Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  After an absence of two and a half years, Mitchell finally managed to produce another New Yorker piece, “Bar and Grill,” which appeared in November of 1936. Little more than an extended sketch, if an amusing one, it described a neighborhood dive and the Runyonesque characters (including, again, many newspaper reporters) who frequented it. At Dick’s Bar and Grill, it seems the clientele went in for a lot of drinking, dicing, fighting, and occasionally shooting. But the customers were no more colorful than the proprietor, Dick, who was known to all as simply “The House.” The House, Mitchell wrote, is “a sad-eyed and broad-beamed Italian who often shakes his fat, hairy fists at the fly-specked ceiling and screams, ‘I am being crucified.’ ” The New Yorker’s editors loved this peek into one of the city’s grimier precincts; they were also delighted that a nonfiction slice of life could be as cheeky as a good short story.

  Other publications beckoned Mitchell, as well. For instance, in early 1937, McCall’s invited him to write about Edward VIII’S recent abdication of the British throne for Wallis Simpson. As an established national publication with a circulation in the millions, McCall’s could offer Mitchell considerably more money than the still-young and penurious New Yorker. But Mitchell thought the magazine’s content so unserious that he couldn’t bring himself to write for it.

  His next freelance piece for The New Yorker, another Reporter at Large, appeared in July of 1937. Entitled “Mr. Grover A. Whalen and the Midway,” it was a portrait of a young woman named Florence Cubitt, “Queen of the Nudists at the California Pacific International Exposition,” whose ambition was to succeed Sally Rand as the nation’s most ogled fan dancer. Her specific aspiration was to be a star attraction of the 1939 New York World’s Fair—notwithstanding the vow of the fair’s president, Grover A. Whalen, that such lewd acts would be entirely unwelcome. Mitchell had written about nudists, fan dancers, strippers, and the like for the World-Telegram, and this piece essentially reworked one he’d produced a year earlier after a memorable interview with the shapely Miss Cubitt. In fact, when she came through the door to meet him, Mitchell wrote, “She was naked. It was the first time a woman I had been sent to interview ever came into the room naked, and I was shocked. I say she was naked. Actually, she had a blue G-string on, but I have never seen anything look so naked in my life as she did when she walked into that room.” Again, The New Yorker was pleased to publish a droll Fact piece, especially one that pitted a beautiful fan dancer’s dreams against a stuffy bureaucrat’s determination to extinguish them.

  Still, the transition from newspaper to magazine writing was not an easy one, even for someone with Mitchell’s skills. His early work did need some editing, if much less than most non-staff contributions did. But Mitchell had a more basic challenge than learning magazine style: He wasn’t sure in what direction to take his writing career. New Yorker correspondence from this pivotal period in Mitchell’s development reveals that the magazine’s cultivation of the writer was serious but also frustrating—in essence because The New Yorker knew what it wanted, and Mitchell didn’t seem to.

  In November of 1936, for instance, Mitchell told McKelway that he was working on “a story about an inquisitive out-of-town boy in New York City, something on the order of a composite profile” (a concept that would resurface, in a far different context, later in his career). The piece obviously would have autobiographical overtones. But after reading it, McKelway turned it down. “Frankly, we are a little puzzled by it and, after the ‘Bar and Grill’ piece, disappointed,” he wrote. “This Mr. Griffin doesn’t seem to come up through this piece as a character at all. One time he seems to be one guy and another time another. I am afraid it is one of those pieces where fact and fiction have got sort of mixed up together with an unfortunate effect. When you first spoke to me about the subject I got the idea that this was to be a piece about the first few years of an out-of-towner in New York—more of a factual piece telling the strange life that such a man leads and the things that he thinks and does which are unfamiliar to most New Yorkers. This turns out to be almost entirely a fictional sketch and I am afraid it doesn’t satisfy us either as fact or as fiction. He just seems to be a pretty ordinary fellow, not very interesting and rather common, if I may use that questionable word.” McKelway went on to say that “I hope to God” the young writer didn’t find his cool reception too deflating. But he pleaded with Mitchell to try something “more tangible.”

  A proposed Reporter at Large about an amateur local detective was rejected as insufficiently interesting. Then, in the fall of 1937, Mitchell made yet another stab at some autobiographical fact-fiction mélange. But McKelway again demurred, his vexation more palpable. “The essential trouble with these stories is that they’re not really stories, but sort of fragments of experiences, which don’t fit into the factual side of the magazine, or the fictional either,” he wrote Mitchell. He goes on, however, to quote his boss, Ross, as saying Mitchell is a “damn good” writer, and Ross wondered if Mitchell should be encouraged to try his hand at more fiction, a prospect that continued to intrigue Mitchell. McKelway, in the meantime, reiterated his concern that the rejections not discourage Mitchell.

  If Mitchell wasn’t discouraged, exactly, he certainly shared McKelway’s frustration—although it’s less clear whether his frustration was with The New Yorker, for its reluctance to explore even moreexperimental creative frontiers, or with himself.

