Harold Ross, having seen “The Mohawks in High Steel” in galleys prior to publication, was the first—though scarcely the last—to praise it. “I would report that I’ve read the story on the Indians, and that I consider it wonderful,” Ross told Mitchell in a letter that July. “Not only am I gratified at being a party to the publication of such a distinguished piece of writing, but, personally, it takes a great load off my mind: I’ve been nagged about those Indians in Brooklyn for ten years, and have been lobbying for a story on them most of that time. I never expected one as brilliant as this, but you cast your bread on the waters and sometimes a miracle occurs.”
“Mohawks” doesn’t rest on Diabo the way “King of the Gypsies” and the Mr. Flood stories rested on their protagonists; Diabo, in fact, doesn’t even turn up until the concluding pages of the piece. Yet it would seem that Mitchell once again was less than forthright about one of his key characters.
A review of both the reservation record and Mitchell’s research for “Mohawks” (it is one of a handful of stories where some of his original reporting notes survive) strongly suggests that Diabo was either a third composite figure or quite possibly a pseudonym for a veteran construction-gang leader of that period, a man named Paul Horn. By 1949, Horn, a well-known member of the Caughnawaga, had worked in high-steel construction for almost twenty-five years, in many states. He had helped erect the Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge, and dozens of other New York landmarks. At the time he also was an elected official of the Brooklyn local of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers, the union representing the Caughnawaga and other high-steel workers. Horn lived most of the year in Brooklyn but spent summers back on the reservation in Canada. He was said to be unusually garrulous for a Caughnawaga, most of whom tended to be more guarded with outsiders.
Diabo was, and remains, a common surname among the Caughnawaga, who today are more familiarly known as the Kahnawake. Paul Horn, in fact, was a Diabo. His father, Peter Diabo, had the Indian name O-na-ka-ra-ke-te, which means He Carries the Horn, and at some point he simply changed the family name to Horn. (Recall that the Indian name of Mitchell’s character Orvis Diabo is O-ron-ia-ke-te, or He Carries the Sky.)
Early in his reporting Mitchell conducted a long interview with Horn, and in subsequent interviews Mitchell spoke to many people about Horn and his family. But there is no Paul Horn in the story. On the other hand, there are no interviews with an “Orvis Diabo” reflected in Mitchell’s reporting notes, and no one he interviewed mentioned an Orvis Diabo. During an interview with a Brooklyn minister who had worked among the Caughnawaga for years, the subject turned to Indian names generally; Mitchell typed the note “O-ron-ia-ke-te: He Carries the Sky,” then later scribbled the word “Orvis” in pencil next to this entry. There is no explanation for this, and it is the lone occasion that name appears in the notes.
Of course, it’s not known if the Mohawk files Mitchell left behind constitute the entirety of his story notes, though they appear comprehensive; an Orvis Diabo interview may yet be out there somewhere. But an extensive search turns up nothing to suggest that a Caughnawaga named Orvis Diabo, subject of a famous New Yorker story, ever existed. Nor does the name register with Kahnawake officials today. The reservation isn’t large; the population numbers about eight thousand now, and when Mitchell wrote his story it was less than three thousand. People there know one another. But the Kahnawake membership office has no record of Orvis Diabo and has never heard of him. Nor has the reservation’s library archive. Nor has Ronald Boyer, a deacon at the St. Francis Xavier Mission Church on the reservation. Now in his mid-seventies, Boyer was a high-steel man himself, helping to erect, among other structures, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Boyer knew Paul Horn, and because of his ministerial work he knows most of the people on the reservation, but he has never heard of Orvis Diabo. None of the Kahnawake asked about this matter had ever even heard of “Orvis” being used as a first name.
If the Diabo character was in essence Paul Horn, it’s unclear why Mitchell changed his identity or altered other personal details, such as his age (Horn was forty-six at the time of the story, whereas Diabo was said to be fifty-four). It’s possible that because Horn was an important union official—and at the time the only Native American to hold such a position in that local—he may have been wary of the attention from a high-profile magazine article. Beyond that, he was a somewhat controversial figure back on the reservation. The Caughnawaga, who had been converted centuries earlier by Jesuits, were mostly Catholic, with a minority of Protestants. But in the early twentieth century they saw a revival of native religious practice, centered on the traditional Iroquois longhouse. The reservation had a main longhouse, and its adherents were ardent in their observance and use of ritual. Horn and several other Caughnawaga established separate longhouses there, however, and these were considered by many to be more of a hobby activity than a true spiritual undertaking, and thus a trivialization of the longhouse tradition.
