Man in Profile
Page 15
The Civil Service Commission’s mini-inquisition rattled Mitchell, and the heavy suspicion evident in the hearing must have carried over into the panel’s deliberations of his suitability to serve in a sensitive wartime capacity. He would hear nothing further for another five months. After a while he made a new inquiry, this one with the Writers’ War Board (then headed by the crime writer Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe), submitting another summary of his professional experience. At last came a terse letter from the OWI, dated May 29, 1944, saying the agency could not hire him “due to our inability to get the necessary clearances for you.” This was a hurtful blow; a latent ulcer was one thing, but to have one’s patriotism questioned quite another. Even so, it appears Mitchell made one final effort to receive a government clearance—if for no other reason, perhaps, than to vindicate his name—and in March of 1945 he was at last adjudged by the Civil Service Commission to be “eligible on suitability for federal employment.” It’s not clear whether he had finally persuaded the bureaucrats of his trustworthiness or just worn them down. By then, however, Allied forces were closing in on Berlin, and Allied planes were bombing Tokyo. Mitchell’s window to serve had effectively closed.
His inability to play a role in the war effort nagged at Mitchell for the rest of his life, a mixture of guilt and resentment that was only exacerbated by the reputation-making war correspondence his friend Liebling produced throughout the entire conflict—not to mention the work of so many other gallant New Yorker writers, among them Mollie Panter-Downes, E. J. Kahn Jr., St. Clair McKelway, Philip Hamburger, Janet Flanner, Daniel Lang, and brothers John and David Lardner. Indeed, The New Yorker turned out some of the most literate reportage of that or any war, from the front lines and beyond. It was a performance that lifted the magazine from its once narrow (if sophisticated) aspirations to become an international icon, one with a cultural influence that founder Harold Ross could scarcely have imagined two decades earlier.
Mitchell was left to channel his frustration into his work. After Pearl Harbor and for the next several years, The New Yorker yielded up to the war effort an almost crippling wave of male editing and writing talent, while an inflow of unknown faces arrived at its West 43rd Street offices to attempt to fill the breach. Staggered by the loss of so many of his stalwarts, Ross longed for stability, and Mitchell provided at least a measure of it. Even as the writer was trying everything he could think of to get into the war, Mitchell continued to turn out some of the magazine’s most accomplished and admired writing, such as his 1942 Profiles of Joe Gould and Gypsy King Johnny Nikanov. He was also hip-deep into his reporting for a triptych of pieces based on the Fulton Fish Market, which would become the next sensation among his growing legion of readers. Then, in the summer of 1943, the publication of a second book of collected Mitchell stories helped assuage the sting of his wartime rejection. Entitled McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, after the subject of one of his best-loved New Yorker pieces, the book was a sort of “greatest hits”—his stories about Mazie, Lady Olga, the musical prodigy Philippa Schuyler, Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, Joe Gould, Santa Claus Smith (who “paid” for meals and services with beautifully rendered—and counterfeit—checks), Commodore Dutch, and many more.
McSorley’s, issued by New York publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce, reached the bestseller lists and was greeted by critical acclaim. Review after review remarked on the depth of detail Mitchell brought to his portraits. That said, most remained transfixed by the “oddball” nature of his subjects, with Mitchell often cast as a slightly mad scientist orchestrating them all. “For years he has been studying, with the prying patience of a botanist, the queer human weeds he finds growing in the dingier interstices of Manhattan’s bum-littered Bowery,” Time magazine proclaimed. Mitchell had grown weary of those who, intentionally or not, marginalized his characters as curiosities. In a foreword to the book, he struck an uncharacteristically sharp tone to answer them, in a few lines that became the best known of his career. “The people in a number of the stories are of the kind that many writers have recently got in the habit of referring to as ‘the little people,’ ” he wrote. “I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.” It was a noble affirmation of his subjects’ innate dignity, of course. But at the same time it neatly preempted any diminishment of the author by diminishment of his subjects.
In a review in the Herald Tribune, Stanley Walker again gave his onetime protégé a helpful roll of the log, pointing out how truly difficult it is to produce nonfiction of this caliber. There is no alchemy involved. “He is a remarkably competent, careful workman, and the apparently casual and effortless result comes from days and nights of research and toil which would flabbergast the ordinary reporter,” Walker wrote. “There could be no greater fallacy than to assume that the people of Mr. Mitchell’s chosen world are easy to write about.”
