Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (2 page)

Mitchell had no time for what he called ‘tinsel words’; he deplored the way copyeditors appeared ‘to prefer the nasty genteelism to the exact word’
²
. He didn’t want to write ‘representative of the
vice
ring’: he wanted to write ‘pimp’. His sentences tend to be short and direct, uncomplicated by fancy phrasing or subordinate clauses. He rarely uses metaphor. His descriptive power comes instead from precise observation, each successive detail adding another tile to the mosaic. Commodore Dutch brushes his hair with exactly one hundred strokes. Reverend Hall’s telephone has nine feet of cord. The meat in a clam is ‘a rosy yellow, a lovely color, the color of the flesh next to the stone of a freestone peach.’ On top of nine-year-old Philippa Schuyler’s piano Mitchell sees ‘a Modern Library edition of Plutarch, a peach kernel, a mystery novel called
The Corpse with the Floating Foot
, a copy of the New York
Post
opened to the comic-strip page, a teacup half full of raw green peas, a train made of adhesive-tape spools and cardboard, a Stravinsky sonata, a pack of playing cards, a photograph of Lily Pons clipped from a magazine, and an uninflated balloon.’ Little escapes Mitchell’s virtuoso noticing. His attentiveness to the world begins to seem less a technique than a moral principle.

He keeps the words simple, but still his prose is full of warmth, sensation and delight. Often, this is an effect of rhythm, the pattern of pause and flow, as in the miraculous beginning of ‘The Rivermen’:

I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running – a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide – and I like to look at when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls that sometimes last as long as half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.

Then there are the exuberant list poems that keep irrupting into the paragraphs, like the names Joe Gould gives the pigeons in Washington Square (Big Bosom, Popgut, Lady Astor, Fiorello); or the styles of beard remembered by Jane Barnell (the Icicle, the Indian Fighter, the Whisk Broom, and the Billy Goat); the nicknames on Commodore Dutch’s showcards (Big Yaffie, Little Yaffie, Gin Buck, Senator Gut, Eddie the Plague, Johnny Basketball, Swiss Cheese); or the triggerfish, lookdowns, halfbeaks, hairtails and goggle-eyed scad that stray into New York Harbour from the south. You feel the relish of these nouns in your mouth and ear, and how for Mitchell these catalogues are little celebrations of abundance, life brimming over, language edging into music.

Above all, there’s the talk. ‘The only people I do not care to listen to,’ Mitchell wrote in his introduction to
My Ears Are Bent
, ‘are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W.C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.’ Mitchell’s curiosity, his readiness to be interested, seems to unstop his subjects: the genie of their speech pours out. Street preacher James Jefferson Davis Hall; New York Police Department gypsy expert Captain Campion; Orvis Diabo, a Caughnawaga Mohawk who counts among his favourite books Theodore Dreiser’s
Is Our Civilization Oversexed
? – all deliver monologues that last for four pages or more; Mr Hunter talks almost continuously about the oystermen of Sandy Ground for twice that. Sometimes Mitchell’s subjects seem to come at us as representatives of
Homo loquens
, Man the Speaker, whose element isn’t air, but language.

There’s art in all this, of course. We can’t know the extent to which Mitchell prompted and cajoled his speakers, removing his interjections when he came to write, eliding and shaping and planing discrete bouts of conversation into these perfectly modulated
soliloquies
. Listen, for example, to Captain Campion’s description of a woman he glimpsed at a gypsy wedding, wearing three necklaces of fifty-pesos coins in ‘Gypsy Women’: ‘She had nineteen on the top necklace, and twenty-one on the middle one, and twenty-three on the bottom one, and they overlapped on her bosom. She was a big, stout woman and she had some wine in her and it was hot in the hall and she was breathing heavily, and every time her bosom rose and fell the gold coins shifted their positions and glinted and gleamed.’ The tethers of punctuation disappear as the memory lifts into the lyrical and mythic, gliding into another register. I’m not sure if that’s Captain Campion’s gift or Joseph Mitchell’s. Either way, it sings.

There’s art everywhere: in the selection of details; the scansion of paragraphs; the way Mitchell delays the revelation of Mazie Gordon’s night charity, or lets Philippa Schuyler’s riddle hang in the room unsolved, only to swing back to it at the close. This artfulness goes a stage further in the three stories about ‘seafoodetarian’ Mr Flood, who Mitchell admits is a composite character, based on several men at Fulton Fish Market. ‘I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual,’ he writes in the Author’s Note to
Old Mr Flood
, not the last time he’d hint at such a distinction (‘You’ve got to get to the
true
facts …’) The factual, I think he means, applies to a specific person or event; the truthful applies universally. So finding the ‘true facts’ means finding the details or images that have the capacity to resonate, to speak to all of us.

Look, for example, at the story called ‘Up in the Old Hotel’. From the start, Mitchell has one eye on mortality: ‘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.’ (The echo of
Moby-Dick
is unmistakeable: ‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.’) Mitchell’s story begins as a portrait of the market restaurant Sloppy Louie’s, and a profile of its proprietor, Louis Morino. But then Mitchell and Louie get talking about the boarded-up floors above the restaurant – an old steamship hotel, with a broken hand-power elevator that reminds Louie of a coffin. Louie says that the air in the elevator shaft is ‘dead’; he doesn’t want to go up there on his own; he’s looking for someone to go with him. But it’s only after another eight or nine pages of
Louie’s
memories that Mitchell brings us back to the mystery of the upper floors. ‘I’ll go up in the elevator with you,’ he tells Louie. The scenes that follow have the eeriness of an exhumation. The two men have looked over into the other side, into the afterworld, and Louie can’t wait to get back down to earth: ‘Sin, death, dust, old empty rooms, old empty whiskey bottles, old empty bureau drawers. Come on, pull the rope faster! Pull it faster! Let’s get out of this.’

So ‘Up in the Old Hotel’ is about both the specific (Louis Morino and Sloppy Louie’s) and the universal (our fear of death, and our nearness to it). In this way, the essay is closer to a great poem or short story than to a piece of journalism. It transcends the categories. And ‘Up in the Old Hotel’ is characteristic of Joseph Mitchell’s writing in being at once so celebratory and exuberant, and so alive to the shadow side. In the Author’s Note to this collection, Mitchell mentions boyhood visits to family graves in cemeteries around Fairmont, his interest in the morbid engravings of the Mexican artist José Posada and the ‘graveyard humor’ that he says typifies his cast of mind. Both ‘Mr Hunter’s Grave’ and ‘The Rivermen’ find him loitering in cemeteries. In ‘The Mohawks in High Steel,’ Mitchell pays special attention to the Catholic and Protestant graveyards on the Caughnawaga reservation in Quebec. When Mr Flood is told that he looks ‘a bit pale,’ the prod of mortality sends him into a rage: ‘Coffins! Undertakers! Hearses! Funeral Parlors! Cemeteries!’

Mitchell’s literary heroes were James Joyce and Mark Twain, but there’s a Chekhovian generosity towards the men and women he writes about, a feeling of solidarity with their struggles and fears and desires, so that you can’t help hearing Mitchell’s own voice in Leroy Poole’s repeated exhortation at the end of ‘The Bottom of the Harbour’: ‘“Thanks again,” said Mr Poole. “Give my regards home. Take care. Take care. Take care.”’

After the publication of
The Bottom of the Harbour
in 1960, Mitchell returned to Joe Gould and
The Oral History of Our Time
. He wrote ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ in the knowledge that, after a spell in psychiatric wards, his subject had died in the Pilgrim State Hospital in 1957. He recalls their encounters – Gould always wandering, ‘almost always alone,’ clutching his portfolio, flitting in and out of
the
saloons on Lower Sixth Avenue. He adds details missing from the earlier profile, details which present Gould in a less favourable light. Gould steals from friends. Many people, Gould admits, ‘loathe’ and ‘despise’ him. Mitchell discovers a disturbing portrait of Gould by an artist called Alice Neel, and the expression on his face is one Mitchell remembers as typical: ‘half satanic and half silly.’ And what Mitchell has actually read of Gould’s book ‘bore no relation at all that I could see to the
Oral History
as Gould had described it.’ Gould’s output seems limited to several versions each of an essay on the death of his father, an essay satirising statistics, and a short memoir of his time spent with the Chippewa Indians.

Mitchell comes to suspect that Gould’s famous
Oral History
doesn’t exist. The idea of a great book, envisioned but never set down, reminds him of a novel he himself had planned to write in his twenties. The novel was to be about a young man who, like Mitchell, comes to New York from the South to work as a reporter. The man grows fond of Fulton Fish Market and the city’s cemeteries. One day he hears a street preacher whose rhetoric recalls the fundamentalist evangelists of his Southern childhood – preachers whose sermons had left him ‘with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the apocalyptic.’

Mitchell had dreamed about this novel but never written it. So he cannot blame Gould for the grand figment of the
Oral History
. He recognizes something of himself in this wanderer who loved the voices of New York City, whose masterpiece remained a marvellous idea. After ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ was published in 1964, Mitchell went into work at the
New Yorker
almost every day for the next thirty-one years and six months but submitted no further writing. Roger Angell, an editor on the magazine, would recall: ‘Knowing him as a colleague during this profound and elegant silence made you feel like an archeologist on the brink of an extraordinary find. He hadn’t stopped writing, that was always clear; he was busy on a piece that hadn’t quite gone right so far … The piece, when it came, would be worth the wait.’
³
Mitchell died at the age of eighty-seven, on May 24th, 1996.

William Fiennes, 2012

¹
My Ears Are Bent
, Vintage Books, New York, 2008

²
My Ears Are Bent
, Vintage Books, New York, 2008

³
The
New Yorker
June 10, 1996

McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon

I

The Old House at Home

McSORLEY’S OCCUPIES THE
ground floor of a red-brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in New York City. In eighty-eight years it has had four owners – an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter – and all of them have been opposed to change. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls – one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves – and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. The clientele is motley. It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck-drivers from Wanamaker’s, internes from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, and clerks from the row of second-hand bookshops just north of Astor Place. The backbone of the clientele, however, is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling about the place. Some of them have tiny pensions, and are alone in the world; they sleep in Bowery hotels and spend practically all their waking hours in McSorley’s. A few of these veterans clearly remember John McSorley, the founder, who died in 1910 at the age of eighty-seven. They refer to him as Old John, and they like to sit in rickety armchairs around the big belly stove which heats the place, gnaw on the stems of their pipes, and talk about him.

Old John was quirky. He was normally affable but was subject to spells of unaccountable surliness during which he would refuse
to
answer when spoken to. He went bald in early manhood and began wearing scraggly, patriarchal sideburns before he was forty. Many photographs of him are in existence, and it is obvious that he had a lot of unassumed dignity. He patterned his saloon after a public house he had known in his hometown in Ireland – Omagh, in County Tyrone – and originally called it the Old House at Home; around 1908 the signboard blew down, and when he ordered a new one he changed the name to McSorley’s Old Ale House. That is still the official name; customers never have called it anything but McSorley’s. Old John believed it impossible for men to drink with tranquillity in the presence of women; there is a fine back room in the saloon, but for many years a sign was nailed on the street door, saying,
‘NOTICE. NO BACK ROOM IN HERE FOR LADIES.’
In McSorley’s entire history, in fact, the only woman customer ever willingly admitted was an addled old peddler called Mother Fresh-Roasted, who claimed her husband died from the bite of a lizard in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and who went from saloon to saloon on the lower East Side for a couple of generations hawking peanuts, which she carried in her apron. On warm days, Old John would sell her an ale, and her esteem for him was such that she embroidered him a little American flag and gave it to him one Fourth of July; he had it framed and placed it on the wall above his brass-bound ale pump, and it is still there. When other women came in, Old John would hurry forward, make a bow, and say, ‘Madam, I’m sorry, but we don’t serve ladies.’ If a woman insisted, Old John would take her by the elbow, head her toward the door, and say, ‘Madam, please don’t provoke me. Make haste and get yourself off the premises, or I’ll be obliged to forget you’re a lady.’ This technique, pretty much word for word, is still in use.