Unlike the case of Old Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, there doesn’t seem to be anything in Mitchell’s notes or files, or in The New Yorker’s archive, to shed light on the Orvis Diabo backstory or on who might have known about it.
On three different occasions in a span of five years, then, Mitchell had either invented key characters or at least blurred their reality. So were any other of his protagonists inventions? Given that Cockeye Johnny was, one is tempted first to turn to Mitchell’s 1955 sequel—a longer and equally textured piece about the gypsy culture, entitled “The Beautiful Flower.” (Mitchell retitled it “The Gypsy Women” when it was republished years later.) The entertaining account delves deeply into the lives and techniques of the gypsy women who ran sophisticated con games—most notably one they called the bajour. And while the piece does reference in passing Cockeye Johnny, it actually was written as a Profile about Daniel J. Campion, a New York Police Department captain who oversaw the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad (and who almost certainly was the model for “Detective John J. Sheehan” in the original story). The gypsy women’s story is told entirely through Campion’s narration, and he was decidedly a real person—a longtime friend and old newspaper source of Mitchell’s, who would continue to see and correspond with him for years afterward. Similarly, the best known of Mitchell’s other subjects, both before and after Cockeye Johnny and Mr. Flood—characters like Joe Gould, Ellery Thompson, Mazie Gordon, Lady Olga, and George Hunter—were well known to, or documented by, many others besides Mitchell. His “minor” protagonists, such as Commodore Dutch and Santa Claus Smith, were flesh and blood, too. In any case, Mitchell’s remaining papers yield no suggestion that any other of his familiar subjects didn’t exist in reality.
However Mitchell had rationalized his approach with the composites, in reality what he was doing was bending the boundaries of nonfiction to the point where these particular stories were more accurately seen as fact-based fiction. And then, just as curiously, he pulled back. Mitchell would always be proud of the Flood, Mohawk, and gypsy stories, especially as to their literary craft and impact. But from his later defensiveness about the Flood trilogy and the fact that he never disclosed what he had done with the Nikanov or Diabo characters, it seems clear that Mitchell carried some regret about taking this tactic as far as he did.
—
And with that, Mitchell returned to the waterfront and began pulling together a story from threads he had been gathering for many years. “The Bottom of the Harbor,” which appeared in The New Yorker in the first week of 1951, was a portrait of the waters that surround the city’s five boroughs but considered from a sort of upside-down perspective. The picture wasn’t pretty, but it made for a dazzling travelogue.
As with “Rats,” this story was less about any one human character than it was a portrayal of an entire ecosystem—one that man-made pollution was quickly ruining. It represented another statement on Mitchell’s part about what he considered the significant
cost of twentieth-century “progress” on quality of life. It also made “Bottom of the Harbor” one of the earlier stories in the mainstream press to warn about the systematic degradation of the natural environment. By this time, health authorities had put the harvesting and consumption of clams and oysters in widespread areas off-limits because of contamination. Meanwhile, certain of the region’s fisheries were declining, and entire industries were being put at risk. And as filthy as the water was, Mitchell says, the bottom of the harbor “is dirtier than the water. In most places it is covered with a blanket of sludge that is composed of silt, sewage, industrial wastes and clotted oil.” All of this Mitchell conveys in the story’s opening pages so as to be unambiguous about his intent.
But having established how appalling these conditions are, Mitchell moves on to describe a marine life that remains stubbornly, defiantly abundant. He dwells on the remarkable symbiosis between man and marine life, such as when he discusses the harbor’s robust eel population thriving among the hundreds of shipwrecks littering the bottom. One Sunday afternoon Mitchell tags along with a “rogue” oyster digger, who grew up with the oyster beds and understands when it’s safe to harvest them, despite the prohibition against it. The man eventually tongs up five dozen of the shellfish. He opens several that are between four and seven years old, and he eats them. “Every time I eat harbor oysters, my childhood comes floating up from the bottom of my mind,” he tells Mitchell.
