“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Mr. Flood’s Party”

McSorley’s is still there, just off Cooper Square at 15 East Seventh Street, and it’s still a wonderful saloon. It sold its first pint in 1854—gold-painted words in the front window say “This Is Our 138th Year And Ale Is Well”—making it the oldest place to drink in New York City. In 1940, when Joseph Mitchell, who had then only recently joined The New Yorker, wrote his famous Profile of McSorley’s, the saloon was a youthful eighty-six. In the half-century since, it has changed very little: it now draws its ale in small glass seidels rather than earthenware mugs; the pair of flickering gas lamps over the bar has given way to two steady-burning electric bulbs; and, since August 10, 1970, when the order to do so came down from City Hall, it has—albeit at first only grudgingly—admitted women. (“Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” was once the motto of McSorley’s, but now, especially during weekends, co-eds from NYU fairly overrun the place.) In all other essentials, however, it remains, by design of a succession of faithful owners, much the same establishment that the Irish immigrant Old John McSorley founded and ran, and that Joseph Mitchell once so vividly wrote about. “There is no cash register,” Mitchell reported. “Coins are dropped in soup bowls . . . and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox.” “The chairs are rickety; when a fat man is sitting in one, it squeaks like new shoes every time he takes a breath.” “It is possible to relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. . . . Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue interne once said that for many mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial than psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.”

At any hour of the day, the crowd at McSorley’s is made up of college students, working- and businessmen from the Village and environs, and a scattering of solitary old ale-drinkers. These people come to the saloon because the food and drink are good and cheap, and because it’s in their neighborhood. Most nights, however, there is also at least one customer who has come a long distance to drink at McSorley’s. He’s never been in the saloon before, yet in some ways he knows it better than most of the regulars. This customer plies the staff with questions about the history of the place, and is more interested in the mementos displayed behind the bar, and the countless documents, photographs, and newspaper clippings framed and screwed to the walls, than he is in his ale. He’s read Brendan Behan or Christopher Morley or some travel guide on McSorley’s, or he’s seen John Sloan’s paintings of it or perhaps the recent public-television documentary about it. He knows something about McSorley’s place in the city’s social and cultural history, and that McSorley’s itself, committed as it is to never changing, is a lively living museum of Old New York.

Most likely, though, this customer has come to McSorley’s because he’s read his Joseph Mitchell. On some nights he’s an old man who long ago read that New Yorker Profile, perhaps in the magazine, perhaps as reprinted as the title piece of Mitchell’s best-selling book McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. On other nights he’s a young journalist, some former idolator of Tom Wolfe’s on whom an elder colleague once pressed a dog-eared copy of McSorley’s with the command, “Read The Master.” Whoever he is, he’s a man on a mission, an amateur historian in search of a vanished corner of Manhattan, the beat once worked by the best reporter ever to write for The New Yorker. The landmarks on that beat, with the single exception of this ancient wooden ale house, are gone now, most of them for decades. Among Mitchell’s other haunts—all rendered indelibly in some forty-five Profiles, Reporter at Large pieces, and fictional sketches published between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s—were certain of the city’s once-countless speakeasies, dime movie theaters, quarter-a-night fleabags, and burlesque halls. More important still were the great, unspoiled fishhouses on Fulton and Water streets—Libby’s and Sweet’s and Sloppy Louie’s—where, at least until the mid-1940s, you could bring “a fish, or an eel, or a crab, or the wing of a skate, or whatever look[ed] best to you that day at the Fulton Fish Market,” and have it cooked to perfection by an old Italian who knew exactly what to do with it. Libby’s is now a memory of only the oldest workers on the waterfront, and Sweet’s and Sloppy Louie’s, like the Fish Market itself, have been gutted and parsleyed over as part of the South Street Seaport, that hideously cute theme-mall in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The staff at McSorley’s have had it easy in recent years; they’ve been distracted from their work less and less often as the querying Mitchell readers, once so numerous, have grown fewer and fewer. The decline in Mitchell’s readership has been largely Mitchell’s own fault: in 1964, for reasons known only to himself, he ceased publishing in The New Yorker, and shortly thereafter, as if to guarantee a state of total obscurity, he began to reject every publisher’s offer to keep his works in print. The result is that Mitchell’s name has lately been known only to a few readers, and this despite the occasional praise heaped upon him by his colleagues. (Brendan Gill called Mitchell “the finest writer on The New Yorker,” Calvin Trillin called him the “reporter who set the standard,” and William Maxwell, going them one better, called him simply “the best writer in America.”)

