At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  Secrets to find and hear—and now I need to flash forward, as in an X-Men sequel, where the chronology gets kicked around but the sequences remain completely unchanged in style, to when I started, just a year or so later, to write and edit at The New Yorker. For six years, I had continued to slip those pieces under the door, and they kept coming back to me. Finally, thanks to a piece I’d written on baseball and art history and its sudden wary embrace by Charles McGrath and Roger Angell, and then, once again, thanks to the generous forbearance of Robert Gottlieb, I was let inside, to edit a little and to write “Talk of the Town” a lot.

  It was, for a young writer, like opening the windows on the most extraordinary and eccentric Advent calendar that had ever been created. You would open a door and there would be Brendan Gill—or Whitney Balliett—or, getting closer to Christmas, Roger Angell. (It was Angell who came upon me with my fast friend the writer Alec Wilkinson around that time, experimentally trying on a jacket Martha had chosen for me that Alec thought of imitating—we had decided, rather pathetically, to become Well-Dressed Men—and who then gave us what is technically called a withering glance. “Writers around this office used to drink,” he said sternly, and shut the door.)

  There was one door on the Advent calendar that was closed, though urgent sounds of typing clattered from inside. I asked Alec whose door this was, and he replied, almost reverently, “That’s Mr. Mitchell’s office.”

  It’s easy to know Joseph Mitchell’s work now. He has become an American classic—even played in the movie adaptation of his masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret” by Stanley Tucci, and is richly back in print for good after decades missing. But at the time there was something utterly mysterious about him. He was a secret within the Advent calendar of the magazine. His was the door that didn’t open even as Christmas came closer.

  Alec, I knew, had modeled his own elegant and taciturn style in part on Mitchell’s, a manner even more impressive to a naturally garrulous stylist like me. Alec had introduced me to Mitchell’s precise, cumulative, oddly mysterious writing—oddly because the enigmas were made with minimal means. There was only an accumulation of precise descriptive sentences and unbroken direct quotation to achieve the effect. I read “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon” and “My Ears Are Bent” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” the then unknown but now famous story of how a Village character, famously at work on a huge, encyclopedic “oral history of our time,” turned out, upon his death, to have been writing, over and over with manic obsessiveness, the same sad story of his mother’s death. It seemed like a warning to all writers, and a truth about writing, too: no matter how large or “objective” the canvas we attack, our marks are always personal, and usually the same, again and again.

  One day I bumped into a distinguished elderly gent—a very distinguished-looking elderly gent. I realized with a start that it was Mitchell. After a few seconds of introduction, he looked at me and, turning his head, beneath an old-fashioned man’s hat, asked a question, intently. “Do you like to read the Russians?” he demanded. He had a beautiful soft North Carolina drawl, all the sentences leaping up at their ends, like dolphins.

  “Yes, of course! I like to read the Russians,” I said. It was true, though not as true as the way I said it suggested it was true.

  “Do you like to read that Gogol?” he asked, pronouncing Gogol so quickly, almost as a variant of “go-go,” as in the style of sixties dancers, that for a moment I wasn’t certain what he meant, but then the context supplied the answer.

  “Love Gogol!” I said enthusiastically. In truth, I hadn’t thought much about Gogol since I had lost my pants and become one of his characters. My tastes since had run to more optimistic and romantic French and American writers.

  “Do you read that…Turgenev?” he said even more enthusiastically. We might have been exchanging the names of old families from Carolina we were both related to.

  “Love Turgenev!” I said, and thought for a microsecond—the egocentrism of young writers at work—that there might be a reprimand looming here. My own published stuff, such as it was, ran more toward melodramatic effects than to the straight descriptive integrity of Turgenev. (Of course there wasn’t; I’m sure he had no more awareness of what I’d written than I do now of the newest twenty-something I share space with. But a young writer who’s been paid any attention at all quickly becomes paranoid about…any attention at all.) He was, I feared, urging me to simplify my work. He wasn’t, of course. He had no idea my writing was too fancy and in need of simplification. But reading Turgenev is a good plan for anyone, and so I did.

