Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  In 1986 he first reached out to Mitchell, suggesting that if they could meet for lunch, he promised not to discuss Mitchell’s work—which Frank in fact honored. But as they became better acquainted, they did of course start talking about the past books, and Frank began to ascertain the obstacles he was up against. Mitchell believed the old books should be published together, not separately, and that omnibus volume should be hardcover. Unlike other editors Mitchell had spoken with, Frank thought both those ideas “made perfect sense.” For him, the true hurdles lay elsewhere. For starters, Mitchell talked about including new, as yet unwritten pieces to freshen the anthology, in particular portraits of Honeycutt and Cantalupo. Frank’s larger concern was that the idea of the new pieces was a tidy vehicle for further procrastination—how could you publish the book without all the material in hand?—and as such had proved quite useful to Mitchell. Frank could sense how torn the writer was about actually seeing the anthology into print. On one level Mitchell was eager about the idea, clearly, but on the other he dreaded the inevitable and uncomfortable questions he knew such a book would raise about what he had been doing since 1965.

  Beyond that, Frank also grew to fear that Mitchell’s pursuit of Cantalupo and Honeycutt was, at bottom, quixotic and ultimately un-winnable. “I felt that he knew that those pieces were embedded in a time and a place that was no more,” Frank explained. “Whatever notes he may have assembled toward those pieces, the fact is that he was a reporter, and one of the conditions that allowed him to write was to return obsessively to the subject for one further detail, one further insight, observation, or clue—and that was no longer possible. [Cantalupo died in 1979; Honeycutt in 1989.] In some sense he became his subjects, and whatever that act of impersonation was required the person he was writing about to be available to him.”

  Still, as he courted Mitchell, Frank rode along with this prospect of incorporating new matter into the anthology. While the editor had no real objection to additions, neither did he think them essential. Mitchell’s past work by itself—pulled together in a logical fashion, handsomely packaged, and intelligently promoted—would stand up well enough to sell, he felt. He thought the book would generate a lot of publicity. It would remind the long-ago fans of why they had waited so expectantly for the next Mitchell piece in The New Yorker, searching each week’s issue like an Easter egg hunt. And, Frank hoped, it might bring an entirely new audience to Mitchell—readers born since his last published story.

  Frank gained an influential ally in Sheila McGrath, who also believed there were still Joseph Mitchell readers out there. She quietly lobbied for the project, getting Mitchell to reread his stories and think about how they might be arranged and presented.

  With Frank subtly pulling and McGrath subtly pushing, Mitchell began to warm to the idea. When a reporter for New York magazine called in early 1987 and inquired what his plans were, Mitchell replied that he had been working on an “omnibus” collection that would have old and new material and would also explain what he’d been up to all these years. Mitchell added that the book would be published within a year—but he characteristically and politely declined to say anything further about it, adding, “I’d like it to be a kind of surprise.”

  —

  Not long before that interview, Mitchell received a surprise of his own—in fact, the most jolting piece of New Yorker news he’d had since the unexpected death of Harold Ross some thirty-five years earlier. Late one afternoon, Sheila McGrath poked her head into Mitchell’s office, with “an expression of shock on her face,” Mitchell would note in his journal. She had just learned that the owner of The New Yorker, media magnate S. I. Newhouse, was prying Shawn from the editorship of the magazine. This was January 12, 1987, and Shawn’s final day was to be March 1.

  The unthinkable news—Shawn no longer running The New Yorker was the cultural equivalent of the Dodgers no longer playing in Brooklyn—stunned not only the magazine’s staff but the wider literary world, making the front page of The New York Times. Yet in retrospect the only truly surprising aspects were the timing and the manner in which it was done. Two years earlier, in equally stunning fashion, Newhouse—who had built his fortune on a string of newspapers around the country—had purchased The New Yorker from the Fleischmann family. That news had not gone down well with the staff or, in particular, with Shawn. Shawn issued a rare but pointed memo on the development, saying that “the editorial staff was not a party to these negotiations. Nor were the views of the editorial staff solicited during these negotiations. We were not asked for our approval, and we did not give our approval.” Even though Newhouse at the time promised that Shawn would remain in charge and keep his independence, it was not an auspicious start. Newhouse and Shawn were every bit the other’s equal for stubbornness. Beyond that, Shawn at the time of the sale was seventy-seven years old and had conveyed little credible evidence that he was thinking about leaving anytime soon.

  Now he was essentially being fired. Taking his place would be the highly respected book editor Robert Gottlieb, who ran another iconic Newhouse property, Knopf. Mitchell and McGrath spent much of the rest of that day spreading the news to their colleagues and discussing possible responses. The next day there was a meeting of the entire editorial staff at the New Yorker offices, where Shawn told them that, contrary to what Newhouse had announced, he had had no intention of quitting on March 1; the decision had been made for him.

  To a staff that had long prided itself and counted on its editorial freedom from the business side, the whole affair felt like a coup. And the assemblage responded in a way that would only happen at The New Yorker. A committee composed a letter to Gottlieb, politely but firmly imploring him to change his mind and turn down Newhouse. Mitchell and McGrath signed the petition, along with about one hundred fifty of their colleagues. These included almost all the leading staff writers and contributors—even the reclusive J. D. Salinger.