McSorley’s has again become a kind a literary tourist attraction.

Now, quite suddenly, all this has begun to change. Mitchell is again a current author —and, to his and his publisher’s surprise, a best-selling one—and McSorley’s has again become a kind a literary tourist attraction. This past August, with little pre-publication fanfare, Pantheon brought out an immense selected works, Up in the Old Hotel,¹ which gathers together Mitchell’s four mature collections—McSorley’s (1943), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1960), and Joe Gould’s Secret (1965)—and seven previously uncollected stories. There is also, for an introduction, a two-thousand-word Author’s Note, the first new piece of writing to appear above Mitchell’s signature in some twenty-eight years. In it Mitchell makes no reference to his long years of silence, nor does he say why he’s chosen this moment to return his work to print; both, for the time being, remain mysteries. What Mitchell does do, more explicitly here than anywhere before, is talk about what in his stories “typifies” his “cast of mind”—in other words, he turns over his carpet and traces the figure in it. The figure is that of a laughing skull, of the kind so often found in the engravings of Posada, a Mexican artist whose work, in Mitchell words, is alive “with animated skeletons mimicking living human beings engaged in many kinds of human activities, mimicking them and mocking them.” What gives Mitchell’s pieces their unity, quite beyond their Manhattan subject matter, is a kind of graveyard humor—call it “The Bird is on the Wing” humor, the humor expressed in a drinking song sung loudly by one of Mitchell’s Fish Market denizens:

It is the humor of the blue young man who, in one Mitchell story, frequents a disused Staten Island graveyard because the riot of live vines obscuring the tombstones there acts as a tonic on him. It is the humor of Mazie, the ticket-lady at the Venice Theatre, who is the friend of every bum on the Bowery and so with all the ambulance drivers in that sorry part of the city: “Police say she summons more ambulances than any other private citizen in town,” Mitchell writes, “and she is proud of this.” And it is the humor of the “steadies” at McSorley’s, the oldest of the old ale-drinkers, who, to ward off thoughts of their own demise, remember the dead with irreverent stories, and who understand the sentiments of the fellow-regular who, on the day of his retirement, pulled his chair close to the barroom’s centerpiece cast-iron stove and said, “If my savings hold out, I’ll never draw another sober breath.”

Joseph Mitchell, who turned eighty-four last July, still reports almost daily to his New Yorker office. Hired on by Harold Ross in 1938, he has weathered a half-century of changes at the magazine, and, from the sound of recent quotes to the press, seems determined to survive even the sea-change wrought by Tina Brown. Mitchell isn’t saying so, but perhaps the sudden publication of Up in the Old Hotel is to be understood as yet another expression of his graveyard sense of humor, a sort of raspberry blown in the face of Change—and of the Reaper.

Mitchell was born in 1908 on a cotton and tobacco farm near Fairmont, North Carolina. His father and his brothers were farmers, cotton buyers, and tobacco warehousers; his ancestors were English, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish farming people who settled in southeastern North Carolina before the Revolutionary War. Mitchell owns a farm in Robeson County and spends more and more of each passing year there; one hears that its proceeds have, for most of his life, allowed him the leisure to do and to write as he pleases.

