Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Finally the two men reach his family’s plot, which is far better tended than the rest of the graveyard. He points out Celia’s grave. Edith’s stone is nearby. Mitchell can see that Hunter has put his own name on this second stone; only the final date remains to be carved into it. He tells Mitchell it was his intention to be buried in the same grave with Edith—not next to her, but literally in the same spot, his casket interred just above hers. He goes on to explain that as ground had become more precious, he had begun to encourage the practice of using the same burial site for two caskets. (“That’s perfectly legal,” Hunter says, “and a good many cemeteries are doing it nowadays.”) The process merely requires that the initial grave be dug eight feet deep instead of six, leaving room above it for a second, later casket. But because Hunter was indisposed with his bad heart when Edith died, he had relied on others for the arrangements. He made the cemetery’s gravedigger, John Henman, promise he would dig Edith’s grave eight feet deep. Henman said he would. Thus Hunter ordered the gravestone, with both names.

  Here is how Mitchell has Hunter conclude the story:

  “Well, one day about a year later I was talking to John Henman, and something told me he hadn’t done what he had promised to do, so I had another man come over here and sound the grave with a metal rod, and just as I had suspected, John Henman had crossed me up; he had only gone six feet down. He was a contrary old man, and set in his ways, and he had done the way he wanted, not the way I wanted. He had always dug graves six feet down, and he couldn’t change. That didn’t please me at all. It outraged me. So, I’ve got my name on the stone on this grave, and it’ll look like I’m buried in this grave.”

  He took two long steps, and stood on the next grave in the plot.

  “Instead of which,” he said, “I’ll be buried over here in this grave.”

  He stooped down, and pulled up a weed. Then he stood up, and shook the dirt off the roots of the weed, and tossed it aside.

  “Ah, well,” he said, “it won’t make any difference.”

  “Mr. Hunter” is a moving-enough story on its face, but its true power and enduring appeal owe to the fact that it is such an affecting allegory, on mortality specifically and the human condition generally. “He knew that everything had fallen apart in his lifetime, the [Sandy Ground] estates had gone to ruin and families had disappeared,” Mitchell recalled. “He looked at it in a very worldly, sad way. I couldn’t have looked for that man and found him.” Or as he observed to Norman Sims in talking about “Mr. Hunter” more than thirty years after it appeared, “The revelations that keep coming from his mind astonish me. I think, my God, here’s Lear. Here’s Lear on Bloomingdale Road in Staten Island!”

  It took Mitchell many visits to receive those revelations and amass the trove of detail that went into the story’s soliloquies. Part of that investment was Mitchell establishing a deep bond (indeed, a genuine friendship that lasted until Hunter’s own death) with his subject, getting their relationship to a level of comfort where the older man would speak without self-consciousness. But part of the time involved the reporter’s search for what Mitchell often described as the “revealing remark.” “I couldn’t really write about anybody until they spoke what I consider ‘the revealing remark’ or the revealing anecdote or the thing that touched them,” Mitchell would explain. “If you read that Profile of Mr. Hunter, he tells in there about his mother, about seeing her in the window of a store one time. She was passing in the street. He saw her face and how sad it was. By seeing it in that way, he saw it in an unfamiliar juxtaposition that revealed something to him. I’ve often deliberately tried to find those things. It’s not in the way a psychoanalyst does, I’m sure. But you’re trying to report, at the beginning without knowing it, the unconscious as well as the consciousness of a man or woman…. Once I had what I considered the revealing remark, I could use that to encourage them to talk more about that aspect of their lives. They were able to talk, like Mr. Hunter could talk about his first wife’s death, about his son’s death, about his stepfather who he hated and who I think hated him. That way I could go far deeper into the man’s life than I could any other way. It isn’t necessary to fabricate anything if you have patience. In my case, it wasn’t patience, because I was genuinely interested in finding out these things.”

  As he had with Louie Morino and other of his protagonists, Mitchell spliced together Hunter’s speeches from related segments of these multiple conversations. Spending so many hours with his subject, Mitchell was not only learning about his history but also absorbing his patterns of speech. By weaving these initially disjointed remarks into long monologues, Mitchell was creating a more powerful narrative driver. The notes for “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” provide insight into how he did this. Consider an important point that occurs halfway through the story, when Hunter relates his mother’s slave background. The following three Hunter quotations come from three different interviews:

  My grandmother was a slave and my mother was a slave. My mother was five years old when her mother was sold and she never saw her again, never saw her or heard from her. She was sold to some man in Georgia. My mother was living in Alexandria, Virginia, when she ran away and came north. She used to say they gave her one pair of shoes a year and if they wore out she had to go barefoot, snow on the ground or not.

