Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  In his first year, Mitchell, like all Tar Heel freshmen, plunged into his general coursework, with a particular emphasis on subjects he most loved—English, history, and geology (in fact, Mitchell would wind up taking enough geology courses to earn nearly the equivalent of a minor in it). But it seems that early on at Chapel Hill, his medical ambitions were scuttled by “his paralysis over mathematics,” in the words of his daughter Nora; doctors needed to be able to perform mental calculations as adroitly as tobacco buyers. More than that, because math proficiency was a requirement for graduation, Mitchell quickly realized that his “block” would likely preclude his earning a degree. He explained the situation years later, during World War II, when he was applying for a position with the Writers’ War Board: “It became obvious, after my freshman year, that I could not cope with college mathematics and would never be able to get a degree, so I was given permission by the dean of the college of liberal arts to become what was called a special student. Thereafter, I studied much as I chose, taking courses in journalism, history, philosophy, geology and biology.”

  It’s not clear when he conveyed this setback to his parents, though he may well have waited lest A.N. immediately reel him back to Fairmont. Nor is it known exactly how Mitchell’s math disability came to the attention of the university’s administrators in the first place, as his transcript doesn’t show him being enrolled in any kind of math class at Chapel Hill. No matter; Mitchell was now free to pursue a self-selected liberal arts portfolio, which, beyond the subjects he mentioned in his letter, would include courses in Spanish, French, sociology, and music. His record reveals a solid if not superior student, one earning A’s, B’s, and C’s more or less equally throughout his four years there.

  Credit 3.1

  Following his muse: Mitchell wrote and edited stories for The Carolina Magazine while a student at Chapel Hill.

  Though disappointed that he would never earn a degree, Mitchell understood that his academic dilemma was, in a perverse way, a gift. He used his latitude to pursue subjects that he liked and needed and that expanded his cultural awareness; the result was a unique education that ran from the discovery of artists (such as Goya) to new literary inspirations (Crane, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and others). Mitchell was like a hungry field hand sitting down to a yawning meal. He found himself especially drawn to the emerging modernists—most significantly the early work of James Joyce. It was at Chapel Hill that he first read Ulysses; a fellow student who had been abroad smuggled it back (considered obscene, it was still effectively banned in America at the time) and shared it with Mitchell. But later in his life Mitchell would say it was an unexpectedly compelling course on Chaucer that left the most enduring mark on him. “I probably learned more about writing in that course than I did working on newspapers,” he said.

  Fairly early in his time at Chapel Hill, he fell in with the campus’s circle of student writers, and he was appointed one of the editors of The Carolina Magazine, the student literary publication. Mitchell and his colleagues wrote as well as edited, swapping story drafts for feedback. His own writing tended to be set in the rural world he knew so well, but its themes were moving into more expansive explorations of the human condition. Yet he was still a Fairmont boy and a Baptist in good standing, as is clear from an amusing exchange of letters, late in Mitchell’s life, with one of his best friends and classmates at Chapel Hill, John Armstrong Crow. After university, Crow would go on to become a distinguished writer himself and a respected Latin American scholar. Reminiscing about their college years, Crow told Mitchell, “I remember our meetings with Parson Moss…with nostalgia, especially the time Lionel Stander asked [him] if he thought Jesus had ever had intercourse, and as I recall things the question aroused an angry response from you, who evidently considered it not appropriate.”

  By junior year, Mitchell had found another outlet for his writing and expanding curiosities: journalism. Mitchell had carried around the writing bug for a number of years—at least as far back as the fifth grade, when he entered an essay contest and won a five-dollar prize. A few years later, one of the magazines he was reading religiously was Lone Scout, published by the Boy Scouts of America specifically for kids like him, whose homes were so remote that troops were unavailable to them. Early in 1925 the magazine reported in a small news item that “Joseph Mitchell of Fairmont, North Carolina” was intending to publish an “Amateur Journalism Annual” that will be sixteen pages, in color, and cost ten cents. (Lone Scout apparently encouraged such self-publications, which it called “tribe papers.”) It’s not known if Mitchell, just sixteen at the time, actually published the annual, but his early seriousness of purpose was evident.