More important than regular reviews was that McSorley’s got the attention of some literary critics, who took a deeper look at what Mitchell was accomplishing. A particularly influential assessment came from Malcolm Cowley, who suggested that, with McSorley’s, a genuinely fresh American writer had emerged, one who possessed the skills of a top novelist but who was applying them to true-life material. Ten years older than Mitchell and a friendly acquaintance of his, Cowley had the intellectual standing to cause other opinion-makers to pay attention. “Mitchell’s collection of portraits is the exact opposite of the books that choose an important subject, but are hastily written and have nothing much to say,” Cowley wrote in The New Republic, where he was an editor. “These books, which form the bulk of current writing, always make you feel as if you had paid for looking into the wrong end of a telescope. Mitchell, on the other hand, likes to start with an unimportant hero, but he collects all the facts about him, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of the whole community.” Cowley went on to liken Mazie and many of Mitchell’s other curious characters to those found in Dickens, although he pointed out that the authors came to them from entirely different directions.
In Mitchell’s factual writing, it is hard not to see an image of the factual lives we lead, under the dictatorship of numbers, statistical averages and mass movements. Yet perhaps this impression of Mitchell is merely superficial. Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that curiously resembles Dickens’: a continual wonder at the sights and sounds of a big city, a continual devouring interest in all the strange people who live there, a continual impulse to burst into praise of kind hearts and good food and down with hypocrisy. Unlike Dickens, he represses this lyrical impulse, but it controls his selection of details. You might say that he tries—often successfully—to achieve the same effects with the grammar of hard facts that Dickens achieved with the rhetoric of imagination.
Cowley also applauded the literary sweep of Mitchell’s work, even if it was somewhat disguised by his understated prose. As an example he cited the tale of Commodore Dutch, who was the sole beneficiary of his popular charity ball. Cowley wrote, “Mitchell doesn’t try to present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling the story of his career, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life since the days of Big Tim Sullivan.” And his story about Cockeye Johnny “is even better,” Cowley continued. “It sets out to describe Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the spokesman or king of thirty-eight gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon’s decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also, in its proper context, more imaginative than anything to be found in recent novels.”
As it happened, Mitchell’s next work would be a novel, of sorts—but one that only two people at the time knew was fiction.
CHAPTER 8
MR. MITCHELL AND MR. FLOOD
Mr. Flood’s attitude toward seafood is not alt
ogether mystical. “Fish,” he says, “is the only grub left that the scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you eat today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your great-great-granddaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved and improved and improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat. Consider the egg. When I was a boy on Staten Island, hens ate grit and grasshoppers and scraps from the table and whatever they could scratch out of the ground, and a platter of scrambled eggs was a delight. Then the scientists developed a special egg-laying mash made of old corncobs and sterilized buttermilk, and nowadays you order scrambled eggs and you get a platter of yellow glue.”
—From “Old Mr. Flood,” 1944
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Hugh G. Flood lived in the Hartford Hotel, a New York waterfront establishment located on Pearl Street, near the Fulton Fish Market. Born on Staten Island before the Civil War, Mr. Flood (as he was invariably called by Mitchell) was long retired after having made a comfortable living as the owner of a house-wrecking company. He was a flinty man of firm habits and equally firm opinions. He liked his Scotch even as he lamented the toll he’d seen spirits exact on so many weaker souls than he. “His eyes are watchful and icy-blue, and his face is red, bony, and clean-shaven,” Mitchell wrote of him. “He is old-fashioned in appearance. As a rule, he wears a high, stiff collar, a candy-striped shirt, a serge suit, and a derby. A silver watch-chain hangs across his vest. He keeps a flower in his lapel.”
Mr. Flood was ninety-three years old in January of 1944, when Mitchell first related his story in The New Yorker, and his only remaining goal in life was to reach the age of one hundred fifteen. This was an almost absurd notion, of course. But once readers became better acquainted with “Old Mr. Flood,” few doubted that he might just do it.