  My mother was a slave and her mother was a slave. My mother’s name was Martha Jennings, she was born in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. It’s likely she took the name of the people who owned her…. My mother worked for her mistress, took care of her. They went on a visit to Alexandria, Virginia, and that’s where she ran away, I don’t know who helped her or how, but she finally landed up in Ossining.

  My mother was eighty-eight when she died. Martha Jennings was her maiden name.

  And here is a portion of Hunter’s speech in the story, constructed from the above passages as well as from additional details about Martha Jennings that Mitchell learned along the way:

  To tell you the truth, my mother was born in slavery. Her name was Martha, Martha Jennings, and she was born in the year 1849. Jennings was the name of the man who owned her. He was a big farmer in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He also owned my mother’s mother, but he sold her when my mother was five years old, and my mother never saw or heard of her again…. Just before the Civil War, when my mother was eleven or twelve, the wife of the man who owned her went to Alexandria, Virginia, to spend the summer, and she took my mother along to attend to her children. Somehow or other, my mother got in with some people in Alexandria who helped her run away. Some antislavery people. She never said so in so many words, but I guess they put her on the Underground Railroad. Anyway, she wound up in what’s now Ossining, New York, only then it was called the village of Sing Sing, and by and by she married my father.

  In the main, the source material for the thrust of Hunter’s speeches is there in Mitchell’s notes. Then again, judging only from those notes, the speeches were essentially re-imaginations, streamlining and liberally embroidering the original quotations. So just how much license did Mitchell take? It’s hard to say with any certainty. For one thing, we don’t know whether Mitchell’s saved notes reflected Hunter’s literal speech—or even whether they were intended to. Perhaps they were more like lengthy reminders of what the subject was talking about at the time, which Mitchell always intended to flesh out from memory. (Adept as he was at note-taking, Mitchell wasn’t a human tape recorder, and he wouldn’t have transcribed literally everything Hunter said in any case.) We also don’t know whether some of Mitchell’s notes for “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” were destroyed or lost or simply haven’t surfaced yet.

  Still, Mitchell’s reporting materials raise other important questions. There are no references to some of the story’s most philosophical passages, such as Hunter’s observation that “I’m no great believer in gravestones…. When the time comes the dead are raised, [God] won’t need any directions where they’re lying,” or when Hunter discusses the �
��mysterious verses” of biblical prophecy, where no matter how deeply you plumb “you still don’t touch bottom.” (In one interview note, Hunter does talk about reading Proverbs, however, and he allows that in “some parts of the Bible, I’m all at sea.”) Nor, for that matter, is there any record in the notes of Hunter’s “revealing remark” about seeing his mother in the store window. These omissions, of course, don’t prove Hunter didn’t say them; they only prove a mystery.

  Then, too, the notes reveal that while the key events in “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” did happen, Mitchell sometimes altered their circumstances, as he did in telling Louie Morino’s story. For example, one of the clerics Mitchell consulted about the area’s history was the Rev. Raymond Brock, rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Rossville. Brock was very familiar with the A.M.E. Zion Church and talked to Mitchell about George Hunter. While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked Brock if he could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which was one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission, and indeed in the story it is Brock, not James McCoy, who steers Mitchell to Hunter. In another instance, according to his notes, Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.

  What does it all mean? Especially in light of the license Mitchell admitted taking with his characters’ dialogue, one cannot compare the “Mr. Hunter” notes to the finished story without concluding that there is a generous dollop of Mitchell himself in Hunter’s speeches. While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.

  Of course, today’s New Yorker, or any mainstream publication, would never knowingly permit such liberties with quotation; they would take a dimmer-yet view of composites being billed as “nonfiction.” But transparency in reporting is a relatively young ethic; it developed gradually, primarily across the second half of the twentieth century, as journalism evolved from a workaday job to a more respected profession, and many of the early New Yorker nonfiction writers—having come directly from anything-goes newspaper city rooms—could be quite creative in their latitude.

  “At The New Yorker, and in nonfiction writing in general, the lines between fact and invention had traditionally been quite blurry,” writes Ben Yagoda, an authority on long-form journalism and author of a comprehensive history of The New Yorker. The magazine had run composites prior to Mr. Flood, for instance, and in 1952—just three years after Mitchell’s Mohawk story—his running mate Liebling published a multipart Profile of one “Col. John R. Stingo,” a colorful racetrack figure who in real life was a New York Enquirer columnist named James A. Macdonald. Liebling invested so much of his own words and worldview into Stingo that when the series was published as a book entitled The Honest Rainmaker, the jacket copy conceded that it was difficult to say “how much…is gospel and how much is unashamedly apocryphal.” Even deep into William Shawn’s reign as editor, the magazine endured several high-profile instances in which nonfiction writers were shown to have taken the kinds of liberties that had been commonplace in The New Yorker’s adolescence.

