Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  As discouraging as it was to Mitchell to be outliving his cohorts and loved ones, an even worse sensation began to take hold. He worried that he was surviving into reputational obscurity. Or, as he put it a little later on in his life, “I’m a ghost.”

  With his depression, Mitchell’s fitful attempts to do creative work more or less ground to a halt. When people asked what he was doing with himself, he explained that he was still on staff at The New Yorker and was busy working on a book that he’d “had to postpone…a couple of times.” He would add that he had every intention of picking it back up, and certainly he hoped he could. But he was beginning to wonder himself if he ever would.

  Credit 15.6

  Mitchell was so passionate about the architectural history of New York City that his “volunteer” engagement became almost a full-time job.

  —

  Then, in 1982, New York mayor Ed Koch provided Mitchell yet another opportunity to avoid writing, for another indisputably noble cause. Koch appointed the writer to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the municipal agency charged with identifying and protecting New York’s historic buildings. The commission had been created in the mid-sixties by Mayor Robert Wagner in response to the rising concern by New York residents like Mitchell over the loss of so many landmark structures—the 1963 demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station being a particularly infamous example. By the time Koch reached out to Mitchell, the commission was at odds with a number of historic churches for denying or altering some of their controversial development projects. The chairman of the commission, Kent Barwick, was an acquaintance of Mitchell’s from Grace Church, where he was also a member. He knew how much Mitchell prized the city’s architectural heritage. He also figured that appointing a new commissioner with official connections to Grace might be read by the city’s churches and clerical groups as a conciliatory gesture.

  In fact, at one of Mitchell’s first commission meetings, representatives of Trinity Church, the venerable Episcopal institution in the heart of the Wall Street district, were presenting early renderings of a pedestrian bridge they wanted to build to connect the church with its offices and ancillary space across Trinity Place. Several commissioners were clearly unimpressed with the draft design, however, and the tension in the room began to build. Barwick thought it might be a good time to ask the heretofore-silent Mitchell to weigh in. As he did so, Barwick conspicuously reminded the petitioners that Commissioner Mitchell was a respected vestryman at Grace Church. But if Barwick expected diplomacy, he got candor. Summoning his best Carolina drawl, Mitchell pronounced, “It’s just like Trinity—so arrogant. They’ve always been so arrogant!” The room erupted.

  For an antiquarian and building lover like Mitchell, serving on the Landmarks Preservation Commission was a dream assignment. Commissioners routinely found themselves in the field examining buildings under review for protection. Mitchell delighted in traversing old, sometimes filthy buildings and filling notepads with architectural observations. He was particularly taken with cast-iron buildings. “He knew the history of every goddamned building in Soho,” said Philip Hamburger.

  Barwick, who would go on to serve several stints as president of the Municipal Art Society, had seen that expertise up close. In a sense, it was Mitchell who led Barwick to his life’s work in the first place.

  As a college student, Barwick spent a dime to buy a used copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, then consumed it in one sitting. That inspired him to begin frequenting McSorley’s, which he fell in love with. This ardor, in turn, caused Barwick to learn about a proposed redevelopment of the Cooper Square neighborhood, which would, among other things, put the wrecking ball to McSorley’s. In a panic and unsure of what to do, Barwick called Mitchell, out of the blue. The writer sympathized, to the point where he agreed to accompany his new young friend to testify against the project before Mayor Wagner and the Board of Estimate. Riding back uptown in a cab after the meeting, Mitchell pointed out to Barwick various real estate developments and went into detail about how they came about—often as not, in New York tradition, via political chicanery. The young activist never forgot how knowledgeable Mitchell was, both about the buildings and about the deals behind them. (After years of argument, the Cooper Square project was defeated.)

