The Art of Joseph Mitchell
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
CORRECTING A MISEMPHASIS The Art of Joseph Mitchell By Stanley Edgar Hyman The general agreement that Joseph Mitchell is the paragon of reporters seems to be so complete that his importance as a...
...Mitchell's major themes are the familiar themes of tragedy and epic...
...God pity him," Mitchell concludes, "and pity us all...
...Aren't you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor...
...When he meets Gould in a Sixth Avenue saloon, it is "long and narrow and murky, a blind tunnel of a place, a burrow, a bat's cave, a bear's den...
...it everywhere demonstrates Mitchell's gift of perfect pitch for human speech...
...his mother could offer him only tears of pity...
...Here is Mrs...
...Flood's account of the process: "'Damn your doctor...
...Aren't they just the finest little girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest...
...These are as far as can be from the dreamlike fiction...
...They are as big as you are, whoever you are,' he writes truculently, and their most admirable affirmation of human dignity is often biting the hand that feeds them...
...Diabo's beautiful evocation of "old red-Indian times...
...On its surface, the book is a comic portrait of an eccentric, a Harvard-educated bum who recites what he claims is "Hiawatha" translated into the language of sea gulls...
...In Mitchell's first sight of Gould, Gould "had something childlike and lost about him...
...the shad running up the Hudson become an affirmation of rebirth...
...In literary terms, Joe Gould's Secret is a Jamesian story of life's necessary illusion (the secret is that the nine-million-word Oral History of Our Time that Gould had spent his lifetime producing did not exist...
...Dusty hotel rooms shut up for decades and now reluctantly explored are infantile experience...
...The preoccupations of Old Mr...
...Ultimately Gould becomes metaphoric for all mankind...
...As do Mitchell's other outcasts in McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Gould affirms human dignity: he may beg, but "He doesn't fawn, and he is never grateful...
...Mitchell is a formidable prose stylist and a master rhetorician...
...Symbolically, these outcasts are Southern Negroes, and such figures as Mazie-"No matter how filthy or drunk or evilsmelling a bum may be, she treats him as an equal" -and old Mr...
...Gould tells Mitchell of his childhood: he was undersized...
...In deeper terms, Gould is a masking (and finally an unmasking) for Mitchell himself...
...God forgive them, they don't know any better...
...Old Mr...
...Flood summons up a lost world in which simple food-an egg, an apple, a loaf of bread-had flavor and gave delight, until progress improved them all into nullity...
...McSorley's was enthusiastically reviewed and had a considerable sale, but no one seemed to notice that the forms of reporting were being used to express the archetypal and the mythic: that Mazie might run a Bowery movie house but is an Earth Mother nevertheless...
...he is a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter, a humorist only in the sense that Faulkner is a humorist...
...The Bottom of the Harbor pieces make bold metaphors out of the river and harbor life of the New York area: a dragger captain who collaborates with oceanographers becomes an allegory of nature and culture in harmony...
...Get them so big you'll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews...
...Mitchell left college in the summer of 1929 and came to New York to work as a reporter, on the staff of the Herald Tribune and then of the World-Telegram...
...The Mohawks in High Steel" similarly ends with Mr...
...and so on...
...that McSorley's looks very like an ale-house but is in fact a Temple...
...Another important theme in Mitchell's work is fertility and resurrection, expressed in an unbroken chain of images from the bursting watermelon in "The Brewers" to the teeming pomegranate in the sermon that concludes the unwritten novel in the new book...
...The publication of Mitchell's longest and most ambitious piece to date, Joe Gould's Secret (Viking, 181 pp., $4.50), invites a general assessment of his work and offers an opportunity to correct the misemphasis...
...Both stories are misty, heavily symbolic, "poetic" in the dubious sense of that word, moody atmospheric sketches...
...And don't eat six...
...he'll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won't spilL And be sure you get the big ones...
...Don't sit down...
...I tell you what to do...
