Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  But it remained the case that, taking Shawn’s cue, no one in authority at the magazine really pressed Mitchell about the situation. They assumed—or at least hoped—that eventually this long-aborning work would simply materialize and that it would be so self-evidently wonderful that it would justify their indulgence.

  Shawn’s patience was an extension of the unorthodox philosophy the magazine always had about its writers—all flowing from founder Harold Ross. Writers were a different, difficult, balky, and inexplicable breed, Ross maintained, speaking from hard experience. Beyond that, different writers produced at different speeds and were motivated by different impulses. It was all very mysterious. Talent could perhaps be nudged, but it couldn’t be stampeded. Thus, according to Brendan Gill, “lack of productivity [at The New Yorker] is neither rebuked nor deplored. On the contrary, it may be sneakingly admired, as proof that the magazine considers writing an occupation often difficult and sometimes, for the best writers, impossible.”

  Another of Mitchell’s admirers at the magazine was the writer Calvin Trillin, who came a generation after Mitchell. In trying to explain the enigma of Mitchell’s last fallow period, he said it was important to remember that The New Yorker was unusual in many regards—including the fact that it had so many full-time writers on the premises in the first place, when most magazines relied almost exclusively on contributors who typically worked from their homes. Since most New Yorker writers were paid by the piece, Trillin continued, no one really knew what anyone was up to—or cared all that much. “Not writing was not that unusual at The New Yorker,” he said. “A lot of people forget that. It was always hard to tell what people were doing, exactly. At one point when I first got there, there were people on salary—very small salary—to write Talk of the Town, and as far as I could tell none of them wrote Talk of the Town. They worked on fiction; I don’t know what they did. It was like having a little fellowship.”

  —

  At bottom, then, why wasn’t Joseph Mitchell finishing anything? There is, unsurprisingly, no “magic bullet” answer. But in hindsight, one truth does emerge with an almost startling clarity. Even allowing for all the external factors that impeded his writing expectations, it was Mitchell himself who’d set things up so that there could be, in essence, only one outcome—failure.

  That setup for failure occurred early on, in the wake of “Joe Gould’s Secret,” when Mitchell decided that his next project would be a full-blown book rather than simply another story.

  In one of the rare instances where Mitchell tried to explain the long slump, he would write, “A number of years ago, after brooding off and on…about the fact that I have never actually written a book (all my books, as you know, are collections), I decided I would stop writing Profiles and Reporter at Large pieces for a while and go ahead and write a real book—as a matter of fact, I decided that I would write the unwritten book that I described in ‘Joe Gould’s Secret.’ ” Yet as straightforward as that sounds, it represented a huge challenge for Mitchell—because, as he acknowledged, that was something he had never done before, and he didn’t quite know how to go about it. As complex as his stories were, books have their own structure and pace. Narrative threads and characters must be established and interwoven over a much longer arc, as the writer builds both his story and the tension to drive it. Just as many accomplished newspaper journalists stumbled with the transition to magazine writing at The New Yorker, the shift from short (nonfiction) story to book was no easy task, even for someone as deft as Joseph Mitchell.

  That challenge becomes even taller when a writer isn’t absolutely certain what story he wants to tell and what characters will tell it. In Mitchell’s case, as has been seen, that was all something of a jumble. He knew the basic notions and themes he wanted to put across, but he never really figured out what to focus on or how to integrate the various themes into the operatic tale of New York he envisaged. In part to compensate for that indecision and inaction—and to show the rest of the world that he was still busy—Mitchell simply kept reporting, accumulating information and family histories and anecdotes about all these people and institutions: Ann Honeycutt, Joe Cantalupo, McSorley’s, the Fulton Fish Market, himself. He felt—hoped—that in that activity the solution to his problem eventually would reveal itself, a deus ex machina. In the end, however, he merely wound up with overflowing file drawers full of paper, a ragged trove that, upon encountering it, one can imagine almost literally burying Mitchell and his book.

