Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

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  It’s not clear why—likely as not it had to do with Mitchell’s conflicted feelings about the work—but the slim volume Old Mr. Flood was not published as a book until 1948, three years after the culminating piece appeared in The New Yorker. Its appearance marked the writer’s tenth anniversary of joining the magazine. As had been the case with McSorley’s, his earlier anthology, Old Mr. Flood reinforced in the literary community Mitchell’s status as a writer of uncommon craftsmanship and imagination. Few observers, however, were noting that his productivity was continuing to abate. After The New Yorker published the final installment of the Mr. Flood pieces in August 1945, it would be a full sixteen months before Mitchell’s byline appeared again, with “Dragger Captain.” An even starker gauge of Mitchell’s ebbing output: In 1939, his first full year at the magazine, the eager-to-please young writer published fourteen pieces; that’s the same number he would produce from 1944 until his death half a century later.

  Of course, the stories Mitchell was turning out now were considerably longer, more shaded and complex in tone, more creatively ambitious, and more detailed in structure than those at the beginning of his career; they were, in other words, more technically demanding and simply harder to write. Mitchell was further burdened by a strain of perfectionism as compulsive as any other aspect of his personality. As a young newsman he wrote quickly because of nonstop deadlines and a newspaper’s need to fill an entire issue each day. If the results seldom satisfied him, all he could really do was strive to be better with the next story. At The New Yorker, given leave to work at his own pace and with no real deadlines pressing in on him, Mitchell was free to indulge an obsession for his writing to be just so, and this self-imposed pressure only mounted with age and growing acclaim.

  Mitchell’s perfectionism also led him to ground his stories in authoritative research, and lots of it. Always a voracious reader for pleasure, he now devoted a great deal of his reportorial time to poring over books in the service of his current projects—the more esoteric the subject, it seems, the better. (Mitchell’s papers include a 1978 letter complimenting the author of The Story of Brick, “a fascinating book to anyone interested in the history of brickmaking….”) His small apartment was chockablock with volumes, floor to ceiling. “Books, so many books, an unbelievable number of books,” recalled his daughter Nora. “He read them all. Of course, he was always reading lots of them at the same time. He had them stretched out through the apartment.”

  Still, in pursuit of a story, Mitchell’s main tools were the reporter’s classic ones—strong legs, acute observation, and unparalleled listening skills, not to mention the patience to engage in serial interview-conversations with his subjects. All this work, especially the interviews, yielded reams of original material. “I [wrote] with a kind of shorthand. An afternoon’s conversation would fill up several of those notebooks,” Mitchell explained to Norman Sims. Depending on the nature of the story, these interviews could play out over weeks, months, or even years as Mitchell patiently stalked his quarry, fueled by coffee and a bottomless curiosity. After each conversation, Mitchell would transcribe those notebooks full of his idiosyncratic shorthand into thick stacks of single-spaced typescript.

  There was an almost scientific method to Mitchell’s persistence with his subjects, and he did think about it in those clinical terms. “I’ve interviewed people so much that I know what I’m hearing better than the ordinary interviewer,” Mitchell continued with Sims. “Fortunately, I’ve been able to get them interested and not throw me out. They get goddamn tired sometimes and say, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to.’ But then they call me up and say come on back. So I think I do have an ability to know what I’m hearing the way an archaeologist knows what he is seeing when he picks it up out of the dirt. I have some good idea what it is. I like to think of it as an archaeological digging into the minds of these people.”

  With his stacks of notes at the ready, then, Mitchell would get down to his real labor—the writing. And labor it truly was, as can be readily seen from the few draft examples Mitchell left behind. Seated at the sturdy Underwood typewriter that he would use his entire New Yorker career, Mitchell would patiently cast and recast sentences, sometimes dozens of times, changing just a word or two with each iteration until an entire paragraph came together and seemed right. He would move through his drafting of the story in this slow, painstaking fashion, at certain points (in that pre-computer era) using a scissors to cut these passages apart, sometimes sentence by sentence, and physically rearranging them to get a better feel for the narrative rhythm. In so doing he often used paper clips to hold the sentence strips together, and these constructions would come to resemble a long, flexible washboard or a kind of primitive girdle. All this fussing was exceedingly time-consuming, even for a magazine writer, which helped to establish Mitchell’s growing reputation for deliberation. “If you’re going to have lunch with him and you go in and pick him up,” recalled Philip Hamburger, “you would see that he had [paper] scraps. He had been cutting out sentences…. It was obvious that the act of writing was, for Joe, a difficult one.”

  Only a person completely dedicated to words, even addicted to words, would go to such lengths with them. In Mitchell’s case, it was an addiction that sprang from his mother’s early encouragement of the reading habit. The condition was nurtured by listening to the great talkers everywhere around him while he grew up in Robeson County, be they family members or characters from the community’s fields, warehouses, churches, and stores. For instance, Mitchell said that every time he heard the hymn “There Is Power in the Blood,” he was reminded of his childhood and a Fairmont tenant farmer named Alonzo. In addition to being a farmer, Alonzo was a skilled butcher and “jackleg preacher.” And as he butchered a lamb or calf, Alonzo would sing from the hymn: “There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb….” Before he bent to his work, however, Alonzo earnestly blessed the animal and gave thanks for its use. Said Mitchell, “He butchered according to Leviticus.” Mitchell’s ear was further developed in the streets and backrooms of New York City on the newspaper beat, a true-life Damon Runyon universe of cops, hustlers, gamblers, street preachers, bartenders, and barflies.

