Up in the Old Hotel Read online

  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.

  In his time, Old John catered to the Irish and German workingmen – carpenters, tanners, bricklayers, slaughter-house butchers, teamsters, and brewers – who populated the Seventh Street neighborhood, selling ale in pewter mugs at five cents a mug and putting out a free lunch inflexibly consisting of soda crackers, raw onions, and cheese; present-day customers are wont to complain that some of the cheese Old John laid out on opening night in 1854 is still there. Adjacent to the free lunch he kept a quart crock of tobacco and a rack of clay and corncob pipes – the purchase of an ale entitled a man to a smoke on the house; the rack still holds a few of the communal pipes. Old John was thrifty and was able to buy the tenement – it is five stories high and holds eight families – about ten years after he opened the saloon in it. He distrusted banks and always kept his money in a cast-iron safe; it still stands in the back room, but its doors are loose on their hinges and there is nothing in it but an accumulation of expired saloon licenses and several McSorley heirlooms, including Old John’s straight razor. He lived with his family in a flat directly over the saloon and got up every morning at five and took a long walk before breakfast, no matter what the weather. He unlocked the saloon at seven, swept it out himself, and spread sawdust on the floor. Until he became
too feeble to manage a racing sulky, he always kept a horse and a nanny goat in a stable around the corner on St Mark’s Place. He kept both animals in the same stall, believing, like many horse-lovers, that horses should have company at night. During the lull in the afternoon a stablehand would lead the horse around to a hitching block in front of the saloon, and Old John, wearing his bar apron, would stand on the curb and groom the animal. A customer who wanted service would tap on the window and Old John would drop his currycomb, step inside, draw an ale, and return at once to the horse. On Sundays he entered sulky races on uptown highways.

  From the time he was twenty until he was fifty-five, Old John drank steadily, but throughout the last thirty-two years of his life he did not take a drop, saying, ‘I’ve had my share.’ Except for a few experimental months in 1905 or 1906, no spirits ever have been sold in McSorley’s; Old John maintained that the man never lived who needed a stronger drink than a mug of ale warmed on the hob of a stove. He was a big eater. Customarily, just before locking up for the night, he would grill himself a three-pound T-bone, placing it on a coal shovel and holding it over a bed of oak coals in the back-room fireplace. He liked to fit a whole onion into the hollowed-out heel of a loaf of French bread and eat it as if it were an apple. He had an extraordinary appetite for onions, the stronger the better, and said that ‘Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies’ was the motto of his saloon. About once a month during the winter he presided over an on-the-house beefsteak party in the back room, and late in life he was president of an organization of gluttons called the Honorable John McSorley Pickle, Beefsteak, Baseball Nine, and Chowder Club, which held hot-rock clambakes in a picnic grove on North Brother Island in the East River. On the walls are a number of photographs taken at outings of the club, and in most of them the members are squatting around kegs of ale; except for the president, they all have drunken, slack-mouthed grins and their eyes look dazed. Old John had a bull-frog bass and enjoyed harmonizing with a choir of drunks. His favorite songs were ‘Muldoon, the Solid Man,’ ‘Swim Out, You’re Over Your Head,’ ‘Maggie Murphy’s Home,’ and ‘Since the Soup House Moved Away.’ These songs were by Harrigan and Hart, who were then called ‘the Gilbert and Sullivan of the U.S.A.’ He had great respect for them and was pleased exceedingly when, in 1882, they made his saloon the scene of one of their slum comedies; it was called ‘McSorley’s Inflation.’

  Although by no means a handshaker, Old John knew many prominent men. One of his closest friends was Peter Cooper, president of the North American Telegraph Company and founder of Cooper Union, which is a half-block west of the saloon. Mr Cooper, in his declining years, spent so many afternoons in the back room philosophizing with the workingmen that he was given a chair of his own; it was equipped with an inflated rubber cushion. (The chair is still there; each April 4th for a number of years after Mr Cooper’s death, on April 4, 1883, it was draped with black cloth.) Also, like other steadfast customers, Mr Cooper had a pewter mug on which his name had been engraved with an icepick. He gave the saloon a life-sized portrait of himself, which hangs over the mantel in the back room. It is an appropriate decoration, because, since the beginning of prohibition, McSorley’s has been the official saloon of Cooper Union students. Sometimes a sentimental student will stand beneath the portrait and drink a toast to Mr Cooper.

