Oddballs of New York

When I went to live for a short time in New York in the mid-1990s, a friend gave me a copy of Up in the Old Hotel, a selection of the 1940s and ’50s New Yorker writings of Joseph Mitchell. I shall always be profoundly grateful to him: if I hadn’t read Mitchell, my experience of the city would have been a thinner one, a bemused tourist’s view enlivened only by a few real-life encounters.

It seemed as though Mitchell had peeled off the shiny exterior of the modern city and prised out the lives that still gave New York its particular, rackety allure: he wrote about eccentrics and obsessives, barflies, shad fishermen, gipsy fortune-tellers, shysters, fraudsters, evangelical street preachers, fairground freaks, clam-diggers and ratcatchers. The urban veneer suddenly appeared very thin: Mitchell’s New York was built upon engagingly cranky and precarious human foundations and a few chance historical encounters; all the glittering skyscrapers were merely recent scaffolding. For Mitchell, who had come to New York in 1929 as a young reporter from South Carolina, Manhattan was a salty, low-lying, marshy island surrounded by ancient encrustations of clam and scallop beds, and peopled by desperate but fascinating oddballs. I was glad to find that Mitchell’s New York hadn’t altogether disappeared. I was once dragged into a dank apartment on the Lower East Side to have my fortune read by a gypsy woman; despite the ignominy of being spotted for a sucker and thankful to have escaped without handing over $90 for specially mixed oils from the Holy Land, I was rather pleased – relieved – that gypsy bajours like the ones Mitchell describes in his conversations with Cockeye Johnny, Manhattan’s gypsy king in the mid-1950s, still existed. Mitchell would have been pleased too – the world he was writing about then seemed on the brink of extinction, which is what gives his writing an elegiac melancholy. Mitchell loved talkers, and as a listener without peer he must have been to his subjects the ideal conversationalist. They rant and ramble at him, their lives emerging piecemeal from long and tantalizing digressions. Mitchell has a quite brilliant eye for quiet detail, and a scrupulous regard for its importance; he knows that the mundane and the strange are joined at the hip. In his 1940 portrait of Jane Barnell, or ‘Lady Olga’, America’s most celebrated bearded lady, he describes her friendship with Professor Heckler, a flea circus proprietor:

Twice a week she goes into Professor Heckler’s booth and watches him feed his fleas. This spectacle always amazes her though she’s seen it scores of times. The Professor rolls up one sleeve, picks the fleas out of their mother-of-pearl boxes with tweezers, and drops them, one by one, on a forearm, where they browse for fifteen minutes. While the fleas are feeding, the Professor reads a newspaper and she smokes a cigarette. They seldom say anything to each other.

One of his more garrulous subjects was the Reverend James Hall, New York’s tireless evangelist preacher, a dedicated eater of raw onions, and a scourge of alcohol and low living. He was a rhetorician of rare power and poetry, and Mitchell records him verbatim:

A lost city, hungry for destruction, aching for destruction, the entire population in a fuss and a fret, a twit and a twitter, a squit and a squat, a hip and a hop, a snig and a snaggle, a spism and a spasm, a sweat and a swivet. Can’t wait for night to fall, can’t wait for day to break.

Then there was New York’s famous child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler, whose progressive parents attributed her precocity to their diet of raw meat three times daily; and old Mr Flood, like Mitchell an aficionado of seafood from the depths of Long Island Sound, having eaten nothing but fish since 1885.

He eats with relish every kind of seafood, including sea-urchin eggs, blowfish tails, winkles, ink squids and barn-door skates. He especially likes an ancient Boston breakfast dish – fried cod tongues, cheeks, and sounds, sounds being the gelatinous air bladders along the cod’s backbone.

The only people who seem never to have interested Mitchell were self-conscious artistic types, the bohemians then swarming round Greenwich Village, setting up magazines and poetry circles; he found them ‘tiresome’. Mitchell’s best-known subject was Joseph Gould, but even Mitchell’s patience was tried by this extraordinary, infuriating figure. He penned two portraits of Gould – ‘Professor Seagull’ and ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’. In the opening line of ‘Professor Seagull’ (1942) Mitchell describes Gould as ‘a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century’. Mitchell is a spare writer, preferring to let his subjects speak for themselves, but he has a knack for the perfect word and ‘blithe and emaciated’ somehow sum up Joe Gould’s particular brand of cunning, freewheeling egotism. Harvard graduate, scion of a wealthy New England family, Gould was usually to be found in the bars of Greenwich Village offering his impersonation of a seagull in exchange for a drink, or perhaps performing the war dance of the Chippewa Indians. In Gould’s own version of his life, he had bravely abandoned the conventional future expected of him to devote himself to writing The Oral History of Mankind, a magnum opus based entirely on the spoken word. This he intended to leave for posterity in a series of exercise books hidden in studios and flophouses across the city. In the years that Gould and Mitchell knew each other, Gould maddened, bored and fascinated Mitchell; ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, written in 1964, after Gould’s death, is a valediction – not only to Professor Seagull himself but to a city and a way of living that had almost, but not quite, died. Joe Gould’s was not the only secret: for this was Mitchell’s last publication before he succumbed to an unshiftable writer’s block. From 1964, until his death in 1996, he barely wrote another thing. But every day, wearing his customary fedora, he travelled to the New Yorker building, went into his own monastically bare office with its row of sharpened pencils, shut the door, sat in silence, and then, in the evening, went back home again.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 12 © Lucy Lethbridge 2006