 1938, where he remained until he died in 1996. He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote remains some of the most memorable creative nonfiction in history.

He specialized in character studies. The Irish family that owned McSorley’s Old Ale House, the oldest pub in Manhattan, and the shad fishermen who worked the Hudson River. Street evangelists and the fearless Mohawk steelworkers who built the bridges that eventually connected Manhattan to the boroughs. Lady Olga, a beareded lady who worked in circus sideshows, Joe Cantalupo, the self-described “mayor” of the Fulton Fish Market, and George Hunter, who maintained a tumbledown cemetery for African Americans on Staten Island.

A 1992 collection of his articles, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, and Thomas Kunkel’s 2015 biography, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, should be required reading for aspiring writers. Both because his reporting and writing sparkle off the page and because his story is a cautionary tale.

A cautionary tale: Not all of his work would survive the rigorous fact-checking of today. His use of composite characters and practice of altering quotations, for example. (“Sometimes facts don’t tell the truth, you know,” Mitchell once said. Scholars could spend years exploring the question of “truth” versus “truthiness” in his work.) We could argue that all nonfiction contains elements of fiction. Writers choose what to include and what to leave out. They compress time when creating scenes and select the most appropriate quotes to use. (To include everything would be unreadable.) The way one writer might describe an event or select the most effective quotes would be different from another writer describing the same event. When dealing with memoir, in particular, the past makes a goal of absolute accuracy next-to-impossible. That said, Mitchell sometimes went further, rendering dialogue in articulate, page-long chunks and not just using composite characters, but inventing them.

Still, at his best, his work reads like literature. About sitting on a barge on the Hudson River waiting for shad, he wrote:

“We might sit there an hour. If it’s during the day, we sit and look up at the face of the Palisades, or we look at the New York Central freight trains that seem to be fifteen miles long streaking by on the New York side, or we look downriver at the tops of the skyscrapers in the distance. I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the New York skyline. Sometimes I think it’s beautiful, and sometimes I think it’s a gaudy dammed unnatural sight. If it’s in the nighttime, we look at that queer glare over midtown Manhattan that comes from the lights in Times Square. On cold, clear nights in April, sitting out on the river in the dark, that glare in the sky looks like the Last Judgment is on the way, or the Second Coming, or the end of the world…”(from “The Bottom of the Harbour,” The New Yorker, 1960)

The rest of the cautionary tale: Although his personal life was settled — he married photographer Therese Dagny Engelstead Jacobsen in 1931 and was with her until her death in 1980, and they had two daughters — he had always been a melancholy man. (Today, he would probably be diagnosed with depression.) Whether it was that, or a severe case of perfectionism, Mitchell succumbed to what might be the most epic case of writer’s block ever recorded. For 32 years, until his death in 1996, he continued to work in his office at The New Yorker, typewriter clattering, but never finished a single piece. He was supposedly working on his magnum opus, a biography of one of his (composite, or entirely fictitious) characters, the elderly Hugh G. Flood, the subject of a couple of articles. A manuscript was never found.

As someone who went through bouts of mid-career writer’s block, I sometimes imagine how he must have felt, knowing that people in the business talked about his failure to produce, speculated on the cause. In Thomas Kunkel’s biography, he quotes New Yorker staff writer Philip Hamburger: “Joe had a hyperintelligence,” said Hamburger. “I’m sure he was aware of [what was being said]. Nobody ever stopped to think of the pain, how painful it must have been for him not to be writing.”