  Old John had a remarkable passion for memorabilia. For years he saved the wishbones of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and strung them on a rod connecting the pair of gas lamps over the bar; the dusty bones are invariably the first thing a new customer gets inquisitive about. Not long ago, a Johnny-come-lately annoyed one of the bartenders by remarking, ‘Maybe the old boy believed in voodoo.’ Old John decorated the partition between barroom and back room with banquet menus, autographs, starfish shells, theatre programs, political posters, and worn-down shoes taken off the hoofs of various race and brewery horses. Above the entrance to the back room he hung a shillelagh and a sign: ‘BE GOOD OR BEGONE.’ On one wall of the barroom he placed portraits of horses, steamboats, Tammany bosses, jockeys, actors, singers, and statesmen. Around 1902 he put up a heavy oak frame containing excellent portraits of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, and to the frame he attached a brass title tag reading, ‘THEY ASSASSINATED THESE GOOD MEN THE SKULKING DOGS.’ On the same wall he hung framed front pages of old newspapers; one, from the London Times for June 22, 1815, has in its lower right-hand corner a single paragraph on the beginning of the battle of Waterloo, and another, from the New York Herald of April 15, 1865, has a one-column story on the shooting of Lincoln. He blanketed another wall with lithographs and steel engravings. One depicts Garfield’s deathbed. Another is entitled ‘The Great Fight.’ It was between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, both bare-knuckled, at Still Pond Heights, Maryland, in 1849. It was won by Hyer in sixteen rounds, and the prize was $10,000. The judges wore top hats. The title tag on another engraving reads, ‘Rescue of Colonel Thomas J. Kelly and Captain Timothy Deacy by Members of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood from the English Government at Manchester, England, September 18, 1867.’ A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is on this wall; so, inevitably, is a facsimile of Lincoln’s saloon license. An engraving of Washington and his generals hangs next to an engraving of a session of the Great Parliament of Ireland. Eventually Old John covered practically every square inch of wall space between wainscot and ceiling with pictures and souvenirs. They are still in good condition, although spiders have strung webs across many of them. New customers get up on chairs and spend hours studying them.

  Although Old John did not consider himself retired until just a few years before he died, he gave up day-in-and-day-out duty back of the bar around 1890 and made his son, William, head bartender. Bill McSorley was the kind of person who minds his own business vigorously. He inherited every bit of his father’s surliness and not much of his affability. The father was by no means a lush, but the son carried temperance to an extreme; he drank nothing but tap water and tea, and bragged about it. He did dip a little snuff. He was so solemn that before he was thirty several customers had settled into the habit of calling him Old Bill. He worshipped his father, but no one was aware of the profundity of his worship until Old John died. After the funeral, Bill locked the saloon, went upstairs to the family flat, pulled the shutters to, and did not come out for almost a week. Finally, on a Sunday morning, gaunt and silent, he came downstairs with a hammer and a screw-driver and spent the day painstakingly securing his father’s pictures and souvenirs to the walls; they had been hung hit or miss on wires, and customers had a habit of taking them down. Subsequently he commissioned a Cooper Union art teacher to make a small painting of Old John from a photograph. Bill placed it on the wall back of the bar and thereafter kept a hooded electric light burning above it, a pious custom that is still observed.

  Throughout his life Bill’s principal concern was to keep McSorley’s exactly as it had been in his father’s time. When anything had to be changed or repaired, it appeared to pain him physically. For twenty years the bar had a deepening sag. A carpenter warned him repeatedly that it was about to collapse; finally, in 1933, he told the carpenter to go ahead and prop it up. While the work was in progress he sat at a table in the back room with his head in his hands and got so upset he could not eat for several days. In the same year the smoke- and cobweb-encrusted paint on the ceiling began to flake off and float to the floor. After customers complained that they were afraid the flakes they found in their ale might strangle them to death, he grudgingly had the ceiling repainted. In 1925 he had to switch to earthenware mugs; most of the pewter ones had been stolen by souvenir hunters. In the same year a coin-box telephone, which he would never answer himself, was installed in the back room. These were about the only major changes he ever allowed. Occasionally one of the pictures his father had hung would fall off the wall and the glass would break, and he would fill in the gap. His contributions include a set of portraits of the wives of Presidents through the first Mrs Woodrow Wilson, a poster
of Barney Oldfield in a red racing car, and a poem called ‘The Man Behind the Bar.’ He knew this poem by heart and particularly liked the last verse:

  When St Peter sees him coming he will leave the gates ajar,

  For he knows he’s had his hell on earth, has the man behind the bar.

  As a businessman, Bill was anachronous; he hated banks, cash registers, bookkeeping, and salesmen. If the saloon became crowded, he would close up early, saying, ‘I’m getting too confounded much trade in here.’ Agents for the brewery from which he bought his ale often tried to get him to open a checking account; he stubbornly continued to pay his ale bills with currency, largely silver. He would count out the money four or five times and hand it to the driver in a paper bag. Bill was an able bartender. He understood ale; he knew how to draw it and how to keep it, and his bar pipes were always clean. In warm weather he made a practice of chilling the mugs in a tub of ice; even though a customer nursed an ale a long time, the chilled earthenware mug kept it cool. Except during prohibition, the rich, wax-colored ale sold in McSorley’s always has come from the Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue; the brewery was founded two years before the saloon. In 1934, Bill sold this brewery the right to call its ale McSorley’s Cream Stock and gave it permission to use Old John’s picture on the label; around the picture is the legend ‘As brewed for McSorley’s Old Ale House.’ During prohibition McSorley’s ale was produced mysteriously in rows of barrels and washtubs in the cellar by a retired brewer named Barney Kelly, who would come down three times a week from his home in the Bronx. On these days the smell of malt and wet hops would be strong in the place. Kelly’s product was raw and extraordinarily emphatic, and Bill made a practice of weakening it with near beer. In fact, throughout prohibition Bill referred to his ale as near beer, a euphemism which greatly amused the customers. One night a policeman who knew Bill stuck his head in the door and said, ‘I seen a old man up at the corner wrestling with a truck horse. I asked him what he’d been drinking and he said, “Near beer in McSorley’s.”’ The prohibition ale cost fifteen cents, or two mugs for a quarter. Ale now costs a dime a mug.