  At Chapel Hill he took at least seven journalism courses, the closest subject to a major had he graduated. Just as important, North Carolina’s journalism school maintained intimate ties to the state’s newspapers, and those connections doubtless served Mitchell well, as at about this same time he began contributing freelance pieces—so-called “Sunday features”—to a handful of the better ones: Raleigh’s News & Observer, the Charlotte Observer, the Durham Herald-Sun, the Asheville Citizen, the Greensboro Daily News. A visit to the Wilmington newspaper, where an older colleague who had already graduated was working as a reporter, further whetted Mitchell’s interest. Later, as his confidence grew and he expanded his range, he also published in The Baltimore Sun.

  In terms of his development, more important than what he was writing was the mere fact that Mitchell was writing, seriously writing, both nonfiction and fiction—and that he was being published. Writing for him was not the dilettantish exercise it was for many of his campus counterparts, and he knew it. As it sank in that his future was not to be found back on the Mitchell homestead, “I knew I had to get some other way of making a living.”

  By the spring of 1928, Mitchell short stories were appearing regularly in The Carolina Magazine. If the work was literarily wanting in places (“I stumbled up the stairs and went into the coffee shop, and ordered a sardine sandwich because I always order a sardine sandwich when I get drunk and go into a coffee shop” or “Yuh can trust a good horse, but yuh can’t trust women and mules”), in others it was surprisingly deft and insightful. A promising example was a piece entitled “Three Field Sketches.” They are just that, sketches, in which little actually happens to the protagonists, all black field hands: A tenant farmer experiences a drought-quenching rain; a woman watches from the field with longing as a train pulls away and into the distance, leaving her to her life of unrelieved toil; and two black cotton hands are called in from the fields at day’s end. But each sketch is lovingly observed, the writer clearly someone who has spent a lot of time in corn and tobacco and cotton fields himself and was paying close attention. And though the writer maybe has just turned twenty years old, the writing already has a muscular maturity. In this passage, the long-awaited cloudburst has finally arrived and the tenant farmer experiences it on a visceral level:

  He holds out his hand and the rain covers it, washes it. He cannot be certain just where his hand ends and the rain begins. He feels that he is part of the rain; part of the fluttering, streaming wet leaves of the poplar trees growing beside the shallow ditches, which carry the water from the fields to the swamp streams. One may see an experienced rider astride a swiftly loping, spirited horse, and think, The rider seems a part of the horse. Just so the negro thought himself one with the rain and one with the new life the rain is giving freely to the fields and the trees.

  At this point Mitchell seemed as committed to his fiction writing as to his freelance news features, and he was able to publish sketches in several minor literary reviews. Then came his first major publication: the inclusion of the story “Cool Swamp and Field Woman” in the 1929 New American Caravan, an anthology of literature edited by, among others, his future New Yorker colleague Lewis Mumford. It was a substantial publication; the volume also contained the first published short stories of a fellow Southerner, Erskine Caldwell, as wel
l as poetry by Stanley Kunitz and E. E. Cummings. As a piece of writing, however, the story is less satisfactory than “Three Field Sketches.” It is an arid tale of the gradual union of a man and a woman, again set against the backdrop of Mitchell’s familiar swamp and crop terrain. Indeed, the unnamed protagonists are portrayed, in overwrought prose, more as elemental extensions of the earth itself than as flesh-and-blood people, and the language self-consciously tries too hard for a literary detachment in the then-emerging modernist style. Parts of it sound like a dubious mimicry of Hemingway, then coming into vogue (“They sat on the porch quietly and the night was the warmest of all the nights. Sand was warm and rooms were warm”). Such forays didn’t really suit the young Mitchell, but he was a writing apprentice still searching for his own style and voice. The same was true of a piece also perhaps conceived while Mitchell was at Chapel Hill and published in the 1931 American Caravan IV. This eerie story, called “The Brewers,” feels almost like magical surrealism. Its brief tale of a desperate farmer and mystical swamp woman collaborating to distill moonshine whiskey is written in an even more experimental vein, and it comes across like a fever dream. This is the effect the author intended, but it again feels forced. Just a few years later, Mitchell would be contributing short stories to The New Yorker, likewise set in his home terrain but rendered in a more unforced and droll voice, well on its way to the kind of lyrical naturalism that would become Mitchell’s writing signature. But, as with its predecessor, the true significance of the publication of “The Brewers” was the company Mitchell was keeping; fellow authors in the 1931 anthology include Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, Robert M. Coates, and William Faulkner.

