Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Whatever their apparent differences, Liebling and Mitchell shared many values and passions. And as writers they influenced each other profoundly. This influence was not really about the other’s prose or style. Nor did they run drafts of their stories by each other; on the contrary, as much as they talked about favorite writers, they seldom spoke of what they happened to be working on. But both were drawn to subjects not unlike themselves—Mitchell in a more psychological sense, Liebling in that he preferred his characters larger than life. And because both were focusing on untraditional subject matter and utilizing more-literary approaches than was possible at daily newspapers, they spurred one another on. As Mitchell would later explain, it “liberated me to talk to Joe about writing, and he gave me a great feeling….” They understood that they were looking at New York in essentially the same way.

  As close as they became, the two writers were also to some extent rivals, remembered Roger Angell, longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker. And he said the thing that most bothered Liebling about Mitchell was that he seemed to know everything, no matter how arcane the fact. One day in the forties, Angell said, Liebling was walking along Sixth Avenue when he spotted a taxidermy shop and, on impulse, ducked in. On a shelf he noticed a peculiar assemblage of small bones. The proprietor explained that those were the bones of a small male opossum, taking pains to point out to Liebling the peculiarly shaped penile bone. For a few dollars Liebling purchased the bones, which he carefully wrapped in his handkerchief. Back at The New

  Yorker he found Mitchell at his desk, typing. Liebling wordlessly unwrapped the bones, arraying them on the desk before Mitchell. Mitchell studied them for a moment, then said, “Pecker bone of a young male possum. What do you want to know about that, Joe?”

  Beyond story subjects, there was one other crucial area where their interests converged. Mitchell and Liebling were among the great eaters in the history of New York City, and frequent dining companions. According to Liebling biographer Raymond Sokolov, Mitchell “understood the complicated importance of gutbucket gluttony in Liebling’s life. The two Joes had been stopping at crummy basement Italian restaurants together since the Depression, eating sheep’s heads, down to the eyes.” Liebling, a man of enthusiastic, outsize appetites to begin with, shared Mitchell’s love of seafood especially. The two enjoyed nothing more than gorging on oysters, clams, squid, octopus, or whatever other denizen of the deep had found its way onto the daily special, washed down with a drinkable wine. After Mitchell’s death, longtime colleague Brendan Gill captured the pair’s gustatory passion. “The Joes often went to the Red Devil, an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood,” Gill recalled. Around Christmastime one year, the owner came out after Mitchell and Liebling had polished off a huge meal; he was carrying two glasses and a bottle of brandy, and to their great surprise he told them to drink their fill. Just as they were starting in on this remarkable offer, however, a grease fire broke out in the kitchen. Flames crackled in the back and smoke began pouring into the dining room. “The situation posed a dilemma for Joe and Joe,” Gill continued. “It was the first time they had ever been so generously treated by the proprietor, and they certainly intended to take full advantage of the gesture. At the same time they wished to save their lives.” Walking away with the bottle would seem ungrateful, even unfeeling. So they hit on a compromise—they stepped out into the street with the brandy, just beyond the smoky chaos, and “toasted the spirit of Christmas there.”

  Credit 6.3

  A. J. Liebling met his New Yorker running mate Mitchell years earlier at the New York World-Telegram.

  Therese Mitchell was also a close friend of the first of Liebling’s three wives, Ann McGinn, a schizophrenic who was later institutionalized. The Lieblings were frequent dinner guests at the Mitchell apartment. The two couples often went to Rockaway Beach together, Sokolov writes. “Therese Mitchell took photographs of them on the sand, a strange but happy-looking couple, Ann ravishing, Joe all pudge, she weirdly vacant, he with an amused glint in his eye.”

