Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Gottlieb said he would talk with his friends at Pilgrim State and do everything for Gould that he possibly could do. ‘The way it sounds,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid there isn’t a hell of a lot that can be done. I’m afraid poor Joe is getting on down toward the end of the line.’

  From time to time thereafter, Gottlieb telephoned me and gave me news about Gould. ‘Joe’s worst symptom is apathy,’ he said during one of these calls. ‘He mostly just sits and stares into the distance. However, every once in a while, the doctors say, something seem to stir in his mind and a smile comes on his face and he rouses himself and gets up and scampers around the ward and waves his arms up and down and makes strange, unearthly screeches until he wears himself out. He seems to be trying to communicate something with these screeches. The doctors and the nurses and the other patients don’t know what he’s doing, of course – they’re completely mystified – but I know what’s he’s doing, and I’m sure you do.’

  On Sunday, August 18, 1957, around eleven o’clock at night, Gottlieb telephoned me and said he had just been notified that Gould had died. We spoke for a few minutes about how sad it was, and then I asked him if Gould had left any papers.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘None at all. As the man at the hospital said, “Not a scratch.” I was hoping that he had. I was particularly hoping that he had left some instructions about what he wanted done with the Oral History. He used to say that he wanted two-thirds of it to go to the Harvard Library and the other third to the Smithsonian Institution, but it doesn’t seem right to split it up that way. When scholars start using it as source material, it will be a nuisance if they have to go up to Cambridge to see one part of it and then down to Washington to see some other part. Maybe one institution could be prevailed upon to relinquish its share to the other, and then it could be kept intact. By the way, where is the Oral History?’

  I said that I didn’t know.

  Gottlieb’s voice instantly became concerned. ‘I took it for granted that you knew,’ he said. ‘I took it for granted that Joe had told you.’

  I said that I didn’t know where the Oral History was, and that I didn’t know anybody who did know where it was.

  ‘Well,’ said Gottlieb, ‘we’ll just have to start hunting for it. We’ll just have to start telephoning and get in touch with all the people who knew him best and call a meeting and form a committee and get busy and start hunting for it. It’s probably scattered all over. Some of it may still be stored in the cellar of that farmhouse near Huntington where he put it during the war – that stone cellar he was always talking about, the cellar on the duck farm – and some of it may be stored in the studios of friends of his in the Village, and some of it may be stored in storerooms in some of those hotels and flophouses he lived in. Do flophouses have storerooms? They must. People must leave things with the clerks in them for safekeeping during the night the same as they do in other hotels, and then go off and forget all about them the same as they do in other hotels, and the flophouses must have to make some kind of provision for this. I confess I have no idea where to start. The first thing we’ll need is a list of addresses of places he lived in. Maybe you could start right now making such a list. You will help with this, won’t you? You will be on the committee?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Gottlieb was an energetic man, the kind of man who gets things done, and I could tell by the way he talked that he was going to get to work the first thing in the morning and start forming a committee, and that very soon the members of the committee would be rummaging around in farmhouses all over Long Island and in studios all over the Village and in flophouses all over the Bowery. I could save him a lot of trouble if I spoke up right then and told him what I knew about the Oral History – I could save him and his committee quite a wild-goose chase – but one of the few things I have learned going through life is that there is a time and a place for everything, and I didn’t think that this was the time or the place to be telling one of Joe Gould’s oldest friends that I didn’t believe the Oral History existed. Joe Gould wasn’t even in his grave yet, he wasn’t even cold yet, and this was no time to be telling his secret. It could keep. Let them go ahead and look for the Oral History, I thought. After all, I thought, I could be wrong. Hell, I thought – and the thought made me smile – maybe they’ll find it.

  Gottlieb repeated his question, this time a little impatiently. ‘You will be on the committee, won’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, continuing to play the role I had stepped into the afternoon I discovered that the Oral History did not exist – a role that I am only now stepping out of. ‘Of course I will.’

  (1964)

  Author’s Note

  THIS BOOK consists of four books that I wrote years and years ago and that have been out of print for a long time, and of latterday additions to one of them. The four books are McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, 1943; Old Mr Flood, 1948; The Bottom of the Harbor, 1960; and Joe Gould’s Secret, 1965. I have added several stories to McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. They are ‘The Gypsy Women,’ ‘A Spism and a Spasm,’ ‘The Deaf-Mutes Club,’ ‘Santa Claus Smith,’ ‘The Mohawks in High Steel,’ ‘The Kind Old Blonde,’ and ‘I Couldn’t Dope It Out.’ Edmund Wilson used ‘The Mohawks in High Steel’ as the introduction to his book, Apologies to the Iroquois. The other stories have never been reprinted. I wrote two Profiles of Joe Gould. I wrote the first one, ‘Professor Sea Gull,’ in 1942, and used it in McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Twenty-two years later, in 1964, I wrote the second one, ‘Joe Gould’s Secret.’ I took ‘Professor Sea Gull’ out of the McSorley book and used it as the first part of the book, Joe Gould’s Secret, but for this book I have put it back in its original place in the McSorley book and ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ now stands by itself. The four short stories, if I can call them that, in the section of the McSorley book numbered II are fictional. The three stories about Black Ankle County in the section of the McSorley book numbered III are fictional. All of the other stories in the McSorley book are factual. The three stories in the Flood book are fictional. All of the stories in The Bottom of the Harbor are factual. Joe Gould’s Secret is factual. All of the stories in all of the books were originally printed in The New Yorker.