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  About this same time, Mitchell received a telephone call that caught him entirely unawares yet thoroughly delighted him. On the other end of the line was Mitchell’s undereducated shipmate on the City of Fairbury, Jack Sargent Harris. It seems he had indeed gone on to make something of himself, just as Mitchell had urged him to do on their transatlantic sail six years earlier. When Harris finally gave up as a merchant seaman, he was accepted into Northwestern University, where he studied anthropology. Now, in an even more remarkable turn, he was working on his PhD at Columbia University and was a graduate assistant for Franz Boas. Even a layman like Mitchell recognized Boas as the most influential anthropologist in the world. Seventy-eight years old and recently retired, Boas had trained a veritable army of anthropologists who were radically redefining race and civilization and reshaping how the West understood cultures once considered simply “primitive.” It was Boas’s earlier work that had largely disproved notions of “superior race”—which now, in a terrible irony, had reemerged so virulently in the scientist’s native Germany. Indeed, Boas lived long enough to see Nazis burning his books in a square outside his alma mater, the University of Kiel, which over the years had bestowed on him its highest honors for his contributions to understanding the family of man.

  Harris arranged for Mitchell to meet his mentor, who in turn agreed to be interviewed for a series in the World-Telegram. Mitchell’s conversations with Boas and many of his protégés resulted in six long pieces that ran in early November 1937. These included an overview of the state and importance of anthropological studies; a profile of Boas himself; and stories specifically focused on the Ojibwa and Pawnee tribes, the Dobu natives of New Guinea, and the collection and recording of aboriginal music. The stories make for good reading, if rather highbrow for World-Telegram readers. But for Mitchell, the experience represented something much more profound; it was a kind of graduate-level seminar in anthropology that caused him to rethink, as a reporter, why people are who they are and do what they do. It would be a career-altering revelation.

  Mitchell went into the interviews with Boas with the typical mindset of a reporter approaching an expert, which is to say he hoped he could find a way to put across his subject’s work to a non-scientific audience in an interesting, coherent fashion. Yet it was Boas himself who upended the usual journalistic transaction, Mitchell would recall years later. As the two men settled into conversation, the reporter began to realize that Boas was paying more attention to him than to his questions, essentially an anthropologist observing a curious specimen—the New York newspape
rman. Boas was becoming increasingly engaged—“not in me,” Mitchell explained, “but in my ignorance.” As Boas tried to explain his research principles, he suddenly told Mitchell, “Read this,” and handed him a copy of his book Anthropology and Modern Life, which Mitchell would in fact read, and he “began telling me how to look at the world. He said, ‘Don’t take anything for granted, don’t take yourself for granted, or your father.’ ” Mitchell was exhilarated by it all. He would remember coming away from the experience “feeling born again.”

  The insights from preparing the anthropology series caused Mitchell to reflect on his own life’s work to date, a review that left him feeling somewhat unsettled. “I began to see that I had written a lot of things that were highly dubious,” he recalled, in particular the stereotypical drinking stories so popular at that time (such as “Bar and Grill” from the previous year’s New Yorker), which tended to wink at heavy imbibing as relatively innocent or even amusing behavior, when in fact Mitchell was beginning to think the truer question was, “What’s so great about all this goddamned sloshing?” He also realized that such stories were, in a sense, too easy to execute; he was better than that. This self-awareness was one of the main reasons that, in time, Mitchell’s subject matter would move in far more substantive directions. In relating the stories of Mohawk steelworkers, gypsies, sideshow acts, and fishermen, Mitchell brought to them a new depth and context—a clear anthropological approach to understanding his subjects as members of distinct communities, with their own values, histories, and prejudices. For instance, when years later he would profile the venerable George Hunter, Mitchell took pains to set the story against the decline of Hunter’s Sandy Ground hometown, lending the tale considerably more richness and meaning. Like a good novelist, Mitchell was moving ever closer to discovering his characters’ fundamental motivation.

  Even as he was pulling together the anthropology stories, Mitchell was putting the finishing touches on another project that, in its own way, would take his writing career to a new level. By now a bona fide newspaper “name,” Mitchell had been approached by a small New York publisher, Sheridan House, about putting out a collection of the best of his journalistic work as a book. Initially, Mitchell was not inclined to do it; he believed that journalists should keep themselves largely out of the picture so that their stories, and their subjects, get the readers’ full attention. But Sheridan’s editors were persistent, and Mitchell began culling almost a decade’s worth of material. He recast some of the pieces and added interesting, and sometimes racier, details that his newspaper editors had cut out of the originals.

  Credit 5.4

  Therese took this photograph of her husband passed out on their couch, with New York’s newspapers strewn about. Mitchell included this image in his first book, My Ears Are Bent.

  The book was entitled My Ears Are Bent, a coy play on Mitchell’s almost masochistic ability to listen at length to all types of New Yorkers, dozens of whom march through his first book like a gaudy parade down Broadway. In the opening chapter, a kind of foreword, Mitchell discusses the art of conversation—how he goes about it and why he loves it. “Now and then…someone says something so unexpected it is magnificent,” he writes. He cites a time early in his career when he was working on a story about voodoo and black magic in Harlem and was present when an assistant district attorney questioned a prostitute. The prosecutor was pressing her because he was convinced the woman had been used as an altar in a black mass. As their interview dragged on, however, she wasn’t especially helpful on this point, and at length the exasperated interrogator asked why she had become a prostitute in the first place. “I just wanted to be accommodating,” she replied. Mitchell was enchanted.