  Mitchell’s combination of knowledge and passion made him effective on the Landmarks Commission. “He was always very generous with his time, very thoughtful,” Barwick said. “Joe’s knowledge of New York was quite unusual. He knew the people so well. He knew the city from the pavement up. He was really respected.” The two would also work closely on the South Street Seaport project, and Barwick recalled in particular a speech Mitchell once gave at the museum. He wanted to make a point about cultural awareness. “Joe was passionate that people understand where their food came from. It wasn’t just that he had a passion for the fish market and the seaport as historic places to be saved. He wanted people to know about the fishermen, the business, the market. He really wanted people to understand their relationship with food.”

  Still, the landmarks role was often a grind for a man in his seventies. When he was invited, Mitchell was told that the commission’s work would take only several hours a month. In reality the board met frequently, and its meetings were often emotional and marathon affairs. One year into his term, Mitchell complained to a colleague that a recent session “as usual” lasted from 9:30 A.M. until nearly midnight. (In the same letter he expressed bemusement at his newly exalted station. “I am now one of the Commissioners and get letters extremely puzzling to the people in the mail room here addressed to the Honorable Joseph Mitchell.”)

  Looked at another way, the Landmarks Commission became virtually a second job for Mitchell during his five-year appointment. This far exceeded the volunteer’s avidity he had, say, for his work at the seaport. Between the commission’s numerous and protracted meetings and Mitchell’s own passion for preparation, the landmarks commitment became almost all-consuming.

  While this civic obligation clearly impeded Mitchell’s writing, no one who cared about him could begrudge him something that gave him so much pleasure. Preservation initiatives like the South Street Seaport and the Landmarks Commission ultimately vindicated his long-standing belief that something important is lost when a great city turns its back on its history. On a personal level, his passion for acquiring architectural curios never relented. In fact, as Mitchell aged, he even demonstrated a willingness to get a little reckless in their pursuit. In one journal note, Mitchell describes his fixation with trying to remove the number off the doorway of a building that was to be razed the next morning. It was night, and he was working furiously, trying to keep one eye out for the authorities. Prying at the numbers wasn’t working; eventually he realized they were bolted into place and that he would need to get inside the building to free them. The building, of course, was locked up tight. So in a spontaneous and adrenaline-fueled moment, he took his hammer and hurled it through one of the painted-over windows adjacent to the door. Having thus gained entry, Mitchell sawed at the bolts for fifteen minutes until he tapped the numbers free.

  A friend who had tagged along was alarmed at how what began as an after-dinner lark suddenly escalated to breaking and entering. That went too far, even with a building on the eve of being torn down. He told Mitchell he was beginning to think he was crazy.

  “And I know I am,” Mitchell said.

  —

  Through all this, Joseph Mitchell, creature of routine, reported to work at The New Yorker most every day, like every other staffer at the magazine. Well into his seventies, his health remained generally sound. Once a two-pack-a-day smoker, he had given up cigarettes back in the late 1950s. As an older man it now irritated him that climbing the stairs out of the subway left him a little winded. When he was diagnosed with a touch of arthritis, the idea of it bothered him more than any actual discomfort. Still, when he began to have some nagging pain in his neck and shoulders, he was persuaded to swap
out his ancient wooden office chair for a modern, adjustable, ergonomically correct one. After trying it out for several days, Mitchell relegated the old chair to the corner of his office. This was an uncomplaining companion of more than four decades, over the years following him around The New Yorker “from office to office and floor to floor,” a partner in some of the most significant stories he’d written. But as it became apparent that the new chair did in fact make him feel better, Mitchell decided to make the switch permanent, and one day while he was at lunch, a workman removed the old one. On his return, “I glanced over in the corner, and I had a sharp, intensely painful feeling of sadness,” Mitchell said, “a feeling of disloyalty toward a discarded inanimate object.” He recognized the sensation as precisely the same one he’d experienced many years before, when a mechanic informed him the family car was so far gone that it would cost more to repair than to replace with a new one. Mitchell reluctantly agreed and let it go for twenty-five dollars. He felt as if he’d just sold a child. “As we were leaving the garage,” he remembered, “I turned and looked at the shabby, beat-up old car in which we had driven up and down the [North Carolina] roads with great enjoyment for three summers knowing that I would never see it again and I collapsed inside with shame and with pure, unadulterated gazing-down-into-the-open-grave-as-the-coffin-is-lowered bitter choked-up scalding grief.”

