Mitchell Joseph - Up in the old hotel, and other stories

J OSEPH M ITCHELL TRAINED AT NEWSPAPERS that are now extinct in a city that is forever lost. In October 1929, just as the Great Depression struck, Mitchell left his home in North Carolina and arrived at Pennsylvania Station. He was twenty-one. He quickly made a name for himself in New York as a reporter at the Morning World, The Herald Tribune, and The World-Telegram. As a feature writer, police reporter, and rewrite man, he covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and countless fires and murders. He interviewed flea-circus operators, Central Park cave dwellers, oystermen, ship captains, fan dancers, Clara Bow, Fats Waller, Albert Einstein, and the Queen of the Nudists, who received the young Mitchell in naught but a blue G-string. Mitchell possessed a gift for human and reportorial listeninga natural sympathyequal to his gift for prose. Ear benders he called his favorite subjects.

Mitchell became one of the most popular newspapermen in the city. His picture appeared on the sides of delivery trucks. He was nimble, quietly ambitious, and infinitely curious. If he wanted to know a neighborhood better, he would take up residence there in a cheap rooming house. He was incredibly fluent and energetic. As he once recalled of his newspaper days, it was not unusual for him to report and write three features in a single day:

When I came in one morning at nine 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 West Side, where he was repairing an oven. 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 OBriens gym on a rainy day. She told me she was not only a lady boxer but a Countess as well. 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 Dillingers 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.

By 1938, The New Yorker had weathered its early financial struggles, and its founder and editor, Harold Ross, himself a newspaperman from the provinces, added to his staff by hiring Mitchell, thinking, no doubt, that he could use not only the young mans evident skills but his impressive productivity. Mitchell remained a staff writer at the magazine for fifty-one years. His most prolific year was 1939, when he had thirteen bylines, and he kept up a similar pace for several years thereafter. The result was the first of his books, McSorleys Wonderful Saloon, a series of New York narratives and character studies as pointed, various, and haunted as the stories in Dubliners.

Mitchells preferred precincts included Times Square, the Village, the East Side saloons, Harlem, and, perhaps most of all, docks and piers. He was not much interested in the good and the great. As he had been in his newspaper work, he was drawn to the visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the-end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy kings and old Gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks. But now his work took on a greater depth. The jokiness found in his newspaper piecescollected in My Ears Are Bentdisappeared; the tone is more mature. There are shadows in the rooms, sadness in even the funniest voices. At Rosss New Yorker, Mitchell found his way.

The most prized possession in my office at the magazine is a photograph of two menthe closest of friendswho set the standard for nonfiction writing in their time. It is a photograph of Mitchellslender, dapper, impishand A.J. Liebling, a Rabelaisian character in both girth and spirit, sitting in wicker chairs under a craggy tree in eastern Long Island. The two men are laughing more than is absolutely required for a photographthe result, perhaps, of the empty wine bottles arrayed in front of them. Mitchell and Liebling often shared turf and characters; they were drawn to the marginal men and women who could talkthe fight trainers, the rogues, the telephone-booth Indians. But in language they were as different as Chekhov and Gogol. Liebling wrote quickly, furiously, faster than anyone better, better than anyone faster. His sentences were baroque, arch, full of digressive comedy (except when he was at war, where he was all business). Mitchell was no less funny, but he was precise, haunted, restrained, and exquisite. His colleague Roger Angell once said that Mitchells writing stood firmly and cleanly in your mind, like Shaker furniture.