Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  The great fear was that the Wyoming’s rats had gotten to shore, perhaps in three different boroughs, and were now commingling with the resident rat population, exchanging fleas and thereby spreading the plague bacteria. Authorities got up teams of rat-trappers and quietly dispatched them to catch hordes of the vermin near the various piers where the Wyoming had docked. Once a rat was trapped, it was tested for plague. Each test came back negative, but the trapping of the waterfront rats continued for several months, until health officials were certain the crisis had passed. The city had averted a calamity, though until Mitchell produced his riveting narrative, New Yorkers didn’t even know they had been in danger.

  —

  That November, then, Mitchell revisited Mr. Flood. In a second story that in later collections was entitled “The Black Clams,” Mr. Flood has summoned Mitchell to share an exciting discovery. Upon arriving, Mitchell hears some of the other residents of the Hartford maintaining how Mr. Flood, now ninety-four, is finally slipping, how he’s been more irritable than usual, how he’s been talking delusionally about a mythical “black clam.” But when Mitchell comes upon Mr. Flood, it turns out that the black clams do exist—and to prove it he has a bushel of them to share. The story is redolent of the multisensory detail characteristic of Mitchell. In a passage about how the black clams are retrieved, one can almost smell the ocean brine and hear the gulls overhead.

  “The bed this basket of clams came out of is called Bed Number Two,” said Mr. Flood. He is one of those who can talk and eat at once. “It’s located two and an eighth miles east-southeast of the whistling buoy off Point Judith, Rhode Island. The water out there is eighty to a hundred and twenty feet deep. That’s why it took so long to find the blackies. The bottom of Number Two is muddy, what the Coast and Geodetic charts call sticky, and it’s just about solid with clams. They’re as thick as germs. Bay clams come from much shallower water. To give you an idea, the water over most of the quahog beds in Great South Bay is only twelve feet deep. The Rhode Island clammers are working the ocean beds with the same kind of dredge boats that oystermen use, except the cables are longer. They lower a dredge on a steel cable and drag it over the bottom. The dredge plows up the mud and the clams are thrown into a big chain-metal bag that’s hung on the tail of the dredge. They drag for fifteen minutes, and then they haul up and unload the bag on the deck. The ocean clammers are making a ton of money. They’re getting a dollar to a dollar and a half a bushel.”

  As Mr. Flood sits in a nearby ship’s chandlery with its proprietor and with Mitchell, devouring the delicious clams, his thoughts—and the story—pivot to the subject of mortality. A year closer to his goal of hitting one hundred fifteen, Mr. Flood had certainly enjoyed a full life, but even more delicious is the sensation of outliving other old people. “This is something I got no business telling a young man,” Mr. Flood says, “but the pleasantest news to any human being over seventy-five is the news that some other human being around that age just died.”

  A third and final installment, “Mr. Flood’s Party,” appeared in August of 1945. More-discerning New Yorker readers may have recognized this as the title of an elegiac poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, about “old Eben Flood”—and thus catch the first sly tip-off from Mitchell that, where his Mr. Flood was concerned, all was not as it seemed.

  The occasion is Mr. Flood’s ninety-fifth birthday party. Mitchell and a handful of Mr. Flood’s friends are assembled in the old man’s room at the Hartford, which he has tidied up for the party. The story begins as a paean to the life-giving elixir that is the oyster. Mr. Flood relates the unlikely tale of Sam, a twenty-two-year-old draft horse that pulled a delivery wagon for so long he no longer had the energy to flick his tail at the bothersome flies. But when a shucker slips some oysters into Sam’s feedbag as a gag, the horse suddenly becomes so frisky that he later breaks his leg chasing after a mare on an icy street. Mr. Flood then discloses that a certain racehorse owned by an oysterman at the market is fed oysters or clams in preparation for a race. “He’s not much of a horse—no looks, no style; he only cost eleven hundred dollars—but he wins every race they want him to win,” Mr. Flood says. “They don’t let him win every race he runs; that’d look peculiar.”

