“In a newspaper office no day is typical, but I will describe one day no more incoherent than a hundred others. When I came in one morning at 9 I was assigned to find and interview an Italian bricklayer who resembled the Prince of Wales; someone telephoned that he had been offered a job in Hollywood. I tracked him to the cellar of a matzoth bakery on the East Side, where he was repairing an oven. I got into a fight with the man who ran the bakery; he thought I was an inspector from the Health Department. I finally got to the bricklayer and he would not talk much about himself but kept saying, ‘I’m afraid I get sued.’ I went back to my office and wrote that story and then I was assigned to get an interview with a lady boxer who was living at the St. Moritz Hotel. She had all her boxing equipment in her room. The room smelled of sweat and wet leather, reminding me of Philadelphia Jack O’Brien’s gym on a rainy day. She told me she was not only a lady boxer but a Countess as well. Then she put on the gloves to show me how she fought and if I had not crawled under the bed she would have knocked my head off. ‘I’m a ball of fire,’ she yelled. I went back to the office and wrote that story and then I was assigned to interview Samuel J. Burger, who had telephoned my office that he was selling racing cockroaches to society people at seventy-five cents a pair. Mr. Burger is the theatrical agent who booked such attractions as the late John Dillinger’s father, a succession of naked dancers, and Mrs. Jack (Legs) Diamond. He once tried to book the entire Hauptmann jury. I found him in a delicatessen on Broadway where he was buying combination ham and cheese sandwiches for a couple of strip-tease women. He pulled out a check made out to him and proved that he had sold and delivered a consignment of cockroaches to a society matron who planned to enliven a party with them, the cute thing. Mr. Burger said he had established a service called Ballyhoo Associates through which he rented animals to people. ‘I rent a lot of monkeys,’ he told me. ‘People get lonesome and telephone me to send them a monkey to keep them company. After all, a monkey is a mammal, just like us.’ I wrote that story and then I went home.”
Reading about other people’s misery shouldn’t cheer me up, but it does, and while I’ve had days like that, they were the exceptions, not the routine. So, whenever I read that passage, I am forced to conclude, against all the other evidence, that there really is some progress in the newspaper business over the last 60 years.
A collection of Mitchell’s newspaper columns (and the best-named book of journalism I know of), “My Ears Are Bent” appeared in 1938, when the reporter was in his late 20s and about the time he was going to work as a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he remained until his death in 1996. The book has been out of print for years, and when Mitchell collected his New Yorker pieces in “Up in the Old Hotel” in 1992, he chose to omit the stories in that debut volume. I think I can see why. The work in “My Ears Are Bent” is a young writer’s attempt to find congenial subjects and the style appropriate to them. In a long autobiographical introduction, he recounts his days as a police reporter, feature writer and trial reporter (he covered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial). But the underlying tone is one of, if not disgust, then certainly frustration at the constraints under which he worked. He was exposed to everything, but as the passage above shows, he had little time to reflect on it. In that sense, “My Ears Are Bent” can be read as a writer’s complaint. The collection was his way of saying goodbye to all that. As such, it doesn’t fit with the mature work in “Up in the Old Hotel,” but Pantheon has now seen fit to republish it, and I am glad they did. By anybody’s standard except Mitchell’s, “My Ears Are Bent” is a lot of fun, full of incidental joys, like a cub reporter’s pleasure at discovering a Harlem bar called the Broken Leg and Busted. I would have paid the price of the book just to know.
Once he got to the New Yorker, Mitchell found the encouragement and the leisure he needed to take the raw material found in the first book and shape it into the artful work for which he is remembered. His three decades of work at the magazine would grow increasingly sophisticated-and increasingly rare, beginning with a rush of stories in the ’40s and then tailing off until 1963, after which he published nothing at all. He never gave a satisfactory answer to the question of why he stopped writing, and like every Mitchell fan, I have puzzled over this endlessly, finally deciding that I’ll never know and that, more important, it doesn’t matter. What he did produce was plenty. Over the course of three decades, he would “set the standard,” as Calvin Trillin once put it, for every other nonfiction writer at the magazine. He became legendary for his profiles and features of saloons, the Fulton Fish Market, derelict graveyards, rats, street preachers, gypsies, Mohawk Indians, bums and assorted other characters in New York and the country people among whom he grew up in southeastern North Carolina. I discovered Mitchell in the 1970s, while haunting used book shops-the only place you could find his work then-and the impression he made on me was enormous. I felt as though I’d stumbled on a lost continent. But unlike a lot of secret finds, the immensity of his achievement never diminished once he was rediscovered by a new generation when “Up in the Old Hotel” came out in the 1990s. Being one of a crowd of admirers didn’t wilt my devotion one bit. His work seems greater with every rereading.