Mitchell is halfway through the story before he introduces a named character—a state conservation officer named Andrew Zimmer, who is well known to the fishing communities that he is paid to oversee in and around New York. Day and night, Zimmer trolls the watery byways, looking for illegal harvesters and other miscreants. His twenty-eight-foot skiff is unmarked and looks like every other lobster boat out on the water, yet it is familiar enough to all the baymen, who refer to it as the “State Boat.” During a break from Zimmer’s patrolling one chill morning, he and Mitchell stop at a Sheepshead Bay restaurant for some oyster stew. There he introduces Mitchell to a friend named Leroy Poole, the owner of a party boat, who obsesses about, even dreams about, the harbor. Mitchell uses Poole as a vehicle to bring the story back around to where it began—warning of the despoiling of this outwardly robust yet surprisingly fragile marine environment and how pollution and overfishing are threatening their way of life. As with other of Mitchell’s characters, Poole becomes a kind of stand-in for the writer himself. “Sometimes I’m walking along the street, and I wonder why the people don’t just stand still and throw their heads back and open their mouths and howl,” he complains. Zimmer asks him why. “I’ll tell you why,” he replies. “On account of the Goddamned craziness of everything.”
Next for Mitchell was almost a sister piece to “Bottom of the Harbor,” in that it dealt with a landmark South Street seafood restaurant that many harbor denizens, especially the workers in and around the Fulton Market, were intimately acquainted with. Sloppy Louie’s was operated by its no-nonsense owner, Louis Morino. The New Yorker called this story “The Cave” when it appeared in June of 1952, but when it was republished in later collections Mitchell retitled it “Up in the Old Hotel.”
A short, stocky man, Morino immigrated to America as a teenager after growing up in a fishing village in the north of Italy, and he worked his way up in the restaurant business. Now in his sixties, “he has an owl-like face—his nose is hooked, his eyebrows are tufted, and his eyes are large and brown and observant,” Mitchell writes. “He is white-haired. His complexion is reddish, and his face and the backs of his hands are speckled with freckles and liver spots. He wears glasses with flesh-colored frames. He is bandy-legged, and he carries his left shoulder lower than his right and walks with a shuffling, hipshot, head-up, old waiter’s walk. He dresses neatly. He has his suits made by a high-priced tailor in the insurance district, which adjoins the fish-market district.”
Sloppy Louie’s was a longtime favorite for those connected to the fish trade but also for professionals who worked in nearby office buildings. It featured fresh seafood cooked simply but impeccably, in a plain, almost refectory-like setting. Mitchell himself had been going there for the better part of a decade. He and Louie were friends, and the restaurant had already made an appearance in his “Old Mr. Flood” trilogy, during the reporting of which Mitchell had several long talks with the restaurateur. Sloppy Louie’s occupied the ground floor of a six-story building that fronted the fish-market sheds, and Louie used the second floor for storage and for his waiters to change. Above that, however, the windows to the street were boarded up. And it turns out those upper floors were largely inaccessible inside, as well, because there were no stairs and the only way up involved moving a manual elevator so ancient that no one knew if it could be moved or was even safe to try. In a prior life the building had been the Fulton Ferry Hotel, but whatever was in the upper floors constituted a mystery—one that had nagged at Louie for years. The dark space above his establishment amounted to a kind of “cave” that he longed to explore.
Credit 9.2
Mitchell and Louis Morino, one of his favorite talkers, outside Sloppy Louie’s restaurant.
Mitchell’s Profile begins as a fairly straightforward account of Louie, his life, and his restaurant. But in stopping by one day for breakfast and engaging Louie in conversation, Mitchell learns of the building’s curious history—and Louie’s obsession with what’s contained in those upper floors. So the account gradually shifts to a kind of detective story. In fact, the story is structurally anchored by two protracted monologues by Louie. The first occurs as he recalls an elderly but refined woman he came to know some years before, a Mrs. Frelinghuysen, whose vivid memories transport Louie back in time to prewar New York and eventually link him to one of the city’s most venerable families, the Schermerhorns, who, it turns out, still own his building. Once he discovered this fact, Louie recalls, “I went back inside and stood there and thought it over, and the effect it had on me, the simple fact my building was an old Schermerhorn building, it may sound foolish, but it pleased me very much. The feeling I had, it connected me with the past. It connected me with Old New York.” The second lengthy monologue, unfolding soon after the first, is Louie’s recitation of the history of the building, which he became determined to excavate once he learned its impressive provenance.