  From this point on, the piece plays out like a latter-day Canterbury Tales, with each character recounting a story in turn, each one a testament to the fickle and unknowable nature of life. Indeed, the next-to-last word in the story goes to an embalmer, Mr. Bethea (“If I had it to do all over again, I don’t know as I’d choose embalming as my life’s work. You don’t get the respect that’s due you”).

  Mitchell’s stories turned Mr. Flood into a minor celebrity. But he was an elusive one. Newspaper reporters and New Yorker readers would come by the Hartford Hotel in hopes of visiting with him, to no avail. After “The Black Clams” appeared, publisher M. Lincoln Schuster was so inspired that he sent Mitchell a telegram with a proposal. “Tell the mayor of the fish market we are fascinated by his philosophy of life and death, his taste in Arctica islandica and the superb way you and he together have put it all into words,” it read. “Don’t you think his salty experiences, his flavorsome ideas and his mind ‘a turmoil of regrets’ would make a colorful and vivid autobiography especially if you could give a helping hand? Do you believe the mayor of Fulton Fish Market would let us send an editor down to investigate?”

  In reply, Mitchell was polite but curt. “Thank you ever so much for your telegram about the story on Hugh G. Flood,” he wrote. “I’m glad you liked it. I’m sorry, but I don’t think Mr. Flood would be interested in doing an autobiography. As a matter of fact, I’m working on a biography of him. It will be published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, probably late in 1945.”

  —

  What Mitchell declined to say was that he couldn’t introduce Schuster, or one of Schuster’s editors, or anyone else for that matter, to Mr. Flood. The old man didn’t exist. He was a composite, comprising elements of several long-established figures at the Fulton Fish Market—with a large dollop of Mitchell himself thrown in for good measure. But it would be several more years before readers knew the truth of the situation. When the three Mr. Flood pieces were published as a slender book in 1948, Mitchell added in an author’s note: “These stories of fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth first appeared in The New Yorker. Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past. I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts.”

  Why a composite? Forty years later, Mitchell explained that the device was about the only way he could really put across the story he had been driven to tell from his first exposure to the Fulton Fish Market as a cub newspaperman. Mitchell had not entirely given up the idea of producing an epic tale of New York, his adopted home. Once he’d imagined that would be a sweeping novel, but by now he had come to think he might accomplish much the same thing in a story of the fish market and the characters who populated it. “I had been trying to write this thing about the Fulton Fish Market in a kind of Melvillean way,” Mitchell told Norman Sims. “I feel funny to say such a thing. I read Moby-Dick in college and it had a great effect on me. I had often thought about a Melvillean background with the Fulton Fish Market.”

  In a decade of gathering material on the Fulton Market, Mitchell had developed a warm relationship with William A. Winant, a prominent purveyor in the market whose family had worked the trade for several generations. Because of Winant’s advanced age, colorful personality, widespread connections, and deep roots in the market, Mitchell thought him a logical and attractive centerpiece for his tale. There was just one problem. “Well, Mr. Winant wouldn’t cooperate,” Mitchell explained. “He’d talk to me. We were great friends. He was quite old then. And Mr. Gus Lockwood, his partner, he wouldn’t cooperate. There were several elderly men down there. Chesebro Brothers, Robbins and Graham. They were the same way.”

  M
itchell said that one day he was talking with New Yorker editor Harold Ross about the dilemma, when Ross offered a potential solution. “There had been a number of composite profiles [in the magazine],” Mitchell said, “a composite profile of a policeman, for example, that McKelway had written. So [Ross] said, ‘Why don’t you write a composite?’

  “I did. I developed Old Mr. Flood.”

  According to Mitchell, Ross instructed the writer to make the tale as accurate in its contextual details as possible. So while the main character and most of the secondary characters in the Mr. Flood trilogy were fictional, some of the latter were real. Real, too, were some of the settings and the specifics of Mitchell’s reportage, such as the laborious process of how clammers dredged up their precious cargo.