  In other words, Joseph Mitchell didn’t have to wonder anymore what he was going to do with his life. He was a writer.

  On the journalism side, Mitchell in the summer of 1929 submitted a feature article called “Tobacco Market” to the New York Herald Tribune. The lengthy piece, while factual, is full of observation and more impressionistic in its approach than a conventional newspaper article. In it, Mitchell reconstructs the vivid sights, sounds, and smells of Fairmont’s Bulldog Alley tobacco market, which were second nature to him.

  In the street a horse trader is singing a song about mules. “Last call for the big horse and mule sale right around on Bulldog Alley, fine Tennessee and Kentucky mules sold for the highest dollar.” A boy leads three stud-muscled mules; the trader, a young fellow with a hard blue face and a cigar in his mouth, turns to him and mutters, “Damn these people! They ain’t got no money!”

  The Herald Tribune accepted the submission and published it, on its op-ed page, on Sunday, October 13. Mitchell was elated. He had his first byline in one of the best papers in New York, the most important writer’s market in the world.

  Chapel Hill had given Joseph Mitchell an outstanding liberal arts education as well as direction, expertise, and professional connections. Now, emboldened by his freelance success, he made a decision. Done with college—he would leave the university several courses short of what it would have taken him to graduate, had he been able to—he would go to New York; he would be a newspaperman. He didn’t really have any prospects per se, but he had something more important, his confidence—and one New York City byline.

  Why was he so intent on leaving North Carolina? No one was ever completely certain, least of all Mitchell himself, who would spend much of the rest of his life trying to answer that question. But it was inevitable, really, and that much he did know. For years Mitchell had tried to suppress the gnawing, enveloping sensation that he had been born out of place, but Chapel Hill had proved it was true. How else to explain the fact that, as an adult, he routinely spoke not of “leaving” the culturally arid Fairmont but of “fleeing” it? As much as he loved home, the perceptive and creative twenty-one-year-old already understood that, in the end, it would mire him like an animal in the swamp. So he would escape—to what, he wasn’t sure. But that naked confidence didn’t surprise anyone who knew him well. “He was so determined,” said a nephew, Jack Mitchell. “I call it deadly determination. He’s like a hawk going after a small animal. A hawk will dive into a bush at ninety miles an hour to get his prey. That’s deadly determination.”

  When at last Joseph mustered the courage to tell A.N. his intentions to go to New York and pursue a newspaper career, his father looked at him, the disappointment and a hint of disdain plain on his face. “Son,” he said, “is that the best you can do, sticking your nose into other people’s business?”

  For all his misgivings—and they were many and grave—A.N. days later found himself driving Joseph the forty miles north to Fayetteville, where his eldest child would catch a northbound train to New York City and the uncertain future that awaited him there. It was a melancholy scene, both fully aware that the train was carrying off not just a son but the longtime expectations the father had of him. There was not a lot of conversation. As the train approached the small depot, A.N. finally said, “Well, son, do the best you can, and write to us.”

