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Visiting Fairmont with her new husband, Therese often went into the countryside to capture the Depression-era existence of Tobacco Road sharecroppers.
Mitchell nursed his grudge for months. Then one day, through a convoluted set of circumstances, he found himself effectively babysitting another of Walker’s reporting protégés, Richard O. Boyer, who was trying to write an important story for the paper but who also had a strong proclivity for drink. Mitchell’s assignment: Keep Boyer sober and on task. This Mitchell did. But when the story was finished, the two celebrated by getting thoroughly drunk, then went off to the paper to turn in Boyer’s piece. Deep into his cups and still bitter at having had his big story snatched from him, Mitchell decided “he would tell Ogden Reid exactly what he thought of him.” He may even have meant to resign his position—something he never would have done in a more sober condition. The two inebriated reporters stumbled around the premises; Boyer, in search of a bathroom, instead relieved himself in the coatroom. Mitchell made it to Reid’s office, but the editor was momentarily away. His secretary said she would try to find him but tactfully suggested Mitchell might leave a note instead. As she headed off, however, Mitchell barged in to Reid’s office. “Suddenly possessed by fury,” he impulsively grabbed a decorative inkwell from the editor’s desk and hurled it at the wall. “I still remember the beautiful crescent pattern,” Mitchell would recall.
The next day Walker called a hungover Mitchell to say that Reid was fairly understanding about the drunken tantrum—but the managing editor, alas, “insisted that the cutups be made examples of.” Walker, reluctantly, had to let Mitchell go.
In no time, the great Mitchell–Boyer inkwell caper—the sort of incendiary, insubordinate gesture every working journalist has contemplated but seldom carried out—would take on legendary status in newspaper circles, one that only built over the years. This came to be something of an embarrassment to Mitchell, a man of control who had allowed himself to get out of control. For the rest of his life, he would be asked about the episode and invariably had to set the questioners straight as to the facts of it, as opposed to the apocrypha that had built up around it. (The fastidious Mitchell took special pains to make clear he had not been the urinator.)
For now, Mitchell had a much larger problem on his hands than a sullied reputation. He was a newly married man in the worst economic climate in the nation’s history, a long way from home, and he was suddenly unemployed. While he hoped Walker would be able to use his vast network to help him land somewhere, that might take a little time, and in any case the predicament was of his own making. For the moment he was back to one priority—get a job, any job. So that summer he undertook what would be one of the great adventures of his life: He signed on as a deckhand on a freighter ship, the SS City of Fairbury, destined for the Soviet Union.
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Mitchell, front center, surrounded by dozens of new friends in Leningrad, a relationship that a decade later he was made to regret.
Years later, from the vantage point of an established and well-known newspaperman, Mitchell would put a considerably lighter gloss on the circumstances of his maritime moonlighting, writing that “I got tired of hoofing after dime-a-dozen murders” and telling his seafaring colleagues that he feared he was getting a little “soft” and wanted some manual labor to toughen up. Elsewhere he would refer to the trip as a “summer vacation.” None of these characterizations made any sense, of course, for a young newlywed in the teeth of the Depression. Like many of the less-experienced men on the Fairbury, Mitchell was there because it was honest work and it paid. But one thing he did make clear to his mates: This was definitely to be a onetime affair for him. And they understood. “This was no career for anyone who was educated,” recalled Jack Sargent Harris, a noted anthropologist and United Nations official who, before he pursued his graduate education, sailed that summer on the Fairbury with Mitchell.
The Fairbury was one of the large, lumbering cargo vessels that were hastily turned out during the First World War at the Hog Island shipyard outside Philadelphia. Its itinerary for this voyage was a routine one: transport heavy machinery to Leningrad (as the Soviets had lately rechristened the imperial city of St. Petersburg) and return to the States with Russian timber. Along the way it would make stops in Copenhagen, Danzig, Stockholm, and a few smaller ports.
Mitchell’s service began on July 8, 1931. Harris, who had done one prior transatlantic sail and would continue to work the Hog Island freighters for several years, said that Mitchell had signed on with a Herald Tribune colleague, Ben Robertson. They were all deckhands, and Mitchell did what everyone on the crew did during their daylong shifts: washed down decks, chipped away rust, painted—whatever needed to be done for the ship’s upkeep. There were about fifteen men on the deck crew. Harris said Mitchell and Robertson devoted much of their downtime to reading and talking—though Robertson did most of the latter. Harris remembered the young Mitchell as taciturn. “There were very few words in Joe,” he said. But Mitchell made an exception for Harris, whose native intelligence the writer sensed. He repeatedly encouraged Harris to continue his education at some point. “Joe liked to talk to me because I listened. I was interested. I think he saw me as someone with a mind that was just awakening,” Harris said.
When the American freighters hit the Soviet ports, Harris recalled, the sailors seldom left the ships, because there weren’t any prostitutes around, as there were in the more-libertine ports to the west. However, when the Fairbury arrived in Leningrad, it put in for the better part of two weeks, and many on the antsy crew took the opportunity to sightsee in the magnificent and historic city, still in the exhilarating first blush of the Communist revolution. The Russians, Harris said, “were very friendly to the Americans, they liked to see us. We were welcomed everywhere. It was quite warm—even though there were no whores.”
