Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Trickery aside, from a writing standpoint what is perhaps most significant about the Mr. Flood pieces is how they allowed Mitchell to channel, unfettered by facts, his own feelings about life and a worldview that was already lamenting a New York quickly passing away. Ever the old soul—“Joe has been working hard at being an old man since he was in short pants,” observed a longtime friend, bar owner Tim Costello—Mitchell was fascinated by the elderly. As a reporter he loved the way they talked and how their unfiltered nature often exposed hard truths that less forthright (or “more polite”) people would avoid. The themes he dealt with in the Mr. Flood pieces—the inexorable march of mortality, the serendipity of life, the fickle humor of our condition, the power of good food and drink, modern life’s undermining much of the best of the past—represented Mitchell’s own attitudes and preoccupations. Indeed, in many ways Mitchell was Mr. Flood, and he drops numerous hints to that effect. He gave the old man his own birthday (July 27). Mr. Flood shares a first name and middle initial with Hugh G. Mitchell, one of the writer’s most prominent ancestors. Writer and subject have the same taste in literature: Mr. Flood’s small room is cluttered with yellowed clippings of the columnist Heywood Broun and books that include the Bible, the collected works of Mark Twain, and a “beautifully written” government guidebook, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, which few laymen but Mitchell would even know existed. Both are devotees of seafood in all its incarnations, and both deplore that much of New York’s architectural heritage is being lost to the wrecking ball. Indeed, time after time Mr. Flood says things that one can easily hear coming out of Mitchell’s own mouth, or that he would say or write in his journals years later. To cite just a few examples:

  On his ambivalence about strong drink: “Still and all, there’ve been times if it hadn’t been for whiskey, I don’t know what would’ve become of me. It was either get drunk or throw the rope over the rafter.”

  On pretentiousness: “I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy.”

  On “new and improved” foods: “I’m not against vitamins, whatever to hell they are, but God took care of that matter away back there in the hitherto—God and nature, and not some big scientist or other.”

  On religion and the hereafter: “[Mr. Flood] comes of a long line of Baptists and has a nagging fear of the hereafter, complicated by the fact that the descriptions of heaven in the Bible are as forbidding to him as those of hell. ‘I don’t really want to go to either one of those places,’ he says.”

  On life: “Nobody knows why they do anything.”

  In his interview with Sims, Mitchell acknowledged there is much of himself in Mr. Flood—including, at least to some extent, his diet. “All the things I said in there about eating fish, that’s what I believe,” Mitchell said. “Seafoodetarian.” Observed Philip Hamburger, “Joe was a man who dwelt at great length with, and was always conscious of, mortality. And the magnificence of Old Mr. Flood actually to me was the way in which a young man projects himself into the body and mind of an old man and does it with such literary style. But Joe is thinking about his own death. There’s no question.”

  Thus for Mitchell, the invention of Mr. Flood—and the invention of Cockeye Johnny Nikanov before him—represented not a prank but a pursuit for a larger truth. “Sometimes facts don’t tell the truth, you know,” Mitchell told Sims, pointing out that he’d read many feature stories over the years about the Fulton Market, but for him they never got at the underlying “truth” of what actually happens there, or why. He went on to say that virtually all “nonfiction” works represent a subjective shaping of the “facts” by the author or reporter that may or may not add up to the truth. “When I’m working on a story,” he said, “before I’m through I have a huge collection of notes. Typewritten. And then I realize: All these are facts, and the truth lies within these collections of interviews. Sometimes it delights me when someone tells a story in a different way. I’ve had several versions, a man telling me the story of his life in a different way. You realize that all of these are true. The word ‘composite,’ that’s the way we look at our lives. Unfortunately, I’m afraid all biographies and autobiographies are fiction.”

  He added: “I believe what I said in the Flood book; it’s more truthful than factual.”

  Before the disclosure, Ross raised the prospect with Mitchell of a fourth Mr. Flood story, which would end with the old man simply disappearing without a trace. However, by that point the writer, feeling uneasy enough about how far the ruse had played out, was “appalled” by the idea of continuing. He also was beginning to fear that when the truth did eventually come out, the entire thing would be written off as a hoax and then perhaps cast doubt on his previous work. This would have been especially worrisome given the well-kept secret about his gypsy composite. As it was, Mitchell for years afterward took pains to assure questioners that his other nonfiction pieces were, indeed, entirely factual—knowing, of course, that in at least one other instance, that wasn’t true.

