Although Gould strives to give the impression that he is a philosophical loafer, he has done an immense amount of work during his career as a bohemian. Every day, even when he has a bad hangover or even when he is weak and listless from hunger, he spends at least a couple of hours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls An Oral History of Our Time. He began this book twenty-six years ago, and it is nowhere near finished.
Mitchell reports that Gould would fill composition books with a barely legible scribble “in parks, in doorways, in flophouse lobbies, in cafeterias, on benches on elevated-railroad platforms, in subway trains, and in public libraries.” He wrote in furious bursts—one all-night session recounted by Mitchell resulted in eleven thousand words. But of the ostensible millions of words so far committed to the history, Mitchell said, “hundreds of thousands…are legible only to him.”
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Joe Gould—a.k.a. Professor Sea Gull—takes flight during a party in the early forties. Mitchell made the Greenwich Village vagabond famous.
Mitchell went on to describe the oral history as “a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations.” Mitchell reached that conclusion having had the opportunity to read only a fraction of Gould’s ostensibly sprawling opus, and he hadn’t found anyone else who’d seen much more of it. What little of the oral history Mitchell did read was limited to “rambling essays on such subjects as the flophouse flea, spaghetti, the zipper as a sign of the decay of civilization, false teeth, insanity, the jury system, remorse, cafeteria cooking, and the emasculating effect of the typewriter on literature.” He continued:
Only a few of the hundreds of people who know Gould have read any of the Oral History, and most of them take it for granted that it is gibberish. Those who make the attempt usually bog down after a couple of chapters and give up. Gould says he can count on one hand or one foot those who have read enough of it to be qualified to form an opinion. One is Horace Gregory, the poet and critic. “I look upon Gould as a sort of Samuel Pepys of the Bowery,” Gregory says. “I once waded through twenty-odd composition books, and most of what I saw had the quality of a competent high-school theme, but some of it was written with the clear and wonderful veracity of a child, and here and there were flashes of hard-bitten Yankee wit. If someone took the trouble to go through it and separate the good from the rubbish, as editors did with Thomas Wolfe’s millions of words, it might be discovered that Gould actually has written a masterpiece.”
The literary merit of the oral history notwithstanding, Mitchell’s Profile made Gould a celebrity well beyond the Village and cemented the relationship between the two men—this last not exactly the outcome Mitchell would have wished for. Enchanted or sympathetic readers began to send money to the “Joe Gould Fund” in care of Mitchell at The New Yorker, which Gould encouraged by giving people the magazine’s address as his own. Gould began routinely dropping by the New Yorker offices and monopolizing Mitchell’s time. When Mitchell finally got up the nerve to object to the constant interruptions, Gould would have none of it. “Look,” he said. “You’re the one who started all this. I didn’t seek you out. You sought me out. You wanted to write about me, and you did, and you’ll have to take the consequences.”
CHAPTER 7
THERE ARE NO LITTLE PEOPLE
When [Commodore] Dutch is introduced to someone, he usually makes fun of his own face. He shakes hands and says, “Pleased to meet you, pal.” Then, opening his mouth as wide as possible and exhibiting his solitary tooth, he giggles and says, “Look, pal! I’m an Elk!” He seems most pleased with himself when people are making jokes at his expense and laughing at him. It makes no perceptible difference to him whether their laughter is scornful or good-natured. “When a fella is laughing at me, I’m sizing him up,” he once told an intimate. “I’m giving him the old psychology.”
—From “A Sporting Man,” 1941
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In 1942, having spent his first decade in New York living something of a gypsy existence himself, pinging from boardinghouse to boardinghouse and flat to flat, Mitchell finally put down roots, moving with Therese into the Greenwich Village apartment that would be home for the rest of their lives. And they were now not just a couple but a family; in July of 1940 they had welcomed their first child, Nora—not coincidentally, the name of James Joyce’s wife.
The Mitchell apartment was on the sixth floor of a ten-story building at 44 West 10th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Their small unit was at the back of the building, on the southeast corner. There were two bedrooms; Joseph and Therese occupied one and Nora the other. (When in 1948 the family added another daughter, Elizabeth, she got her parents’ bedroom; from that point on Joseph and Therese slept on a foldout sofa bed in the living room.) The kitchen was so tiny that with four people sitting at the breakfast table there wasn’t enough room to stand and open the refrigerator. If something was needed, someone sitting at the table had to open the refrigerator door and reach in for it.
The intimate space didn’t keep the Mitchells from entertaining. Quite the contrary, they maintained an active social schedule and had people in often for drinks or dinner. Liebling, Hamburger, and many other New Yorker colleagues were frequent guests. “They lived in this cramped little apartment which was about as cozy as any place I have ever been,” Hamburger remembered. And while the kitchen was small, Therese, a highly accomplished cook, coaxed feasts from it. Friends made a point of saying that of Therese’s many fine qualities, that was one her food-loving spouse found particularly endearing. “Dinner would always start out with an enormous Swedish-Norwegian smorgasbord followed, usually, by a big roast of lamb,” Hamburger said. “They ate well.”
