They had all come to the city when New York was at its cultural and symbolic zenith, and grand public-works programs were pointing to a shining future, as if the entire enterprise were a living World’s Fair. By the late sixties and early seventies, however, New York’s glory days were long distant. The turbulent times were visiting on New York what Mitchell considered an almost biblical rash of pestilence. Crime, as in all major cities, skyrocketed. Motorists dodged potholes, and pedestrians ducked panhandlers. A huge homeless class developed and moved into the streets and subways. The city’s finances were in shambles. Mitchell’s beloved harbor was even filthier than when he’d documented it in 1951, and the air, if anything, was worse. Even his favorite fish-market haunt, Sloppy Louie’s, burned in 1967 (though it would reopen the following year). The war in Vietnam, racial divisions and riots, generational rebellion, and then the Watergate scandal overlaid everything with a shroud of disillusionment. Maybe worst of all for Mitchell, New York had seemingly turned its back on its storied history and was bent on pulling down some of its most architecturally significant buildings. This all affected Mitchell profoundly. As he confirmed to his North Carolina friend Roy Wilder, Jr., in a 1972 letter, “I no longer have much enthusiasm for New York City, but I do have a kind of morbid interest in watching it go to pieces.”
This sense of his city slipping its moorings was another factor exacerbating Mitchell’s innate depression. With each passing year he felt more disconnected—not only from his place, New York, but from his time. He began to fixate on what he was losing. Mitchell’s journal observations from this period sound very much like those characters in his stories who lament a world that is fast disappearing. “McSorley’s, middle of the afternoon, sit at [a] table in back and have a few mugs of ale and escape for a while from the feeling that the world is out of control and about to come to an end.” On that same page he notes, “Very likely that humanity is done for.”
Eventually the depression-plagued Mitchell sought refuge from this outside welter the only way he knew how—by electing to “live in the past,” as he explicitly and intentionally described it.
Living in the past: a deliberate retreat from the now, a flight from reality, a personal reversal of course—call it what you will. The point is that somewhere along the way Mitchell realized that a circuit had tripped in his mind, and he was now spending more time focused on what had gone before in his life—a space where the people so dear to him were all still alive, and the most satisfying times could be replayed at will—than he was confronting the frustrating present or an even worse future. It was Mitchell’s way of coping emotionally with a world he felt was simultaneously overwhelming him and letting him down.
This new outlook was both facilitated and spurred by his keeping of journal notes, a routine Mitchell had recently begun. Sometime in the late sixties, Mitchell was consulting another doctor about his chronic depression, and he was advised that he might find it therapeutic to maintain a daily journal. From that point on—at times more faithfully than at others—Mitchell kept an eclectic, scattershot record of his day-to-day activities. Not a diary per se, it was more an ad hoc collection of notes, facts, observations, anecdotes, and arcana. Sometimes his recollections were typed out and more composed, but most often they were simply scrawls of dates, events, places he ate (and what the meals cost), books he bought (and what they cost), shows he attended (and what they cost), people he saw. Keeping track of such unremarkable things seemed to bring a satisfying order to a mind so troubled by the disorder he saw all about him. But the note-keeping also had the effect of sending him back into his memories. Mitchell’s memories tended to be vivid, anyway—and in the throes of the black dog, they could be terrifying:
I know the exact day that I began living in the past. I didn’t know it then, of course, but I know it now. The day was October 4, 1968, a Friday…. On that day, according to my diary, a dream woke me up around four A.M. In this dream, I was standing on the muddy bank of a stream that I recognized because of a peculiar old slammed-together split-rail bridge crossing it as being the central stream running through Old Field Swamp, a cypress swamp near my home in North Carolina. I had often fished in this stream as a boy. In the dream, I was fishing for red-fin pikes with a snare hook hung from a line on the end of a reed pole. I was watching a sandbar in some shallow water out in the middle of the stream that the sun was shining on, and I was waiting for a pike to show up over the sandbar where it would be clearly visible and where I could maneuver my line until I had the hook under it and could snatch it out of the water. I was intent on what I was doing and oblivious to everything else. And then I happened to look up, and I saw that the bridge was on fire. And then I saw that the mud on the opposite bank was beginning to quiver and bubble and spit like lava and that smoke and flames were beginning to rise from it. And then, a few moments later, while I was standing there, staring, fish and alligators and snakes and muskrats and mud turtles and bullfrogs began floating down the stream, all belly-up, and I realized that the central stream of Old Field Swamp had turned into one of the rivers of hell. I dropped my pole and spun around and started running as hard as I could up a muddy path that led out of the swamp, but the mud on it was also beginning to quiver and bubble and spit, so I plunged into a briar patch beside the path and tried to fight my way through it, whereupon I woke up. I woke up with my heart in my mouth.