Mitchell studied for four years at the University of North Carolina, where he reported for the college paper and began to write strange, lyrical short stories about the region he’d grown up in. One of these stories, “Cool Swamp and Field Woman,” appeared in The New American Caravan of 1929; another, “The Brewers,” in The American Caravan IV of 1931. These early efforts are wholly unlike his later work in both tone and subject matter, and they reveal the young Mitchell as a student of the moderns, earnestly appropriating the themes and techniques of Lawrence, Faulkner, and especially Joyce. They are the kind of stories in which men drink corn liquor and thump watermelons and yearn for women “with clean strength like a colt”; they are made up largely of such unconsciously parodic sentences as “He would watch space decay and he would think of time dissolving like thick cigaret smoke when a breath is blown into it and through it.” Mitchell soon abandoned such purple language. He also dropped North Carolina as a locale for his writings, except in a series of Tarheel tall tales, memoirs in the form of “stretchers,” published in The New Yorker in 1939-40 and reprinted in McSorley’s. These three stories, set in a mythical Black Ankle County where the men teach the boys “how to bait a hook for blue and red-breast bream, how to use a shotgun, how to tell the age of a mule by examining his teeth, [and] how to dress partridges for the skillet,” are squarely in that tradition of American small-town humor which has its source in Mark Twain and now runs through the monologues of Garrison Keillor—the tradition, that is, of the cracker-barrel tale full of exaggerated characters, precise local detail, and cunningly camouflaged moral purpose.

In the spring of 1929, Mitchell left college without a degree. That summer he wrote a report on the tobacco market in Fairmont and sold it to the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune. This, together with his reading of James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, encouraged him to come to New York and work as a newspaperman— ultimately, he hoped, as a political reporter. He cubbed for a few months on Pulitzer’s foundering World (which would soon be bought out by the afternoon Telegram), then, in 1930-31, worked as a “district man” at night for The Herald Tribune. He covered Brooklyn, the West Side, and Harlem. “I liked Harlem best,” he wrote in the prefatory essay to his first book, a collection of newspaper features called My Ears Are Bent (1938):

While working in Harlem, Mitchell frequented its speakeasies, nightclubs, and gambling dens and took a special interest in their proprietors and regulars. “I got to know a few underworld figures,” he wrote, “and I used to like to listen to them talk.” The Herald Tribune, unfortunately, wasn’t much interested in what he heard. It was not until 1931, when Mitchell joined The World-Telegram, that he was allowed to concentrate on the sorts of stories that interested him most—interviews, especially with what Harold Ross would later term “low life.” Over the next seven years, Mitchell would crank out scores of brief features, few numbering over fifteen hundred words, based on the banter of saloonkeepers, panhandlers, and scab taxidrivers; fire-and-brimstone revivalists and marrying-parlor priests; a great many naked or near-naked ladies (fan-dancers, bubble-dancers, nudists, strippers, and shimmy-shakers); and various suppliers of dead bats and powdered roots to the conjure doctors of Harlem. These people could talk—they were fountains of artless, unpremeditated monologue, full of incident and character and uncommon knowledge—and they provided welcome relief from Mitchell’s main job of work, interviewing celebrities. “The least interesting people to interview,” Mitchell wrote during these years, “are the ones who probably should be the most interesting, industrial leaders, automobile manufacturers, Wall Street financiers . . . people like that,” either because their speech is canned—they don’t so much talk as spew forth their own publicity—or because they are so reticent as to appear truly stupid. Only slightly less boring, according to Mitchell, are society women, “distinguished authors,” explorers, and actresses under the age of thirty-five. “After painfully interviewing one of those [people], you go down the elevator and walk into the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work.”

They were more to each other than just convivial lunch partners.

It was during his first year at The World-Telegram that Mitchell met a fellow-staffer as new to reporting, as passionate about literature, and as fascinated with rashness as he was: A. J. Liebling. The two became instant friends, and, as Raymond Sokolov writes in Wayward Reporter, his 1980 biography of Liebling, they “talked and drank and ranted at each other for the next thirty years”—that is, until Liebling’s death, in 1963. They were more to each other than just convivial lunch partners: they were mutual literary influences, the shapers of each other’s talents. Together, through their talk and work, they defined the aesthetics of “New York Low Life,” a literary genre all their own.

Not that they pretended to be without literary ancestors. They both saw themselves as but the latest in a long line of artist-journalists, writers who, finding the conventions of the novel, the drama, or the narrative poem uncongenial to their subject matter and story-telling talents, adopt instead the conventions of another and “lower” narrative form, the newspaper or magazine article. In English, Mitchell and Liebling agreed, their line began with Defoe and his 1722 Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the Black Death in London 1664-65 that, if not completely factual, is solidly based on facts and is certainly “true.” The line continued through the Fielding of Jonathan Wild and the Sterne of A Sentimental Journey and on through such more purely journalistic writers as William Cobbett, Pierce Egan, and George Borrow. Among Americans, Mitchell and Liebling prized the example of Mark Twain, especially the Twain of the sketches and travel books and Life on the Mississippi. Liebling adored the fiction-cum-reporting of Crane.

