Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  That final image is strongly redolent of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” which “The Rivermen” has much in common with. As he did with George Hunter, Mitchell centers his story on a spry, colorful, and colorfully spoken, town elder—in this case, seventy-four-year-old shad fisherman Harry Lyons—to capture a way of life that the author reveres for its simplicity, community, and constancy (the rhythms of the annual fishing cycle), as well as for the healthy symbiosis between mankind and nature. At one point Mitchell describes a traditional shad bake, a community picnic in which the large fish are boned, butterflied, nailed to white-oak planks, and mop-basted with butter as they broil slowly over open coals—and in so doing again reminds us that food is as vital to the memory’s nourishment as to the body’s. In that sense “The Rivermen” is a strongly romantic story, and pleasant, and a reader can almost feel the afternoon sunshine as he joins Mitchell on the deck of Lyons’s shad barge and reawakens the past.

  In the end, however, “The Rivermen” is perhaps even more elegiac than “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” to the extent that it is overtly a lamentation, a discourse on the end of things. That strain is woven throughout the piece, but Mitchell nakedly drives it home in the story’s conclusion. In fact, he delights in beginning this final section with a particularly vivid example of his graveyard humor. As young girls skip rope along the town’s riverbank, they sing a nonsense song: “The worms crawl in/The worms crawl out/They eat your guts/And spit them out.” Soon after, Mitchell relates a scene in which one of Lyons’s friends, Joe Hewitt, who is visiting at the time, studies a photograph that Lyons has tacked up in his shad barge. The picture shows a large group of Fulton Market fishmongers at one of Lyons’s shad bakes. It was taken only a few years prior, but Hewitt—in the photo himself—remarks on how many of the men have since died. His gloomy commentary becomes a veritable litany. “This one’s alive,” he says. “This one’s dead. This one’s alive. At least, I haven’t heard he’s dead…. This man’s alive. So’s this man. Dead. Dead. Dead. Three in a row. Alive. Alive. Alive. Dead. Alive….”

  The following spring, Little, Brown published a book that collected Mitchell’s six waterfront pieces: “The Rats on the Waterfront,” “Dragger Captain,” “The Bottom of the Harbor,” “Up in the Old Hotel,” “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” and “The Rivermen.” Entitled The Bottom of the Harbor, the book was received warmly, even rapturously. “The memorable things in The Bottom of the Harbor are the portraits of men of strong character,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Mr. Mitchell gives them his undivided attention. He does not criticize or evaluate them; he does not patronize them in any way…. If this book were a collection of feature articles, the character and technique of the author would not be a matter of importance. But The Bottom of the Harbor is literature.” Half a century later, many critics still consider The Bottom of the Harbor the apotheosis of Mitchell’s career, the point at which a master in complete control of his work has found the timeless themes equal to his talent.

  When Harbor appeared in early 1960, Mitchell was fifty-one years old. Throughout the decade of the fifties, he published only five stories in The New Yorker, albeit some of the most consequential pieces he would ever write. During that span, the protective cocoon of The New Yorker meant he hadn’t had to navigate many professional changes—with one significant exception.

  Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker and the man who had recruited Mitchell, appreciated both his dark moods and humor, and encouraged his idiosyncratic subject matter, died from lung cancer at the end of 1951. For almost two decades, Ross had made a point of staying connected to Mitchell, and the writer found the editor’s mix of wit, empathy, and constant encouragement energizing. On one occasion Mitchell derived particular pleasure from telling Ross something about his own family that the editor hadn’t known. By chance, Mitchell had come to learn that one of Ross’s uncles back in Colorado had helped bankroll the rise of an eccentric religious figure of that period, Bishop Alma White, leader of the Pillar of Fire movement. Ross—whose soft spot for shamans and spiritual charlatans matched Mitchell’s—was delighted by this revelation. “One day [Ross] put his head in my office, as he used to do every now and then, and asked me how I was getting along,” Mitchell recalled. “I was bogged down in some Profile or other, and getting nowhere, and I said that I was ready for Bellevue. ‘You ought to go over and ask Bishop Alma to pray for you,’ he said.”