  In any case, when the book version of Old Mr. Flood appeared with its disclaimer about Mr. Flood, there was no apparent anger or sense of deception. Some reviews didn’t even mention it, while others, like the reviewer in the Herald Tribune, seemed to condone it. “As a reporter of the New York scene whose integrity equals his human insight and admirable command of a disciplined prose that is never loosely journalistic or falsely literary, Joseph Mitchell informs his readers that this portrait of Mr. Flood is not one man but a composite of several venerable Fulton Fish Market habitués,” the review said. “His purpose has been to make the stories ‘truthful rather than factual.’ Having become acquainted with Mr. Flood when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker we are reluctant to accept a multiple image. In his person and his philosophies, in his speech and in every detail of his deportment, old Mr. Flood remains intact and indivisible.”

  In our own times, however, Mitchell’s Mr. Flood has occasionally been cited and criticized, usually in the wake of some instance of high-profile journalistic fabulism, such as that committed by Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, and there surely would have been even more such assertions had people known about Mitchell’s invention of Cockeye Johnny Nikanov. But it’s a questionable tactic for today’s critics to apply modern standards to past actions rather than the practices of the time. Of course, the other key distinction between Mr. Flood and contemporary journalistic inventions is that Blair, Glass, and their ilk were deceiving their own editors and publications, while in Mitchell’s case, his editor not only knew about the deception but actually encouraged it.

  It should also be remembered that, at the end of the day, Mitchell was really creating literature. Philip Hamburger called the autobiographical nature of the Mr. Flood pieces “fiction of the highest.” Mitchell “was projecting himself fictionally into old age, and it’s a masterpiece. There are no two ways about it. And I don’t think that it makes a bit of difference whether there was a Mr. Flood or there wasn’t a Mr. Flood. Just as it doesn’t make a difference whether there was a Nicholas Nickleby or a David Copperfield.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR

  “I didn’t rest so good last night,” [Mr. Poole] said. “I had a dream. In this dream, a great earthquake had shook the world and had upset the sea level, and New York Harbor had been drained as dry as a bathtub when the plug is pulled. I was down on the bottom, poking around, looking things over. There were hundreds of ships of all kinds lying on their sides in the mud, and among them were some wormy old wrecks that went down long years ago, and there were rusty anchors down there and dunnage and driftwood and old hawsers and tugboat bumpers and baling wire and tin cans and bottles and stranded eels and a skeleton standing waist-deep in a barrel of cement that the barrel had rotted off of. The rats had left the piers and were down on the bottom, eating the eels, and the gulls were flopping about, jerking eels away from the rats. I came across an old wooden wreck all grown over with seaweed, an old, old Dutch wreck. She had a
hole in her, and I pulled the seaweed away and looked in and I saw some chests in there that had money spilling out of them, and I tried my best to crawl in. The dream was so strong that I crawled up under the headboard of the bed, trying to get my hands on the Dutch money, and I damn near scraped an ear off.”

  —From “The Bottom of the Harbor,” 1951

  —

  Once—and apparently only once—Joseph Mitchell summoned the courage to climb to the highest reach of the Statue of Liberty, its torch. Having swung treetop to treetop as a boy adventurer and ascended still-rising skyscrapers as a newspaper reporter, Mitchell was not one to be intimated by heights. Even so, after clambering up the five hundred or so steps just to get to the lady’s crown, Mitchell nervously worked his way up the forty-foot nearly vertical ladder that ran inside her narrow, upraised arm. At the final rung, he stepped out from darkness into sunshine and a view unlike any other in the world—the majestic entirety of New York Harbor at his feet. Daintily, he moved about the tiny balcony surrounding the torch, gazing for miles in every direction; with a stiff wind whipping about, his knees wobbled and an unfamiliar queasiness rose in the pit of his stomach. Access to the torch had been closed to everyone but maintenance workers since a terrorist scare in 1916, but there was another, unstated reason—human beings simply were not meant to be up here, suspended more than three hundred feet above the sea. But occasionally a persuasive working journalist could still gain access and, despite his nerves, Mitchell relished what this privileged vantage point afforded him. Below him, freighters and tugboats and ferries and scows crisscrossed the watery concourse, in slow motion. Miniature ocean liners waited patiently at the Manhattan piers, and miniature battleships sat under repair at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He could follow the East River to the Williamsburg Bridge and beyond, and due north the view was straight up the Hudson to the horizon. Turning to the west he saw the meandering rivulets of the Meadowlands. To the south was the Verrazano Narrows, the harbor entrance separating Staten Island from Brooklyn, and then the Atlantic beyond. After a few minutes Mitchell could feel the arm swaying, and he pulled back from the thin railing and took his descent—but not before the sheer immensity and glory of the harbor was imprinted on him forever.

