Joseph Mitchell

You are currently browsing articles tagged Joseph Mitchell.

“He Is A Fictional Character, And I Invented Him”

April 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

You don’t read anything like Joseph Mitchell’s articles in the New Yorker anymore because that New York City no longer exists. Of course, even back during the ’30, ’40s and ’50s, it didn’t completely exist.

In the early and middle parts of last century, there was a lot more lassitude in regards to what was printed as fact, and Mitchell certainly wasn’t above employing poetic license when weaving one of his unforgettable narratives. Janet Malcolm, a fellow New Yorker scribe, though one of a different and more veracious era, writes in the NYRB about Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell bio, Man in Profile. An excerpt:

Mitchell studied at the University of North Carolina without graduating and came to New York in 1929, at the age of twenty-one. Kunkel traces the young exile’s rapid rise from copy boy on the New York World to reporter on the Herald Tribune and feature writer on The World Telegram. In 1933 St. Clair McKelway, the managing editor of the eight-year-old New Yorker, noticed Mitchell’s newspaper work and invited him to write for the magazine; in 1938 the editor, Harold Ross, hired him. In 1931 Mitchell married a lovely woman of Scandinavian background named Therese Jacobson, a fellow reporter, who left journalism to become a fine though largely unknown portrait and street photographer. She and Mitchell lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village and raised two daughters, Nora and Elizabeth. Kunkel’s biography is sympathetic and admiring and discreet. If any of the erotic secrets that frequently turn up in the nets of biographers turned up in Kunkel’s, he does not reveal them. He has other fish to gut.

From reporting notes, journals, and correspondence, and from three interviews Mitchell gave late in life to a professor of journalism named Norman Sims, Kunkel extracts a picture of Mitchell’s journalistic practice that he doesn’t know quite what to do with. On the one hand, he doesn’t regard it as a pretty picture; he uses terms like “license,” “latitude,” “dubious technique,” “tactics,” and “bent journalistic rules” to describe it. On the other, he reveres Mitchell’s writing, and doesn’t want to say anything critical of it even while he is saying it. So a kind of weird embarrassed atmosphere hangs over the passages in which Kunkel reveals Mitchell’s radical departures from factuality.

It is already known that the central character of the book Old Mr. Flood, a ninety-three-year-old man named Hugh G. Flood, who intended to live to the age of 115 by eating only fish and shellfish, did not exist, but was a “composite,” i.e., an invention. Mitchell was forced to characterize him as such after readers of theNew Yorker pieces from which the book was derived tried to find the man. “Mr. Flood is not one man,” Mitchell wrote in an author’s note to the book, and went on, “Combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past.” In the Up in the Old Hotelcollection he simply reclassified the work as fiction.

Now Kunkel reveals that another Mitchell character—a gypsy king named Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the subject of a New Yorker profile published in 1942—was also an invention. How Kunkel found this out is rather funny. He came upon a letter that Mitchell wrote in 1961 to The New Yorker’s lawyer, Milton Greenstein, asking Greenstein for legal advice on how to stop a writer named Sidney Sheldon from producing a musical about gypsy life based on Mitchell’s profile of Nikanov and a subsequent piece about the scams of gypsy women. Mitchell was himself working on a musical adaptation of his gypsy pieces—it eventually became the show Bajour, named after one of the gypsy women’s cruelest scams, that came to Broadway in 1964 and ran for around six months—and was worried about Sheldon’s competing script.

“Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did,” Mitchell told Greenstein. Therefore “no matter how true to life Cockeye Johnny happens to be, he is a fictional character, and I invented him, and he is not in ‘the public domain,’ he is mine.” Mitchell’s Gilbertian logic evidently prevailed—Sheldon gave up his musical. But the secret of Johnny Nikanov’s wobbly ontological status—though Greenstein kept quiet about it—had passed out of Mitchell’s possession. It now belonged to tattling posterity, the biographer’s best friend.•

Tags: , ,

“Diabo Stepped Off A Scaffold And Dropped Into The River And Was Drowned”

July 5, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"In 1926, attracted by the building boom, three or four Caughnawaga, gangs came down." (Image by Detroit Publishing Co.)

From “The Mohawks in High Steel,” Joseph Mitchell’s 1949 New Yorker story about a Native American tribe’s contributions to NYC bridges and skyscrapers:

“Sometime in 1915 or 1916, a Caughnawaga bridgeman named John Diabo came down to New York City and got a job on Hell Gate Bridge. He was a curiosity and was called Indian Joe; two old foremen still remember him. After he had worked for some months as bucker‑up in an Irish gang, three other Caughnawagas joined him and they formed a gang of their own. They had worked together only a few weeks when Diabo stepped off a scaffold and dropped into the river and was drowned. He was highly skilled and his misstep was freakish; recently, in trying to explain it, a Caughnawaga said, ‘It must’ve been one of those cases, he got in the way of himself ‘ The other Caughnawagas went back to the reservation with his body and did not return. As well as the old men in the band can recollect, no other Caughnawagas worked here until the twenties. In 1926, attracted by the building boom, three or four Caughnawaga, gangs came down. The old men say that these gangs worked first on the Fred F. French Building, the Graybar Building, and One Fifth Avenue. In 1928, three more gangs came down. They worked first on the George Washington Bridge. In the thirties, when Rockefeller Center was the biggest steel job in the country, at least seven additional Caughnawaga gangs came down. Upon arriving here, the men in all these gangs enrolled in the Brooklyn local of the high-steel union, the International Association of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Iron Workers, American Federation of Labor. Why they enrolled in the Brooklyn instead of the Manhattan local, no one now seems able to remember. The hall of the Brooklyn local is on Atlantic Avenue, in the block between Times Plaza and Third Avenue, and the Caughnawagas got lodgings in furnished‑room houses and cheap hotels in the North Gowanus neighborhood, a couple of blocks up Atlantic from the hall. In the early thirties, they began sending for their families and moving into tenements and apartment houses in the same neighborhood. During the war, Caugh nawagas continued to come down. Many of these enrolled in the Manhattan local, but all of them settled in North Gowanus.”