—
Late in his life, Mitchell summoned another memory—this one more poignant than apocalyptic, involving one of his last moments with his father. It was in late September or early October 1976, and Mitchell had been back in Fairmont for a week or so. A.N. was ninety-five at that point. They were again sitting on the back porch. The older man was staring out to the yard and beyond. “I was very sure that he was seeing in his mind the buildings that used to be out there in the backyard—I remembered them all very well myself—but that had been torn down one by one through the years as Fairmont grew from a country village into something between a town and a city,” Mitchell wrote. There had been a small barn with a corncrib and hayloft in it, and a larger barn farther out in the pasture, a smokehouse where they used to cure hams and pork shoulders, a woodshed, a washhouse for boiling clean the family laundry—all gone.
Suddenly A.N. sat up in his rocking chair and broke the silence. “Son, it’s your feet go first, your feet and your legs.” Mitchell would recall, “I had heard him say this several times during the past week and I knew he didn’t expect any answer or response from me. We continued sitting there, neither of us saying anything, until about fifteen minutes had gone by, and then he roused himself again, and this time he said something I had never heard before. ‘Out on the farm, when I was growing up,’ he said, ‘I went from shanks’ mare to muleback to horse and buggies, and after I moved to town I went from horse and buggies to Fords to Dodges to Cadillacs to rocking chairs.’
“I wanted to say something in response to this remark,” Mitchell continued, “but I was so shocked by it—it was so bleak and so bitter and so true and so final and so unexpectedly revealing and so emotionally uncharacteristic of him—that I couldn’t think of anything even remotely worth saying. We sat in silence for a few more minutes, and then he roused himself once again. ‘Ah, well, son,’ he said, ‘I’m getting tired. I better go lie down for a while.’ ”
A.N. had taken ill in early 1975, and Mitchell and Therese went down to help tend to him. Throughout that year he had three separate operations, each of which Mitchell came home for. The last of these visits was in December. During this time Mitchell had been trying to write, but he’d had little luck with all the discombobulation. “In other words,” he told Ellery Thompson, “I have been living in a state of confusion.”
His father’s decline was obviously on his mind when, in September of 1976, Mitchell wrote an uncharacteristically emotional letter that was published in the Fairmont weekly newspaper, The Times-Messenger. A full one thousand two hundred words, the letter actually was addre
ssed to a North Carolina highway engineer, as what prompted Mitchell to write was a proposal to relocate part of Church Street in Fairmont to accommodate an expansion of the community’s First Baptist Church. But that project would require the relocation of a number of graves in the adjacent cemetery, which Mitchell considered a desecration.
