Writing a legend
What it became was a colossal case of writer’s block: From 1964 until his death in 1996 at the age of 87, Joseph Mitchell arrived at the New Yorker’s offices almost every day, ascended to his office on the 20th floor and produced nothing.
That Mitchell was a legend for the stories he had produced from the time he began writing for the magazine in the 1930s until he stopped publishing in1964, few long-time New Yorker fans would dispute. Thomas Kunkel’s new biography, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker, basks in Mitchell’s glory and sheds more light on his life than anyone previously.
Kunkel, whose previous books include the 1995 biography of New Yorker founder Harold Ross ( Genius in Disguise), had access to all of Mitchell’s private papers, including the unfinished memoir he had been working on. (A few pieces from that have appeared in the New Yorker over the last few years.) He spoke with friends, relatives, former colleagues and Mitchell’s two daughters. But Kunkel didn’t have a surfeit of primary materials to work with and Mitchell proves to be too private a target to completely crack. The result, as clam enthusiast Mitchell might put it, is more littleneck than cherrystone — delightful to be sure, but less than filling.
We do learn that Mitchell suffered from dyscalculia, the mathematical version of dyslexia, and couldn’t do arithmetic. This ruled him out of running the family’s sprawling North Carolina tobacco-and-cotton farm, which his father had expected him to do.
In October 1929, when Mitchell announced he was leaving to pursue a newspaper career in New York, his father said: “Son, is that the best you can do, sticking your nose into other people’s business?” Mitchell chased after his father’s approval his whole life. In both New York and North Carolina, Mitchell felt rootless and like an outsider.
For readers, this wasn’t a bad thing. “Outsiders like Mitchell brought with them the sense of discovery and wonder that were hallmarks of the New Yorker from the beginning,” Kunkel writes. Mitchell’s stories propelled you to people and places you never knew you wanted to know about: Mazie, the tough talking, soft-hearted Bowery theatre ticket-taker; Lady Olga, the bearded circus performer; McSorley’s saloon; the Fulton Fish Market; Joe Gould and his multimillion word
Oral History of Our Time; and the much-revered and reprinted “Mr. Hunter’s Grave.” In all, Mitchell wrote 20 profiles and 19 Reporter At Large pieces for the New Yorker, many of them exceptional examples of literary journalism.
It was this talent that finally broke him. As Kunkel reveals, Mitchell was producing work in those post-1964 years, but nothing that met his standards. Then, when his beloved wife Therese died in 1980, his writing practically ground to a halt. Depression set in, something Mitchell was prone to. Kunkel neglects to flesh out this darker side of Mitchell’s persona; at times Kunkel seems to be protecting Mitchell, no more so than in the sections devoted to Mitchell’s preference for “truth” over facts.
One of Mitchell’s style tics was his use of extremely long quotes, which allowed his subjects to reveal themselves through their words. According to the notebooks Kunkel examined, plenty of these words were Mitchell’s and he often spliced together bits of dialogue from different moments and places. This occurs in “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” which also contains at least one instance of fabrication. In another story, “King of the Gypsies,” a more serious issue arises: the so-called king is actually a composite character.
For some Mitchell fans, this will change the way they approach his work. Kunkel though, gives him a pass, saying it isn’t fair to apply today’s journalistic standards to another era.