  Amid the boxfuls of yellowed newspaper clippings, writing scraps, journal notes, pamphlets, and other miscellany that Mitchell left after his death, there was one especially telling artifact. It was a lengthy article about the workings of New York Harbor, which he had cut out from the February 1937 issue of Fortune magazine. In an accompanying double-page spread, a map annotated the scores of bays, channels, inlets, and marine landmarks that made up the harbor—a two-dimensional version of what Mitchell saw with his own eyes. The article covered the commercial aspects of the harbor in great detail, from the comings and goings of those stately liners to the bustling Brooklyn docks to Staten Island’s oyster grounds and the Fulton Fish Market. The article is heavily underlined; it’s clear Mitchell read it closely and set it aside for some future use.

  In fact, Mitchell would devote the next phase of his writing life to a series of stories from and about the New York waterfront, pieces that dealt with the harbor’s impact on the lives of the city’s residents but also with its larger, metaphorical implications for all people, wherever they lived. They are stories that, taken together, established a defining Mitchell motif. In one sense this body of work can be seen as a logical extension of the themes Mitchell developed in “Old Mr. Flood.” Certainly the tales grew out of his interest in the waterfront, first cultivated years before at the fish market, and no doubt his Depression-era experience as a merchant seaman further whetted his curiosity about lives that revolved around the water. Then, too, the “Rats” story, by happy chance, had nudged Mitchell in this direction.

  Credit 9.1

  Therese caught her husband in a rare recreational pose, no suit or hat in sight, during a vacation in Rhode Island.

  After several years devoted almost exclusively to the “Old Mr. Flood” series, the next piece Mitchell published centered on a character almost Mr. Flood’s equal in terms of his crustiness, idiosyncratic personality, and firm views on life. But this time the protagonist, Ellery Thompson, captain of a hardworking fishing boat, was as real as the wrecks that littered the fishing grounds off his home base of Stonington, Connecticut.

  The Profile, entitled “Dragger Captain,” appeared in The New Yorker in two parts in January of 1947. Thompson is captain of the Eleanor, a trawling boat, or “dragger,” which pulls nets to snare its catch—primarily flounder destined for New York’s restaurants. At age forty-seven, he has three decades of fishing behind him and is widely considered the ablest captain in Stonington. With so much hard-won experience, he can tell from the weather at sunrise if a day is going to be worth putting out to sea, and he knows how to drag a line close to the submerged wrecks without snagging it. Most important, he has an almost mystical intuition as to where the fish are. His two crewmen tell Mitchell that over time Thompson has achieved a kind of flounder consciousness. “He only sleeps four or five hours,” one says. “The rest of the night he lies in bed and imagines he’s a big bull flounder out on the ocean floor.”

  Mitchell came to know Thompson through mutual acquaintances at the Fulton Market, where the captain sold his catch. It’s easy to see why the rumpled sailor appealed to the natty planter’s son. For one thing, Thompson, while not formally educated, is cerebral in his way, and he seems to have his priorities in order—which is to say, they align perfectly with Mitchell’s. “He abhors hurry,” Mitchell writes. “He thinks that humanity in general has got ahead of itself. He once threatened to fire a man in his crew because he worked too hard.” At another point, he says of Thompson, “He is deeply skeptical. He once said that the older he gets the more he is inclined to believe that humanity is helpless. ‘I read the junk in the papers,’ he said, ‘and sometimes, like I’m eating in some eating joint and I can’t help myself, I listen to the junk on the radio, and the way it looks to me, it’s blind leading blind out of the frying pan into the fire, world without end.’ ”

