Joseph Mitchell was at once the most lucid and the most mysterious of the great mid-century New Yorker writers. Lucid in its clean, limpid minimalism, Mitchell’s prose was like a beautiful, clear river, its bottom not muddy but sparkling—sparkling with what might simply be gravel catching the light or, perhaps, diamonds worth diving for. Whichever it was, in each of his sentences there was always the mysterious sense of something more left unsaid.
“Joe Gould is a jaunty 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,” begins Mitchell's Profile “Professor Sea Gull,” from 1942, the foundation for his masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret,” from 1964. The slightly winking sobriety of the inventory is made poetic by the eccentric pairing of adjectives: jaunty and emaciated, hungry but happy—two concepts in sharp but subtly pointed contradiction.
On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the New York World. But his real heroes were the Joyce of “Dubliners” and the great Russian stylists—Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov. And he was an instinctive avant-gardist. The story of Joe Gould, for instance, appeared in two batches—“Professor Sea Gull” and“Joe Gould’s Secret,” itself a two-part series—and the latter essentially revises all we thought we had learned in the earlier. The whole tells the story of a New England renegade who supposedly spent his life compiling, from overheard conversations, “The Oral History of Our Time.” That book, we learn, never actually existed; all that did was a few antic skits and a set of compulsively rewritten tales of his mother’s death. In this respect, the Oral History was a model for those missed masterpieces of advertised literary ambition. Joe Gould was Truman Capote and Harold Brodkey and all the other American authors whose encyclopedic aspirations shrank, in the way of literary things, to a few obsessive subjects, in a perpetually replayed fable of American writing.
Mitchell was the most quietly elegant of men, dressed in a costume—a homburg, a knitted vest, a tweed jacket—that seemed unchanged since the thirties, and speaking in a soft but confident North Carolina accent. I asked him once, over lunch at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, his favorite, what A. J. Liebling and St. Clair McKelway and others of his cohort had in common. “Well, none of ’em could spell,” he breathed. “And none of ’em had any sense of grammar.” That myth having been exploded, he added, “But each one . . . each one had a kind of wild exactitude of his own.” A wild exactitude! It summed up then, and still does, everything we ask of New Yorker writing: a love of facts and details for their own sake, with some crazy gust of passion beneath to make it matter.
Along with the mystery of Mitchell’s sentences came another riddle: the perpetual silence that defined his later years at the magazine. Though he arrived daily in his office, and his typewriter certainly worked, he published nothing in the magazine between 1964 and his death, in 1996. What silenced him? Though there is much to be said for an abundance agenda in writing—we love those who die with their armor on, like Updike and Dickens—withdrawal is not necessarily neurotic. Truman Capote’s last editor, Joe Fox, once told me that Capote’s taste had survived his talent, and that he was sure Capote failed to finish his novel “Answered Prayers” exactly because he knew this. Mitchell, though a more refined man than Capote, also had perfect taste, and I suspect that he became suspicious—perhaps unduly so—of his own capacity to rise to the mark he held in his head.
No one who loves Mitchell can help but compare him with Liebling, his greatest colleague and closest friend. In Liebling’s best work, there is only one character—himself. (The new ones introduced are, like Colonel Stingo, Liebling in costume.) Since this character is as many-sided, cheerful, and witty as Odysseus, we don’t mind. Mitchell, in contrast, subsumes himself into his subjects, seldom intruding on the surface of his own prose. The two are perfectly paired and will remain so—like Chaplin and Keaton, the red and white roses of New Yorker allegiance. Readers need, and writers can draw from, both voices: both forms of extravagance, both pleasures in registering the world as it is, both kinds of sanity, both kinds of crazy. ♦