  Looking back at the trilogy years later, Mitchell produced a memo that painstakingly sorted out the Mr. Flood fact from fancy. The memo is undated and it’s not clear what its purpose was, though it was included among other reporting-related information in his journal materials. Mitchell may have written it simply to remind himself what was what:

  The Hartford House was a real place, but it doesn’t exist any longer. Since the book appeared, it went through three changes in ownership, and was torn down in 1958.

  Maggiani’s fishing-boat chandlery, in which the second story in the book is laid, is entirely fictional, as is Mr. Maggiani himself.

  Several other places mentioned in passing, such as S.A. Brown’s drugstore, Mrs. Palumbo’s bakery, and the Purity Spice Mill do or did exist. S.A. Brown’s went out of business, and the building has been torn down.

  Sloppy Louie’s exists….

  The following characters are entirely fictional: Mr. Flood; his daughter Louise; Mrs. Birdy Treppel the fishwife; Mr. Ah Got Um; Mr. P.J. Mooney; Tom Maggiani; Old Dan the barber; Peter Stetson; Jack Murchison the waiter; Tom Bethea the embalmer; Matthew T. Cusack the watchman; Ben Fass; Sam the horse and Woodrow his driver; Gus Lowry; Charlie Titus; Captain Oscar Doxsee; Mr. Unger; Archie Ennis.

  The only real people in the book (they appear only incidentally, and their names could and should be changed) are Mrs. James Donald, who was the owner of the Hartford House; James Donald, who was the bartender there; Gus Trein, who was the manager; Drew Radel, the oysterman (he died after the book came out); George Still (also dead); and Edmond Irwin.

  While in retrospect this approach to a New Yorker story seems strange or even inexplicable, it was consistent with Ross’s personality and his quirks as an editor. As Mitchell indicated, The New Yorker had published composite characters before, and it would again; the dubious technique would not really disappear from the print media’s bag of tricks until the general elevation of journalistic standards several decades later. In its early years especially, The New Yorker routinely merged fact and fiction in the short, confectionary sketches it called “casuals,” which it didn’t bother to label for readers—who couldn’t have cared, anyway, since the pieces were so ephemeral as to be harmless. It must also be remembered that for Ross, the primary purpose of The New Yorker was to mine humor from the city it covered; he always said he began the magazine as a “fifteen-cent comic paper,” and he worked tirelessly to make sure it never took itself too seriously. And, of course, Joseph Mitchell was one of the magazine’s few staffers who had substantive portfolios in both fact and fiction. Which is to say, Ross had confidence that as a writer Mitchell would be able to handle the composite adroitly—his main concern.

  Then, finally, was this highly germane fact: Joseph Mitchell had done it before.

  —

  In a 1961 letter to The New Yorker’s in-house attorney, Milton Greenstein, Mitchell explained that in “King of the Gypsies,” his popular 1942 Profile, Cockeye Johnny Nikanov was likewise a composite. “Insofar as the principal character is concerned, the gypsy king himself, it is a work of the imagination,” he wrote. “Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did.” Mitchell was explaining the situation to Greenstein because at the time he was working with a producer to create a musical based on the Profile (and a kind of sequel he wrote in 1955), but another theatrical script—by a then up-and-coming producer and writer named Sidney Sheldon, later famous for his popular television series and novels—had surfaced. Mitchell had read it and felt the treatment appropriated too much of his gypsy stories. “No matter how true to life Cockeye Johnny happens to be, he is a fictional character, and I invented him, and he is not in ‘the public domain,’ he is mine,” Mitchell insisted. In fact, his main purpose in disclosing all this to Greenstein was to inquire as to what legal recourse he had, if any, to block Sheldon’s prospective production.