  A few days later, I went up and knocked on his door in order, God help me, to praise Turgenev. We had now, after all, Turgenev in common. And then I had the courage—of a kind I hadn’t called on since asking Martha out on a date to hear Die Winterreise—to ask him out to lunch. And to my surprise he said yes, and suggested that we go to the Saloon of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. It was a place I knew and loved already, and had the right aura of old New York and the right hums of the living city.

  I had a chance to observe him as we walked the few blocks from office to station. He was naturally elegant, in a startling, old-fashioned way. Alec once said that Mitchell was the most stylish man he had ever known, which was funny, because Mitchell looked as if he hadn’t bought new clothes since around 1941. But it was true. He had the natural elegance of the self-possessed, the true style of someone who has a completely integrated self projecting forward in a completely natural way, even if the costume is eccentric. It’s the kind of elegance Roman Catholic priests have, the kind of elegance the Hasidim have, the kind of elegance the Queen’s Guard have—people who are completely as they present themselves, even if the way they present themselves might seem mannered or calculated in a more self-conscious man. A woolen vest, an old-fashioned overcoat, always a plaid necktie, and a crushed felt forties kind of hat. (I recall asking myself what the name of that kind of hat was—and realized that my hat vocabulary was hopelessly impoverished. A Stetson? A Borsalino? A derby?)

  We walked the four blocks to Grand Central and I saw the city for the first time through his eyes. He was always looking upward. Walking along the avenue (he said later), if you looked up at the second-story windows, you saw the real city. If you took your eyes away from the pavement you saw ballet classes, detective agencies, tailors—you had a wholly different sense of what New York is.

  I had gone on many pilgrimages, but more than anything I wanted to understand the secret of his work—how he and the generation of writers, of whom he and Phil Hamburger were the last representatives, had pulled themselves together. You can’t ask a priest or a mystic the secret of what he does. That was the lesson of “Joe Gould’s Secret.” The secret that people tell you isn’t the secret they’re keeping. But I tried to paw at his secret anyway over the red-checked tablecloths of the saloon and the oysters, to pry the secret out, like opening an oyster.

  “Boy, I love Joe Liebling’s writing,” I said. “How did he go about—what were his days like?”

  Mr. Mitchell looked at me, “Mhhm,” he answered, noncommittally. “Well. He often would be willing to eat a bad clam.” Then he was silent. Okay: dubious shellfish might have something to do with literary greatness. A month or so later, we would make the same slow, stately walk from the offices to the Oyster Bar, and I would try to lever out the secret again. He didn’t have any desire to share it. He would simply listen and say, “I know! I know!,” as though the recognition of the question were the same as the answer. (His other secret, why he hadn’t published anything in so long, I was wise enough to know was unaskable.)

  I learned, though. I realized that, above all, he was, as a writer, a listener. He listened beautifully—head cocked and, with that slow, sympathetic murmur of “I know! I know!,” always on call. It did make me, by contagion, a better writer. Writing “Talk of the Town,” I learned to listen, to understand—what my experience with the Maxies of the world should have already taugh
t me, if I had paid attention—that everyone has his story, and everyone wants to tell it, if he feels safe in the presence of the listener. The most secretive people in the world are not really secretive. They would pour their hearts out, if they could be sure that the listener would never make a mock of them. It was, in itself, a good lesson, and I found myself, notebook poised, for five years listening to self-made eccentrics—table-hockey champions, and women who wrote “slash” fan fiction, a new thing then, and slack-rope walkers, and even a man who taught thirteenth-century fresco technique. Stories poured out from people, and you took them down, and that, to a decent extent, was what writing was, all writing was, its secret: listening to what people said, making lists of what they made and owned, taking notes and distilling the results into an aromatic essence. So I learned that secret just from being across the saloon bar from him. You just go places and you listen to people. That is the secret of writing, or a reasonable part of it.