“The reason I have hesitated to write to you is that I am not a resident of Fairmont and it might at first appear that this matter is none of my business,” he began. But he reminded people that he was born and raised there, still owned property and paid taxes there, and at some point intended to retire there. He was baptized in the Baptist church in question. “Ancestors of mine have been members of it since its earliest days,” he wrote, “and my father and my two brothers and their families are members of it today. Furthermore, among the graves the church proposes to move are the graves of my grandfather and my grandmother and those of several other members of my family.” Then he launched into the particulars of his objections:
First of all, I do not think that the present-day congregation and the present-day officers have the right—and I am speaking of moral and spiritual rights, not narrowly defined legal rights—to move these graves. If it were a matter of great importance to human safety—if the road, that is, was especially dangerous or in some way more dangerous than any other side road leading off a highway—that would be a different matter…. But what is involved is not a highway matter at all, in my opinion, but a matter of sacred trust. My grandfather and my grandmother could have buried their children in the old Mitchell-Griffin-Easterling cemetery out in the country from Fairmont, where my great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents are buried, and they could of course have been buried there themselves, but they chose to bury their children and to be buried themselves in the cemetery of the First Baptist Church, a cemetery owned and administered by the church to which they belonged and in which they worshipped and to which they contributed. They chose the Baptist cemetery because they wanted to be close to the church and because they had every reason to think that their final resting places there would be permanent and undisturbed. In doing so, I think that they and the church entered into an agreement that might be described as an implied non-disturbance trust in perpetuity, and I do not think that the present-day congregation and the present-day officers can rightfully break this trust if their stated objective in doing so is merely to obtain more room for “necessary administrative offices and proper square footage for Senior Adults, Media Center, Parlor, and other facilities.”
I would feel the same way if the people in the graves that the church proposes to move were in no way related to me. The old Baptist cemetery goes deep into the past of Fairmont and the surrounding countryside. It is one of the most historic places in the southern part of Robeson County, along with the cemeteries of Olivet and Iona and Ashpole. The men and women who are buried in it worked extremely hard and endured all kinds of hardships in helping to build up this part of North Carolina, and we are benefiting in one way or another from their work to this day. If it were not for them, we would not be here ourselves, let alone the church and the road. They cleared the land and drained the swamps, and they put up the turpentine distilleries and cotton gins and sawmills and grist mills and other enterprises, all of which are only memories now. I think they deserve our deepest respect and veneration. In any case, the least we can do is leave their graves alone. I was taught to honor my father and my mother and by extension my grandfather and my grandmother and all those who have gone before, and I firmly believe in doing so. I believe in preserving links to the past. I believe that these links give us something permanent to hold on to in our daily lives and make us feel more balanced and reconciled in relation to what may happen to us at any moment in the present and what will most surely happen to us sometime in the future. If the road is put through the cemetery, in ten years or so it will have to be widened or somehow changed, and in twenty years or so it will have to be changed again, and in time to come the old Baptist cemetery will be gone for good, like the old Court House in Lumberton. One more link with the past—with our own local past—will be gone, and spiritually we and our descendants will be the poorer for it, no matter how much more room we might have gained for administrative offices and Media Centers and Parlors.
For these reasons, I respectfully ask the Highway Department to reconsider its “agreement” with the church.
Mitchell was certainly capable of expressing strong emotion in private, but that had never been his custom in his public writing. This letter represented perhaps the most passion he had ever committed to print. Then again, he knew what few readers of the letter could have—that he was on the verge of burying the one person over whom he had spent a lifetime sorting out his emotions, the person who had had more influence on him than any other. Consider a journal note Mitchell made around this time: “I am only now beginning to realize what I was writing about in those stories: my father as a Hudson River shad fisherman; my father as an Italian-American restaurant keeper; my father as an old Negro man.” In the end the cemetery was not disturbed. This lengthy letter would turn out to be the last original piece of writing Mitchell ever “published.”
A. N. Mitchell died that November. In the end, and even allowing for the enduring frustrations, the son felt that the many hours they spent together in the father’s latter years brought them closer and, at least to some extent, eroded the disappointments the older Mitchell had held for so long. “I wanted his respect,” Mitchell recalled years later, “and I believe I got it.”
In the same journal note in which Mitchell connected his father to some of his most enduring and commendable characters, the writer typed another single phrase: “Ecce Puer,” the title (“Behold the boy”) of the poem James Joyce wrote after the confluence of his father’s death and his grandson’s birth. The last stanza reads,
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
In the wake of A.N.’s death, the son became mired in an emotional funk that he couldn’t seem to shake. “No matter how boring it may sound,” he wrote to Ann Honeycutt the following March, “I’ve decided to be truthful and say that most of the time I seem to still be in the grip of the depression or the demoralization or whatever it might be called that took hold of me early last year when I realized that my father had given up and was getting ready to die. He died in November, and you’d think that I’d be able to get it out of my mind (or that particular aspect of it, anyway) by this time, but I can’t seem to.”
