Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  That capital-letter disdain, however, didn’t keep acolytes and English majors from pestering him about the New Journalism. And in time, as Mitchell surveyed the growing, and enduring, imprint that he and his New Yorker counterparts had made on American letters, his attitude did soften. Near the end of Mitchell’s life, a graduate student pursuing a dissertation specifically inquired if the writer, back in the forties or fifties, felt that any other reporters took the same pains he had to learn so much about his subjects, or to go into such detail, or to quote at such length, or to make every sentence pull so much weight. Did he believe that John Hersey, with his epic account of the bombing of Hiroshima, and Lillian Ross, with her provocative Ernest Hemingway Profile and novelistic portrait of film director John Huston, were truly breaking new journalistic ground? Hadn’t Mitchell already done that? The writer replied:

  I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in that hullabaloo some years ago in re is there a New Journalism and if so who were its pioneers, and afterwards my interest dwindled to no interest at all. Several times, through the years, I have been asked questions about the matter by interviewers, and, having a vague, uneasy feeling that I should know something about it and genuinely wanting to be helpful, I disregarded my lack of knowledge as well as lack of interest and went ahead and answered the questions, and then, later on, reading what I had said, I was appalled by the shallowness and the haphazardness and in some cases the looniness of my remarks, and consequently, sometime ago, after one of these experiences, I made a solemn vow or at least a vow never to answer questions about journalism new or old ever again unless I am on the witness stand under oath and the judge orders me to or unless a gun is being held to my head, and therefore I am obliged to say that I am sorry but I can’t help you with answers to your questions. However and nevertheless and be that as it may, I wish you luck in finding the answers, for at this late day I am beginning to feel that I would really like to know what they are myself.

  On the other hand, Mitchell the lifelong lover of literature had a more sanguine view of the literary establishment, and, propelled to some extent by evaluations like Hyman’s, Mitchell’s name began to be mentioned in the same conversation with the best purveyors of American literary fiction. That judgment was validated in 1970, when Mitchell was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Chartered by Congress, the institute honored top artists in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and writing. Membership was limited to two hundred fifty (an elite subset of fifty of these constituting the Academy of Arts and Letters). So it was that Mitchell took his place among a who’s who in the American arts that ranged from Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber and Georgia O’Keeffe to Alexander Calder, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. A handful of New Yorker colleagues were in the pantheon already—William Maxwell, E. B. White, and S. J. Perelman, for instance—but others in Mitchell’s reportorial cohort were not. Indeed, the letters inductees were mostly novelists, playwrights, critics, poets, historians, and biographers. John Hersey and Janet Flanner (The New Yorker’s longtime Paris correspondent) were among the few working journalists represented when Mitchell was tapped. Induction into the institute was an imprimatur from the cultural establishment. But owing to the institute’s limited membership and the inevitable politics that enveloped its pronunciations of merit, the question of who got in and who didn’t often provoked hard feelings, including among some New Yorker writers who felt they were no less worthy than the honorees. Others simply considered the organization elitist and self-important and (ostensibly) paid it no heed. No one, however, seemed to begrudge the honor to Mitchell, whose body of work spoke with uncommon eloquence. Indeed, Mitchell was proud of the recognition and always took seriously his involvement with the institute’s affairs.

  Still, there is a price when one is officially designated a national treasure—the air grows thinner, the public’s expectations become all the more elevated. As it was, Mitchell held himself to an impossibly high standard, a bar that, intentionally or not, he had steadily raised in the previous two decades of New Yorker writing. Now, with the world heaping praise on him, it was starting to have a kind of paralyzing effect. With such stories as “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” “The Rivermen,” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Mitchell had unquestionably taken his writing to the level of art. With all this pressure, how could the master keep producing…well, masterpieces?