  Until World War II, Liebling, like Mitchell, had worked almost exclusively in New York. Then, in the fall of 1939, The New Yorker dispatched him to Paris to fill in for its longtime European correspondent, Janet Flanner, who was returning stateside for what was supposed to be a temporary leave. When Germany commenced its blitzkrieg across northern Europe, Flanner couldn’t get back to Paris. Liebling would spend the rest of the war producing some of the most powerful and enduring journalism to emerge from the European theater, including a particularly moving first-person account of the Normandy invasion. Mitchell, for his part, would try every way he could think of to become involved in the war effort, from attempts at enlistment to endeavoring to work for the Writers’ War Board—only to be thwarted at each turn by a combination of bad luck and bad health.

  Indeed, sometime in the spring or summer of 1941 Mitchell began feeling unwell, and this vague malady persisted for months. He and Therese decided to go ahead with their usual summer trip to North Carolina, where Mitchell hoped the respite would fix whatever was wrong. Instead, his health worsened. He was compelled to check in to a hospital in Fayetteville, where he was diagnosed with an ulcer. In a letter to McKelway in late September, he reported being put on a milk diet and being held for three weeks; upon his release, he was under doctor’s orders to stay in Fairmont for several additional months of rest, where, according to Mitchell, all he did was read Dickens and take walks in the woods. It wasn’t until the following January that Mitchell was cleared to return to work in New York.

  —

  His position at The New Yorker firmly secured, Mitchell was determined to put even more depth into his pieces, which were appearing less frequently as they expanded considerably. He found himself spending more time simply wandering the city’s five boroughs, taking in…well, everything. He described the process in his unfinished memoir:

  What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city. I like to walk the streets by day and by night. It is more than a liking, a simple liking, it is an aberration. Every so often, for example, around nine in the morning, I climb out of the subway and head toward the office building in midtown Manhattan in which I work, but on the way a change takes place in me—in effect, I lose my sense of responsibility—and when I reach the entrance to the building I walk right on past it, as if I had never seen it before. I keep on walking, sometimes only for a couple of hours but sometimes until deep in the afternoon, and I often wind up a considerable distance away from midtown Manhattan—up in the Bronx Terminal Market maybe, or over on some tumbledown old sugar dock on the Brooklyn riverfront, or out in the weediest part of some weedy old cemetery in Queens. It is never very hard for me to think up an excuse that justifies me in behaving this way (I have a great deal of experience in justifying myself to myself)—a headache that won’t let up is a good enough excuse, and an unusually bleak and overcast day is as good an excuse as an unusually balmy and springlike day.

  When he wasn’t on foot, Mitchell was crisscrossing the city by subway or, for a better view, by bus.

  There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city. I frequently spend an entire day riding on the New York City buses, getting off at junction points and changing from one line to another as the notion strikes me and gradually crisscrossing whatever part of the city I happen to be in. I might ride in a dozen or fifteen or twenty different buses during the day.

  Mitchell was investing more in his reporting because his work was widening to capture entire cultures, not just a single person like Mazie or a single place like Dick’s Bar and Grill. This evolution is plain in “King of the Gypsies,” published in August of 1942. The piece starts out as a portrait of Johnny Nikanov, a self-appointed gypsy king of inde
terminate age. (He estimates that he’s between “forty-five and seventy-five, somewhere in there,” he tells Mitchell. “My hair’s been white for years and years, and I got seventeen grandchildren, and I bet I’m an old, old man.”) King Cockeye Johnny, as he is sometimes called, is a thief and, again, a drunk. His drink of choice is equal parts gin and Pepsi-Cola, a concoction he calls “old popskull.”

  But while Johnny is the protagonist, he isn’t the only actor in the piece. It is populated with such secondary characters as Detective John J. Sheehan, a member of the New York Police Department’s pickpocket squad, who has “worked exclusively on gypsy crime for the last nine years,” and Johnny’s fortune-teller wife, Looba. And the piece reflects reporting done over a long period—early in the article Mitchell notes that he first became acquainted with Sheehan six years earlier, while a newspaper reporter. That was the same time he met Johnny Nikanov, and they had stayed in touch. “Once he invited a few of the Criminal Courts loafers, including myself, to his home on Sheriff Street for a patchiv, or gypsy spree,” Mitchell writes. “We ate a barbecued pig, drank a punch composed of red wine, seltzer, and sliced Elberta peaches, watched the women dance, and had an exceedingly pleasant time. Since then I have often visited Johnny. Whenever I am in the Sheriff Street neighborhood I call on him.”