  But one day at lunch I pressed him more about the secret.

  “I so love what you write, and what Liebling wrote and Thurber and White and Gibbs—what was it that all you guys shared? What was it you had in common?”

  And he looked at me and he said, “Well, none of ’em could spell.”

  Okay, I thought. And he looked round almost guiltily, as though the ghost of one of his old colleagues might be looking on, tasting an oyster pan roast. “And none of them really had any sense of grammar at all.” There was a myth he was glad to dispel.

  Then he looked off into the distance.

  “But each one…each one had…had a kind of wild exactitude of his own,” he concluded.

  And I thought, There it is! That’s the secret! And I wrote the words down on a card, “A Wild Exactitude,” and kept it over my desk. I do still. It seemed to summarize for me everything that I valued in the tradition. You wanted to catalogue, to inventory, to love the world for its facticity and record as much of it as you could. To listen! But that would only produce a parody of that high style unless you had some other element that was extravagant, that was willed—that was wild, that was even a little bit crazy. Flat descriptive sentences describing an absurdly vivid character, simple inventories of impossible objects—that was the end! Good stories were strange stories told straight. Unless you had an appetite for the exact, precise thing, and an equally large flair for the strange and the eccentric subject—balancing those things in every paragraph you wrote and even, if you could, in every sentence—you would never be much of a writer about anything. And it seemed to me that he had given me the secret, and it’s a secret that’s stayed with me: A wild exactitude! I still can’t imagine a better title for a book about good writing.

  But there was another, sadder secret buried in that secret, which I was still too young to understand. And that was a secret about silences. Why had he had been silent for so long? I was too shy, or too sensitive, to ask him directly, but at one of the last of those lunches he raised it himself.

  “People wonder why I haven’t published in so long,” he said abruptly when the check came. “But I’ll tell you why.” His gaze leveled. “My sentences didn’t run out,” he said as he smiled, crookedly. “They ran away.”

  He didn’t add anything more, but I knew at once what he meant, or thought I did. Mitchell didn’t have anything new to be wild and exact about. It wasn’t just his sentences that had run away; his subjects had. He had experienced his subjects, as writers will, as sentences. The New York he had so matchlessly evoked was not the New York he sat within now. The flat declarative descriptions got their energy—their wildness—not from his exactitude alone. They got it from shared knowledge of the world he described. Making sentences match scenes looks easy. But it is hard. Rubbing one against another is the friction that makes them wild. The readers do much of the work. So his silence wasn’t a mystery. It was a rational response to his situation. Subjects just ran out, taking your sentences with them, and if you weren’t watching, yours might, too. Subjects pass like the names of hats.

  When you’re a young writer you think that style and energy will get you through. If you have an engaging—a vivacious!—style, and enough energy, then you can accomplish anything. Publish and publish, make yourself felt, and your voice heard. But as you get older, you discover that energy and style don’t make writing. No, writing is made by their opposite, sentences and circumstances. Painters depend on their materials more than they admit, but writers depend on their circumstances more than they know. Writing involves a lot of bumping into people. It’s essential to be exact, but to be wild is hard, because we can only become wild about common objects. The objects worth being wild about decrease with time, or at least our ability to detect them decreases.

  Joe Fox explained something similar to me over dinner, insisting that Truman Capote had finished his lost book, the novel Answered Prayers—and then destroyed it, leaving readers with only those chapters that had already been excerpted in magazines. “He had lost his talent, which was always indeterminate,” he said. “But he never lost his taste. And his taste told him that his book was terrible. It was the only part of his talent that survived.” Writers run out of subjects, being subject-bound, and their talents are time-bound.

  Writers aren’t silenced. Writing is silence, unless it is turned to speech in another head. We catch our subjects on the run. Sometimes they run toward you. Sometimes they run away. Painters are their marks and their time, which they can’t explain; writers are their sentences and their circumstances, which they can’t escape.