  Gottlieb graciously declined the staff’s offer to resign before he’d even begun, and a few weeks later he was making rounds in the New Yorker offices, starting to build relationships. One of the staffers he made a point of seeing was Mitchell. The two men talked for maybe fifteen minutes. They compared notes about their shared taste for idiosyncratic collecting—Mitchell with his pickle forks and handmade bricks, Gottlieb his kitsch purses from the city’s flea markets. Mitchell then turned the talk to what he had been working on. “I tried to explain to him why I haven’t finished anything in a long time, and I think I was able to. In other words, I think he understood me,” Mitchell noted after the conversation. “I told him I have a deadline of my own—an inner deadline.”

  Though little more than a get-acquainted chat, the meeting left Mitchell a bit more hopeful about the editorial change he had been dreading. “I have a feeling things are going to turn out much better than I thought they would,” he wrote.

  The next day was Shawn’s last at the office. It was a poignant and bittersweet occasion, especially for those few, like Mitchell, who had known the editor for his entire tenure at The New Yorker. There was to be a party for Shawn at day’s end, but a melancholy Mitchell slipped out of the building early. When even William Shawn was seen to be expendable, the modern world had truly overtaken Joseph Mitchell.

  A few months after Gottlieb took office, he picked up again with Mitchell, who went into more detail about having tried to work on “the most ambitious piece of my life” for a number of years, only to be tripped up by innumerable and painful “interruptions”—most especially the passing of his father and its various complications with the farm in North Carolina, followed by the long, agonizing death of Therese. Meeting yet again that October, Mitchell asked his editor, “Can you take another year [of me] working on this?” To which Gottlieb replied, “I’m not worrying about you if you’re not worrying about us.”

  Years later, for a New Yorker retrospective on Mitchell’s career, Gottlieb characterized these visits as “very pleasant,” saying that he didn’t press fo
r details on Mitchell’s work in progress and the writer didn’t volunteer them. “I liked him, liked his work, and I wanted to be respectful without being demanding,” the editor said. “I just showed, I hoped, a continuing affectionate interest without being exigent. It quickly became apparent to me that we were going through some ritual.”

  —

  In early 1991, Mitchell’s “other” editor, Dan Frank, moved to Pantheon. Though he had continued to nudge Mitchell along for the past few years, he had yet to secure a commitment from him. That May, after yet another inconclusive conversation, Frank in frustration wrote to Mitchell:

  Joe, I don’t know how to persuade you to allow your work back into print. At lunch, we spoke briefly of how what the truth might look like would be little like what scientists or ministers have in mind. I recalled this on seeing some words of Eudora Welty who, in talking of Walker Percy, said “only a judicious portion of this truth is the factual kind; much of it is truth about human nature, and more of it is spiritual.” Your books possess that truth, and those fortunate to read your books, today or years hence, will recognize it and be enriched by it.

  This entreaty must have done the trick, as soon after, the two came to a formal agreement that Pantheon would bring out the long-aborning Mitchell anthology, and by early summer they were deep into the logistical details. The book would pull together the material originally published in McSorley’s, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould’s Secret, plus seven previously uncollected stories. These last would include some of his earlier North Carolina–based fictional pieces for The New Yorker, as well as such important later stories as “The Mohawks in High Steel” and “The Gypsy Women.” Mitchell continued to talk to Frank, as he had to his New Yorker editors, about the “new material” he’d been working on. Indeed, for the rest of his days Mitchell would reference these pieces as living things, works in process, albeit ones that were never forthcoming. This was not disingenuousness; there’s no question that a part of Mitchell truly did hope he would be able to set the new stories down one day, even as another part knew he could not. According to Chip McGrath, who in his role as deputy editor of The New Yorker got updates from Mitchell, it always sounded as if he was “writing it in his mind.”

  Having the Pantheon contract and an actual plan energized Mitchell. “I haven’t had a book published in so long, this feels like my first one,” he told the Times. The book would be called Up in the Old Hotel, after the Profile of his old friend Louie Morino and doubtless because Mitchell appreciated the aptness of that story’s theme—that, in the end, rummaging around for the past will get you dirty but little else. (Like every other aspect of the project, arriving at an acceptable title proved something of an ordeal. Initially, Mitchell pitched Born Again: Four Unavailable Works of Joseph Mitchell, but Frank persuaded him that would put the emphasis on the mere fact of publication rather than the material itself. Mischievously, Mitchell also suggested some part of “the worms crawl in” children’s song from “The Rivermen.” Frank demurred but indicated that pulling some phrase from Mitchell’s oeuvre did make sense, which ultimately they did.)