  All in all, however, Mitchell was holding up rather well. His lifelong regimen of walking no doubt was paying dividends. He was still quite trim, if fighting a bit of the gentleman’s paunch. He dressed as smartly as ever, his bald pate invariably covered with a fedora when he was out. The hair that still grew at each side was closely cropped and mostly gray. His blues eyes could still dance, twinkle, or pierce, on cue.

  Mitchell still tended to take his lunch with coworkers, most often from his own cohort but not infrequently with younger ones. He preferred the humble yet reliable eateries in the vicinity of the magazine. Like many of the veteran New Yorker writers, Mitchell belonged to the Century Club, but, unlike them, he seldom went there. As he once quipped, “I’m saloonable, I’m even bar-and-grillable, but I have found out to my sorrow that I’m really not very clubbable.” One long day that did begin at the Century, however, was especially memorable for one of those younger colleagues, writer Ian Frazier.

  Frazier had come to The New Yorker from Chicago in 1974. At the time he didn’t know Joseph Mitchell or even his work. But someone introduced him to Edmund Wilson’s Apologies to the Iroquois, and he recalled being stunned by Mitchell’s opening piece on the steelworking Mohawks and by the fact that a magazine article could pack that much sheer power and poignancy. Frazier was so moved that it sparked his own interest in the plight and culture of Native American communities, which he would go on to write about in such acclaimed works as Great Plains.

  Frazier began to acquaint himself with Mitchell, who he said struck him like “someone from mythology” or a Front Page figure. “He just had this look about him, with his fedora and his suit and his raincoat,” Frazier said. “He managed to combine real elegance with just the possibility that he could be a bum.” He was also taken with Mitchell’s occasional crankiness, especially concerning the inescapable march of technology. When the magazine updated its telephone system, Frazier and Mitchell attended an orientation session together concerning what the newfangled machines could do. Frazier was amazed at how openly disdainful Mitchell was of the woman leading the training, almost to the point of heckling her. When she was done, Mitchell asked, “Now, will these changes affect the phones down in the lobby?” The instructor, somewhat baffled by the question, said no, the lobby phones would be left alone. Replied Mitchell, “Then those are the phones I’m going to use.”

  One day Mitchell invited Frazier to lunch at the Century, where they talked for hours as the other diners came and went. Eventually they decided to move on to a bar, continuing their conversation. Then it was off to another bar, and then, finally, to McSorley’s, where afternoon pleasantly passed into evening. Frazier was so entranced by Mitchell and their conversation that he forgot his wife was waiting for him at home—and that she was due any moment with their first child. In that pre-cellphone age, she’d had no way of tracking down a moving target. When Frazier finally got back to his Brooklyn home after “lunch,” at around 8:00 P.M., he found not only his wife but his mother-in-law and sister-in-law waiting for him. By this point, he recalled, he was as intoxicated as they were irritated. After an awkward silence, Frazier finally blurted out the only thing he could think to say: “I was drinking all day with Joe Mitchell.” With that simple declaration, all was forgiven; the three women, it turned out, were as much Mitchell fans as he was. (Some days later, Mitchell stopped Frazier at work and said, “You mean your wife was at home about to have a baby, and you were out all afternoon and evening drinking with me?” He paused. “Why, that was irresponsible!”)

