A touching bonus came in the hundreds of fan letters that arrived, many from friends and acquaintances he hadn’t heard from in decades. Mitchell was delighted by the turn of affairs—delighted, stunned, and humbled. He had not been forgotten after all, it turned out, merely misplaced.
All the attention also rekindled his enthusiasm. In one of the 1992 interviews he gave in conjunction with the publication of Hotel, Mitchell refers—in the present tense—to still wanting to finish the autobiographical history of the fish market. “I just hope I can hold on long enough to write about these things,” he said. “At the end of your life, you are the only one who knows how far short you fell from what you intended. And that doesn’t help, because at the end of your life you don’t always know what you intended.”
CHAPTER 17
HOMECOMING
[I] got in the habit of looking at people—people sitting across from me on a bus, for example—and speculating on how much time they had left on Earth. A vigorous young girl—she may have seventy-five years ahead of her. An old woman—she won’t be here this time next year, lying in some cemetery somewhere. A thin, wiry, sharp-eyed old man—not an ounce of excess fat on him—he’s the kind who’ll live forever. He’s many years older than I am, but long after I’m dead and gone, he’ll be around.
—From Joseph Mitchell’s journal, circa early seventies
—
One afternoon Mitchell and Sheila McGrath were returning to Manhattan on the ferry after a day trip to Staten Island. Seated out in the open air, they noticed a yellow piece of paper scuttling along the deck toward them, when it suddenly swept up onto their bench as if being delivered. McGrath grabbed the sheet, which had writing on it, and as she read the message she was taken aback: “My name is Mitchell,” it said. “Please take me home.” She handed it over, and she saw the writer blanch as he in turn took in the words. McGrath thought Mitchell might even faint, so clearly unsettled was he by something she took for an enigmatic coincidence but he interpreted as anything but.
“Joe was a great believer in talismans, charms…he believed in evil spirits,” Philip Hamburger said of his friend. “He knew damn well that there were evil spirits out there.” For much of his life, in fact, Mitchell carried with him a handmade iron nail that had passed down to him from his grandfather’s cotton mill, Hamburger pointed out. “He thought this was good at warding off whoever these spirits were.”
For Mitchell, one would have to say the talisman, in the main, did its work well. He led a long and lovely life—in many ways, yes, even a charmed one. He had a satisfying and mutually gratifying marriage of half a century’s duration. It was a union that produced two children, five grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter, all of whom adored Mitchell, and vice versa. He grew up with the privileges and culture afforded a Southern planter’s son yet came of age in New York City at its most magical and captivating, where he met countless of the era’s leading figures. For six decades he worked for a magazine that writers respected more than any other, under not one but two of the most influential editors in the history of American letters—both of whom let Mitchell do precisely as he pleased. And near the end of his life he capped that career with a triumphant professional rebirth.
If his life’s journey had its share of sorrows, too, no one knew better than Mitchell that that was the way of things, and at the end of the day not even the most potent talisman was going to prevent that. Let the dead bury the dead.
Only a month after Up in the Old Hotel was published, Robert Gottlieb left The New Yorker and was replaced by an even more controversial appointment, the young British editor Tina Brown, fresh from her rehabilitation of one of The New Yorker’s sister imprints, Vanity Fair. It was true that Brown had a taste for the sensational and a genius for publicity-grabbing provocation, but those qualities often caused people to overlook her substantial editorial gifts—not least being her appreciation of writing talent. Brown, like Gottlieb, arrived with an immense respect for Mitchell and his past work. And like Gottlieb, she hoped he could be coaxed from his writing slump. Telling him “it is still my dream” to publish some new Mitchell material, no matter how modest, Brown tried a number of inducements. She prevailed on him to weigh in when there was a major fire at the Fulton Fish Market. On the occasion of The New Yorker’s seventieth anniversary, in February of 1995, she asked if he might write a short memoir. When Shawn died in December of 1992, and the magazine was preparing its tribute to him, she solicited a contribution from Mitchell, who had worked for Shawn for about as long as anyone on the premises. But each time approached, Mitchell said that he couldn’t oblige, much as he might wish to. He liked Brown well enough and appreciated her ministrations, even if, like many of The New Yorker’s veteran guard, he was discouraged by “old colleagues retiring or dying or being fired or having to vacate their offices to make way for the incoming Brits, and all that.” But creatively he seemed spent.