Idiosyncratic but never odd, sublime but never mandarin, Mitchell’s stories are tragic and hilarious, often in the same sentence, and those sentences, each and every one, can only be described as serene. Lean, almost plain, they have perfect cadence and they seem as effortless as breathing. Like the songs of his fellow North Carolinian Thelonius Monk, they sound instantly familiar and at the same time like nothing you’ve ever heard. This, though, is just writer shoptalk-writer envy, to be honest. To a reader meeting Mitchell on the page, his stories and the people are all you see, because the prose is just about transparent. In every story, Mitchell pulls that ultimate writerly magic act: he disappears, leaving you face to face with the king of the gypsies, garrulous Joe Gould or Mazie, the Bowery’s softhearted movie ticket-taker. Here’s the beginning of “Lady Olga” (Mitchell’s openings, “leads” in journalistic parlance, are as perfect as they come):
“Jane Barnell occasionally considers herself an outcast and feels that there is something vaguely shameful about the way she makes a living. When she is in this mood, she takes no pride in the fact that she has had a longer career as a sideshow performer than any other American woman and wishes she had never left the drudgery of her grandmother’s cotton farm in North Carolina. Miss Barnell is a bearded lady. Her thick, curly beard measures thirteen and a half inches, which is the longest it has ever been. When she was young and more entranced by life under canvas, she wore it differently every year; in those days there was a variety of styles in beards-she remembers the Icicle, the Indian Fighter, the Whisk Broom and the Billy Goat-and at the beginning of a season she would ask the circus barber to trim hers in the style most popular at the moment. Since it became gray, she has worn it in the untrimmed, House of David fashion.”
“Lady Olga” appears in Mitchell’s second collection, “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,” which appeared in 1943 and which Pantheon is publishing as a companion volume to “My Ears Are Bent.” Even today it remains an arresting book, heartbreaking, hilarious and humane, and when seen in contrast with the first book, a genuine miracle of stylistic development. The difference between “My Ears Are Bent” and “McSorley’s” is the difference between raw talent and genius and the most astonishing thing is that only five years separate the publication of the two works. Once Mitchell hit his stride, there was no stopping him. Here again, the temptation is to start talking about technique, how he put together these articles about bearded ladies and gifted children and glutinous beefsteak dinners and calypso singers. But what is important is the ravenous zest for life that animates them, a spirit oddly mixed with melancholy and an almost amazed respect for human fortitude and ingenuity. Most important, while Mitchell wrote about a lot of people in desperate circumstances, he never took advantage of them; they all walked away with their dignity intact.
I got to know Mitchell a little bit in the last years of his life, and he turned out to be one of the most complex people I’ve ever met, erudite but endlessly curious, melancholy but unfailingly cheerful, and probably the best example I ever saw of what I think of as the good Southerner: he was gracious and polite and a wonderful talker, a true lowercase-D democrat but without a trace of good-old-boy folksiness. “I hate folksy,” he once told me. This was a man, after all, who when he remembered his aunts murmuring to each other as they meandered through the family graveyard, was reminded of the multilingually gabbling washerwomen in the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” On another occasion, he said that his whole view of life could be summed up in an old saying that he heard as a boy from a relative in North Carolina. “From the cradle to the hearse, things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.” When he told me that, he laughed to the point of tears, and whenever I think of him, or read his stories, it is that moment that always comes to mind.
One final note of mild complaint: Pantheon, for whatever reason, has seen fit to omit the short Author’s Note with which Mitchell introduced “McSorley’s” in the original edition. This is regrettable, because the sentiment expressed therein deserves to be chiseled over the door of every newsroom in America: “The people in a number of the stories are of the kind that many writers have recently got in the habit of referring to as ’the little people.’ I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.” As long as there is an appetite for good stories, readers will be hungry for Joe Mitchell.