  These aural influences were augmented by his extensive reading, which in time he came to appreciate as master classes in assembling a narrative. As seen, Mitchell devoured all types of writers and genres; in various interviews and writings he references Chaucer, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Flaubert, Rabelais, Kafka, Twain, Flannery O’Connor, Henry James, Dante, Shakespeare, and the authors of the Bible, to name but a few. Tellingly, the names are essentially all writers of fiction (well, depending on where one stands on Scripture). Still, beyond Stephen Crane and other realists in the “street” tradition, few of his influences are especially discernible in Mitchell’s own writing. Like any writer of consequence, once Mitchell got past his apprenticeship, he managed to shape a style all his own.

  That style was naturalistic, unforced, and elegant, the kind of prose that non-writers might have assumed was easy but that professionals knew was anything but. Mitchell prized permanence, endurance, and beauty, whether those qualities came together in a carefully constructed cast-iron building or a Profile. In fact, he routinely talked about writing in structural terms—how a well-told story required a substantial foundation, high-quality materials, a logical “flow,” and interesting adornments. And that is how he went about his work. Mitchell fashioned long, languid sentences that built layer upon layer, achieving a satisfying richness—not dissimilar to many Southern novelists who were his contemporaries. His authoritative and liberal use of facts framed his tale, even as his careful sentences relentlessly propelled it along. Mitchell stories may not have much plot, as such; the “action” more typically involves human beings revealing themselves to us, bit by bit, usually in their own words, until we become privy to their innermost feelings and impulses.

  While Mitchell was telling one story on the sur
face, much of his deliberation owed to the effort he made to achieve an extra level of meaning with his pieces—what he sometimes called their “underground stream” of meaning. It was this less-obvious meaning, he felt strongly, that marked the best literature and brought people back for second or third readings. And certainly no other writer “sounded” quite like Joseph Mitchell. His clear, foursquare style merged with his penchant for infusing historical context to create an appealingly gauzy effect, a feeling the novelist Thomas Beller once described simply as “Mitchell time.” “Mitchell invented a temporal dimension for his stories, a strange and twilit place,” Beller explained, where “a density of historical fact and the feeling of whole eras fading from view are sharply juxtaposed with scenes of cinematic immediacy related in the present tense.”

  Mitchell’s was also an indisputably American voice. It’s ironic, then, that his paramount literary influence, and the one he most openly admired, was James Joyce—neither American nor a writer of nonfiction. Indeed, one can rightly be considered a photographic negative of the other: Joyce worked in fiction, Mitchell nonfiction; Joyce characters were often real people given a thin fictional veneer, while Mitchell brought fictional techniques to telling the stories of real people; Joyce prose was dizzyingly complex and enigmatic, Mitchell prose direct and clear. Yet at the most fundamental level Mitchell and Joyce were artistic brothers, because both examined the lives of their home cities’ most humble citizens, in the most modest precincts, to convey universal truths.

  Beyond that artistic connection, Joyce resonated with Mitchell on any number of personal and psychological levels. As someone who always considered himself an exile, Mitchell felt a kinship with Joyce’s need to leave Ireland in pursuit of his muse. Then there was their mutual delight with word origins, wordplay, and puns. While Mitchell didn’t follow Joyce’s impish lead in sprinkling his stories with puns, in his personal life he reveled in them. Sometimes when Mitchell was invited to an event he preferred to duck, he politely told the callers he was sorry but he was just headed off to Buffalo. That led him to tell friends that if he ever wrote his autobiography, it would be entitled “A Man Called Me…But I Was in Buffalo.” More seriously, Mitchell brought a lexicographer’s zeal to documenting unique words, phrases, and usages, particularly from his native region. A heavy rain is a “frogchoker”; to “dingdong” someone is to nag them to death. “He got his legs crossed” meant he was in financial trouble, but if things improved he might get “almost back up to broke.” “He may out-nice you, but she will out-sad you,” observed one acquaintance. “If she does that again, I’ll snatch her baldheaded,” said another.

  Joyce’s main influence on Mitchell, however, was simply inspiration. At one point in the early seventies, Mitchell noted in his journal that he hadn’t read many new books of late, that the older he got the more he preferred rereading works that he knew from experience spoke to him. “The novel that I get down most often is Finnegans Wake,” he wrote. “I keep my place in it, and I gradually read it straight through, and I read it over and over, just as one of my grandmothers used to read the Bible. I am now reading it for the seventh time. I feel toward it much as a very old man might feel toward an overcoat he has bought and knows that he most likely won’t ever buy another: it will last me.”