Again, not a lot “happens” in Mitchell’s yarn. It essentially consists of a visit between the two men, which affords the writer a chance to render a carefully observed study of a character eccentric even by Mitchell’s high bar. Mr. Flood, for instance, is a self-described “seafoodetarian,” who for the better part of six decades has eaten little beyond fish—and fried cod tongues and clams and crab and octopus and lobster and eel and all other manner of things fishermen pull from the sea and sell at the Fulton Market. (About the only exceptions to his strict seafood regimen are a few items he considers proper accompaniments: bread and butter, onions, and baked potatoes.) He is convinced a seafood diet is the key to a long life. Every weekday morning he heads to the Fulton Market, where he is as much a part of the landscape as the vendors and the chefs, and he walks the stalls until a certain piece of fish catches his eye. This he purchases and takes to a trusted restaurant—usually Sloppy Louie’s, also one of Mitchell’s favorite haunts—and precisely instructs the annoyed cooks how to prepare it. Mr. Flood considers oysters an almost magical cure-all. When another elderly resident of the Hartford complains of feeling poorly and is headed for the doctor’s office, Mr. Flood’s retort is sharp and certain:
“Oh, shut up,” he said. “Damn your doctor! I tell you what to do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby’s oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters. Don’t sit down. Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he’ll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won’t spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you’ll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don’t know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don’t put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you’d smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it’ll make your blood run faster. And don’t just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn’t it blue? And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren’t they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You’re apt to feel so bucked-up you’ll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.”
—
A few months later, in April, Mitchell published a tale that, in its own way, came across nearly as fantastical as the Mr. Flood Profile. The story was entitled “Thirty-Two Rats from Casablanca,” though when it appeared years later in an anthology, Mitchell gave it its more straightforward and enduring title: “The Rats on the Waterfront.” And that’s exactly what it was—a detailed, fascinating, and not a little curious portrait of the fecund vermin that populated every seeming nook of the metropolitan harborside.
Mitchell’s encyclopedic account plumbs rat biology and physiology, the rat-friendliness of old New York buildings and the ratproofing of modern ones, health authorities’ various efforts to control rat populations, and the ever-present concerns about a resurfacing of bubonic plague. He focuses his tale on the three rat varieties most common to New York: the black rat, indigenous to India (“It is an acrobatic beast…. It can gnaw a hole in a ceiling while clinging to an electric wire”); the Alexandrian rat, a native of Egypt and a cousin to the black; and the brown rat, from Central Asia—the most abundant in the city, not to mention “the dirtiest, the fiercest and the biggest.” All three strains spread into Europe in the Middle Ages with the explosion of global trade, and in like fashion they found their way to America aboard the merchant and slave ships of the colonial era. Once established, New York’s rat population grew dramatically, as the animals litter multiple times a year. While no one could be entirely sure, of course, authorities in 1944 believed there were at least as many rodent New Yorkers as there were the human variety.
The story likely arose from Mitchell’s experience at the Fulton Fish Market, where rats were an annoying fact of life—although, as he pointed out, New York’s resourceful rodents were to be found everywhere their voracious appetites took them, from the subway system to five-star hotels. Besides, at that particular moment the city’s rat population seemed to be spiking, as it always did during wartime, with the increased seaport activities. Not coincidentally, the story of Gotham’s rats is also one Harold Ross would have cherished—for its colorful arcana and for the slightly repellent chord the subject would surely strike in his upper-crust readers, who had never before given a thought to what was lurking inside their apartment walls. Mitchell did not disappoint. Here, employing some dark anthropomorphism—rats portrayed almost as gang members—he captures his subjects’ unsettling essence:
As a rule, New York rats are nocturnal. They rove in the streets in many neighborhoods, but only after the sun has set. They steal along as quietly as spooks in the shadows close to the building line, or in the gutters, peering this way and that, sniffing, quivering, conscious every moment of all that is going on around them. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encountered most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrubwomen, policemen and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. The average person rarely sees one. When he does, it is a disquieting experience. Anyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away, its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands fully why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of the Judas and the stool pigeon, of soullessness in general. Veteran exterminators say that even they are unable to be calm around rats.
The drama began when a French freighter, the Wyoming, arrived in New York Harbor that January, having come from Casablanca in North Africa, where there had recently been a plague outbreak. Health officials had put an elaborate system in place to check all vessels for rat infestation as they arrived in New York, and the captain of the Wyoming produced a certificate that his ship had been fumigated in Casablanca. The ship docked at a pier in Brooklyn to off-load mail, then moved on to a Hudson River pier in Manhattan to deposit the rest of its cargo. There, longshoremen reported seeing rats aboard the freighter, and health authorities ordered it fumigated. They found dead rats and ran test cultures that, several days later, confirmed the presence of plague in the animals. “It was the Black Death, no doubt about it,” Mitchell quotes one health official as saying. “We had found it in the harbor for the first time in forty-three years.” By the time of this discovery, however, the Wyoming had moved on to a third New York port, in Staten Island, for repairs. Now nearly frantic that they had a plague ship traversing the city, health officials found the Wyoming, re-boarded it, ripped holes into all the enclosed holds, fumigated it again—and found yet more infected rats.