  CHAPTER 4

  DISTRICT MAN

  Until I came to New York City 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. I would go off duty at 3 A.M., and then I would walk around the streets and look, discovering what the depression and the prurience of white men were doing to a people who are “last to be hired; first to be fired.” When I got tired of looking, usually around daybreak, I would get on the subway and go to my $9 a week furnished room in Greenwich Village. When I got out of the subway at Sheridan Square I would get a Herald Tribune to see what the rewrite man had done with the stories I had telephoned in hours earlier. I had a police card in my pocket and I was twenty-one years old and everything was new to me. By the time the Harlem trick was over I was so fascinated by the melodrama of the metropolis at night that I forgot my ambition to become a political reporter.

  —From My Ears Are Bent, 1938

  —

  In the wake of World War I, the gravitational pull that New York City exerted on ambitious and literate young people from the American hinterland is impossible to underestimate. For those well read enough to imagine the life available out beyond the unbroken horizon, Manhattan meant sophistication, it meant liberation, it meant opportunity. It represented excitement and validation of talent. It was Sodom; it was Oz. “New York in the thirties, this city was so fantastic I can’t get over it,” said Mitchell’s longtime friend and colleague Philip Hamburger. “It was really marvelous. It was the only place where Joe could have gone.” The creative migration to New York in the twenties and thirties would catalyze the nation’s cultural and intellectual development for the rest of the century. The pull of the city on Joseph Mitchell was almost precisely the same as it had been just a few years prior on a high school dropout turned newspaper roustabout from Utah, Harold Ross, who went to New York to prove himself and, once there, got it into his head that he could create a magazine setting a new standard for sophisticated reportage, light fiction, and humor. Early in 1925—just as Mitchell was looking forward to his high school graduation down in Fairmont—Ross launched The New Yorker. As it happened, Ross’s spectacular success with The New Yorker would add immeasurably to New York’s pull on all those other talented strivers out in the sticks, especially the ones who fancied themselves writers. As Mitchell himself acknowledged, “A great many New Yorkers knew when they were little children, when they were living in little towns all throughout the country, that they were going to come to New York.”

  In Mitchell’s case, his imagination had been further sparked by some recent reading and thinking he’d been doing about his future. In the summer of 1929, just after he’d left Chapel Hill, Mitchell had his appendix removed. While recovering from the operation, he read the popular book The American Commonwealth, a political history written by Britain’s former ambassador to the United States, James Bryce. It made such an impr
ession that it reinforced a notion he’d already been considering, that of becoming a political reporter—yet another reason to set his compass for New York. So when the Herald Tribune purchased his submission about tobacco markets, it surely seemed an omen. It was time to make the leap.

  Aspiration is one thing; timing is another. That train Mitchell boarded in Fayetteville in October of 1929 deposited him in New York just in time for the stock-market crash that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. After an overnight trip, Mitchell arrived at teeming Pennsylvania Station smack in the middle of the morning rush. He stowed his suitcase in a rental locker, got a bite of breakfast, and headed straight to the Herald Tribune. There Mitchell first met with the op-ed editor who had purchased his tobacco story, who in turn introduced him to Stanley Walker, the paper’s city editor. After only a few short years in the role, Walker was something of a legend among New York’s tribe of newspapermen. A fellow Southerner (from Texas), Walker liked his young visitor right off. He sensed in him the same enthusiasm and wide-eyed wonder about the city that Walker himself had brought to New York. As the Herald Tribune’s city editor, Walker championed a freer, more writerly approach to news reporting that, not coincidentally, resulted in a kind of talent pipeline to The New Yorker—Alva Johnston, St. Clair McKelway, John Lardner, Joel Sayre, and others would migrate from the paper to the magazine. Walker’s passion was infectious; he so loved the thrill of the chase that he was known to tag along on police raids just for fun. At the same time he implored his reporters to be unafraid in the stories they pursued. “A paper which doesn’t take chances is a dead paper,” he would say a few years later, in 1934, when he literally wrote the book on how to be a city editor. It was for all these reasons that Walker was revered by so many of New York’s newspaper reporters—the ones who worked for him, and the ones who wanted to.