  While drafting a story, Mitchell would closet himself in his warren along the staff writers’ row of the twentieth floor of The New Yorker’s offices, a bleak venue that Hamburger famously dubbed “Sleepy Hollow.” Gardner Botsford, a longtime New Yorker editor who handled many of Mitchell’s stories, described Mitchell’s office as an austere space, uncluttered and with everything in its place. His desk held a glass full of “needle-sharp pencils.” He sat in an uncomfortable-looking wooden swivel chair, bent over his typewriter while he composed. As he did, Mitchell listened for the music of his passages as intently as he listened for rhythms in his characters’ confessionals. Nonfiction writing “has to have a lyricism,” he would explain. “By lyricism I don’t mean it has to be poetic by any means. I do believe the most commonplace words are the ones that in the end have the most power…. The commonplace words are the strong ones. It reminds me of those old paving stones the fishermen use to weight the nets. Those words are like stones. I’ll search endlessly for the right small words of a few syllables that hold something up. A foundation.”

  When at last Mitchell had the story where he wanted it, he typed up a final version for submission to his editors. The payoff for all his labor was copy that, even within the finicky precincts of The New Yorker, was legendarily pristine. “I’d insert maybe three commas,” Botsford recalled of reading a Mitchell manuscript. “[He] took forever to write a piece, but when he turned it in, the editing could be done during one cup of coffee.”

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  Sometime in the middle of 1948, Mitchell started reporting a story about a tightly knit Brooklyn-based group that had fascinated him for years. The Caughnawaga community of Native Americans was “a band of mixed-blood Mohawks,” widely respected in the construction trades for their skill as high-steel workers. Mitchell, with his fascination for buildings, had long been cognizant of the unique role the Caughnawaga played in the creation of the city’s signature bridges and skyscrapers—a culture operating high above New Yorkers but not really of them. In September of 1949 he told their story in “The Mohawks in High Steel,” a Reporter at Large piece notable not only for its fascinating storyline but also for its non-patronizing treatment of Native Americans at a time when that was highly unusual. Indeed, a New Yorker colleague (and a polymath of a different kind), Edmund Wilson, was so taken with the story that he used it as the introduction to his book Apologies to the Iroquois. Mitchell describes life on the Caughnawaga reservation a few miles upriver from Montreal, Canada, and in its satellite colony in the North Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.

  Mitchell again focuses on one person to help convey the story of a culture. This time, he is “a man of fifty-four whose white name is Orvis Diabo and whose Indian name is O-ron-ia-ke-te, or He Carries the Sky.” Diabo quit his rivet gang because of crippling arthritis. A regular at the Nevins Bar and Grill, Diabo, like Mitchell, is a man with one foot in two separate worlds and a bit unsteady for the straddle. One day Mitchell finds him drinking gin instead of his usual ale.

  “I feel very low in my mind,” he said. “I’ve got to go back to the reservation. I’ve run out of excuses and I can’t put it off much longer. I got a letter from my wife today and she’s disgusted with me. ‘I’m sick and tired of begging you to come home,’ she said. ‘You can sit in Brooklyn until your tail takes root.’ The trouble is, I don’t want to go. That is, I do and I don’t. I’ll try to explain what I mean. An Indian high-steel man, when he first leaves the reservation to work in the States, the homesickness just about kills him. The first few years, he goes back as often as he can. Every time he finishes a job, unless he’s thousands of miles away, he goes back. If he’s working in New York, he drives up weekends, and it’s a twelve-hour drive. After a while, he gets married and brings his wife down and starts a family, and he doesn’t go back so often. Oh, he most likely takes the wife and children up for the summer, but he doesn’t stay with them. After three or four days, the reservation gets on his nerves and he highballs it back to the States. He gets used to the States. The years go by. He gets to be my age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger, and one fine morning he comes to the conclusion he’s a little too damned stiff in the joints to be walking a naked beam five hundred feet up in the air…. He gives up high-steel work and he packs his belongings and he takes his money out of the bank…and he goes on back to the reservation for good. And it’s hard on him. He’s used to danger, and reservation life is very slow; the biggest thing that ever happens is a funeral. He’s used to jumping around from job to job, and reservation life boxes him in. He’s used to having a drink, and it’s against the law to traffic in liquor on the reservation; he has to buy a bottle in some French-Canadian town across th
e river and smuggle it in like a high-school boy, and that annoys the hell out of him.”

  Then again, it’s on the reservation where Diabo (pronounced DIE-bo) can find the traditional foods he longs for: o-nen-sto, or corn soup, and boiled Indian bread made with hominy and kidney beans. Diabo even finds comfort resting in a graveyard:

  “There’s hundreds of high-steel men buried in there. The ones that were killed on the job, they don’t have stones; their graves are marked with lengths of steel girders made into crosses. There’s a forest of girder crosses in there. So I was sitting on Uncle Miles’s stone, thinking of the way things go in life, and suddenly the people in the longhouse began to sing and dance and drum on their drums. They were singing Mohawk chants that came down from the old, old red-Indian times. I could hear men’s voices and women’s voices and children’s voices. The Mohawk language, when it’s sung, it’s beautiful to hear. Oh, it takes your breath away. A feeling ran through me that made me tremble; I had to take a deep breath to quiet my heart, it was beating so fast. I felt very sad; at the same time, I felt very peaceful.”