  Mitchell explained that his interest in gypsies went back to his Southern boyhood, when he first encountered them, and grew when he was a newspaperman becoming acquainted with various New York families. He had read dozens of books on gypsies and was intimately familiar with their history and traditions. He secured Ross’s approval to do a Profile about a gypsy king that would double as a vivid cultural portrait of the gypsy people for New Yorker readers. But that idea proved difficult in execution, as Mitchell revealed to Greenstein:

  In 1942, after doing the reporting for the gypsy king Profile, I told Mr. Ross that because of wartime conditions not a single one of the gypsy kings in the city at that time was a really representative one and that a picture of gypsy life built around any one of them (which was what we were trying to do) would be a distortion. Consequently, with his knowledge and approval, I invented Cockeye Johnny Nikanov. Contained in him are aspects of a number of gypsy kings I had known in previous times in the South and in New York City and I think I can safely say that he is truer to life than I would’ve been able to make him had he been a real person—most of the gypsy kings I have known have had long records of arrests but no convictions, at least for felonies (it is the women who have criminal records), and such men can sue for libel or invasion of privacy, or threaten to, the same as men whose reputations are flawless.

  The fact that Mitchell, with Ross’s imprimatur, had already presented a composite character as a real person surely made their decision to create Old Mr. Flood much easier when Mitchell confronted an ostensibly comparable barrier to writing about the Fulton Fish Market. But unlike with Mr. Flood, Mitchell, for as long as he lived, never made any public acknowledgment about Cockeye Johnny’s fictional pedigree. Then again he hadn’t had to, as gypsies by nature were peripatetic and there had never been any public questioning of Nikanov’s existence.

  In a sense, the true misleading of readers came in how the magazine labeled the Mr. Flood stories, and Cockeye Johnny’s before that. If a New Yorker story was identified as a Profile (as the first Mr. Flood story and “King of the Gypsies” were) or a Reporter at Large (as the two Flood sequels were), readers simply assumed them to be factual; it would never have occurred that the characters might be fictions or fabrications. But even in this departure, Ross—a lifelong lover of practical jokes—was tapping in to some of his deeper instincts. He would have been especially delighted to know he was “pulling one over” on sophisticates like M. Lincoln Schuster and other literary friends, and there is evidence he clearly relished this particular ruse. At the same time that Schuster had queried Mitchell, the publisher also wrote Ross about a possible Mr. Flood book. Ross passed along that correspondence to Mitchell with a note of his own, saying that “ten or twelve people have spoken of the last Flood piece with the usual enthusiasm and extravagance that always marks the appearance of one of your pieces. Don’t picture Mr. Flood as more eccentric than he is in his diet. You know damned well he eats cole slaw, and a few other things in addition to potatoes and onions. He’s not that cracked.”

  Ross also was an editor who liked to keep his readers alert. Indeed, a year after the third Mr. Flood installment, Ross stunned his audience when, with no tip-off whatsoever, he turned over a complete issue of The New Yorker to a single story, John Hersey’s journalistically groundbreaking account of the dropping
of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  Nevertheless, it is a genuine paradox that Ross, so finicky about accuracy that he established an entire department for fact-checking New Yorker stories, could be so cavalier about the most fundamental “fact” of all—the actual existence of a Profile subject. He somehow drew a distinction here, telling himself that he wasn’t so much tricking readers as presenting them with a gift they couldn’t have had otherwise—which was arguably true.

  Despite Ross’s support, Mitchell found the popular reaction to Mr. Flood’s debut unsettling. “People, throngs of people, went down there to the hotel where he was supposed to live,” Mitchell said. “I told them at the hotel to just tell them he’s up at Norwalk at his daughter’s. I never intended to…foster a hoax or anything. That was the farthest thing from my mind. The idea was to get the spirit of the fish market.” After that initial Profile and its visceral public response, Mitchell even wondered whether they should continue with the follow-up pieces. “We began to feel strange about this,” Mitchell said. “But Ross said, ‘Oh, go ahead.’ I don’t think, except with his approval, that it would have been possible. We weren’t trying to fool anybody, really.”

  Only those few editors at The New Yorker who needed to know the circumstances were let in on the truth. But Mitchell’s colleague Philip Hamburger recalled years later that there were at least some suspicions at the time about the extravagantly crusty and sagacious Mr. Flood. “When I first read [‘Old Mr. Flood’], I took it at face value,” he said. “And then I began to think about it and said to myself: ‘You shrewd little bastard. He’s making this up.’ ”