The Mitchells were a playful and affectionate couple. They loved to sing around the apartment, almost as much as they enjoyed needling each other, as she would do about his esoteric collecting and he would do about her unwavering positivity. As a young wife, Therese began a private ritual that continued until late into their lives—presenting her husband with original love poems for Valentine’s Day. The verses might be silly or serious; often they managed to be both. (“Is me and has been all these years/The one who helps to dry your tears/And sends you out each day anew/to fight another battle through/Then home to labskaus, fish or steak/And risengrod and chestnut cake.”) Their happiness radiates from a tiny image of the couple taken at a photo booth early in their marriage. Mitchell is smartly turned out in a coat, silk tie, and topcoat, but his hat is pushed back incongruously on his head. Eyes narrowed in a laugh, he has the moony, cartoonish expression of a man in love. Therese is leaning into her husband, her chin resting on his shoulder, bright eyes gazing up at him with a laughing smile. The mugging pair in the photograph, two very attractive people in their twenties, are clearly in the first blush of a romance, and family and friends attest that they were comfortably affectionate in this way their entire marriage.
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A photo-booth image from early in the Mitchells’ relationship reflects the easy affection they would share throughout their long marriage.
Mitchell was an attentive father. As soon as Nora was walking, they began to explore the Village’s parks and lanes hand in hand, much as his parents had introduced him to the mysteries of the farm as a toddler. There was a precocity about Nora; when she was not quite four and on her first visit to a museum, the Whitney, she took in a number of paintings before stopping in front of a nude. She commented to her father, “Look at the bosom.”
At night, Therese’s kitchen often doubled as her darkroom. As she had all through the thirties, Therese was photographing the city. She captured everyday people on the streets, on the job, selling their wares, parading on holidays. The striking black-and-white images evoke the great city trying to wrest itself from the Depression’s grip and coping with
the early years of World War II: People crowded beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. A parish priest keeping an eye on things from the rectory doorway. A Greenwich Village mother and her young daughter hunched over a stroller, framed by an archway. Workers at a wig shop, all sporting their own handiwork as they march down the street asserting their right to organize. Men sitting atop a Brooklyn esplanade, legs dangling. A cop on horseback. Drunks and prostitutes, peddlers and preachers. Similarly, the photographs she took in and around Fairmont document, in unemotional, head-on fashion, the unrelieved want of the rural South. Houses are as swaybacked as old mules, their clapboards peeling away or missing altogether. There are open square cutouts in the walls where proper windows should be. Women and small children are captured as they impassively grade tobacco leaves, barefoot and wearing clothes that are little more than rags.
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Joseph and Therese at the beach in the forties.
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Mitchell was as intent on revealing the wonders of New York to daughter Nora as his parents had been in showing him the North Carolina countryside.
Because Therese photographed solely for her own satisfaction, only close friends and family got to appreciate the results. Watching her mother convert negatives into powerful images is among Nora’s most poignant childhood memories. “She used to…work into the night, hanging contact sheets and prints on the shower curtain rod over the bathtub,” Nora wrote in the program for an exhibition of her mother’s work in 2000, sponsored by the Municipal Art Society of New York and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “I would often sit with her during these times and I remember them as magical—the darkness, the closeness, the images swimming up out of the chemical baths….”
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Joseph Mitchell was thirty-three years old when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, pushing a theretofore reluctant United States into World War II. By this point, perhaps surprising even himself a little, Mitchell had become the picture of domesticity, at least by Greenwich Village standards. He was established as a respected staff writer at The New Yorker. He was adjusting to the family’s new home. And he was a husband and new father. Nonetheless, after Pearl Harbor, Mitchell, like so many comparably settled American men, was determined to get into the war.
In the summer of 1942—a bleak period in the early hostilities, with America’s lone consequential victory coming over the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway—Mitchell, the onetime freighter deckhand who was still interviewing a crazy man who talked to sea gulls, applied for a commission with the United States Naval Reserve. To his great disappointment, his application was rejected; a letter that August from the Office of Naval Officer Procurement cited his “inability to meet physical requirements.” The rejection stemmed from the gastric ulcer that laid him low the previous year in North Carolina but subsequently had given him no problems. Later in the war, when summoned to appear by his local draft board, Mitchell was actually classified as 4-F because of the ulcer history. It was terribly frustrating to be thwarted by his medical past, all the more so because Mitchell now considered himself to be in robust health.
Precluded from active duty, Mitchell sought to serve through his communication abilities. In April of 1943, he applied for a position as a senior script editor with the newly formed Office of War Information—an agency that, ironically, The New Yorker had a direct hand in creating. Early in 1942, Mitchell’s colleague at the magazine E. B. White had written a Notes and Comment piece suggesting that the numerous and confusing “information bureaus” cropping up in wartime Washington should be consolidated into a single entity. White even nominated the person to run it: prominent news commentator Elmer Davis. And in a matter of months Davis in fact was named to run the newly formed Office of War Information.