  Even eight decades after the material was produced—most of it under unforgiving deadline—a reader is struck by several things about the stories contained in My Ears Are Bent. Foremost is how fresh Mitchell’s voice was and how consistent that voice remained from story to story throughout a remarkable range of subjects. Then there is the fact that he was able to establish such a distinct voice at all in a medium so hidebound by its rules and prejudices that it almost by definition suppressed a writer’s individuality. The material has a distinct maturity in outlook and a wry humor throughout. There is a tinge of world-weariness here and there, perhaps surprising from a writer so young but not surprising at all to anyone who knew Mitchell, an “old soul” from his boyhood days. And there is the Mitchell trademark—empathy for his fellow man, even when that man is certifiably crazy.

  When it was published, My Ears Are Bent garnered considerable reviews and press attention in New York, virtually all positive. Not surprisingly, one of the friendliest, but also the most prescient, was written by Stanley Walker for the Herald Tribune. “Perhaps no other city in the world offers such a lush field for a man with Mr. Mitchell’s talents as New York. This lovely and confusing and uproarious city is made to order for the knowing observer of human curiosities,” Walker wrote. New York’s fine newspapers do their best to reflect this “color and glory,” he continued, “but somehow they never quite do the job, for the elusive quality of the city is the despair alike of poets and short story writers and historians. If Mr. Mitchell sticks to his knitting he should be able to turn out something of infinitely greater value than this present little volume, charming though it is.”

  The book generated flattering newspaper stories about Mitchell back in North Carolina, as well. One reminded readers that North Carolina had previously exported O. Henry to New York. Elsewhere the publisher, Sheridan House, speculated that, in time, Joseph Mitchell might match the success of another Southern writer—Margaret Mitchell. The author was uneasy about this kind of premature flattery, of course; he understood his talent, but he also knew he was just getting started. That hint of dismay can be detected in a publisher’s photograph accompanying these stories. They show a handsome young man staring intently into the camera, unsmiling and suppressing all his usual amiability, as if being photographed against his will. His eyes are inquisitive, his dark hair combed neatly and beginning to recede ever so slightly from his forehead.

  That summer, Mitchell sent a copy of My Ears Are Bent to his parents. Inside the front, he inscribed, “For Mamma and Daddy, with my love and with the promise that my next book will be much better. J.Q.M.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A REPORTER AT LARGE

  Jane Barnell occasionally considers herself an outcast and feels that there is something vaguely shameful about the way she makes a living. When she is in this mood, she takes no pride in the fact that she has had a longer career as a sideshow performer than any other American woman and wishes she had never left the drudgery of her grandmother’s cotton farm in North Carolina. Miss Barnell is a bearded lady. Her thick, curly beard measures thirteen and a half inches, which is the longest it has ever been. When she was young and more entranced by life under canvas, she wore it differently every year; in those days there was a variety of styles in beards—she remembers the Icicle, the Indian Fighter, the Whisk Broom, and the Billy Goat—and at the beginning of a season she would ask the circus barber to trim hers in the style most popular at the moment. Since it became gray, she has worn it in the untrimmed, House of David fashion.

  —From “Lady Olga,” 1939

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  By 1938, Depression-weary Americans were already looking back on the twenties with nostalgia. That decade, as intoxicating as its successor had been desperate, had represented not only an age of personal liberation but one of cultural liberation. American literature moved in a bolder, more provocative, more naturalistic direction. The emerging motion-picture industry rooted itself in the latter-day paradise of Hollywood. Radio as a commercial medium spread coast to coast with astonishing speed. And print media evolved, as well, perhaps most notably in the rise of bold new magazines. To be sure, many of the venerable titles in American publishing were still around to usher in the Jazz Age—Collier’s, Liberty, and The Saturday Evening Post, fo
r instance, not to mention a shelf full of the still-popular “women’s” magazines. Yet such periodicals were hardly of the Jazz Age; for the postwar generation, they came across as staid and out of touch. Young entrepreneurs recognized an opening for magazines with a more contemporary focus. They sought to make cultural statements, to take political stands, to take a fresh look at news—and just maybe, in that great American tradition, to get rich. Among the most important magazine launches in the wake of World War I were H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s The American Mercury (founded in 1924); DeWitt Wallace’s Reader’s Digest (1922); and Henry Luce and Briton Hadden’s groundbreaking Time (1923)—to be followed in short order by such other Luce titles as Fortune (1930) and the picture magazine LIFE (1936).

  Then there was The New Yorker, founded in 1925. By now, with the thirties slogging to a close, Harold Ross’s shiny weekly was regarded by people who made their living with words as something special, and distinct from the rest. “We were reading The New Yorker all the time and I saw what the possibilities were,” Joseph Mitchell recalled in his 1989 interview with Norman Sims. “That’s the magazine that changed everything.”