When the Fairbury sailors went ashore, they were escorted by young Russian women—always women, given the evisceration of the male population in the war; “even the winch-drivers [on the docks]were girls,” Mitchell said. The young ladies were more-charming forerunners of the official “minders” who would shadow Western visitors to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Mitchell wrote in some detail about his Leningrad stay in a feature story not long after his return and then several years later in his introduction to My Ears Are Bent. He and his Fairbury colleagues took their new Russian friends to a Charlie Chaplin movie, discussed their mutual affection for the work of Alexander Pushkin, and made a short train ride to the former summer residence of the Russian royal family, now converted into a rest home for Soviet workers.
It is south of Leningrad and the flat, swampy country reminded me of eastern North Carolina. Somewhere on the tremendous estate the two girls picked some wild strawberries, and that night they made some cakes, a wild Russian strawberry on the top of each cake. We ate them and got sick. I remember how proud they were when they put the cakes on the table, smiling at us, and how ashamed we were, an hour or so later, when we got sick. We figured out it was the change in the water, but we couldn’t explain that to them because we knew no Russian. In Leningrad we swam naked each day in the Neva, under the gentle Russian sun. One afternoon we got together, the seamen from all the American ships in the harbor, and marched with the Russians in a demonstration against imperialist war, an annual event. One night a girl invited me to her house and I had dinner with her family, thick cabbage soup and black bread which smelled of wet grain. After dinner the family sang. The girl knew some English and she asked me to sing an American song. I favored them with the only one I could think of, “Body and Soul,” which was popular in New York City when I left. It seemed to puzzle them.
Lighthearted and bucolic as that all sounded, Mitchell was quietly observing Leningrad’s bustling populace, the ever-present propaganda, and “the smell of sacrifice in the streets,” and he concluded the Russians were distinctly unsettled as to how things were going to turn o
ut for them under this experiment of Communism. He called Leningrad an “index city” for the rest of the country, and he was not sanguine. “The uneasy feeling of unrest there is perhaps not universal. However, except for the hospitality of the people…this minor desperation is the most lasting impression an American seaman has of the city.” In this way Mitchell was a good bit less naïve than his fellow sailors and many other early Western visitors to the putative workers’ paradise. Still, the layover in Leningrad would prove to have serious consequences for him, years later, when Mitchell was trying to get official clearance to work as a writer for the U.S. government during World War II.
The Fairbury, laden with Russian pulp timber, returned to the States at the end of August 1931, dropping off Mitchell in Albany, New York. He hopped a bus for New York, ready to return to his wife and, he hoped, his newspaper life.
Four decades later, making notes for a planned memoir, Mitchell typed these phrases on a sheet of paper: “Looking back on it, I think I got scared during the Depression and never got unscared” and “always lived with a feeling of anxiety” and “never been sure anything would last very long, particularly a job.” It’s not clear if he was referring specifically to the frightening turn of events with his employment in 1931, but it would scarcely be surprising if he was.
Mitchell’s guardian angel, Walker, again came to the rescue: He arranged for Mitchell to get a reporting position at the World-Telegram. By early October, tanned and no longer “soft,” and with his worldview heightened considerably, Mitchell was back on the news beat. Still freshly married, Mitchell was grateful to have a paycheck again. It would be a few years yet before he could appreciate just what a springboard Walker’s intervention really was.
CHAPTER 5
ASSIGNMENT: NEW YORK
I have been up in scores of buildings of a wide variety of types while they were being demolished (I have a passion for climbing up on scaffolding), and I have been up in dozens of skyscrapers while they were under construction, and I have been out on half a dozen bridges while they were under construction, and I have been down in three tunnels while they were under construction—the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel—and watched the sandhogs forcing their way inch by inch through the riverbed. I am also strongly drawn to certain kinds of subterranean places…. I have been down in the vaults under Trinity Church and I have been down in the vaults under the Federal Reserve Bank and I have been down in the dungeony old disused warehouse vaults in the red-brick arches under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, which still smell mustily but pleasantly of some of the products that used to be stored in them—wine in casks, hides and skins from the wholesale-leather district known as the Swamp and now demolished that once lay adjacent to the bridge, and surplus fish held in cold storage for higher prices by fishmongers from Fulton Market, which is nearby….
—From Joseph Mitchell’s unfinished memoir
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In 1931, as Mitchell was still learning the city in his Herald Tribune apprenticeship, he stumbled across one of its more fascinating microcosms on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Fulton Fish Market was exactly the kind of sprawling, bustling, feast-for-all-five-senses environment that Mitchell relished, with color and characters in any direction he turned. Each day before dawn, crates of freshly caught fish and seafood of every variety arrived by boat and truck, where they went into huge bins and hatches. Some of the fish would be sold whole, and others were filleted by aproned workers wielding their long blades like surgeons. The fish market, located in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, originally was operated by transplanted New Englanders who sold the fish that their seafaring families brought to the city. But with the polyglot evolution of New York, the market became a collection of ethnic populations—first the Irish, then Italians, then Jews.