As Sokolov notes, at the beginning of their time at The World-Telegram, “Mitchell’s and Liebling’s professional interests coincided so completely that they found themselves writing about some of the same people”—and, one might add, in much the same manner, that of the humorous local-color sketch. Mitchell’s first book, My Ears Are Bent, and Liebling’s, Back Where I Came From (both 1938), collect the best of their brief World-Telegram pieces and in places seem the work of a single writer. By the mid-Thirties, however, when The New Yorker began to accept their proposals for longer articles, these two writers, so different in temperament and personal background, had started to develop their own “specialties.” Liebling, a native New Yorker and the son of a self-made fur wholesaler, took to painting florid portraits of self-made petty businessmen—and the pettier the business, the better. He wrote about struggling fight promoters, cigar-store owners, “tummlers,” “jongleurs,” “guys what knows to get a dollar.” He found his ideal subject in what he termed “The Telephone Booth Indian,” the small-potatoes bookmaker or talent agent who, too poor or too cheap or too wily to pay rent for a permanent office, conducts his business—incoming calls only—from pay phones in lobbies of Midtown office buildings. On the other hand, Mitchell, who grew up among the give-and-take of the Carolina tobacco markets, gravitated toward more social settings: the fish market, the saloons, the isolated black neighborhood on the far side of Staten Island. He discovered he was less interested in depicting colorful, idiosyncratic “types” than in detailing the history and folkways of complex, densely populated communities. According to Sokolov, “Mitchell now thinks his personal involvement with his subjects was greater than Liebling’s, whose concern for poor people grew more out of a sense of economic injustice.” (Mitchell also told Sokolov that Liebling “had read Engels on the working class of Manchester and had been influenced by him as a reporter.”) In other words, Mitchell was interested in people, and Liebling, at bottom, in The People.

By the time both writers had published their second books—Liebling his Telephone Booth Indian in 1942, Mitchell his McSorley’s the following year—each had an office at The New Yorker and, like Thurber and White, were spoken of by readers in the same breath. They still are. But by then their collaboration on “Low Life” had already ended: in 1939, Ross broke up the Mitchell-Liebling team when he sent Liebling to France to cover World War 11. After his return to New York in 1945, Liebling struck out for new territory: he reinvented The New Yorker’s Wayward Press department, added Boxing journalism to the magazine’s mix, did a tour of duty as Ross’s Chicago correspondent, and, among so much else, wrote the classic travel book Normandy Revisited and his memoirs as a glutton in France. He did not return to “Low Life” until the early Fifties, in his numerous essays about his “favorite writer,” Colonel John R. Stingo, the racetrack reporter for the seedy New York Enquirer. In contrast, Mitchell stayed at home in the Village, traveled extensively only in the Fish Market, and worked and reworked his “Low Life” material with ever more exacting craft and to ever greater literary effect.

Mitchell’s first signed piece for The New Yorker appeared in November 1933. Between then and the publication of McSorley’s ten years later, he produced the bulk of his work, thirty-four pieces, most of which make up the first half of Up in the Old Hotel. Over the next twenty years he would publish only twelve more items, half of them appearing between 1944 and early 1947. “One thing I can’t understand about myself,” Mitchell recently told a reporter for The New York Times, “is that on rewrite at The World-Telegram I was very fast. But when I got to The New Yorker, it took longer and longer.” Yet surely it is one thing to be, as Mitchell was at The World-Telegram, a just-hatched reporter with a craft to learn and reputation to earn, and quite another to be, as Mitchell was in 1943, a fifteen-year veteran with a subject to exploit, a style to perfect, and a uniquely patient and deep-pocketed magazine behind you. But, one suspects, it was not only the sinecure of a New Yorker staff job that slowed Mitchell down; it was also the success of McSorley’s and the screws Mitchell put to himself to top it. The book quickly went through several printings and several editions and occasioned raves on both sides of the Atlantic: Malcolm Cowley put Mitchell right up there with Dickens, and A. A. Milne and John Betjeman were unsparing with their praise. His sudden reputation as a reporter, Mitchell recently told the Times, became an albatross around his neck.