The OWI coordinated communication efforts on the home front, including the release of war news, printing of patriotic posters, and production of radio broadcasts that were essentially infomercials for the war effort. An overseas branch produced propaganda campaigns intended for enemy audiences. A number of Mitchell’s friends and professional acquaintances wound up working there, including Philip Hamburger, who had left The New Yorker in 1941 to write for the U.S. Office of Facts and Figures and then moved over to the newly constituted OWI. Despite these various connections, Mitchell’s hopes would be dashed again—this time by that distant and impetuous sea voyage to Leningrad, an innocent trip now being viewed by Washington clearance officers through the paranoia of wartime politics. Indeed, it could be argued that it was a single sentence from the introduction to My Ears Are Bent, the anthology of Mitchell’s newspaper columns released five years previously, that kept him from working for the government.
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Two typical New York street scenes from Therese. Her black-and-white photos were documentary in nature yet radiated great empathy.
In December of 1943, fully eight months after he applied for the OWI position, Mitchell was summoned to a meeting with an investigator for the U.S. Civil Service Commission office in New York, who was assigned to Mitchell’s case. It’s not known whether Mitchell considered the meeting in any way unusual or merely part of a protracted bureaucratic vetting. Regardless, the point of the session became quickly apparent. According to a short “Report of Interview and Special Hearing” transcript, the investigator, Henry Beckwith, ominously informed Mitchell that “the purpose of this interview is to allow you an opportunity to answer questions concerning information which has been received by the Civil Service Commission about alleged activities on your part.”
After establishing the perfunctory facts of Mitchell’s life, Beckwith asked the writer why the employment history in his application didn’t include his summer excursion to Leningrad twelve years earlier on the City of Fairbury. “I didn’t remember the dates,” Mitchell replied—disingenuously, as he knew full well it wouldn’t help his cause to disclose even a brief trip to Communist Russia. Besides, for more than a decade his employment had been as a professional journalist, which spoke directly to the expertise he brought to the position in question. He explained that he “did not want to complicate this thing with faulty information, and I did not consider it to be important enough to mention. It was in the summer vacation of 1931. The trip lasted three months altogether.”
Mitchell’s inquisitor bore in. “In your book, My Ears Are Bent, you state: ‘One afternoon we got together, the seamen from all the American ships in the [Leningrad] harbor, and marched with the Russians in a demonstration against imperialist war,’ ” Beckwith said. The implication was that Mitchell had been something of a ringleader in the “demonstration,” and Beckwith wanted an explanation. But Mitchell dismissed the idea. “I liked the Russians,” he said, “and in a spirit of adventure, I marched with them and with the sailors from these ships in a demonstration against imperialistic war that, as I understand it, is an annual celebration over there, and whatever kind of parade it had been, I would have marched in it.”
Mitchell was pressed on several other matters. One had to do with a short story he published in 1939 in the Communist magazine New Masses. “I wrote a series of articles on Black Ankle County, in North Carolina, where I was born, and The New Yorker took three of them,” Mitchell explained, but a fourth piece—“The Ruination of Judge MacDuff,” the tale of a cornpone local magistrate whose penchant for practical jokes backfired on him—was rejected. He tried selling it to several other magazines, but when none would buy it he offered it to New Masses. Beckwith then asked Mitchell about his signing of a nominating petition for American Communist leader and fringe presidential candidate Earl Browder in 1940. Mitchell was unapologetic. “I believe that Browder has the right to run if he desires,” he said.
Joseph and Therese Mitchell counted a number of friends who were, or had been, registered Communists. But in a closing statement, Mitchell asserted, “I am not and never have been a Communist Party member, however I have sympathized with some of their activities from t
ime to time. In other cases I have opposed Communist activities. Actually, I consider myself a Democrat and have registered as a Democrat in various national, state and city elections. I have several times, however, voted for American Labor Party, Republican and Communist candidates.” Mitchell in fact would demonstrate these left-leaning but eclectic political inclinations all his life. For instance, less than a year after the Civil Service Commission interview, in November of 1944, he was one of about a dozen high-profile magazine writers and editors who signed an advertisement endorsing Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection. The signers represented many political views but said Roosevelt’s leadership was too important to interrupt at that crucial point in the war. A former Newspaper Guild local representative, Mitchell was strongly pro-labor and he cared passionately about issues of social justice. He would be disgusted by the McCarthyism of the fifties, and he despised Richard Nixon on general principle; on the other hand, as he aged, his antipathy for all politicians grew, including Democrats. In his notes, Mitchell indicated he had little use for John Kennedy, disliked George McGovern, and eventually soured on Bill Clinton.
Man in Profile Page 14