  —

  One summer when Mitchell was back in North Carolina, he and his father went down to a pond that A.N. had built, where an alligator had subsequently taken up residence. The elder Mitchell named the animal Bill, and “he fed that alligator everything he could think of to feed him,” Mitchell would recall. A.N. would get day-old bread from the grocery or, when he wanted to offer a special treat, pineapple upside-down cake. This particular summer A.N. hadn’t seen Bill for some time, and there was talk along the swamp that someone had killed an alligator; A.N. thought perhaps it had been Bill. Then, while the father and son stood at the pond in conversation, the alligator suddenly appeared—and Joseph was a little startled at his father’s visceral delight in seeing the prodigal reptile. “Hello, Bill! I’m glad to see you, Bill!” A.N. gleefully called out. As Joseph remembered it, “I had the strangest thing, it’s very hard to explain—a spasm of jealousy…. This is probably the only case in medical history of a sibling rivalry with an alligator!” Mitchell laughed as he told Bill’s tale, but there was some underlying truth to his envy over affection that, it seemed, could be elicited more readily by the animal than by the son.

  In the wake of his mother’s death and with his widowed father in slowly declining health, Mitchell was now traveling to Fairmont every chance he could—typically in the spring and late fall or early winter, in addition to his traditional summer trip. A “quick” visit was at least a week, and he spent a month when he was able.

  Credit 13.1

  Men in hats: A. N. Mitchell, left, visits with his always well-dressed sons Joseph, Harry, and Jack.

  Ironically, it was his mother’s death that helped free Mitchell to take these extended trips. He inherited one of the family farms that had been in her name, then had that heavily wooded property timbered out. The modest windfall afforded him a financial latitude he’d never before had. All his life Mitchell had harbored an anxiety, warranted or not, over where his next dollar was coming from. But with some independent means, “I became much braver than I had ever been before,” said one journal entry.

  Even when Mitchell wasn’t in North Carolina, he worked hard to maintain the home connections. He kept up relationships with numerous friends and acquaintances there. He even had delivered to his New York apartment his home region’s main newspaper, The Robesonian—“a novel I have been reading a long time now,” he once said of its typically provincial and quirky content. He scoured the paper, front page to obituaries, from the social notes (which always included the “New York Mitchells” when they were visiting Fairmont) to the latest elevation of the Lumbee River, from which measurement Mitchell could conjure in his mind’s eye the current water level in the local swamps.

  In truth, Mitchell considered himself first and foremost a North Carolinian. In a 1983 letter, he complimented a writer friend, Roy Parker, on a piece he’d written about Mitchell for a North Carolina newspaper. “I especially liked it because it linked me directly with where I come from and where I still belong—up until quite recently articles about me have always somehow seemed to indicate or imply or get across the idea that while I might possibly have been born in North Carolina I was really a New Yorker.”

  It was another way of expressing his lifelong sensation of exile—belonging to two worlds but not truly rooted in either. Mitchell referenced this notion frequently—in his journal notes, in letters to friends, in interviews later in his life. It became the central motif in his own story. “After I’m down in North Carolina awhile, I flee back up here [New York],” he told Sims. “And after I’m up here awhile, I flee back down there.�
�� On a page of journal notes, Mitchell scrawled, “Doomed to go back and forth between NY and NC, not feeling altogether at home in either place. Wanting one place when in the other.” Elsewhere on the same page he writes that “most of the people I have known best…have been exiled.” In the note he cites such close friends as Louie Morino and Joe Cantalupo as examples, though he could just as easily have added the protagonists of innumerable of his stories, from Lady Olga to Joe Gould.

  For Mitchell, Fairmont was and forever remained “a town in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all heart-wrenchingly homesick….” It was no secret to Mitchell’s family how strong a grip the homestead continued to exert on the oldest son; they saw his joy every time he came through the front door. Nor did Mitchell ever rule out the possibility of returning one day for good, which continued to give them hope. “We always thought Joe would come back,” acknowledged his youngest brother, Harry.