  In time, then, Mitchell’s inability to move forward preyed on his deep capacity for guilt, which in turn compounded his growing stress over the situation. And stress always could block Mitchell, especially when combined with discouragement—which, of course, the stress only exacerbated. As early as the mid-forties, Mitchell himself had taken note of this tendency. In a letter to friend John McNulty, he discusses having undertaken the reporting on what was planned as a two-part Profile—what would become “Dragger Captain.” Mitchell was enthusiastic about the project, but he hit a snag, he says, and came to a hard stop for several months. “It drove me into the worst slump I’ve ever been in, and I got to feeling that if I didn’t finish it, and finish it to my satisfaction, I’d never be able to write another word.” If Mitchell had such an adverse reaction to a temporary obstruction, one can appreciate his being genuinely stymied by all these mounting pressures three decades later.

  So it was that Mitchell was psychologically set up to struggle. Add to that the convergence of the other realities of his life: advancing old age and its attendant inertia; the personal tragedies and family obligations; the proliferating outside activities and diversions, such as his role with the city’s historic preservation efforts—and in time the mere idea of writing a new, sustained work became essentially impossible. He was too weighed down with, as he described it, “that bleak and hollow remoteness that a writer who hasn’t published anything for a long time is bound to feel….” Mitchell had stepped into a trap, one largely of his own device.

  By this point, whatever others thought he was up to, Mitchell himself was beginning to face up to the reality that his great “New York story” might never get written. He was tired in every respect, losing energy and losing heart.

  On the other hand, he was beginning to think seriously about what he perhaps might do with the great New York story he had, in effect, already written.

  CHAPTER 16

  UP IN THE OLD HOTEL

  Your letter is one of the first I am really answering because it has meant so much to me. If you remember, in your letter you said you had thought of writing to me about missing my stories in The New Yorker but had decided not to do so until you read in the Author’s Note of my book that graveyard humor exemplified the cast of my mind—“so,” you continued in your letter, “you will appreciate this: I thought you were dead.” Well, Mrs. Edwards, I don’t know why, but that delighted me. It filled me with cheerfulness. I keep the letter in the tray drawer of my desk and anytime one of those strange, sudden attacks of depression that many of us have hits me, I get it out and reread it, and it never fails to cheer me up.

  —From a letter to a fan of Up in the Old Hotel, 1993

  —

  Within a year of Therese’s death, a still-grieving Mitchell determined he needed to resume a semblance of social life, and he began dating. One of the first people he saw was a fellow writer—Marie Winn, a New York City journalist, author, and urban naturalist who, among other things, was (and remains) an authority on the wildlife of Central Park. She is also the sister of New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm and sister-in-law of longtime New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford (who died in 2004), both good friends of Mitchell’s. Over the years Winn and Mitchell, though not particularly close, had many overlapping acquaintances and so sometimes found themselves guests at the same dinners and cocktail parties. In the period after Therese’s death, Winn, then formally separated from her husband, happened to be spending some time working in her sister’s New Yorker offi
ce—giving herself, as she described it, a professional “change of scenery.” Mitchell began dropping by when he saw her there, and before long they were keeping steady company.

  The two had many shared interests, not least being New York City itself. Both also happened to be in emotional turmoil at this time and were feeling vulnerable. Winn had long been an enthusiast of Mitchell’s work, and they would often make pilgrimages to sites of special significance to him, such as the Sandy Ground cemetery with George Hunter’s grave. As their relationship deepened, Mitchell sometimes shared with her stray pages of work in progress, such as sketches from his journal, but Winn said she never saw anything that looked remotely “finished.” In social settings, she became accustomed to people asking Mitchell what he was working on. “He was horribly tormented by that question,” she recalled, and he invariably replied that he was hard at work on pieces about Joe Cantalupo or Ann Honeycutt. But in Winn’s estimation that was essentially a stock response, “the party line—and then he would look at me and sort of wink.”

