Here are some glimpses from a review of Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the ‘New Yorker' (Thomas Kunkel, 2015) which appeared in the London Review of Books:
Joseph Mitchell of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did. ....[I]n the annus mirabilis of 1940, Mitchell published three stories of the hard to describe but unforgettable kind that give a writer a reputation for life: ‘Mazie’, about a woman who sold tickets in a skidrow movie theatre; ‘Lady Olga’, about the sideshow life of a bearded woman; and ‘The Old House at Home’, about a neighbourhood tavern that had been selling ale mainly to elderly gents with Irish names since 1854.
Mitchell wrote a lot of other great stories, too – ‘fact pieces’, the New Yorker called them – and over time a growing body of devoted readers made him about as famous as a writer who never earns a lot of money can be. The last of his fact pieces was ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, about a Greenwich Village character who claimed for decades that he was writing an epic oral history of our time, but wasn’t. The Gould piece was published in 1964. Mitchell died in 1996. What Mitchell was doing during that final 32 years – he went to the office every day, fellow staffers said they could hear him typing, he met annually with editors to describe what he was working on – is the central challenge faced by Thomas Kunkel in his new life of the writer...
Reading was half of Joe’s life [while he was growing up]. The other half was the natural world beyond his dooryard. Once his parents trusted him to keep shy of snakes and alligators, he was left free to poke about alone among the swamps and creek bottoms, closely inspecting all the creatures that walked, crawled, swam or flew in Robeson County. He devoured the book of nature ... The passion for knowing and naming things stuck with him for life. In one of his New Yorker pieces, ‘Mr Hunter’s Grave’, he named nine of the ten kinds of weed that he found choked around a tall marble gravestone in the cemetery of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in a little community called Sandy Ground on the south shore of Staten Island. They were poison ivy, cat brier, trumpet creeper, wild hop, blackberry, morning glory, climbing false buckwheat, partridgeberry and fox grape. The tenth he couldn’t identify. Growing over other graves were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet, mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, old-field cinquefoil, cinnamon fern and lady fern. Mitchell might have written that the cemetery was overgrown with weeds and left it at that, but he didn’t .....
[A]... stand-in for Mitchell was ‘Old Mr Flood’, [1944] a character he confessed ... was a ‘composite’ based on ...different men...[A]ny reader of Kunkel will understand that one of Flood’s originals was Mitchell himself. He gave Flood his own birthday, for example – 27 July – but more to the point were Flood’s love of the physical city right down to the architectural ornament, an obsession likewise of Mitchell’s; Flood’s refusal to follow the family business, as Mitchell had done; and Flood’s plain speaking about the torments of a Baptist upbringing, which Mitchell could never bring himself to confess in a plain flat way. ....
The great bulk of Mitchell’s work can be found in the 718-page omnibus volume, Up in the Old Hotel, published by Pantheon four years before Mitchell’s death, and it is enough. The first thing to stress about Mitchell as a writer is that it is no work to read him; his pieces are funny, full of surprise and intensely interesting.
Mitchell fell silent in 1964. It took a while for people to notice. The year before his mother had died, and a few months later she was followed into the grave by Mitchell’s closest friend since their meeting at the World-Telegram in 1931, A.J. Liebling. Mitchell and Liebling, the other great writer of fact pieces for the New Yorker, had lots to talk about. Both wanted to write fiction, but didn’t. Both loved the classic writers of low-life – George Borrow, William Cobbett, François Villon, Laurence Sterne, Rabelais.
.... After his daughters grew up and moved away he started to fill the apartment with relics of the old city he collected on his endless walks – door hinges, nails, bottles, bits of stonework, doorknobs, bricks, drawer pulls, bronze taps, the tarnished brass street numbers above doorways. Once or twice he was guilty of breaking and entering to get something he wanted from a building awaiting demolition. All of it was precious to Mitchell, who liked old things generally in the way of people who have never quite left behind the attachments of childhood. ...
Kunkel met Joe Mitchell while he was researching a biography of Harold Ross, the founder of the New Yorker, published in 1995 under the title Genius in Disguise. A couple of years later he decided to follow the Ross book with a Life of Mitchell, ‘remembered too much’, in Kunkel’s opinion, ‘for what he hadn’t written – the wilderness years of his late career – instead of for what he had’. ...
... Kunkel’s view of the wilderness years was shared by Mitchell’s colleagues. ‘Why didn’t he write more?’ Philip Hamburger, one of Mitchell’s friends at the New Yorker, asked. ‘Well, he wrote enough.’
... Kunkel’s view of the wilderness years was shared by Mitchell’s colleagues. ‘Why didn’t he write more?’ Philip Hamburger, one of Mitchell’s friends at the New Yorker, asked. ‘Well, he wrote enough.’
Enough.
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