  The deeper and more textured reporting—the desire to write the story behind the story, if you will—may well have been a by-product of Mitchell’s exposure to anthropologist Franz Boas. But it also speaks to Mitchell’s prowling curiosity and his propensity to immerse himself in a subject, not merely to dabble in it. For instance, in pursuing his Profile of King Cockeye Johnny and later writing about other aspects of the gypsy culture, Mitchell sought out tutorials with police experts and even became a member of the Gypsy Lore Society, remaining a regular reader of its journal for years. Such an immersion allowed Mitchell to write with authority about not just a gypsy but all gypsies. With broad, bold strokes, Mitchell writes:

  Johnny does not know how many gypsies there are in the city, and neither does anyone else. Estimates range between seven and twelve thousand. Their forefathers came from every country in Europe, but the majority call themselves Russians, Serbians, or Rumanians. They are split into scores of vaguely hostile cliques, but they intermarry freely, speak practically the same dialect of Romany, the universal gypsy language, and are essentially alike. They are predominantly of the type that anthropologists call nomad gypsies; that is, unlike the Hungarian fiddler gypsies, for example, they never willingly become sedentary. They are contemptuous of the Hungarians, calling them house gypsies. In the past the nomads straggled from Maine to Mexico, spending only the winters in the city, but since the depression fewer and fewer have gone out on the road. Johnny has not been farther away than Atlantic City since 1934. At least two-thirds receive charity or relief of one sort or another. The gypsy kings are authorities on relief regulations; they know how to get their families on relief and keep them there. In the city, gypsies prefer to scatter out, but there are colonies of them on the lower East Side, on the Bowery, on the eastern fringe of Spanish Harlem, and on Varet Street in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. They rent the cheapest flats in the shabbiest tenements on the worst blocks. Three or four families often share one flat. They move on the spur of the moment; in the last two years one family has given seventeen addresses to the Department of Welfare. In the summer, like all slum people, they bring chairs to the sidewalks in front of their houses and sit in the sun. They nurse their babies in public. They have nothing at all to do with gajo neighbors. Even the kids are aloof; they play stick- and stoopball, but only with each other. The children are dirty, flea-ridden, intelligent and beautiful; one rarely sees a homely gypsy child. They are not particularly healthy, but they have the splendid gutter hardihood of English sparrows.

  “King of the Gypsies” represented Mitchell’s first true effort at profiling an entire culture, and, like the works to follow, it’s an often-wistful profile of a culture in decline, a culture undermined by the changing city. A whole people—not just one bar, not just one tradition like the beefsteak—are victims of “progress.” And though still a young man, Mitchell already was concerned enough about the impact of New York’s breakneck changes that he was starting to channel that distress through his stories. In “Gypsies,” he let Cockeye Johnny do the lamenting of days gone by, writing: “Johnny sighed and slopped some more gin into his glass. ‘Things have been getting worse and worse for gypsies ever since the automobile was put on the market,’ he said. ‘When I was a little knee-high boy the U.S. was gypsy heaven. Everybody was real ignorant and believed in fortune-telling.’ ”

  —

  While her husband was chronicling New York’s disparate communities with his typewriter, Therese was doing much the same with her camera. Though she photographed all over the city, her favorite subject was her home neighborhood, the Village. With Washington Square Park at its center and (roughly) bounded by Broadway to the east, the Hudson River to the west, Houston Street to the south, and 14th Street to the north, Greenwich Village was by this time well established as an enclave of bohemian culture, home to writers, radicals, artists, poets, avant-garde theater, art galleries, and more than a few flat-out loons. Many found its exotic atmosphere alarming; for the Mitchells, it was entertaining and comforting all at once, a kind of carnival that never closed up or left town. And one of the best shows in the Village was an irrepressible character who would provide the most memorable subject of Joseph Mitchell’s career to date.