  It was true that Ross, per his reputation, maddened many a New Yorker writer, often as not through his queries written on working galleys of their stories. These were legendary for both their number and fractured syntax (Ross’s most fabled habit was scribbling “Who he?” in the margin whenever a new character caught him off guard). In 1957, as James Thurber was preparing a series of articles about Ross, he asked if Mitchell was the writer who once got a story galley back from the editor with a staggering one hundred forty-four queries on it. Mitchell replied that Thurber had the wrong man; he suspected the actual recipient was the “other” Joe—Liebling. Then Mitchell passed along a related anecdote. “When I first came to The New Yorker,” Mitchell wrote Thurber, “Joe and several others were quartered in a suite of offices down on the eighteenth floor. There was no name on the door, and one day, after a wrangle with Mr. Ross over queries, Joe hired a sign painter to paint WHO HE? in gold letters on the glass part of the door. A few days later one of the elevator operators said that another tenant on that floor had asked him what in the name of God kind of product did the WHO HE? company put out.” All his life Mitchell maintained great affection and respect for Ross, his champion and occasional co-conspirator. He was also one of the New Yorker staffers who felt the editor’s genius was willfully underappreciated, because he was so easy to caricature (as he felt Thurber did) and left so much comic material in his wake.

  Not long after Ross’s death, his second-in-command and longtime managing editor for factual matter, William Shawn, was named editor of the magazine. The diminutive and preternaturally serene Shawn couldn’t have been more different from Ross as a person, but he was just as stubborn and as an editor he was committed to the same principles of excellence. He knew better than anyone what a treasure The New Yorker had in Mitchell. And since Mitchell had worked directly with Shawn for as long as the writer had been at the magazine, the change at the top of the masthead actually meant little in terms of Mitchell’s routine.

  Another aspect of Mitchell’s job that didn’t change much during the fifties was his salary. According to pay stubs, Mitchell earned one hundred fifteen dollars a week from 1945 until 1953, when he received a twenty-five-dollar raise. In real spending terms, his annual salary of about seven thousand three hundred dollars in 1953 was the equivalent of about sixty thousand dollars today. In what was then a considerably more affordable New York City, that was a respectable enough salary. But top writers at other magazines were earning much more, and The New Yorker had a well-deserved reputation in the industry for penury. Mitchell’s journal notes recount an occasion on which Liebling invited The New Yorker’s owner, Raoul Fleischmann, to lunch at the Algonquin. Both men were having a pleasant time until Liebling announced that it happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of his joining the magazine. Fleischmann instantly stiffened. “Mr. Liebling, if you’re expecting any increased emolument because of that”—which of course he was—“you’re mistaken.”

  Mitchell understood. After the 1953 adjustment, his pay would stay the same for the next eleven years—no doubt reflecting in part the declining productivity. Still, if it hadn’t been for some annual income from Joseph’s portion of the North Carolina farming proceeds, the Mitchell family—with one breadwinner and two daughters in private schools—would have had a harder time getting by than it did.

  While Mitchell privately groused about his pay—the issue would become even more acute for him a few years down the road—it was one reason he didn’t feel particularly guilty about his infrequent appearances in the magazine an
d doing much as he pleased with his workdays. Mitchell spent hours upon hours wandering the city, constantly curious about it, cataloging its small details that added up to a magnificent whole. His journals are replete with examples. One day, for instance, he was at the Fulton Market visiting with a vendor named Joe Carter, proprietor of Joseph H. Carter, Inc. On a post in front of Carter’s stand was this sign:

  J H C

  I N C

  On this occasion a group of dieticians had stopped during a tour of the market to talk with Carter. A woman who noticed the sign asked, “Mr. Carter, what do those letters mean?” Carter replied, “They mean ‘Jesus H. Christ, I need cash.’ ”

  Unlike the walks of his apprenticeship in the early thirties, Mitchell could now be unhurried. He particularly indulged his lifelong love of older buildings, with their architectural curlicues and weathered embellishments that reminded him of the physical idiosyncrasies in aging people. He articulated this passion in his unfinished memoir:

  Ever since I came here, I have been fascinated by the ornamentation on the older buildings of the city. The variety of it fascinates me, and also the ubiquity of it, the overwhelming ubiquity of it, the almost comical ubiquity of it. In thousands upon thousands of blocks, on just about any building you look at, sometimes in the most unexpected and out-of-the-way places, there it is. Sometimes it is almost hidden under layers of paint that took generations to accumulate and sometimes it is all beaten and banged and mutilated, but there it is. The eye that searches for it is almost always able to find it. I never get tired of gazing from the back seats of buses at the stone eagles and the stone owls and the stone dolphins and the stone lions’ heads and the stone bulls’ heads and the stone rams’ heads and the stone urns and the stone tassels and the stone laurel-wreaths and the stone scallop-shells and the cast-iron stars and the cast-iron rosettes and the cast-iron medallions and the clusters of cast-iron acanthus leaves bolted to the capitals of cast-iron Corinthian columns and the festoons of cast-iron flowers and the swags of cast-iron fruit and the zinc brackets in the shape of oak leaves propping up the zinc cornices of brownstone houses and scroll-sawed bargeboards framing the dormers of decaying old mansard-roofed mansions and the terra-cotta cherubs and nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes and Atlases and Dianas and Medusas serving as keystones in arches over the doorways and windows of tenement houses. There are some remarkably silly-looking things among these ornaments, but they are silly-looking things that have lasted for a hundred years or more in the dirtiest and most corrosive air in the world, the equivalent of a thousand years in an olive grove in Greece, and there is something triumphant about them…. To me, they are sacred objects. The sight of a capricious bit of carpentry or brickmasonry or stonemasonry or blacksmithery or tinsmithery or tilesetting high up on the façade of a building, executed long ago by some forgotten workingman, will lift my spirits for hours.

  Credit 11.2

  In 2009 photographer Steve Featherstone showcased the ornate beauty of Mitchell’s “found objects.” Mitchell collected everything that struck his aesthetic fancy, from hotel pickle forks to bricks to the bygone doorknobs shown here.

  When he had opportunity, Mitchell would lug some of these “sacred objects” home to the Village apartment. The inveterate collector couldn’t help it; his habit, carried over from childhood, gave him immense pleasure even into old age.

  If a building was condemned and about to be torn down, Mitchell considered it fair game and might try to pry off, say, an interesting set of brass address numbers or a decorative rosette. It was his way of literally hanging on to pieces of a disappearing past. Later in his life, he recalled an occasion when he and Joe Cantalupo discussed purloining some balcony sculptures, to preserve them, from a building that was about to be razed near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time Mitchell circled back to the building, however, he discovered that “someone had beaten [us] to the punch.” (He was happy to learn later that the statues had found their way to a Brooklyn museum.) On this point Mitchell’s barkeep friend Tim Costello offered another apt observation: “If [Mitchell] ever disappears, start looking for him under fifty foot of brick, with a rusty fire escape on his chest and a pleased smile on his face.”

  In truth, most of the artifacts Mitchell carried home were considerably less exotic, their significance less archaeological or architectural than anthropological. These included bottles and boot hooks, drawer pulls and pickle forks, and the brightly colored glass insulators from old electrical poles. Boxes of bottles and nails and bronze hardware from apartment buildings and hotels were stored under the beds and sofas and other furniture that crowded the family’s apartment. His “antiquarianism was obsessive,” said Hamburger. Then there were his beloved bricks; always the bricks. “He had enormous collections of old bricks. He was fascinated by bricks,” Hamburger said. He recalled a cocktail party where Mitchell learned that a guest was from a family “very prominent in manufacturing bricks. Now, this was manna from heaven. So, he gets her in the corner and he spent the whole evening talking about bricks—kinds of bricks, special bricks, the color of the soil, the way in which the bricks were made, how they would get this stuff off the Hudson. That kind of thing just grabbed him.”

  The thread that best connected all Mitchell’s disparate finds was their essential beauty. Underscoring that aesthetic, a 2009 Duke University exhibit entitled “The Collector: Joseph Mitchell’s Quotidian Quest” featured photographs by Steve Featherstone of various Mitchell objets that pop from the page in almost three-dimensional detail—brass keys and brass hinges and brass doorknobs and brass drawer pulls and brass buttons and blue bottles and green bottles and broken bottles enclosed in glass jars. Photographed with some of the items are Mitchell’s handwritten notes of explanation. One photograph, for example, includes a vertically bisected screw and a note on New Yorker letterhead that reads, “mutilated screw that came out of the MUNICIPAL BUILDING doorknob—see if I can find one to replace it.”