  People did relish Mitchell’s company; as Chip McGrath put it, “Every day you had a Joe sighting was a great day.” Because their offices were on the same floor, McGrath said he often seemed to bump into Mitchell in the men’s room, where they might engage in lengthy, impromptu conversations—Mitchell doing most of the talking—about James Joyce or more-contemporary writers or religion or the latest issue of The New Yorker. Mitchell seldom failed to surprise. In one such exchange, McGrath happened to mention that he felt the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who had recently died, was rather underappreciated. “And Joe blew me away by just standing there in the men’s room, wadding up paper towels and reciting Bishop’s poems. Holy shit; he did that. Whether he was writing or not, he was reading all the time. He knew everything.” (After Jonathan Schell published the first of his “Fate of the Earth” articles in the magazine in 1982, Mitchell sent him a rare fan note, calling it “the most impressive article The New Yorker has ever published, including Hersey’s Hiroshima. The predicament you are writing about, and dealing with so powerfully on so many levels—the so-called practical, the political, the philosophical, the religious, etc.—makes the predicaments that Gibbon and Spengler and Toynbee wrote about seem like Sunday school picnics.”)

  Nevertheless, where it came to Joseph Mitchell, most New Yorker people had one burning question: What was he doing? What were once whispers grew louder with each passing year—he seemed to be trapped in what was becoming the longest case of writer’s block in history. There were all the signs that he was writing something; that’s what he told people, and indeed his outward routine was essentially the same as it had been when he was producing stories. He would arrive, go into his office, remove his coat and hang it, shut the door, and go to work. Colleagues often purposefully cocked an ear as they passed that door, and they might well hear Mitchell inside, typing. But typing what? What was he working on? With the possible exception of what hermitic J. D. Salinger might be doing up there in New Hampshire, Mitchell was becoming the literary circle’s biggest mystery. If anything, Mitchell’s mystery was all the more fascinating because he was being (professionally) hermitic right there at work, under everyone’s nose.

  McGrath, Hamburger, and others confirm that the Mitchell fixation reached the point where some staffers were known to rummage in Mitchell’s trash can, in a vain search for clues. But this curiosity was driven strictly out of respect, McGrath said, “it was not bemusement at all.” In fact, it was precisely because Mitchell was such a revered writer that this compulsion to know what he was working on existed; had he been a lesser figure, the question would have been of no consequence. Then again, a lesser figure never would have been extended the open-ended courtesy in the first place.

  None of this was easy for Mitchell, of course. He was acutely aware not only of the internal curiosity but also of the growing number of people outside the magazine who wondered why on earth The New Yorker continued to pay a writer, his past accomplishments notwithstanding, who was not writing. “Joe had a hyperintelligence,” said Hamburger. “I’m sure he was aware of [what was being said]. N
obody ever stopped to think of the pain, how painful it must have been for him not to be writing.”

  Others close to Mitchell acknowledged that. His daughter Elizabeth said that for a number of years after the publication of Joe Gould’s Secret, the family wasn’t especially cognizant of any particular “block” in his productivity, because the intervals between his later stories had become so protracted already and because he was continuing to pursue story ideas and conduct interviews much as he had before. They also appreciated the time he was committing to North Carolina. His brother Jack had died in 1983; that meant the farm supervision transferred to Joseph’s surviving brother, Harry, and Joseph tried to help out as he could. One way was with the management of the properties’ considerable woodlands. By this time Mitchell had become increasingly passionate about the many benefits of reforestation. He had seen the debilitating cycles of fire and disease; he became expert in discerning when trees had passed their maturity and should be timbered. “I am afraid [I am] almost obsessively interested in the subject,” Mitchell admitted to a friend.

  Nonetheless, Mitchell’s daughters did gradually realize that something had changed about their father’s writing work, that none of it was coming together as Mitchell wished, and in his later years he would sometimes talk to them about his inability to finish a story. Mitchell expressed guilt and anger about the situation, on occasion even apologizing for it—“a jumble of emotions,” Elizabeth said. Her father, she concluded, had become a prisoner of his own expectations. In the same vein, Janet Groth, a New Yorker receptionist who knew Mitchell well at this time, recalled that on the few occasions over lunch when Mitchell tried to talk about his writing difficulties, she caught “the note of suppressed panic in [his] voice.” In conversations with friends like Roy Wilder, Mitchell also lowered his guard on the subject. “Sometimes I just wish they’d fire me and I would go home to North Carolina,” Mitchell remarked in one such call.