  Their relationship grew serious enough that the subject of marriage did arise, but in Winn’s view it was always an unlikely prospect. Mitchell held the institution of marriage in such sober regard, she explained, that he would not have been comfortable feeling he had helped bring hers to an end. In fact, Mitchell over time subtly encouraged Winn to give her marriage another chance, and she and her husband eventually reconciled.

  Even before Therese’s death, Mitchell had maintained a regular Friday lunch engagement with Janet Groth, who while working at The New Yorker began doctoral studies at New York University. She would go on to a respected career as a university professor and author, with particular expertise in the life and work of yet another New Yorker figure, Edmund Wilson. After Therese’s death, Mitchell apparently made a point of seeing even more of Groth, according to her published memoir. But while Groth was young and beautiful and Mitchell certainly had a flirtatious streak, the serial luncheon was a platonic one, she reported, their shared passion being literature—especially the works of Joyce, which had brought her to Mitchell’s attention in the first place. The lunches came to a gradual end as Groth left the city to begin her academic career.

  In time, Mitchell began to see a New Yorker colleague named Sheila McGrath, who was the executive administrator of the magazine’s editorial department. She oversaw much of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of producing a weekly publication—getting staffers on the payroll, securing advances for writers, making travel arrangements, and so forth. Most important of all, she was a key liaison between the editorial staff and William Shawn in regard to the business aspects of his fiefdom. McGrath (no relation to fellow staffer Chip McGrath; a native of Newfoundland, she pronounced her name “McGraw”) had an office on the magazine’s twentieth floor, as did Mitchell, Brendan Gill, Philip Hamburger, Emily Hahn, and many other writers—and because of that proximity, she recalled, she met Mitchell on her very first day of work at The New Yorker in 1967. While she and Mitchell had been friendly through the years, they were not really close.

  It was only after Therese’s death, and almost by chance, that their relationship took a more intimate turn. One afternoon McGrath realized that several workdays had passed with no sign of or word from Mitchell, which, even allowing for his city wanderings, was uncharacteristic. Calling his apartment, she got no answer, so McGrath decided to go see for herself if everything was all right. When she arrived she banged on Mitchell’s door, and after an uncomfortably long time with no response he finally answered—looking haggard and so weakened by flu that he’d barely been able to get off the couch. McGrath went off to restock his empty cupboard and helped get him through that illness. From that point they began going out, and they would remain a couple until Mitchell’s death.

  An actress as a young woman, McGrath shared Mitchell’s love of literature, poetry, and the arts, and her temperament was as steely as Mitchell’s was stubborn. Her sense of order—after all, keeping the magazine’s internal affairs on track was essentially her job—nicely complemented Mitchell’s need for order. And because she, too, had been reading Mitchell’s writing almost all her life (McGrath’s widely traveled parents in Newfoundland were early subscribers to The New Yorker), she had a deep appreciation for his life and work. Though she was some three decades his junior, they proved to be a good match.

  McGrath took it upon herself to try to bring the vulnerable Mitchell back to emotional life. As part of that, they joined a mutual friend, Mary Painter—Shawn’s longtime personal assistant—for a two-week vacation in Paris in the summer of 1984. Mitchell had always wanted to go to Paris; Liebling, the great Francophile, had urged him to make the trip for as long as they knew each other. Painter secured a large apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, where she had stayed on previous visits, and the three of them happily explored the city’s cafés, museums, bookstores, and side streets. Mitchell—no surprise—was enchanted. He and McGrath made their return by way of another great walker’s city, London, and the entire adventure left Mitchell revitalized.

  As McGrath had hoped, it also helped jump-start his thinking about that long-delayed book.

  —

  Diehard fans, who had grown impatient waiting for a new Mitchell story that never arrived, and younger ones, who’d stumbled onto his work only through word of mouth, had to make do with his previously published books. But as time passed, those volumes became nearly as scarce as new Mitchell material. A veritable Mitchell cult gradually coalesced, with devotees who scoured secondhand bookstores for dogeared copies of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, or Old Mr. Flood, or even his first book, the collection of newspaper matter, My Ears Are Bent.

