Vintage Books,
Paperback, 716 pages, $16
When I found myself telling fishermen about this book, I realized that although some of the stories go back as far as 1938 – worth telling Working Waterfront readers about.
Up In The Old Hotel is a compilation of four books Joseph Mitchell wrote during his illustrious career as a feature writer, first for several New York City newspapers and then for The New Yorker magazine. The books, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould’s Secret were first published in 1943, 1944, 1948 and 1963, respectively. These books, together with several stories from his first book, My Ears Are Bent, were republished in 1992, as Up In The Old Hotel. Until then, Mitchell admirers had to scour used book stores, looking for copies of the originals. The paperback version, published in 1993, is still in print, which says something for the quality of what he wrote and the veneration in which he is still held.
Mitchell, a southerner, loved oddballs, the New York waterfront and waterfront characters. He loved and was amused by human beings in all their humanity and foibles. He had enormous compassion for his subjects and was often filled with an almost child-like wonder. He had a gift – he must have had total recall – for rendering long conversations with his subjects. The amount of research he did before starting to write appears to have been prodigious. As was said in a New Yorker appreciation published after his death, “A profile might take him months or years; it took as long as it took.” (He was lucky to have written for that magazine, in that it allowed him this luxury.)
He had a sly, understated sense of humor. A sentence in My Ears Are Bent makes me smile. He had been sent by his paper to interview a stripper who started nude and then put on her clothes, piece by piece. She appeared for the interview clad in nothing but a G-string, sat down opposite him, and started to explain her act. In five words, he captured the moment, writing, ” ‘Now look,’ she said, unnecessarily.”
After having been sent to investigate rumors of sordid goings-on on a night cruise from Pier 52 in Manhattan to Albany, he concluded, “The Night Line has a wanton reputation, and I was disappointed.”
The Bottom of The Harbor is about the New York waterfront. Among other stories, it contains Mr. Hunter’s Grave, Mitchell’s graceful story of an old, black Staten Island oysterman, and The Rivermen, his investigation of Hudson River shad fishing and fishermen. It’s hard to choose a short example of his descriptions of people and places because he wrote in great, looping paragraphs filled with detail, but his description of Fulton Fish Market around 1960 also gives a sense of his personality.
“Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me.”
Newsweek’s review of The Bottom of The Harbor compared him with his own favorite author: “[Mitchell’s] account of an old seaman’s hotel, rats and plague, dragger captains and shad fishermen are what James Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism.”
Journalist John McPhee, no slouch himself, wrote, “When the self-proclaimed ‘New Journalists’ landed on the beach with their novel insights into non-fiction writing, Joe Mitchell met the boat. He was ahead of them in time, artistry, and range.”
In the Foreword to McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Calvin Trillin, also no slouch, tells of finding a difficult-to-find copy of My Ears Are Bent. (It was later re-issued). Trillin got it for $1.50 (it was on sale for half price) and wrote, “‘A dollar and a half!’ I always said, when relating the story to fellow cultists. ‘Why, I would have left the man my shoes.'”
The stories in McSorley’s are not so much about the waterfront as about bar-room characters; Gypsies; fearless Mohawk Indians who work the high iron constructing skyscrapers; and wackos.
Joe Gould’s Secret is a two-part profile of a classic wacko: a Harvard graduate alcoholic panhandler who claimed to be writing the world’s longest book, parts of which were stored all over New York. Fascinated by this erudite bum, Mitchell studied in depth and for years the man who called himself Professor Seagull and who claimed to understand and speak the seagull language. The actor Stanley Tucci recently made the book into a movie.
The three stories that make up Old Mr. Flood are fiction. Mitchell stirred together a mix of characters he found around Fulton Fish Market and concocted 93-year-old Hugh G. Flood, who calls himself a “seafoodetarian” because he eats nothing but seafood.
After publishing Joe Gould’s Secret, Mitchell developed writer’s block. He became famous for it. He never published again, except for the Foreword to Up In The Old Hotel. For 30 more years until he died in 1996, he came to his office at The New Yorker. He never discussed his problem and he never complained. A writer’s writer, Mitchell held the respect and admiration of his peers.
Trillin explained, “What struck me as astonishing was that he was able to get the marks of writing off his pieces. The words seem to have just appeared on the page by some process that was the reverse of those magic slate pages that children lift to make what they’ve written or drawn vanish. … Like Joe DiMaggio, Joe Mitchell made it look perfectly natural, even though nobody else could exactly do it.”