When Mitchell was introduced to the Fulton Fish Market, he knew nothing of the fish business particularly, but he understood the workings of a commodities market from growing up with his father’s cotton and tobacco businesses. The fish market would be one of the first, and most enduring, emotional bridges between Mitchell’s former life and his new one. He found it a stimulating yet comfortable space, and it was one he would return to, in different ways and in different capacities, for the rest of his life.
Mitchell’s “tour guide” to this new world was one of the market’s best-known figures—Joe Cantalupo, whom Mitchell would come to consider “my oldest friend in New York.” When Mitchell first met him, Cantalupo was running his father’s “carting” business, which was responsible for hauling away all the trash from the fish market. The two Joes bonded immediately; Cantalupo was a great talker and, because of his business, he seemed to know everyone in the market. He was also a very large man, with an appetite to match; Mitchell likened him to another Falstaffian figure, one he worked with at the World-Telegram and who would also become a lifelong friend, the writer and gourmand A. J. Liebling. (“He ate too much just like Joe Liebling,” Mitchell said of Cantalupo years later, “but most of the people I admire seem to eat themselves to death.”)
Maybe what Mitchell most appreciated about Cantalupo was the commitment he had made to truly understand his people and surroundings. Though not a fisherman or a fishmonger himself, Cantalupo “was so involved in the fish market. He knew fish…. He knew where the shrimp came from. He had been on the shrimp boats. And on draggers in Boston and saw everything he knew. And so he got to be the most respected man in the market.” Courtesy of Cantalupo, Mitchell would become friendly with the most established and influential members of what was then the Fulton Market Fish Mongers Association, some of whom would figure prominently in his later writing. He began to spend much of his spare time around the market, and in his own words he became a “fish market buff.”
At the fish market Mitchell also was learning something that would prove immensely useful to a young reporter—what New York sounded like. In and around the stalls he was encountering Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Old Yankee, and other tongues heretofore alien to him; as he put it later, “I got a feeling for New York speech down there.” In a sense he was training his ear.
Joe Cantalupo was just one of the unique people who made New York New York—one of hundreds of genuine characters that Mitchell had already met in a kind of big, messy, living novel. Of course, he had encountered many of the most memorable characters on the other end of Manhattan, in Harlem—the street preachers, speakeasy operators, prostitutes, detectives, beat cops, drug dealers, and drug users. To a still-transitioning Southern boy—and one who at this point in his career continued to feel he was as likely to pursue fiction as fact-based writing—they left an immense and lasting impression. He found especially compelling the black ministers, who had mastered the oratorical arts and who had such a cultural and moral pull in their communities. In fact, around this time Mitchell began to formulate the rough idea of a novel, one taking a distinctly Joycean approach to his garrulous new home. The book would record a day in the life of a newspaper reporter, and it would pivot on his meeting up with a black preacher in Harlem. The themes would be the large ones—life, death, redemption, and resurrection.
While nothing came of that idea, at least at the time, it’s hard to imagine any person in any other occupation who was exposed to as much of thirties New York as Joseph Mitchell of the New York World-Telegram. By mid-November of 1931, Mitchell was regularly turning out bylined stories for his new paper, and of increasing significance. For the next several years his work consisted mostly of “features”—color pieces, profiles, human-interest stories, hard-luck stories, and everything in between. He went to many trials, which he enjoyed somewhat, and even more gangster funerals, which he enjoyed a great deal. (“There would be a whole lot of wreaths, which would clash with the fact that the man was lying there, embalmed,” he recalled. “The five-o’clock shadow: they were always kind of blue around the jaw…. ‘Goodbye Old Pal’ on the wreath.”) And right from Mitchel
l’s hiring, his editors liked his way with a newspaper staple: the celebrity profile. Bing Crosby, Ida Tarbell, Noël Coward, Emma Goldman, Aimee Semple McPherson—Mitchell visited with them all as they traipsed through the nation’s cultural capital. Over three days he produced a droll, rolling profile of George Bernard Shaw, then eighty years old and irascible as ever, as he sparred with the local press. (Asked what he hoped to do in New York City, Shaw replied, “Get out of it.”) Mitchell wrote about an offbeat young humorist and cartoonist named James Thurber, who in time would become Mitchell’s friend and colleague at The New Yorker. Occasionally Mitchell indulged what would become one of his signatures—taking a story in a far different direction than its readers might expect. A good example was a lion-in-winter profile of Billy Sunday, which ran in January 1934, not long before the fiery evangelist died. Sunday is visiting New York with his wife, getting ready for a revival and wearing itchy woolen long underwear to ward off the chill. Instead of dealing head-on with Sunday’s evangelism, Mitchell gets at the subject by having the old man talk about the people who have come by to reminisce about his long-ago first career, that of a professional baseball player:
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