McSorley’s, like My Ears Are Bent, is unabashedly a miscellany, a catchall for the best of Mitchell’s work through 1942. The Black Ankle sketches are here, and so are a couple of fictional vignettes, but chief among McSorley’s contents are a dozen “Low Life” pieces, including Profiles of Lady Olga, a bearded lady in a traveling circus, and of Commodore Dutch, “a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself.” There is also a piece about Cockeye Jimmy Nikanov, “the king of the pickpockets,” a Russian Gypsy given to explaining himself in the following terms: “To a gypsy feller, there ain’t but two kinds of merchandise. Lost and unlost. Anything that ain’t nailed down is lost.” These and the rest of the best of the pieces in McSorley’s take Mitchell the reporter, the gatherer and shaper of facts and talk, about as far as his chosen material could take him. In the wake of the book’s success, Mitchell, it seems, was confronted with a choice: to go on and write another dozen such humorous character sketches and so turn out yet another such miscellany, or to somehow, without abandoning his hard-won audience and subject matter, take the art of “New York Low Life” somewhere beyond mere tour-de-force reporting.

His sudden reputation as a reporter, Mitchell recently told the Times, became an albatross around his neck.

But where? The first stop, it turned out, was fiction. Between January 1944 and August 1945, Mitchell published three linked sketches which, after much revision, would be shaped into his third book, Old Mr. Flood. These “stories of fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth” are Mitchell’s definitive tribute to the world of Fulton Fish Market: its stalls, restaurants, hotels, and barrooms, its invigorating reek, its remarkable bounty. Here, as in their journalistic predecessors, Mitchell is the narrator, and is present less in person than as disembodied eye and ear; indeed, on the surface these stories read like a three-part factual Profile of yet another of Mitchell’s inspired eccentrics, this time Hugh Griffin Flood, a nonagenerian ex-house-wrecking contractor and the honorary “Mayor of the Fish Market.” But it soon becomes clear that these stories are about more than the ancient lore of fishmongers and fish-eaters and the crotchets of one old man. They are about, above all else, how to live the right life.

Old Mr. Flood, Mitchell explains, is not based on any one person; “combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past.” He is two times a widower, and lives alone in a room at the Hartford House, “the oldest hotel in continuous operation in the city”; he is well-to-do “and could undoubtedly afford the Waldorf-Astoria, but newness depresses him.” He was born on Staten Island in 1850, and when we are introduced to him he is ninety-three years old.

Mr. Flood may be no churchgoer, but is a finer Christian than most any of my acquaintance. He gives praise to God daily, not by sitting in an ill-lit pew for half an hour but by rising at five, dressing in clean if old-fashioned clothes, and making a comprehensive tour of the Fish Market, breathing in its smells and stopping to admire His creation at every stall. He is a Saint Francis to the gulls, feeding them all and tending specially to the one-legged specimens, one or two of which will take scraps from his hands. He remembers Christ not with bread and wine at the Communion rail, but with oysters and whiskey at the Hartford House bar. Still, like every good Christian, his mind is a turmoil of regrets. “It’s not what I did I regret,” Mr. Flood confesses to a friend, a fishing-boat chandler named Tom Maggiani:

“Life is sad,” said Mr. Maggiani.