  Those early New Yorker tactics definitely included conflation and “sweetening” of speeches. For instance, one of the earliest of the magazine’s standout journalists, Morris Markey, wrote long dispatches that quoted his subjects at suspicious length. Harold Ross openly gave his writers a wide berth on this score, as long as the speeches retained the owner’s spirit and context and didn’t insult common sense. But even Ross had his limit. Yagoda relates a 1948 incident in which Ross criticized a Joel Sayre article for an improbably long speech of several thousand words. “[This] manifestly is not quote at all,” wrote Ross, “but just Sayre writing. He’s ostensibly quoting one of his women characters. It doesn’t sound any more like a woman talking than I sound like Betty Grable.”

  There’s one other pertinent distinction in such examples as George Hunter or Louie Morino: These were friendly and flattering portraits, in which, it can be argued, no real harm was done with the rearranging and massaging of the protagonists’ speeches. The same would not be true if the subject was controversial or the treatment sharp, which would raise the suggestion of personal bias on the part of the writer, but such pieces were not in Mitchell’s repertoire. In a philosophical sense, one might compare how Mitchell approached a story like “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” to a present-day filmmaker attempting to faithfully depict a historical event—but within a two-hour window. In the service of practicality and dramatic impact, the director might consolidate characters, compress events, or alter known speeches in their specifics, if not in thrust. The difference is that the movie would be characterized as being “based on” or “inspired by” real events; “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” like all of Mitchell’s later New Yorker work, was simply tagged as nonfiction.

  Mitchell certainly didn’t think there was anything malign or unprofessional about what he was doing. As he said, he truly believed the latitude taken with a character’s speech and certain surroundings were in the service of a greater good. The core “truth” of the story was important; its interior factuality was not.

  Pantheon Books editor-in-chief Dan Frank, who worked with Mitchell near the end of his life and who is an unabashed Mitchell fan, offered an insightful view of the writer’s approach to his characters, including their monologues. “Yes, there was something literary or artificial in Joe’s depictions. But that did not make his portraits less faithful,” he said. “The most contrived aspect (at least to my ears) of course were the lengthy speeches that he would give his characters. They are simply too well constructed, with too many sentences that only Joseph Mitchell could have written. But if he had gone the opposite route and been faithful to their actual speech, one would be on the slope toward oral history—and also would have undermined Joe’s intent to infuse these figures with the ‘uniqueness,’ the particularity that he saw in them.”

  Speech is character. In an age before the ubiquity and national reach of television flattened out our regional dialects and homogenized our usages, Mitchell managed to capture the unique flavor and patois of his subjects. Further, surviving letters to him from Hunter and such other late Mitchell subjects as Ellery Thompson and Daniel Campion tend to reinforce that the writer accurately captured their individualistic expressions in their stories. Nor did any letters appear to dispute the fundamental accuracy of what he quoted them saying, which is arguably the bottom line. There’s no apparent record of any of his characters objecting to how they were quoted. They appreciated that they came across on the page as articulate, with the common digressions and tics of speech cleaned up, and that Mitchell had faithfully conveyed what they had said. Mitchell’s subjects recognized themselves in their speeches.

  —

  Literary license aside, there is no question that the success of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” owes much to the fact that, as with many of his protagonists, there was so much of Joseph Mitchell in George Hunter to begin with. In time, Mitchell came to realize that this synchronicity—this overlap of his own interests and outlooks with those of his subjects—was no accident, that to some extent he was self-selecting, albeit in a way that allowed the writer to bring greater acuity to the work. “If you find [a subject] you have no connection with, you start out with a laborious matter right at the beginning,” Mitchell said. “The insights you have about yourself may contribute to the insights you have about the other person, or they may not. There is a structure there of looking for an insight. Mr. Hunter could not have been out of a background any more different than mine—well, anyway, our backgrounds were pretty different. But I could understand him an
d he could understand me. Gradually, I got out of him what I needed, but you never know.”

  What Mitchell “got out of him” was a story that resonated with readers on all the fundamental levels that literature must. Indeed, in telling the story of Sandy Ground and George Hunter, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is full of allusions of mortality and time passing, some pronounced—it does take place in a cemetery, after all—but others quite subtle, such as when Mitchell relates Hunter’s offhand observation that bones left over from the dinner table make excellent fertilizer for his rosebushes. He takes pains to note the slow deterioration of Sandy Ground’s formerly proud houses; the wilting flowers of Billy Hunter’s funeral wreath; the eroding features of even relatively recent stone grave markers; and the weeds, of course, everywhere overtaking those tombstones. Man simply cannot keep up, and at the end of the day it’s all out of our hands, anyway. “We don’t know what the hell is going on around us,” as Mitchell would later explain, “whether we’re being propelled or whether we think we have free will about making our own lives, or whether we’re like mice in a laboratory. We think we can see through things and we may be directed to see through things.”