  CHAPTER 12

  JOE GOULD REVISITED

  [Gould] told people he met in Village joints that the Oral History was already millions upon millions of words long and beyond any doubt the lengthiest unpublished literary work in existence but that it was nowhere near finished. He said that he didn’t expect it to be published in his lifetime, publishers being what they were, as blind as bats, and he sometimes rummaged around in his pockets and brought out and read aloud a will he had made disposing of it. “As soon after my demise as is convenient for all concerned,” he specified in the will, “my manuscript books shall be collected from the various and sundry places in which they are stored and put on the scales and weighed, and two-thirds of them by weight shall be given to the Harvard Library and the other third shall be given to the library of the Smithsonian Institution.”

  —From “Joe Gould’s Secret,” 1964

  —

  It is typical for the relationship between a journalist and his subject to end once the latter’s story is published. That had been anything but the case with Mitchell and Greenwich Village iconoclast Joe Gould, protagonist of Mitchell’s “Professor Sea Gull” piece. After the Profile appeared in 1942, the author of An Oral History of Our Time inserted himself into Mitchell’s life and would stay there for more than a decade—to Mitchell’s endless chagrin.

  In the wake of the popular story, Gould—emboldened by his new fame—had been savvy enough to appreciate that Mitchell, too, was profiting from their “partnership,” in terms of his ascendant literary reputation. He also knew that the writer’s highly developed sense of guilt would not let him simply walk away from New York’s favorite Bohemian once their editorial business had been transacted. Staffers at The New Yorker quickly came to dread Gould’s appearances to pick up mail and reader contributions to the Joe Gould Fund; they usually knew he was there before they saw him, because the stench of his clothes preceded him. “The sound of his voice began to make me wince,” Mitchell later confessed. Gould became a black hole for
the writer, devouring his time and energy. The visits were especially grinding if Gould was hungover, as was not unusual. “In this state,” Mitchell wrote, “he was driven to talk, he was determined to talk, he would not be denied, and I would be lucky if I got him out in an hour and a half or two hours, or even three. He would sit on the edge of an old swivel chair in a corner of my office, his portfolio on his lap, his clothes smelling of the fumigants and disinfectants used in flophouses, rheumy-eyed, twitching, scratching, close to hysteria, and he would talk on and on and on. His subject was always the same—himself. And I would sit and listen to him and try my best to show some interest in what he was saying, and gradually my eyes would glaze over and my blood would turn to water and a kind of paralysis would set in.”

  What no one, not even Mitchell’s New Yorker colleagues, knew was that the writer had a special reason to find Gould’s presumptuous behavior galling. Over the course of reporting the Profile, Mitchell found himself increasingly skeptical about Gould’s oral history. It was a given that it existed, because many people had seen elements of it, the newspapers had done stories about it, and Gould himself was seldom without the weather-beaten portfolio carrying whatever writer’s notebooks were in progress. Naturally, Mitchell wanted to see the material himself and repeatedly asked Gould for the notebooks. When Gould complied, the ones he shared contained essays he had written, and they were usually iterations on the same handful of themes, such as the death of his father, a physician, or a mock-serious treatise on the dangers of consuming tomatoes. What they weren’t, however, were true oral histories—which is to say, the recorded comments or monologues or overheard conversations of other people. These developments began to concern Mitchell. His anxiety was only compounded by what seemed to be elaborate evasions when the writer pushed Gould to see material that went beyond the essays. The bulk of his history was locked away for safekeeping in remote locations, Gould would explain, such as on a farm out on Long Island, and might not be retrievable until the end of World War II. It all gave Mitchell a growing queasiness about the entire undertaking. After all, as indisputably interesting as Joe Gould might be, he scarcely would have merited a full-blown Profile without the extraordinary undertaking of the oral history. Still, based on what Mitchell had seen and on the testimony of various other credible sources, he was comfortable enough to write the Profile.