Physically, though, he was still just fine—to most who encountered him, in fact, he appeared nearly age-resistant. A full medical workup in November of 1994 confirmed that. While Mitchell had put on a little more weight than he liked in recent years and on occasion experienced an irregular heartbeat, there seemed to be nothing of any real consequence ailing him. Meanwhile, he and McGrath were continuing to enjoy their relationship. She often accompanied him on his trips back to North Carolina, and in the summer of 1994 they took an extended vacation to England and Ireland. They lingered especially in Dublin, where Mitchell happily retraced the footsteps of the Joycean characters he knew like old friends.
In part because he still felt spry, Mitchell, even at this late juncture, was quietly contemplating one final writerly overture for the magazine. His enthusiasm still elevated from the warm reception for Hotel, Mitchell turned up at McGrath’s apartment one day with a grocery sack full of typewritten pages and plopped it on a table. The unorganized pile represented much of the start-and-stop work he had occupied himself with for the previous three decades, including many of the sketches, notes, and anecdotes from his irregular journal. He had never shared this material with her before. He invited McGrath to look it over and to let him know if she saw anything that, with some rewriting, might be suitable for The New Yorker. McGrath excitedly waded into the pile and immediately latched on to the three essentially complete chapters of autobiographical matter. She consolidated the typewritten pages and entered them into her computer. McGrath felt that with very little additional work, these forays into Mitchell’s personal history could be put into publishable condition. Had Mitchell been granted but a little more time, McGrath said, he would have done just that, for he gave all evidence of preparing to tackle this new project with the same enthusiasm he had brought to Hotel.
Credit 17.1
Curious about the natural world even as an old man, Mitchell studies the flora near his Fairmont home.
In the waning months of 1995, however, things came to an abrupt stop. Mitchell began to experience bouts of back pain, of mystifying origin, and the discomfort became severe enough that it began to affect his gait. Through that winter and into spring Mitchell went to a number of doctors, including internists and orthopedists, and underwent a lengthy series of tests for everything from disk issues to tuberculosis. He and McGrath became increasingly frustrated as they heard an assortment of potential diagnoses about the cause, even as the symptoms worsened. Finally, a doctor diagnosed lung cancer, which was subsequently confirmed—but which, by that time, had metastasized to his brain. A lingering Mitchell premonition had come true.
Mitchell was admitted to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, but the cancer was beyond cure. In those final days, his family and loved ones gathered around him. At one point, as the end neared, he quietly said, “There was so much I still wanted to do.”
Joseph Mitchell died on May 24, 1996. He was eighty-seven years old.
The family returned him to Fairmont for his funeral and burial, ending a tug-of-war for Mitchell�
��s affection that began his first week in New York City almost seven decades earlier. Several dozen people attended the funeral, which was presided over by the pastor emeritus of Fairmont’s First Baptist Church. His eulogy naturally recounted Mitchell’s literary achievements, but as the writer’s hometown pastor, he used the occasion to figuratively return Mitchell to his roots. He noted how appreciative the Fairmont community was that Mitchell had seen fit to come back so often in the latter years of his life, helping with the farm and in particular reforesting the family properties. At the end, turning to Nora and Elizabeth, he added that the daughters were “grateful most of all for his goodness as a person, and his love and faithfulness as a father. I feel that Joseph Mitchell treasured this more than all the other honors combined.”