...the wrecks on the bottom of the harbor, teeming with marine life, are festering failures and guilts...
...the rats that come boldly out of their holes in the dark before dawn are Id wishes...
...And don't put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry...
...take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen...
...Oysters in Old Mr...
...Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open, And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor...
...Flood, Mitchell's New Yorker pieces have returned to dealing with actual people, but with an imaginative breadth and a symbolic depth that makes them quite unique...
...and in a few places (particularly a moving tragic study of Billy Sunday, done entirely by understatement and implication, called "Old Ball-Player in Winter Underwear") it shows the complex richness of Mitchell's mature work Late in the 1930s, Mitchell became a staff writer for the New Yorker (to which he had earlier contributed), and in a few years there he reshaped the magazine's traditional reportorial forms, the "Profile" and "A Reporter at Large," into supple and resourceful instruments for his own special purposes, blending the symbolic and poetic elements of his early fiction with the objectivity and detail of his newspaper reporting...
...Mitchell's other major theme, most boldly imaged in The Bottom of the Harbor, is the depths of the unconscious...
...Mitchell writes of his look: "I have seen the same deceptively blank expression on the faces of old freaks sitting on platforms in freak shows and on the faces of old apes in zoos on Sunday afternoons...
...They are hard-edged, factual and objective interviews with strippers, athletes, small-time criminals, and such...
...Look at the sky...
...thus his subjects, particularly in McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, have been mostly the insulted and injured: bums and gypsies, freaks and buffoons, cracked old men and drunken old women...
...One is human dignity...
...In my eyes, Mitchell writes, "he was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man...
...Mr...
...The Mohawks in High Steel,' about a colony of Canadian Mohawks settled in Brooklyn, has already become a classic of imaginative ethnography, as, among other things...
...And then tip the man a quarter and buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and walk down to Bowling Green...
...At its best My Ears Are Bent gives a sense of the tropical-rain-forest luxuriance of New York life...
...his surgeon father mocked him as incompetent to be a surgeon or anything else...
...CORRECTING A MISEMPHASIS The Art of Joseph Mitchell By Stanley Edgar Hyman The general agreement that Joseph Mitchell is the paragon of reporters seems to be so complete that his importance as a writer, a unique figure in our literature, has been generally overlooked...
...was gypsy heaven...
...And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet...
...his teachers despised him as "a disgusting little bastard...
...One of them, 'The Mohawks in High Steel," originally printed in 1949 was reprinted in Edmund Wilson's book Apologies to the Iroquois (1960), and six of them with the waterfront as their scene were published as The Bottom of the Harbor (1960...
...As the theme of human dignity comes out of Mitchell's experience as a Southerner, so another important theme, the Edenic image of the good old days, is indebted to the tent revivalist sermons he heard in his youth...
...Poole's dream of the draining of New York harbor by earthquake is a paradigm of psychoanalysis...
...The history of Mitchell's writing is a remarkable example of the development of a formal convention to fullest effectiveness, then of breaking through it...
...Joe Gould's secret, which is the burden of Joseph Mitchell's powerful art, is ultimately the secret of our brief lonely existence on a disinterested planet...
...And along about here, you better be careful You're apt to feel so bucked-up you'll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.' " A woman chaser in "The Rivermen,' the final chapter in The Bottom of the Harbor, picks up young widows visiting their husbands' graves in the cemetery on Sunday, thus providing a kind of rebirth after death (the Widow of Ephesus motif), and the piece ends with an old shad fisherman affirming that "the purpose of life is to stay alive...
...Cockeye Johnny preaches a magnificent sermon on the text "When I was a little knee-high boy the U.S...
...A selection of these pieces, along with some fiction, was published as McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (1943...
...You get right out of here and go over to Libby's oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters...
...This is the idyllic pastoral vision of the American Eden on which The Great Gatsby ends: "the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world...
...inept, and runny-nosed...
...And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you'd smell a rose, or a shot of brandy...