  In the sixties, Calvin Trillin was working at Time magazine and didn’t really know about Joseph Mitchell until a friend at The New Yorker lent him a copy of McSorley’s. “I read it and I was just astonished by it,” he says of the discovery. “I just think that [Mitchell] seems to get the marks of writing off of his prose so that it looked like it just appeared. You didn’t feel him working on it. It was as if you were just looking at what he wanted you to look at without any interference, and that’s a great art.”

  Not long after his initiation to Mitchell, Trillin went to work for The New Yorker himself. A fellow tenant in his building was Mitchell’s close friend Robert MacMillan, a New Yorker editor, and “Bob agreed to let me borrow My Ears Are Bent if I promised not to take it out of the building.” From that point on, Trillin, like so many others, sought all Mitchell’s volumes in a kind of a quest. This was no small challenge; when Mitchell’s books did turn up in stores, they were quickly snatched up by equally determined aficionados. In those pre-Internet days, Mitchell collectors would compare tactics and share accounts of how they came to win particular titles. Being the oldest of Mitchell’s books, Ears was a genuine rarity. Trillin remembers coming across it at a bookstore in Seattle; the price tag said it was a mere three dollars. Knowing how scarce the book was, Trillin thought the listed price might be a mistake, and in fact, when he was checking out, the sales clerk examined the volume and said rather gruffly, “Where’d you get that book?” Trillin was anxious: “I had this irrational fear he was going to take it away from me,” he recalled. When Trillin pointed to the shelf he had taken it from, the clerk informed him that there had in fact been a mistake: The books from that section were half off. So Trillin got his original copy of My Ears Are Bent for one dollar and fifty cents.

  In truth, the Mitchell scarcity was a manufactured one, engineered by Mitchell himself. Over the years, publishers had implored him, practically pleaded with him, to permit the reissue of his books in paperback. But Mitchell resolutely declined. He felt strongly that paperback reprints, such as those of Liebling’s work, seldom garnered serious attention or had much impact. Besides, he had another idea in mind—that one day all his books would be reissued in a kind of master anthology. But the notion had remained lodged in his head, while Mitchell ostensibly pursued his great
New York tale like Ahab chasing the white whale.

  In the end his quarry proved too elusive. By the late eighties, it had become clear even to Mitchell that he was not going to write a retrospective profile of Ann Honeycutt, his female doppelgänger; he was not going to be able to marshal the story of his mentor Joe Cantalupo as the centerpiece for his sweeping narrative of New York City; he was not going to compile another installment of the gypsies of the city—and it was increasingly unlikely he would be turning out any more chapters detailing his own life and experiences. Now an octogenarian, Mitchell knew in his heart that his writing life was done. If he didn’t like that truth, he could at least live with it. But it saddened him to the marrow that as the manic modern world whizzed by him, it also seemed to be leaving behind his hard-earned reputation as a writer. By this point, Joseph Mitchell had come to grasp the dreadful irony: If he was known by a modern audience at all, it was for not writing.

  As it happened, however, he wasn’t quite correct about that. If Mitchell was done writing, he was not altogether finished publishing.

  In the mid-eighties, Dan Frank was a talented young editor at Viking Books, where he was introduced to Mitchell via Joe Gould’s Secret, which Viking had published. He was smitten. He went back and read all Mitchell’s books, coming away with the idea to reprint each of them—upon which he learned that many editors before him, including at his own imprint, had had the same idea and failed. Frank, however, was undeterred. He was convinced there was still an appreciative audience out there for Mitchell’s kind of stories. “I have in common with Joe a deeply elegiac sense of the transience of our lives coupled with the permanence of the past, a sense of being haunted by first and last things,” Frank would later write. “And I of course wanted to succeed where all of my editorial colleagues else failed.”