  In going over these stories – rereading some of them for the first time since they appeared in The New Yorker – I was surprised and pleased to see how often a kind of humor that I can only call graveyard humor turned up in them. In some of them it is what the story is all about. In some of them it lurks around in the background or in between the lines. It turns up often in the conversations between me and the people I interviewed, or in the parts of the conversations that I chose to quote. I was pleased to discover this because graveyard humor is an exemplification of the way I look at the world. It typifies my cast of mind.

  I am sure that most of the influences responsible for one’s cast of mind are too remote and mysterious to be known, but I happen to know a few of the influences responsible for mine. One influence dates back to my childhood and youth. I grew up in a farming town in the southeastern part of Robeson County in North Carolina. The name of the town is Fairmont, which happens to be a remarkably inexact name. The town’s original name was Ashpole and this was changed to Union City and this was changed to Fairmont. There are no monts in or around it or anywhere near it. It is in the middle of a region of flat, rich, black farmland interspersed with swamps and the branches of swamps and with woods in which short-leaf pines predominate. My ancestors on both sides were farmers in this region since back before the Revolutionary War, growing cotton, tobacco, corn, and timber. When I was young, my father and mother and my brothers and sisters and I would leave Fairmont on Sunday afternoons and go for a ride in the country. Some Sundays we would head south and ride around on back roads down in the Marietta, Black Ankle, and Bear Swamp sections, where my father’s people came from. The backgrounds of most of the people down there are English and Welsh and most of them are Methodists and Baptists. And some Sundays we
would head west and drive around on back roads in the lona and McDonald sections, where my mother’s people came from. The backgrounds of most of the people out there are Scottish (the county adjoining Robeson County on the west is named Scotland County), and most of them are Presbyterians. Scattered all over these sections are family cemeteries in many of which people kin to my family by blood or marriage are buried. Most of the cemeteries are out in the middle of fields – usually in a grove of cedars and magnolias and usually surrounded by an old wreck of a cast-iron fence. Now and then my father would stop the car and we would get out and visit one of those cemeteries, and my father or my mother would tell us gravestone by gravestone who the people were who were buried there and exactly how they were related to us. I always enjoyed those visits.

  And once or twice every summer my family and the families of my mother’s two sisters – Aunt Annie Parker Lytch and Aunt Mary Parker Davis – would meet in a picnic grove in back of an old church out in the country – old lona Church, a Scottish Presbyterian church that my mother’s ancestors had helped build – and cut some watermelons. The melons had been pulled early that morning in our own gardens – long, heavy, green-striped Georgia Rattlesnakes and big, round, heavy Cuban Queens so green they were almost black. We would place them on the picnic tables and cut them into rashers. After we had finished eating the watermelons, we would stand around and talk for a while. And then, when it was getting late in the afternoon, some us would walk out to the cemetery of the church in a kind of procession. My Aunt Annie would always lead the procession. All of us loved and admired Aunt Annie. She was tall and thin and erect, and she was sure of herself. She had been through a lot in her life and I remember how sad her eyes were, but her disposition was cheerful. She wore old-fashioned clothes and she often talked about ‘the old times,’ and we thought of her as our link to the past. She had what her sisters called a dry sense of humor, and she sometimes delighted us by using (or, as my mother called it, ‘coming out with’) words and expressions that were considered ‘earthy’ in those days. She had a lovely garden covering an acre or so in which old-fashioned varieties of vegetables and flowers and herbs and grape vines and peach trees and fig bushes and chinquapin bushes and pomegranate bushes grew side by side. She had a row of old-fashioned roses along one fence, and people came from afar to admire them and get cuttings. She was a fancier of dominicker chickens and had a large flock of them, and she had a flock of tree-roosting guineas.

  As I said, Aunt Annie would lead us into the cemetery, and here and there she would pause at a grave and tell us about the man or woman down below. At some of the graves my mother and my Aunt Mary would chime in, but Aunt Annie did most of the talking. ‘This man buried here,’ she would say, ‘was a cousin of ours, and he was so mean I don’t know how his family stood him. And this man here,’ she would continue, moving along a few steps, ‘was so good I don’t know how his family stood him.’ And then she would become more specific. Some of the things she told us were horrifiying and some were horrifyingly funny.

  I am an obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake – I must’ve read it at least half a dozen times – and every time I read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section I hear the voices of my mother and my aunts as they walk among the graves in old Iona cemetery and it is getting dark.

  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.

  Joseph Mitchell

  (1992)

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781448113491

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  Published by Vintage 2012

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Joseph Mitchell 1938, 1939, 1940,

  1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949,

  1951, 1952, 1955, 1956, 1959, 1964, 1965, 1976, 1992.

  Copyright renewed © Joseph Mitchell 1966, 1967,

  1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977,

  1979, 1980, 1983, 1987, 1992

  Introduction copyright © William Fiennes 2012

  The stories in this book first appeared in the New Yorker in a somewhat different form.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in the USA by Pantheon in 1992

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099561590

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