  Mitchell became keenly focused. He wrote his own flap copy for the book’s jacket. With Sheila McGrath’s help, he read over every scrap of the previously published material, making small edits here and there (as a confirmed technophobe, he was disconcertingly amazed how easy this was once his drafts were put into a computer) and trying to decide whether the story order should be shuffled around to make more sense in the omnibus format. For the most part, Mitchell kept the story lineup consistent with the original books. His goal was, in the main, to have related material appear together while still keeping the overall arc of the stories largely in chronological order. Thus, the new stories were all inserted into the McSorley’s section. He left the first Joe Gould Profile in McSorley’s, where it had originally appeared, but kept the long sequel by itself at the end of the anthology. This vetting process was painstaking, in one sense literally. About this time Mitchell was dealing with complications from cataract surgery, including a detached retina that hospitalized him for several days. The situation for many months made reading most uncomfortable for Mitchell, and writing difficult.

  Still, he was gratified to be assaying his life’s work all at once. He was especially delighted, he wrote, to find “how often a kind of humor that I can only call graveyard humor turned up in them,” he wrote in the “Author’s Note” for the collection. He goes on to recount some of his Fairmont childhood and explains how the family’s tradition of communing in cemeteries had ultimately caused him to connect the folly and futility of life with our final resting places.

  Then, in a vivid end note, Mitchell ties his own sardonic outlook to his discovery as a young man of a late Mexican artist who, it turned out, was a kindred soul:

  Another influence on my cast of mind has been a Mexican artist named Posada. I first heard of him in 1933, during the worst days of the Depression, when I was a reporter on the World-Telegram. I had gone up to the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel to interview Frida Kahlo, who was the wife of Diego Rivera and a great painter herself, a sort of demonic surrealist. That was when Rivera was doing those Rockefeller Center murals. Thumb-tacked all along the walls of the hotel suite were some very odd engravings printed on the cheapest kind of newsprint. “José Guadalupe Posada,” Kahlo said, almost reverentially. “Mexican. 1852–1913.” She told me that she had put the pictures up herself so she could glance at them now and then and keep her sanity while living in New York City. Some were broadsides. “They show sensational happenings that took place in Mexico City—in streets and in markets and in churches and in bedrooms,” Kahlo said, “and they were sold on the streets by peddlers for pennies.” One broadside showed a streetcar that had struck a hearse and had knocked the coffin onto the tracks. A distinguished-looking man lay in the ruins of the coffin, flat on his back, his hands folded. One showed a priest who had hung himself in a cathedral. One showed a man on his deathbed at the moment his soul was separating from his body. But the majority of the engravings were of animated skeletons mimicking living human beings engaged in many kinds of human activities, mimicking them and mocking them: a skeleton man on bended knee singing a love song to a skeleton woman, a skeleton man stepping into a confession box, skeletons at a wedding, skeletons at a funeral, skeletons making speeches, skeleton gentlemen in top hats, skeleton ladies in fashionable bonnets. I was astonished by these pictures, and what I found most astonishing about them was that all of them were humorous, even the most morbid of them, even the busted coffin on the streetcar tracks. That is, they had a strong undercurrent of humor. It was the kind of humor that the old Dutch masters caught in those prints that show a miser locked in his room counting his money and Death is standing just outside the door. It was Old Testament humor, particularly the humor in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Gogolian humor. Brueghelian humor. I am thinking of that painting by Brueghel showing the halt leading the blind, which, as I see it, is graveyard humor. Anyway, ever since that afternoon in Frida Kahlo’s hotel suite, I have been looking for books showing Posada engravings. I never pass a bookstore or a junk store in a Spanish neighborhood of the city without going in and seeing if I can find a Posada book. My respect for him grows all the time.

  Up in the Old Hotel was published in August of 1992. As the date neared, Mitchell’s anxiety grew. Would anyone want it? Would anyone even remember who he was?

  He needn’t have worried. Hotel came out to tremendous critical acclaim. (The cover of the paperback edition, still in print almost a quarter-century later, features the same iconic Mitchell photograph as the frontispiece of this book.) It was as if a long-lost treasure had been retrieved from the ocean floor for people to appreciate all over again.

  The critical response was unalloyed joy tinged with reverence. The Times typified this admiring tone, calling the book in essence a gift to New York: “That city, the one in which Joseph Mitchell finds his gloom lifted by the smoke [
of the Fulton market] itself, no longer exists. But a book like Up in the Old Hotel—in print forever, one hopes—will cause another melancholy soul…to look in the waste places of the present city, listen to its lunatic ravings and report back to us, as amply and as sympathetically as Mr. Mitchell has done. ‘STAND AT THE BAR AND JUST LISTEN.’ ”

  Beyond the reviews—maybe even more important than the reviews—was the personal attention Hotel prompted for Mitchell. Suddenly he seemed to be everywhere. There were television interviews, newspaper feature stories, profiles, photographs—most of the latter showing the same well-dressed, trim man, carrying a little more wear and tear but no less dapper than before. He looked younger than his eighty-four years; he was still walking the city, still vigorous, still mischievous. He had to juggle several pairs of glasses to contend with his lingering eye problems, but, other than that, about his only concession to old age was switching from regular leather shoes to black “dress” Reeboks. More than flattering, the stories all reminded people of Mitchell’s substantial body of work and planted him firmly in the American literary pantheon. His decades-long spell in the wilderness was scarcely mentioned.

  Credit 16.1

  Mitchell’s joy is evident at a book party celebrating the publication of Up in the Old Hotel.