  It turns out that a tragedy underlies Thompson’s dark outlook—the terrible death of his younger brother, Morris, a fellow dragger captain. During the worst days of the Depression, Morris took his boat out to fish in a gale, against his better judgment, because he needed the money. A huge wave swept him over the side and he drowned. Thompson and his father went out as soon as they got word and began to drag for his body. As Mitchell recounts, “On the morning of the third day”—the Christian imagery unmistakable, if not redemptive in this instance—“when they had almost decided to quit and go in, it came up in the net.”

  Despite this traumatizing experience, Thompson manages to meet life less with bitterness than with a droll world-weariness. He is, in fact, a near-ideal Mitchell protagonist. The captain is eloquent, he is highly skilled at a man’s trade, he is a pilothouse philosopher—and for good measure, he cooks up a tasty lobster. Mitchell explains that when other captains catch lobsters in their fishing nets, they ship the best of them to the market for sale. Thompson, however, keeps the best lobsters for himself and his crew, boiling them expertly and storing them on ice to indulge in whenever the mood strikes. He holds forth on any number of subjects, with great humor. For instance, somewhere along his life’s journey Thompson became a self-taught painter, specializing in portraits of the Eleanor and the fishing boats of friends and acquaintances, the vessels invariably braving angry skies and storm-tossed waves. Much to everyone’s surprise, Thompson’s paintings became popular, first with the kind of people looking for nautical-themed art for vacation homes, then among more-serious collectors who made the trek out from New York to acquire them. The collectors “never fail to inform [Thompson] that he is a primitive,” Mitchell writes. “This word used to anger him. He now understands its significance in relation to painting, but he pretends that he doesn’t. Last summer, a woman from New York told him that she knew dozens of painte
rs but he was the first primitive she’d ever met. ‘I’m not as primitive as I have been,’ Ellery said. ‘Nowheres near. Back before I got the rheumatism, I was without a doubt the most primitive man in eastern Connecticut.’ ”

  In reporting his story, Mitchell spent long hours fishing with Thompson and his crew, as they laboriously set out the dragging nets and later reeled them back in to see what had fetched up. Much of Mitchell’s time on the Eleanor coincided with the visits of two oceanographers who were using the boat as a kind of floating laboratory. Like Mitchell, the scientists had gravitated to Thompson because of his reputation as the most knowledgeable man in the Stonington fleet, the better to help them assess the health of commercial fishing in and around Long Island Sound. Again, much like Mitchell, who became something of an authority on everything from anthropology to architecture in pursuit of his work, Thompson embraced the oceanographers’ research so completely that he became a virtual collaborator and as conversant in the Latin names for the fish he caught as the scientists were.

  Because they spent so much time together for the Profile, and because of their congruent worldviews, Mitchell and Thompson became friends. Their connection was further cemented by the fact that “Dragger Captain” provided them a tantalizing if brief promise of Hollywood fame and fortune.

  After the story was published, Mitchell was approached about turning it into a film script. He was open to the idea, and so was Thompson, to whom Mitchell promised 10 percent of any proceeds that might result. It seems there was a deal struck for an option—basically a lease on the movie rights for a set period of time in exchange for a modest payment—and much correspondence between the two ensued as Mitchell kept the captain apprised of the prospects. Occasional notes in the gossip columns fueled their hopes. “I’m enclosing a clipping, in case you missed it, of the Hedda Hopper column I mentioned in my telegram, in which she said that Warner Brothers had ‘acquired’ the Dragger Captain Profile and would develop it for Gary Cooper,” Mitchell wrote in May of 1948. “This report was repeated in movie columns in the Herald Tribune and the Times. I was quite excited about it….” But in following up for himself, Mitchell learned that the report grew out of “studio commissary gossip” and that “the only truth in it is that a writer has been assigned to try and work out a script on dragger fishing, using the Profile as background, which, of course, we knew already.” In the end it was all just Hollywood fairy dust; neither Gary Cooper nor anyone else ever appeared in a movie version of “Dragger Captain.”