Because of the inherent danger in the antiquated and long-unused elevator, which was designed to rise with a rope-and-pulley system, Louie had been unsuccessful at talking anyone else into giving it a try. Now he asks Mitchell if he is game. The natural-born explorer leaps at the chance. With considerable effort, they rouse the ancient elevator to life and access the third-floor reading room of the old hotel. “It was pitch-dark in the room,” Mitchell writes. “We stood still and played the lights of our flashlights across the floor and up and down the walls. Everything we saw was covered with dust. There was a thick, black mat of fleecy dust on the floor—dust and soot and grit and lint and slut’s wool.” There are no treasures evident, just the most banal kind of detritus—bedsprings and stacked bed frames, brass spittoons, empty whiskey and seltzer bottles. Mitchell is keen to continue up to the fourth floor and see if they would have better luck. But Louie, who had hoped to turn up at least some hotel registers or other historical documents, becomes almost despondent in his disappointment. “There’s nothing up here,” he saysa. “I don’t want to stay up here another minute. Come on, let’s go.”
“This climax is a tremendous letdown, and it is meant to be,” the critic Noel Perrin observed of the story. “They have broken through to the past, and all they find is trivial debris. For once the past had seemed retrievable—but when you reach out to seize it, you find nothing but dust and decay.” For Mitchell, whose longing for the past was every bit as strong as Morino’s, the ending was also an example of the dark humor he so enjoyed, for in this instance the ultimate joke was on them.
—
In a journal note set down a quarter century
after “The Cave” first appeared, the writer provided a rare peek into the kind of dramatic and emotional ignition required to make a Joseph Mitchell story happen. Back in late 1950 or early 1951, he said, he had the notion of doing a Profile about Morino, and he undertook some initial conversations with him to that end. But he eventually began to think better of the project, Mitchell said, since “articles about old restaurants were getting to be pretty old hat, as far as The New Yorker was concerned.” Then, by happy chance, came the spark.
Sometime in the winter of 1951, Louie and I made the trip up in the old elevator or hoist. As I remember it, we went only to the third floor, but we may very well have gone up at least one more floor before he decided he had had enough. After Louie and I got out of the cage, I got back in and made a trip up by myself, and, as I remember it, I stopped and got off at every floor. The elevator experience made a deep impression on me and revived my interest in doing the Profile, but nevertheless I decided to postpone working on it for a while. Then, some months later, after thinking about it a good deal off and on, I decided to write about the trip up in the elevator with Louie and not about Louie per se or the restaurant per se. I decided to leave out what I myself had found out about the upper floors and confine the story entirely to the trip up with Louie.
Beyond revealing much about Mitchell’s creative process, this note also demonstrates how Mitchell was quite open to, in essence, editing the experience to suit his purposes—by sharpening the episode’s focus and heightening its literary impact. In the same way, “Up in the Old Hotel” is noteworthy for its vivid examples of one of Mitchell’s favorite techniques, which he was employing to even greater effect in these later stories: This is to let Louie, his protagonist, declaim in long, expansive monologues.
No doubt that, even as they were enjoying the story, some New Yorker subscribers were curious as to how Mitchell could possibly capture such disquisitions, some of which go on for pages. Mitchell, as has been shown, was an intense listener, and beyond that he had an incredible memory. In one journal note Mitchell discussed his “freak memory”—that while on the one hand he never seemed to be able to get down the multiplication tables, he had the ability to “remember conversations word for word.” Mitchell felt part of that paradox owed to the fact that a person’s speech has a distinct rhythm, which he somehow was able to key in to. Whatever was behind this talent, New Yorker contemporaries like Philip Hamburger attested to it. Of course, Mitchell mostly relied on the shorthand notes he took during his lengthy interviews, which he typed into fuller, cleaner form back in his office. In this way he worked like many reporters. Capturing lengthy quotation was an art form, unquestionably, but it could be done quite accurately with enough practice.
Man in Profile Page 19