The name Mr. Flood comes from a Tillbury Town poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, the one about the whiskey-soaked old man who, alone beneath the harvest moon, conducts a nostalgic dialogue with himself (“Well, Mr. Flood, . . . The bird is on the wing . . . Drink to the bird”; “Well, Mr. Flood,/ Since you propose it, I believe I will”). And, in a sense, that is what Old Mr. Flood is for Mitchell, a dialogue between himself at thirty-five and his alter ego, the man he might have been had he been born not in 1908 but some sixty years earlier, or the man he hopes to be in his own old age. Mitchell gives Mr. Flood his own birthday, July 27. He gives him all his own gustatory predilections. He gives him his own love for the Bible, and Twain, and Heywood Broun, columnist for The World-Telegram and friend to the underdog. And he gives him a love of all things old, especially those things that speak of Old New York. Mr. Flood keeps on his mantelpiece “three small cast-iron statues—a bare-knuckle pug with his fists cocked, a running horse with its mane streaming, and an American Eagle”—which came off the fire escapes of the old Police Gazette building. “He once wrote the Museum of the City of New York suggesting that the owners of the Gazette building be asked to donate the fire-escape ornaments to the Museum. ‘Suppose this bldg. is torn down,’ he wrote. ‘All that beautiful iron work will disappear into scrap. If the owners do not see fit to donate, I am a retired house-wrecker and I could go there in the dead of night with a monkey-wrench and use my own discretion.’” Mitchell is a founding Friend of Cast-Iron Architecture and for many years was one of the Commissioners of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Tim Costello, proprietor of a Third Avenue bar made famous not by Mitchell but by a somewhat later “Low Life” writer, John McNulty, knew Mitchell well. Perhaps thinking of Old Mr. Flood, Costello once said to Brendan Gill, who was collecting material for his book Here at The New Yorker: “Joe has been workin’ hard at bein’ an old man since he was in short pants. It’s as good an ambition as any, since barrin’ a bus in your path or an angry husband or, in Joe’s case, the side of a buildin’ tumblin’ in on you, you can’t help but succeed. He’s a great one, Joe is, for pawin’ over other people’s fallin’-down properties. If he ever disappears, start lookin’ for him under fifty foot of brick, with a rusty fire escape on his chest and a pleased smile on his face. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,’ my grandmother said, ‘we’re all born, but we’re not all buried!’”

After publishing the stories in Old Mr. Flood, Mitchell returned to reporting, and to some of the same subjects he’d written about previously. Mitchell’s later pieces, however, are in no way mere rehashes of past successes. In them, he goes well beyond what he had already achieved as a reporter by posing new and exacting formal demands on his talent, challenges that only the most serious and accomplished literary artist could rise to. The chief challenge was to find a way to invest the factual reporting he’d perfected in McSorley’s with the thematic resonance he’d brought to the Mr. Flood stories—in other words, to write strictly journalistic pieces that, without abandoning the conventions of reporting, also explore classic literary themes. That Mitchell found a successful way to do this, to write a handful of unique non-fiction pieces that in their literary interest can hold their own beside the best American short stories, is a remarkable achievement. These late pieces, together with the best of Mitchell’s earlier work, will earn a place among our classics, and for reasons beyond Mitchell’s mastery of a peculiarly American kind of vernacular humor. They will last because, to paraphrase F.R. Leavis writing in another context, they not only enlarge the possibilities of literature for its practitioners, but also enlarge in their readers an awareness of the possibilities of life.

Two of these late pieces, which now augment the McSorley’s section of Up in the Old Hotel, are already among Mitchell’s best known: “The Mohawks in High Steel” (1949), a study of a band of New York Indians who have no fear of heights and work as riveters on skyscrapers and bridges, which was used by Edmund Wilson as a kind of introduction to his book Apologies to the Iroquois (1960); and “The Beautiful Flower” (1955), lately retitled “The Gypsy Women,” which was the inspiration for Bajour, a musical comedy about the ways of Gypsy con artists that ran 200-plus performances on Broadway in 1964-65. Six others, including “Up in the Old Hotel,” concern the New York City waterfront, and were gathered together in The Bottom of the Harbor. But it is the last and the longest and the best of these late pieces, “Joe Gould’s Secret” (1964), that I wish to discuss here. It bears close examination not only because it is the summit of Mitchell’s art, but because it is also, perhaps, the key to his subsequent silence.

“Joe Gould,” writes Mitchell, “was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years.” He called himself the last of the Greenwich Village bohemians—“All the others fell by the wayside”—and “the foremost authority in the United States on the subject of doing without.” When Mitchell first saw him, in 1932, Gould was in his early forties, but looked decades older. He stood five feet four, and weighed no more than ninety pounds; he had a bushy beard, and his hair had gone perhaps a year without cutting. “In my eyes,” writes Mitchell, “he was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man. I never saw him without thinking of the Ancient Mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman.” Mitchell also never saw him without inquiring into the progress of his work, for Gould was a fellow-writer, the Harvard-educated author of what was reputedly the longest unpublished work in existence, “An Oral History of Our Time.” This great work, described by Gould as “the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows”—was the fruit of over twenty thousand conversations with almost as many Manhattan down-and-outers. In it, writes Mitchell, “are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, . . . grisly descriptions of hospital and clinic experiences, . . . summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, and the addled opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants.” “What people say is history,” said Gould. “In time to come . . . people may read Gould’s Oral History to see what went wrong with us, the way we read Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ to see what went wrong with the Romans.”

