Joe Mitchell’s Secret
Culture
The legendary New Yorker writer freely mixed fact and fiction—much of what he wrote wouldn’t meet today’s fact-checking standards. But maybe literary journalism has lost more than it’s gained.
By Ruth Franklin
As a cub reporter in New York in the s, Joseph Mitchell once listened in on the questioning of a prostitute who had allegedly allowed her body to serve as the altar for a Black Mass. Asked why she had become a prostitute, the woman replied, “I just wanted to be accommodating.” Mitchell adored this remark. “The best talk is artless,” he concluded. “Now and then … someone says something so unexpected it is magnificent.”
Mitchell made a legendary career out of listening to, recording, and shaping that artless talk. Of the first generation of New Yorker writers—A. J. Liebling, Janet Flanner, E. B. White—he remains the most influential. His immersive techniques and famously lucid style have given rise to countless imitators. In a foreword to a reissue of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, a collection that includes many of Mitchell’s famous profiles of figures on the margins of New York society, Calvin T
&#;I wish this guy hadn&#;t written this book&#;
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About halfway through Thomas Kunkel&#;s remarkable new biography of Joseph Mitchell a feeling of dread swept over me. I called a friend and said, &#;I wish this guy hadn&#;t written this book.&#;
Any writer with aspirations in literary journalism &#; or creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction, whatever phrase suits you &#; has to reckon with Mitchell, the late New Yorker reporter who wrote portraits of oystermen, bearded ladies, saloon keepers, gypsies, and other assorted characters sometimes described as New York City&#;s little people, a construction of words Mitchell detested. &#;They are as big as you are,&#; Mitchell would say, &#;whoever you are.&#;
Mitchell&#;s work inspired a couple generations of nonfiction writers. In graduate school, having no life, no girlfriend, and no premium cable TV channels, I often wandered over to the library late at night to read Mitchell stories in old bound copies of the magazine, preferring the original type, set next to Aqua Velva ads, to the anthologies on my bookshelves.
What did I love? His characters, of course, the
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By Jennifer Wells Star Business Columnist
What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city. I like to walk the streets by day and by night. It is more than a liking, a simple liking — it is an aberration. Every so often, for example, around nine in the morning, I climb out of the subway and head toward the office building in midtown Manhattan in which I work, but on the way a change takes place in me — in effect, I lose my sense of responsibility — and when I reach the entrance to the building I walk right on past it, as if I had never seen it before.
— Joseph Mitchell, from his unfinished memoir
The wanderer is trim and spruce in a Brooks Brothers suit, button-down shirt, perhaps a vest, certainly a fedora. If he has followed his habit, he has taken a piece of paper, folded it in half and then again neatly in thirds, sliding the paper inside his breast pocket, the paper making a slight rasping sound against the worsted. A pencil is tucked alongside the paper.
The wanderer’s lace-up shoes are cap
The Master Writer of the City
In The New Yorker published Joseph Mitchell’s profile of a homeless man in Greenwich Village named Joe Gould, whose claim to notice—the thing that separated him from other sad misfits—was “a formless, rather mysterious book” he was known to be writing called “An Oral History of Our Time,” begun twenty-six years earlier and already, at nine million words, “eleven times as long as the Bible.” Twenty-two years later, in , the magazine published another piece by Mitchell called “Joe Gould’s Secret” that ran in two parts, and that drew a rather less sympathetic and a good deal more interesting portrait of Gould.
Mitchell revealed what he had kept back in the profile—that Gould was a tiresome bore and cadger who attached himself to Mitchell like a leech, and finally forced upon him the realization that the “Oral History” did not exist. After confronting Gould with this knowledge, the famously kindhearted Mitchell regretted having done so:
I have always deeply disliked seeing anyone shown up or found out or caught in a lie or caught red-handed doing anythin
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