CHAPTER 14
INTO THE WILDERNESS
Except for Maron Simon the rewrite man and Jimmy Flexner and Joe Alsop and, I think, Tex O’Reilly, and maybe a few others, you and I are the only ones still around. Stanley [Walker] is gone, of course, and so is Charlie McLendon (he was night city editor when we were there) who succeeded Stanley, and so is Lessing Engelking (he was assistant city editor under Stanley when we were there) who succeeded McLendon. Ogden Reid and Mrs. Reid are gone. And so is Armistead R. Holcombe the managing editor (Stanley called him the good gray blank), and so are the editorial writers Geoffrey Parsons and Walter Millis and Henry Cabot Lodge and Marcus Duffield, and so is Mr. Rogers the head of the morgue, and so is that nice cheerful Scandinavian girl Mae Nyquist who was his assistant and who was always so helpful to young reporters just starting out and who later became head of the morgue herself, and so are Ben Robertson (I think Ben was the first to go) and Ed Angly and Alva Johnston and Ishbel Ross and Lucius Beebe and Dick Boyer and Tom Sugrue and Tom Compere and Joel Sayre and Bob Peck and Bob Neville and Joe Driscoll and Beverly Smith and John T. Whitaker the city hall reporter who became a foreign correspondent and got mixed up with Mussolini’s daughter Edda Ciano…. I hope this doesn’t sound morbid to you.
—From a letter to a former New York Herald Tribune colleague, 1981
—
Mitchell’s bleak outlook was hardly impr
oved by the fact that he was getting no traction whatever in what he’d hoped for some time now would be his next major writing project. The several ideas he pursued in the years since the second Joe Gould installment had all stalled. He toyed with adapting Gould’s story for the stage. He considered a follow-up piece on George Hunter (the two men had stayed in touch after Mitchell’s Profile; once, when Joseph and Therese visited in the mid-sixties on the occasion of Hunter’s ninety-fifth birthday, they found him preparing to bake a pie). In the immediate aftermath of the Gould book, Mitchell seemed to be working intently on a major update about McSorley’s, a piece that would go deeper into the saloon’s colorful history. He amassed a trove of original material for that, such as wills tracking how the bar exchanged hands and the recollections of family members and principals, especially as to the later owners, the Kirwans. He and Therese even took a vacation in Ireland so Mitchell could piggyback some reporting on Old John McSorley’s ancestry. One can readily imagine the appeal of the project for Mitchell. He knew McSorley’s so well that reporting the story would not seem like starting from scratch. Besides, the Gould “sequel” had gone so well that the idea of revisiting another of his “greatest hits” might well have been attractive. Even so, Mitchell apparently could not find a suitable dramatic pretext for the story—at least to stand on its own—or build up enough momentum to overcome his inertia.
Still, as he felt his window of productivity shutting, Mitchell couldn’t let go of the idea that had nagged at him for so long—that “big book” about New York City. At this stage of his life, the exact nature of the decades-old idea was hard for Mitchell to describe, when he tried to describe it at all, which given his secretive nature he seldom did except for occasional updates for his editors. What he had in mind was a work that would amount to “a summation of all I have ever written about the city,” according to notes he assembled before one such meeting with William Shawn in the early seventies. But he would need something—a place, a person, an idea—to give the story definition. He thought for a while that McSorley’s might be that connective tissue. He had a similar notion about the Fulton Fish Market, and over these same years he amassed folder after folder of market records, accounts of interviews and anecdotes, sketches of buildings, random musings, and other materials. But in time he rejected both those concepts; “they simply weren’t representative enough,” he said in one cryptic, and rare, journal note on the subject.
Man in Profile Page 27