One morning in the summer of 1942, Mitchell approached his editor at The New Yorker about the possibility of writing a Profile of Gould. Mitchell remembers telling him that “I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his Oral History.” Soon as word was out that Mitchell was looking for him, Gould phoned The New Yorker to set up a meeting. When Mitchell met him the following morning at a Village diner, Gould drew himself up on his counter stool and said: “I understand you want to write something about me, and I greet you at the beginning of a great endeavor.”

And indeed the endeavor was great.

And indeed the endeavor was great. Mitchell sat for weeks upon weeks of interview sessions with Gould, some of them lasting eight and ten hours. He bought Gould many breakfasts, which Gould would prolong with countless cups of coffee and by emptying a bottle of ketchup on his plate and then eating it with a spoon. (“I don’t particularly like the confounded stuff,” he explained, “but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.”) Gould told Mitchell about his place within a most distinguished New England family (“the Goulds were the Goulds when the Cabots and Lowells were clamdiggers”) and about how, by disobeying his father’s wish that he become a doctor, he lost that place forever. He told Mitchell about his coming to New York to write novels, plays, poems, songs, and essays, and about how he had settled instead for a job as an assistant crime reporter on the Evening Mail. He told how, by listening closely to the gulls, they at last “got through” to him, and how he learned to speak their language and even translate English poetry into it. (“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translates perfectly into sea gull,” Gould said. “I think he sounds better in sea gull than he does in English.”) But most of all he bragged to Mitchell about his Oral History and of the sheer self-sacrificing heroism involved in writing it. He bragged about how snippets of the book had been published in some of the most distinguished little magazines of the era, including Ezra Pound’s The Exile, Malcolm Cowley’s Broom, and Marianne Moore’s The Dial, and he gave Mitchell his own tattered copies of these magazines to prove it. Mitchell was unimpressed by Gould’s writing; like his conversation, “it was a little stiff and stilted and mostly rather dull, but enlivened now and then by a surprising observation or bit of information or by sarcasm or malice or nonsense.” Yet a couple of sentences in one of the essays had a haunting effect on him. “In the years to come,” Mitchell writes, “they would return to my mind many times. They appeared at the end of a paragraph in which [Gould] had made the point that he was dubious about the possibility of dividing people into sane and insane. ‘I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly,’ he wrote. ‘I suppose I feel about it in this way because I have a delusion of grandeur. I believe myself to be Joe Gould.’”

Mitchell’s Profile of Gould, “Professor Sea Gull,” was published in The New Yorker in December 1942, and was reprinted the following year in McSorley’s. It instantly made Joe Gould an official Village tourist attraction. Letters and dollar bills meant for Gould began turning up in Mitchell’s mail, and Gould, responding to this mail, began to use The New Yorker as his postal address. Soon Gould was turning up at Mitchell’s office daily, inquiring after his mail and staying on to talk—and talk, and talk, and talk. When, weeks into Gould’s new routine, Mitchell at last complained, Gould said something that brought him up short. “Look,” he said. “You’re the one who started all this. I didn’t seek you out. You sought me out. You wanted to write about me, and you did, and you’ll have to take the consequences.”

Mitchell took the consequences for much of the next fifteen years, until Gould’s death, at the age of sixty-eight, from arteriosclerosis and senility. But along the way, in an effort to get Gould off his back by finding him an editor for the Oral History, Mitchell stumbled onto Joe Gould’s secret: the Oral History did not exist. Except for the handful of essays written for the little magazines and then rewritten, over and over, in dozens of dime-store composition books, Gould had produced nothing. He had taken in Mitchell, and he had taken in his friends—indeed, as Mitchell later realized, he had taken in even himself. For if Gould couldn’t produce a great book, whether because of laziness or lack of talent or an unproductive perfectionism, he could at least convince well-wishers that he was a person capable of doing so. He could, that is, create a great illusion by living out a great delusion, the delusion that he was “Joe Gould.”