  A.N. in particular never really stopped trying to lure Joseph and Therese. Family friend David Britt recalled that one of the properties the elder Mitchell acquired during the Depression was considered among the loveliest in Robeson County. “I have offered to give [Joseph] the McCall farm, which is the prettiest farm that I own, if he would come back down here and live on it with his family,” A.N. told Britt. “Of course, it didn’t work out.”

  When he was back home, Mitchell filled his days by catching up with friends and family, going over farm accounts with his father and brothers, and indulging in such simple pleasures as cutting rashers from a freshly picked watermelon (wielding a “long carving knife that has been sharpened so many times it has become narrow and limber”) or foraging the fields for Indian artifacts. He welcomed the quotidian physical activities it takes to keep a farm running. One journal note relates a graphic example: what can happen when a cow becomes mired in a ditch. One day when Mitchell was in Fairmont, neighbors called to report a stench emanating from one of the far reaches of the family property. Mitchell, his father, and a number of their hands went out to investigate:

  We found a cow lying on her back, all four feet sticking straight up, in one of those narrow shallow ditches that are tributaries to the main ditch…. The maggots were working on her, and the smell was hideous, and it was hideous to think of her lying there lowing and lowing until she couldn’t low any longer. She must’ve started across the ditch and made a false step and fallen on her back, and trying to get out she fitted herself tighter and tighter into the ditch. She had been dead so long in the hot weather that we couldn’t pull her out with the tractor, we’d simply pull her apart.

  In the end there was nothing for the men to do but bury the animal where she was, covering her with dirt and sand, and rerouting the ditch around her.

  —

  As the summer sun slid behind the swamps of Pitman Mill Branch, Mitchell was again keeping his father company, this time in side-by-side rocking chairs on the back porch, taking in the quiet. It was a ritual they had engaged in countless times. It was 1974, and by now Joseph’s routine when he was back home had changed in one important respect—like his siblings, he functioned as a caregiver to a parent having great difficulty adjusting to the emotional and physical realities of old age. A.N. was ninety-three, his eyesight was dimmed by cataracts, he had to walk with the help of canes, and he needed more or less round-the-clock attention.

  As darkness settled in, Mitchell patiently led A.N. to his small room. He helped the older man off with his clothes and into pajamas. He made sure A.N. took his medicine, then maneuvered him into bed. A little later, Mitchell himself turned in.

  In the middle of the night Mitchell was awakened by the ringing of the small bell that A.N. kept at his bedside table. He went in to check on his father.

  “See if the commode will flush,” A.N. said. A bedroom closet had been converted into a private bathroom for his convenience. Mitchell flushed the toilet.

  “It doesn’t flush,” A.N. said.

  “Yes, it does, Daddy, it flushes all right.”

  “Must be my eyes,” A.N. said with an aggravated sigh. He had tried to flush it but couldn’t seem to work the handle. He got up with some difficulty and walked over to a small refrigerator, which Jack and Harry had installed so he more readily could get at the Coca-Colas he enjoyed. But in his determination A.N. had forgotten his cane; his son noticed this with some dismay, thinking it precisely the sort of innocent lapse that could lead to a fall.

  “There’s something wrong with it, too,” A.N. said of the refrigerator. Mitchell went over and saw that the door couldn’t fully close. Then he realized that his father had simply loaded too many Coke bottles into it and one was obstructing the door.

  Mitchell resettled his father and returned to his own room. But with thoughts racing now, sleep wouldn’t come; he opened up the Jerusalem Bible he kept there and, as he had all his life, began reading in Genesis and Exodus until his mind calmed. The middle-of-the-night exchange with his father had rattled him. As he noted, “It was the first time I ever saw him so confused.”

  Because Mitchell’s siblings interacted with their father every day, the changes in A.N. were almost imperceptible to them. But to Mitchell, who saw him at longer intervals, they were pronounced and sobering. Watching mortality finally get its hooks into the man he’d long considered impervious to time was unsettling. Still, it wasn’t entirely empathy behind this reaction. At this point, the writer was becoming an old man himself; he had just turned sixty-six.