...Hunter's grave is at once tomb and womb and marriage bed...
...Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters...
...Then we realize that Gould has been Mitchell all along, a misfit in a community of traditional occupations, statuses, and roles, come to New York to express his special identity...
...Flood (1948) took the next step, into fiction: its protagonist, Hugh G. Flood, the retired 95-year-old "Mayor of the Fish Market," is an invented composite figure...
...Flood are the resurrection and the life: eating a few dozen oysters can rejuvenate an old man as it can make a 22-year-old truck horse scamper after a mare down an icy street...
...Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks...
...Gould even has some of the grace of a more famous comic tramp: he smokes his cigarette butts picked up out of the gutter in a long black holder, and he lights them "with an arch-elegant, Chaplinlike flourish.' Read less superficially, the book is a pathetic and moving account of a "lost soul" who had been an unloved boy...
...Joe gould's secret, Mitchell's fullest study of a single subject to date, consists of a Profile of a Greenwich Village bohemian published in the New Yorker in 1942, and a sizable amplification of it in the light of later knowledge, published in the magazine in 1964...
...The tone is sometimes flip, the style is at times mannered, the humor is occasionally forced...
...Mitchell decides not to expose him in an image that merges Gould with the faceless masses of Asia: "I didn't want to tear up his meal ticket, so to speak, or break his rice bowl...
...it'll make your blood run faster...
...but Gould himself, and the unwritten Oral History merges with Mitchell's own unwritten novel, a New York Ulysses (which Blooms magnificently even in four-page synopsis...
...The book is written, however, not in intricate Jamesian prose, but in the bubbling, overflowing manner of James Joyce...
...F1ood-the originator of the Human Race Parade-are ideal images of interracial fraternity...
...finally we realize that the body of Mitchell's work is precisely that Oral History of Our Time that Gould himself could not write...
...I never saw him without thinking of the Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman, or of a silent old man called Swamp Jackson who lived alone in a shack on the edge of a swamp near the small farming town in the South that I come from.' Gould is a paradigm of alienated man, of what he himself once called "the tragic isolation of humanity...
...that Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the king of 38 families of slum gypsies, is simultaneously a Winter King...
...In the book's universal meaning, Gould is an archetype of Ishmael...
...Here is Mr...
...By the end of the book, when he discovers Gould's secret, Mitchell becomes, not Gould's bearer or Gould's victim...
...The language is a torrent of rhetoric and eloquence...
...His first book, My Ears Are Bent (1938), reprints some of his newspaper feature stories...
...Birdy Treppel, a fishwife, on the harbor breezes: "'Well, son, I tell you,' she said, hopping up and down as she talked, 'if you went up to the North Pole in the dead of December and stripped to the drawers and picked out the biggest iceberg up there and dug a hole right down to the heart of it and crawled in that hole and put a handful of snow under each arm and sat on a block of ice and et a dish of ice cream, why, you wouldn't be nowhere near as cold as you'd be in Peck Slip in a sheepskin coat with a box fire in the gutter.' Since Old Mr...
...That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head...
...Mitchell's first publications were two short stories, "Cool Swamp and Field Woman" in The New American Caravan in 1929 (published while he was still an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina), and "The Brewers" in American Caravan IV in 1931...
...In Joe Gould's Secret Mitchell seems freer than ever before to talk about himself, his resolutions and intentions, his methods of reporting and writing, even his life: "I was still under the illusion that I had plenty of time,': Mitchell says, to explain his listening to Gould hour after hour, until "my eyes would glaze over and my blood would turn to water and a kind of paralysis would set in" Eventually the situation becomes comparable to that of Bellow's The Victim, and Mitchell writes: "I set out deliberately to get him off my back...
...Isn't it blue...
...Mitchell sees Gould "sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet- choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square...
...Flood are those of the later Yeats: the lust and rage of the old, the terrors of death, the joyous hopes of resurrection and rejuvenation...
...one of the few successful capturings of traditional Indian eloquence...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 24