So what, one wonders, is Joe Mitchell’s secret?

So what, one wonders, is Joe Mitchell’s secret? Why, after writing this last remarkable Profile, did he suddenly fall silent? No reviewer of Up in the Old Hotel has been able to keep himself from guessing. Most all have made the valid point that the very last vestiges of Old New York, which Mitchell sought out in the best of his pieces, are now vanished for good; nothing and no one still survives to remind New Yorkers that their city was once, before and above all else, a seaport. Another notes that during the composition of “Joe Gould’s Secret,” A. J. Liebling died, robbing Mitchell of his most trusted sounding board and loudest-laughing audience; as Edmund Wilson once remarked, one writes for one’s contemporaries more than one realizes until one of them dies. Still others, notably Roy Blount, Jr., have suggested that “low life,” “talk,” and the realities of so-called “personality reporting” have changed so radically over the last three decades as to have become impracticable. “Low life” is no longer amusingly raffish; the Commodore Dutches and Telephone Booth Indians have devolved into abject beggars and crack-cocaine dealers. “Talk” now consists of psychobabble, sociobabble, anthro-ethno-gender babble, and what people heard on televison last night. And real, honest “personality reporting” is lately practiced only with the fear of litigation hanging over the reporter; just ask Janet Malcolm, sued for her Profile of Jeffrey M. Masson, or Ian Hamilton, sued for his biography of J. D. Salinger, or anyone who would dare to quote verbatim the self-incriminating words of Mr. Gordon Lish.

Yet one suspects Blount got still closer to the truth when he wrote: “I don’t think it is being fanciful to suppose that [Joe] Gould wore Mitchell out.” I think that Gould hardened Mitchell’s heart against his type—the crank, the yo-yo, the visionary, the member of “the shirt-sleeved multitude”—and that, in doing so, he soured Mitchell’s appetite for “Low Life” material for good. Suddenly, writing about such people as Gould became morally problematic. It became not only about making striking, darkly humorous portraits of society’s outcasts but also about “taking the consequences” of becoming part of these outcasts’ lives. It became, in Gould’s pointed words, not only about “lying down with dogs” but also about “getting up with fleas.” The Mitchell who narrates “Joe Gould’s Secret” puts one in mind of Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand, a man with a famously hardened heart, a heart that “had ceased to partake of the universal throb.” Perhaps Mitchell felt that by writing about such men as Gould, he too “had lost his hold on the magnetic chain of humanity.” Brand, writes Hawthorne, was, at the end,

I don’t think it is being too romantic to suppose that something like this is at the bottom of Mitchell’s silence, and that it is just this sort of morbid state of mind that he refers to when, according to a reporter for The New York Times, “he says that in part a personal sorrow that he does not care to discuss took away his zest for the kind of humorous subjects that had been his staple.”

One hears that Mitchell has never stopped writing, that he is hard at work on another book. Sometimes it is said to be a memoir of his dual life in New York and North Carolina. Sometimes it said to be a further study of the Old Fulton Fish Market. The Sunday Times Book Review lately reported that Mitchell is writing what he describes as “a complicated biography of a woman about town.” Perhaps Mitchell has been at work at all three projects. Perhaps soon we will be treated to a series of new books, and the recent release of Up in the Old Hotel is merely Mitchell’s canny way of setting the stage for them. But I doubt it. Mitchell recently said something to a reporter that makes me wonder if all these works-in-progress are as mythical as the Oral History itself. He told The New York Times that the impulse behind his bringing out his omnibus was this: “I decided if I could get [my previously published work] in a book together, I could put it all behind me. Maybe it will free me to find my way to the right door.”

It is greedy, perhaps, to hope for more from Joseph Mitchell, whose collected work to date, now presented by Pantheon in a handsome one-volume edition, exhibits, in its entirety, an organic shapeliness, a full-roundedness, a humor and originality and literary integrity unique in contemporary American prose. Up in the Old Hotel is Mitchell’s Oral History of Our Time. Unlike Gould’s, his exists, and, one feels certain, will stay in print forever, bending the ear with the sound of great American talk for as long as there are readers who can listen.