  One of the reasons I got so depressed helping Daddy get his clothes on and off and all that (although I did my best not to let him know or even sense that I was depressed) is that all those moles on his back and some of his other physical aspects as well as his mental confusion are all ahead of me—what I have to look forward to if I am lucky enough to last as long as he has. That and the general time-limit part of it. I can see him thinking: at the very best, I can only hope to live ten more years—although I guess, after sixty, all of us start thinking that way (or trying not to think that way). Boxed-in by time. As boxed-in as a prisoner on death row waiting for electrocution. Those moles: I have them already, and the liver marks on the back of my hands, and the coarsening of the skin on my face, and a certain lack of elasticity when I walk, and the forgetting of names (although I think that is due to all the Seconal and Valium and other medicines that I have been taking through the years, particularly Soma compound and the other strong headache medicines and duodenal ulcer medicines).

  Despite A.N.’s fragility in his tenth decade on earth, he had lost none of his vinegar. If anything, his physical and mental decline only caused his patience to grow shorter, his tongue sharper. And he was not at all reluctant to train his pique on his eldest. Joseph Mitchell’s frustration is palpable in a journal note as he recalled a conversation with his father from a few years earlier, one concerning how over time A.N. had divided the farm acreage among his children. Mitchell had tried, delicately, to question the equity of some of the property allocations and how they would eventually impact his own children, but A.N. cut him short. “Get it out of your heart what you’ve been thinking,” he said angrily, and further instructed his son never to bring up the subject again. “As always, it was impossible to talk logically or even coherently with him,” Mitchell wrote, noting A.N.’s “fury at even being remotely questioned.”

  In fact, as much as Mitchell looked forward to visits home, the tension with his father was always just beneath the surface, waiting to break through. Even a seemingly innocent conversation might do the trick. For instance, if A.N. happened to mention that someone was building a new home in the county—not unusual, given his passion for real estate and knowing everyone else’s business—Mitchell could be sure it would lead to an admonition about the foolishness of renting an apartment for one’s home. Mitchell braced for these exchan
ges, which he could see coming like the buildup of a summer squall, but that didn’t soften their impact. “I very rarely feel altogether at ease with my father and haven’t since I was a child,” he wrote. “He is still able to make an offhand remark and cut me to pieces.”

  On every such occasion, Mitchell was reminded why he couldn’t really be tempted by the prettiest farm in the family or the numberless pleasures of a springtime stroll in the woods. He would remember why he had wanted to leave home in the first place, all those years ago, and he would begin looking forward to his return to New York as much as he had looked forward to leaving it weeks before. He was in an emotional whipsaw, an exhausting cycle as predictable as the seasons.

  —

  Unfortunately, returning to New York no longer provided Mitchell the respite it once did. For many years now he had experienced distress at the changes reshaping his adopted city. But in the last decade, as he watched New York, his anxiety had turned to heartache; nostalgia morphed into palpable anger.

  Like so many of the seminal figures in the history of The New Yorker, Mitchell had come to the great metropolis from other, mostly smaller, places. These non–New Yorkers were the people who gave the magazine its shape, tone, and purpose. Founding editor Ross was from the Rocky Mountain West. William Shawn was from Chicago by way of a small newspaper in rural New Mexico. Katharine White was from Boston, James Thurber was from Ohio, St. Clair McKelway was from North Carolina, and John O’Hara was from working-class Pennsylvania. That very “otherness” was key to The New Yorker’s freshness and inventiveness, in that all those creative people were exploring their curiosity about New York within the magazine itself. Unlike the natives, who tended to be blasé about the city, the transplants had no such compunction; they were fascinated by New York’s every idiosyncrasy and crotchet. Outsiders like Mitchell brought with them the sense of discovery and wonder that were hallmarks of The New Yorker from the beginning.