Then Mitchell, who throughout his life had found so much beauty and comfort in graveyards, was laid to rest in the Floyd Memorial Cemetery, next to Therese. As he once wrote in his journal: “An old man walking alone down a cemetery path, [you] can tell by the way he walks that he knows exactly where he is going: among all these graves, he has a certain one in mind.” The tombstone awaiting Mitchell bore an epitaph from Shakespeare’s elegiac seventy-third sonnet, a favorite line of his selected by his daughters: “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
—
The passing of Joseph Mitchell was marked by obituaries and appreciations from all over the English-speaking world. Unsurprisingly, the most expansive of these was produced by Mitchell’s colleagues at The New Yorker, which gave over six pages of the June 10, 1996, edition to his life and literary import—a tribute comparable only to what they had done a few years earlier at Shawn’s passing. “Joseph Mitchell, who died May 24th, at the age of eighty-seven, was a staff writer at The New Yorker for fifty-eight years and was one of its dearest and most irreplaceable friends,” the piece began. “But his death is not merely a personal loss to his colleagues, or a loss to the magazine. He was an essential figure in modern writing and in the history of the city.”
The man who had outlasted Ross, Shawn, E. B. and Katharine White, Wolcott Gibbs, James Thurber, his friend Liebling—and so many others who had forged the magazine—was remembered by such contemporaries as Brendan Gill, William Maxwell, Roger Angell, and Philip Hamburger. Lillian Ross recalled the first time she read The New Yorker, in 1944, and discovered Mitchell by encountering the indelible figure of Hugh G. Flood. “As I read, I knew immediately that I wanted to report and to write in a way that would be worthy of Joe Mitchell,” Ross wrote. “When I joined the magazine—Joe used to call it ‘our paper’—I discovered that everybody else here also wanted to write in a way that would be worthy of Joe Mitchell. Nobody ever tried to imitate him, but everybody learned from him. Mystically, he gave us the key to finding our own original ways of working.”
Calvin Trillin testified similarly of Mitchell as an inspiration. Once, while promoting a book in the seventies, Trillin was asked about writers he admired. He replied that he’d be willing “to trade pretty much everything I’d written for a paragraph of ‘Old Mr. Flood’ or ‘Joe Gould’s Secret.’ ” Reading his own quote later in the newspaper, Trillin said it hit him as so overly “flowery” that it might embarrass Mitchell. As it happened, The New Yorker’s in-house newsletter reprinted the interview, and one day Mitchell turned up at Trillin’s office with a copy in hand. He thanked Trillin for the compliment. “I guess I sort of got carried away,” Trillin said sheepishly. Mitchell smiled and said, “You’re not going to take it back, are you?”
Two decades after he brought out Up in the Old Hotel, editor Dan Frank still marvels at the unique transit that was Mitchell’s career—from journeyman journalist to a literary writer of the first rank. It was a rare and inspirational achievement in American letters. “When you look at his work as a daily beat reporter during the 1930s, you realize how quick he was, how adept he was at the type of copy a newspaper—especially one whose editions were appearing three or four times a day—demanded,” Frank explained. “And [you see] how skilled he was at listening. But when you move from his early work to the compositions of the 1950s, you realize that his purpose [then] stood at direct cross-purposes to his original goal: the desire to find ways to record in more lasting form what was in danger of disappearing, to find a way in words to preserve what would otherwise be unnoticed, lost sight of, disappear…. Novelists create fictional characters that may be based in part on people they knew; Joe did the opposite—he took the Sloppy Louies and Mr. Hunters and ‘represented’ them with all the imagination, depth, and complexity that a novelist employed in the creation of his characters. Only Joe’s characters were real, and his ‘representation’ of them placed them in a context, a community, a history, a past that was larger than them, so that one could see how they were shaped, from whence their outlooks and attitudes came.”
For many contemporary journalists and writers of nonfiction, Mitchell still inspires. And it’s likely that as long as human beings are laid low by life’s trials and humiliations, and as long as they somehow manage to overcome or outlast these indignities, Joseph Mitchell’s work will endure.