Tags: ,

“She Denied A Report That She Had Once Lured Some Men Out Of A Mission By Waving A Bottle Of Whisky Outside”

June 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of my favorite Joseph Mitchell New Yorker pieces is the 1940 article, “Mazie” (subscription required), which profiles a doyenne of the Bowery, a movie-theater ticket seller who treated the riff-raff of the downtrodden strip with a mix of tough love and kid gloves. I recently found her 1961 obituary on the New York Times site. The opening:

Bowery Mourns Mazie Phillips, Faithful Friend of Derelicts–She Was “Over 21”–Mazie Phillips known as the “Queen of the Bowery,” died Monday in Lenox Hill Hospital after a long illness. She lived at 18 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side with her sister, Mrs. Jean Hallen, a widow, and always gave her age as ‘over 21.”

For more than 65 years, Mazie, a platinum blonde with a husky voice, passed out advice (“Go take a bath, you bum”) money (“That’s a real quarter now”) and sympathy (“You got the makins of a great man”) to every Bowery derelict who would pause and listen.

Mazie dispensed the advice, money and cheer day and night on the streets of the Bowery, and most particularly from behind a cashier’s cage at the theater on Park Row.

She was known and liked in the Bowery and yesterday, Harry Baronian of the Bowery News said there were men sitting on doorsteps, ignoring their tattered clothes and other discomforts and lamenting her death. Some drank to her memory, he added, as she had often done for others.

The “Gentlest Heart”

The children of the Bowery will miss her, too, in their own way. They looked for the lollipops she carried in her pockets and she looked for the children, enjoying the jest of first saying she had no more.

But why did she help those in the Bowery? Her sister said yesterday that there was no real reason, “she just had the gentlest, kindest heart of anyone.”

Mazie did not believe, however, that the men of the Bowery could be helped by organized charity.

“I’m not out to knock missions or such,” she once said, “but you aint goin’ to get a bum in a mission if there’s a gutter to sleep in.” But she denied a report that she had once lured some men out of a mission by waving a bottle of whisky outside.

Mazie Was Buying

“All I did,” she remarked, “was to go in the King Kong Saloon and pass out the word that the drinks was on me.”

It is not clear just when Mazie arrived in New York, but it was probably around 1890. She was born in Boston, and her sister recalled that Mazie was a “quiet, very demure little girl” when she left for New York.

Shortly after, she became a familiar, friendly face in the ticket-seller’s cage in front of the old Venice Theater at 207 Park Row, where the Bowery and Chinatown meet.•

Tags: , ,

“The Life Of The Party At A Beefsteak Used To Be The Man Who Let Out The Most Enthusiastic Grunts”

March 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"At a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer."

Joseph Mitchell’s great 1939 New Yorker story, “All You Can Hold For Five Bucks.” profiles the NYC tradition of the working-class beefsteak dinner, which was begun in the 1880s by political machines and has long-survived only in obsolescence. An excerpt from the article about how women, who began attending the banquets in the 1920s, “corrupted” the tradition of the beer-soaked beef-fest:

“It didn’t take women long to corrupt the beefsteak. They forced the addition of such things as Manhattan cocktails, fruit cups, and fancy salads to the traditional menu of slices of ripened steaks, double lamb chops, kidneys, and beer by the pitcher. They insisted on dance orchestras instead of brassy German bands. The life of the party at a beefsteak used to be the man who let out the most enthusiastic grunts, drank the most beer, ate the most steak, and got the most grease on his ears, but women do not esteem a glutton, and at a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer. Until around 1920, beefsteak etiquette was rigid. Knives, forks, napkins, and tablecloths never had been permitted; a man was supposed to eat with his hands. When beefsteaks became bisexual, the etiquette changed. For generations men had worn their second-best suits because of the inevitability of grease spots; tuxedos and women appeared simultaneously. Most beefsteaks degenerated into polite banquets at which open-face sandwiches of grilled steak happened to be the principal dish.”

Tags:

Three Great Opening Sentences By Joseph Mitchell

January 7, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

All three articles excerpted are contained Mitchell''s great collection, "Up in the Old Hotel."

Three wonderful opening sentences from articles written by the unimpeachable New Yorker legend Joseph Mitchell.

••••••••••

From “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (1956):

“When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries there.”

••••••••••

From “Hit on the Head with a Cow” (1938):

“When I have time to kill, I sometimes go to the basement of a brownstone tenement on Fifty-ninth Street, three-quarters of a block west of Columbus Circle, and sit on a rat-gnawed Egyptian mummy and cut up touches with Charles Eugene Cassell, an old Yankee for whose bitter and disorderly mind I have great respect.”

••••••••••

From “Goodbye, Shirley Temple” (1939):

“I’ve been going to Madame Visaggi’s Third Avenue spaghetti house off and on since speakeasy days, and I know all the old customers.”

Tags: