Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction by William Fiennes

  McSORLEY’S WONDERFUL SALOON

  I

  The Old House at Home

  Mazie

  Hit on the Head with a Cow

  Professor Sea Gull

  A Spism and a Spasm

  Lady Olga

  Evening with a Gifted Child

  A Sporting Man

  The Cave Dwellers

  King of the Gypsies

  The Gypsy Women

  The Deaf-Mutes Club

  Santa Claus Smith

  The Don’t-Swear Man

  Obituary of a Gin Mill

  Houdini’s Picnic

  The Mohawks in High Steel

  All You Can Hold for Five Bucks

  A Mess of Clams

  The Same as Monkey Glands

  II

  Goodbye, Shirley Temple

  On the Wagon

  The Kind Old Blonde

  I Couldn’t Dope It Out

  III

  The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County

  I Blame It All on Mamma

  Uncle Dockery and the Independent Bull

  OLD MR FLOOD

  Old Mr Flood

  The Black Clams

  Mr Flood’s Party

  THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR

  Up in the Old Hotel

  The Bottom of the Harbor

  The Rats on the Waterfront

  Mr Hunter’s Grave

  Dragger Captain

  The Rivermen

  JOE GOULD’S SECRET

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses, nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the ‘visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.’ Mitchell’s trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays.

  Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould’s Secret.

  About the Author

  Joseph Mitchell was born near Iona, North Carolina, in 1908, and came to New York City when he was twenty-one years old. He arrived at Pennsylvania Station on Friday, October 25, the day after the stock-market crash that is generally considered to have been the beginning of the Great Depression. He eventually found a job as an apprentice crime reporter for The World. He also worked as a reporter and feature writer at The Herald Tribune and The World-Telegram before landing at the New Yorker in 1938. Mitchell’s ‘Profiles’ and ‘Reporter at Large’ articles are among the best the magazine has ever published. His colleague Calvin Trilling dedicated a book to him stating ‘To the New Yorker reporter who set the standard – Joseph Mitchell’. The Times Literary Supplement said Mitchell was the ‘finest staff writer in the history of the New Yorker and one of the greatest journalists America has produced.’

  Mitchell frequently spent days wandering around New York with a pair of binoculars studying the facades of old buildings. He was one of the founders of the South Street Seaport Museum. His favourite institutions in the city were the Metropolitan Museum, Fulton Fish Market (on the cover), the Grand Central Oyster Bar, McSorley’s ale-house, Grace Church, the Belmont racetrack, the Staten Island ferry, the Gotham Book Mart and the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge in the Staten Island Marshes.

  ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, which appeared on September 26 1964, was the last piece Mitchell ever published. He went into work at the New Yorker almost every day for the next thirty-one years and six months but submitted no further writing.

  Joseph Mitchell was married to the photographer Therese Mitchell. They had two daughters. Joseph Mitchell died May 24, 1996.

  FOR SHEILA MCGRATH

  Introduction

  THE LAST piece of writing Joseph Mitchell ever published was the essay-novella called ‘Joe Gould’s Secret,’ which appeared in the New Yorker on September 26th, 1964. Mitchell had first written about Joe Gould in 1942, introducing a blithe and eccentric down-and-out – ‘a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century’ – who claims he understands the cawing of seagulls so well that he can translate poetry into it. Gould tells Mitchell about a work-in-progress, a book called The Oral History of Our Time, which he has been writing for twenty-six years and which is already eleven times as long as the Bible, and possibly ‘the lengthiest unpublished work in existence.’ The Oral History contains descriptions of Greenwich Village night life in such venues as Eli Greifer’s Last Outpost of Bohemia Tea Shoppe, and discursive essays on a variety of Gouldian preoccupations, including the zipper as a sign of the decay of civilization, and the emasculating effect of the typewriter on literature. But the book is primarily an archive of talk: the transcribed monologues of the citizens of New York. More than half of the Oral History consists of conversations taken down verbatim or summarized – Mitchell describes it as ‘a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey …’ But Gould speaks of the project with high seriousness. He believes that ‘what people say is history.’ His ambition, he declares, is to ‘put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude – what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows.’ This, curiously, is one way of talking about Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel.

  Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908, in Fairmont, North Carolina, where his father was a farmer who traded in cotton and tobacco. He began submitting newspaper stories as a student at the University of North Carolina, and moved to New York in 1929 with the idea of writing about politics. He got a job as a ‘district man’ on the Herald Tribune, ‘hoofing after dime-a-dozen murders’ in Brooklyn and Harlem1. The latter, especially, left a deep impression. ‘Until I came to New York City,’ Mitchell would write in an introduction to My Ears Are Bent (1938), a collection of his early newspaper stories, ‘I had never lived in a town with a population of more than 2,699, and I was alternately delighted and frightened out of my wits by what I saw at night in Harlem.’ By the time his stint there was over, Mitchell was ‘so fascinated by the melodrama of the metropolis at night’ that he forgot his ambition to be a political reporter.

  Instead, he went to sea, working on a freighter shipping heavy machinery to Leningrad. Returning to New York, Mitchell found a job at the World-Telegram, writing features and interviews. He wrote about strippers, Eleanor Roosevelt, lady prize-fighters, Noël Coward, pickpockets, Tallulah Bankhead and George Bernard Shaw, and he began contributing short pieces to the New Yorker, the weekly magazine founded by Harold Ross in 1925. Mitchell joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1938, and the magazine immediately gave him two great gifts. The first was a form. The Profile – a portrait of an individual drawn from interviews, observations and background research – is now a journalistic commonplace, but in the 1930s it was an innovation, conceived and developed at the New Yorker by Ross and writers like Alva Johnston, Meyer Berger and St. Clair McKelway. The Profile, according to Ross, showed that it was possible ‘to write history about living people’. Joseph Mitchell would become its greatest exponent.

  The second gift was t
ime. Released from the ticking-clock schedules of newspaper reporting, Mitchell now had the freedom to immerse himself in his stories, spending weeks or even months with his subjects, watching and listening. ‘There was this anomaly,’ he would say, much later. ‘You can write something and every sentence in it will be a fact, you can pile up facts, but it won’t be true. Inside a fact is another fact, and inside that is another fact. You’ve got to get to the true facts. When I got [to the New Yorker], I said to myself I don’t give a damn what happens, I am going to take my time.’

  At first, taking his time, he concentrated on characters in and around the Bowery in lower Manhattan, a Damon Runyon world of fleapits, flophouses, speakeasies, gambling dens and all-night greasy spoons, haunted by Bellevue psychiatric hospital and the corrupt city politics of Tammany Hall. He was drawn to loners, outcasts, eccentrics and down-and-outs. In the first book in this collection, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), we meet – in addition to ‘blithe and emaciated’ Joe Gould – Mazie Gordon, the ‘bossy, yellow-haired blonde’ who presides over the ticket cage at a Bowery cinema; Jane Barnell, who has a beard thirteen and a half inches long; nine-year-old child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler, who reads Plutarch, plays poker, and has composed more than sixty pieces for the piano; and 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’. We meet Johnny Nikanov, self-declared king of thirty-eight families of Russian gypsies; and the Caughnawaga Mohawks who have no fear of heights and work as riveters on the steel structures of bridges and buildings; and Charles Eugene Cassell, proprietor of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, who claims to be the first person to have collected stamps. McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon is a pageant of idiosyncrasy, and a shout of wonder at the variousness of human experience. There’s nothing quite like it.

  In his next two books collected here, Old Mr Flood (1948) and The Bottom of the Harbour (1960), Mitchell gravitated away from Greenwich Village and the Bowery to the waters around New York. He shares Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea – ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs’ – and his stories gather into a rousing shanty of fishing-boat chandleries and Fulton Fish Market fishmongers; of skiffs, draggers and dredges; of Long Island bays and Staten Island tide marshes, bushels of littleneck and cherrystone clams, sludge bubbles upsurging in the East River, gulls hunting for fish scraps along Peck Slip. No-one since Melville has written so vividly and lovingly of the waters and waterfronts of the Eastern Seaboard.

  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 Schuyl
er’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.’