In 1982, a political science professor from California sent Mitchell a note that, as smartly as anything he’d ever received, summed up what his life’s work had meant to countless appreciative readers over the years. “I do not know of anyone whose writing so happily combines the qualities of purity, simplicity and unaffectedness, of kindness, sweetness and serenity, as does yours,” he told Mitchell. “At least they are its qualities that, for me, over and over again are present in it and are the source of the great pleasure I take in it. I always glow with a gentle cheerfulness, feel somehow cleaner, more contented, and more appreciative, after I have read even a few pages from one of your books.” The fact that Mitchell kept this particular letter close at hand and often returned to it, especially in those final years when he wandered in the professional wilderness, suggests that the effects his writing had on this particular reader were precisely the ones he’d hoped to achieve all along, from the earliest days of his apprenticeship to his ultimate mastery.
Would it have been wonderful to have some fresh Mitchell in the final trimester of his life? Without question. But Up in the Old Hotel alone comprises thirty-seven stories and almost three hundred thousand words, and that reckoning doesn’t take into account Mitchell’s grinding decade of newspaper work, which produced at least several million more. By any fair measure he was not only productive but, in his day, prolific. More to the point, everything he did write mattered. As Philip Hamburger would say when asked about his friend’s output, “Why didn’t he write more? Well, he wrote enough.”
In the end, maybe it was Mitchell himself who set forth the most exacting measure of a writer’s enduring worth—and, in typical fashion, he did so by channeling the wisdom of another. In the eulogy he delivered many years before for A. J. Liebling, Mitchell related a conversation he had with a longtime owner of a secondhand bookstore, who talked about the steady demand that remained for Liebling’s out-of-print books. “Literary critics don’t know which books will last,” the bookseller told Mitchell. “And literary historians don’t know, and those nine-day immortals up at the Institute of Arts and Letters don’t know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and re-read and re-read.”
In early 1996, just three months before Mitchell died, the Modern Library published an elegant new edition of Joe Gould’s Secret. Though Mitchell was battling his still-undiagnosed cancer, he rallied enough to do a reading from the book at an event that February at Books & Co. in Manhattan.
His Modern Library editor, Susan DiSesa, recalled that Mitchell was unusually nervous about the appearance. He was unaccustomed to such readings, and he asked her, “Do you think anyone will come?” The reading was set for 6:00 P.M., and to calm himself Mitchell came by the bookstore an hour early to practice at the microphone. But when he arrived, a smal
l crowd had already gathered. Before long the presentation area was packed, and by six the audience filled the store’s staircase and stretched out the front door. “Joe glowed,” DiSesa said. “He read beautifully for thirty minutes. At the end, he signed books, new ones and old out-of-print ones…. He talked, posed for pictures, laughed. The scene became a wonderful party.”
Among the crowd were family members, friends, and New Yorker colleagues. But so, too, were a waitress from his beloved Oyster Bar at Grand Central; the owner of McSorley’s; a union janitor with a strike placard; lawyers; editors; secretaries—and a stripper.
Mitchell people.
For Deb,
more than ever
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AND A NOTE ON THE SOURCES
—
It was my happy fortune to get to know Joseph Mitchell, late in his life, as I was reporting a biography of a person he revered, New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross. I talked to Joe about Ross on a number of occasions, sometimes in his small, spotless office and at other times on the phone. He could not have been more gracious or helpful. He was also personally at peace at that time, as Up in the Old Hotel had just appeared and the world was rediscovering what those of us in journalism had never forgotten—here was the master.
Some years later, when I was a new dean at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and looking for a creative project in my discipline, I hit on the idea of a biography of Joe himself, who had died in 1996. Even allowing for the triumph of Hotel, I still felt he was remembered too much for what he hadn’t written—the wilderness years of his late career—instead of for what he had. Alas, I badly underestimated the extent to which academic administration monopolizes body, soul, and calendar. And I certainly never foresaw actually running an entire school, which I have done since 2008 as president of St. Norbert College, a remarkable liberal arts institution just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin.
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