  10

  Sleeping and Talking

  One night, sometime in the late eighties, at around eleven o’clock on a Friday, I looked over at the bed in our loft and saw that Martha was sound asleep. Now, one of the things about Martha—I think it’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to cohabit so happily for so long—is that she can sleep through anything. She is, as I’ve said, a champion sleeper, one of those people who fall asleep at nine at night and wake up at eleven the next morning and have breakfast and then take a nap. She loves to sleep—actively enjoys it, finds sinking inside slumber a pleasure somehow deeply sensual. Her sleepiness coincides with her huge consumption of hyper-strong coffee, a combination that puzzled me until, years later, we went off to her ancestral home in Iceland and discovered that everyone there drinks coffee all day and sleeps as much as they can or want to. There must be a recessive gene for poor blood circulation splashing around in the tiny Icelandic gene pool, as they self-medicate with caffeine and then succumb to their chromosomes with instant unconsciousness.

  I was awake in part because I am always awake—a world-class insomniac, I wait hours for sleep to begin its normally minimal drugging—and also because I had promised her to stay awake to watch for mice. Essentially, what we were doing, by leaving the Blue Room for this bigger room, was leaving insect life for rodent life. The loft in SoHo was overrun with mice. You would see them by the baseboards on dark nights, even hear them creepily scuttling in the kitchen in the dark. But in the same Canadian way in which we had thought a piece of plywood would protect us from the roaches, we believed that the mice could simply be warned off from invading our space. We used to stamp our feet upon entering the loft and shout, “Mice, go away!”—and we believed that they therefore would, we were confident that they would listen. But Martha could still fall asleep securely only if I promised to stay up and watch for the mice as long as I could. Why she could not go to sleep without a mouse-watchman—though she could stay asleep while I slept, too, when the mice presumably were free to express themselves as they chose—was mysterious, in the way of the mysteries of marriage.

  It was just around that time that I had started to find work talking to people at night for money. I was beginning to write art criticism—though I had been hired to write “Talk of the Town” stories at the magazine, I had been persuaded to write art criticism, too. (No one will believe this, but I really didn’t want to do it: escaping from art criticism was the
whole point of having a job writing “Talk” pieces.) That small notoriety was beginning to get me gigs as a speaker—small-time gigs, triple-A gigs, a lecture at the Drawing Center around the corner, or across the street at the Knitting Factory. Not as grand as MoMA, but at least I was no longer working the lunch shift. Occasionally, I’d even get an out-of-town engagement to lecture at one of the smaller museums, in Richmond or Salem or Baltimore.

  I enjoyed it. I liked speaking, I liked being listened to. I liked making sense. I probably liked being listened to more than I liked making sense. But it wasn’t a time for sense. I tried the many approaches there are to public speaking—with a set text to read, a set text memorized, notes on paper, or notes on three-by-five cards, or notes on yellow legal tablets, alongside a list of slides, as we called them then.

  It took me years to learn the simple speaker’s truth that the best way to deliver a talk is…by talking. You study your subject, get a sense of what you want to say in the order in which you want to say it, and then you stand up and say it. The preparation is like packing a parachute—it has to be done carefully, and only you can do it. But then you jump out of the plane and there you are, skydiving. You almost can’t help doing it well, since doing it well just means surviving. There’s almost always a haystack to land on. The worst that can happen is to land on a lesser haystack. And if you miss the haystack you don’t actually die. It just feels that way for a moment.

  I looked over at Martha, as I did so often in those days. I liked watching her sleep; she did it so…completely. Our bed was placed in the far corner of the loft, in discreet isolation from the rest of the loft’s doings. I say “discreet”: loft life revealed that the discretion of the bourgeoisie, of which we hear so much, turns out to be almost entirely spiritual, induced rather than instantiated, more a matter of space quietly implied than divisions firmly made.