  Joe Gould “wasn’t just a bum, he was a bum of a certain genius,” writes Ross Wetzsteon in his history of Greenwich Village in the first half of the twentieth century. He was “the leading beneficiary of the Villagers’ enduring fantasy of a link between the social misfit and the cultural rebel—after all, who better understood society’s hypocrisies than society’s outcasts?”

  Gould, a Harvard graduate and, for a brief time, a newspaper police reporter, was generally homeless and hungover. He made his way by hustling for meals, drinks, and spare change. Poet E. E. Cummings was among Gould’s benefactors, giving him money and cast-off clothing. Gould told people he had several pet seagulls when he was a child and knew their cawing “language” well enough to communicate with them; as if to prove it, at parties he would remove his shoes and socks and take off in “awkward, headlong skips about the room, flapping his arms and letting out a piercing caw with every skip.” The bizarre performances earned Gould the nickname “Professor Sea Gull.” But what set Gould apart from the other hard cases roaming the city were his garrulous personality, his need to be the center of attention, his obvious intelligence—and his astonishing claim to be writing the Oral History of Our Time, an exhaustive, handwritten work chronicling life in New York. The history was said to fill hundreds of notebooks. A 1934 story in the Herald Tribune reported that the oral history was then more than seven million words, and a follow-up four years later said it had grown to almost nine million words, although no one had seen the entire omnibus in one place.

  Mitchell would recall first encountering Gould at a Greek diner in the Village during the hard winter of 1932. The young reporter was drinking coffee while on a break from covering stories at a nearby courthouse, and the ragged bohemian was cadging a free meal. Mitchell would come to know Professor Sea Gull much better later on, after he moved to the Village, and he kept notes on Gould and his quixotic oral history for several years before pitching The New Yorker on a Profile, in mid-1942. “I remember telling [my] editor that I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his oral history,” Mitchell would say later. Mitchell passed word around the Village that he wanted to talk to Gould. Before long, Gould phoned him at The New Yorker, and they met the next morning at a diner. Gould drew himself up on his counter stool and said, “I understand you want to write someth
ing about me, and I greet you at the beginning of a great endeavor.”

  It was an endeavor that would require hours upon hours of interviews with a man who was, essentially, mad. Mitchell often bought Gould breakfast during the course of their interviews, meals Gould extended by dumping copious amounts of ketchup onto his plate and eating it with a spoon. Mitchell trailed his subject on his evening perambulations, in which he sometimes crashed parties of well-known figures from the theater and arts communities, some of whom, like Cummings, had adopted Gould as a kind of amusing mascot. More typically, however, Gould “prowls around the saloons and dives on the west side of the Village, on the lookout for curiosity-seeking tourists from whom he can cadge beers, sandwiches, and small sums of money,” Mitchell wrote. “If he is unable to find anyone approachable in the tumultuous saloons around Sheridan Square, he goes over to Sixth Avenue and works north, hitting the Jericho Tavern, the Village Square Bar & Grill, the Belmar, Goody’s, and the Rochambeau.” This went on for months.

  Mitchell’s patience paid off in an unusually rich Profile piece: “Professor Sea Gull” was published in December of 1942, and it was a reader sensation. It was also just the second piece Mitchell had in The New Yorker all year. While this paucity was attributable in part to his ulcer and recuperation, it also suggests how all-consuming his commitment had been to the Gould Profile and to getting it just right. Mitchell’s utter fixation with Gould is not especially difficult to appreciate. In Gould, Mitchell found a near-doppelgänger—if one who slept in doorways, seldom bathed, wore filthy rags, and had long ago lost his teeth. Gould tells Mitchell he is writing “the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude”—not a bad description of Mitchell’s own portfolio to date. Like Mitchell, Gould had left behind his home and a disappointed father. Like Mitchell, Gould was a practiced listener. Indeed, where others saw in Gould—eccentric even by Village standards—a panhandling if occasionally charming drunk, Mitchell saw an oddly disciplined reporter: