The literary merit of “Mr. Hunter” was appreciated immediately upon publication. A typical observation—and one Mitchell was especially glad to get—came from the respected British critic John Davenport, who sent the author this handwritten note:
I’ve been reading your pieces in The New Yorker for a good many years; recently, too few of them, it seemed to me. Now in the issue of September 22nd comes ‘Mr. Hunter’s Grave.’ It is wonderfully, superlatively good. I would not inflict fan-mail on you except for reasons of pure vanity: I knew it was yours before I’d finished the first column on page 50. There was no need to check the signature on page 89. [At the time, The New Yorker still ran bylines at the end of articles instead of at the beginning.] It makes me happy to think that I introduced Dylan Thomas to your work with McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. He had a great admiration for you, as you must know, for he told me he had met you; a pleasure denied me, though we have several common friends. With many thanks….
Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it? As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser. What can be said with a degree of confidence is that had Mitchell (or anyone else, for that matter) written the piece adhering to what Hunter literally said and in the rigidly accurate sequence in which events occurred, the result would have been a compelling human-interest story but not much more. With the imagination he applied, Mitchell produced an enduring piece of literature, the kind of work without which we’d be the poorer.
Several months after “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” was published, its protagonist sent Mitchell a letter about “the wonderful story you gave in the magazine New Yorker.” For weeks afterward, George Hunter said, people were writing him and stopping by his home to congratulate him. Friends couldn’t get original copies of that issue and so were passing them around to one another. Hunter’s penmanship is tall and precise, and his manner is as dignified but direct as the speech Mitchell captured in the story. After his opening pleasantries, he comes to the real point of his letter.
We are observing the 106th anniversary of our church next Sunday, Dec. 16th, ’56, from 10 o’clock…. We have pastors from every church to speak. So I and our congregation will be looking for you, and the people who know about that kind of business tell me that you were well paid for that story, but that is none of my business. The only thing I am interested in is my church and I feel that you should give the church a nice donation. Please do not count me anything.
May God bless you and your family.
Sincerely yours,
George H. Hunter
Two weeks later, The New Yorker sent the A.M.E. Zion Church a check for fifty dollars.
CHAPTER 11
A RIVER IN A DREAM
I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running—a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide—and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls that sometimes last as long as half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.
—From “The Rivermen,” 1959
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With Mitchell’s success, he and Therese occasionally discussed finding a bigger apartment—one where, at the very least, they could have their own bedroom. But invariably after looking at other places they decided to stay put. They preferred familiarity to comfort, even if it came with complications. For instance, Nora, by now a teenager, sometimes brought home boyfriends. But her home was such a cracker box that her parents went to almost comic lengths to be inconspicuous. Elizabeth, eight years younger than Nora, had her own room to disappear into. For his part, Mitchell might go off to Nora’s bedroom and turn in early. That left Therese, who would typically sit in the cramped kitchen (separated from the living room by only a swinging door), trying to mind her own business. But if this was a steady boyfriend and Therese knew they desired more privacy, she would closet herself in the bathroom and, using the commode for a chair, read for hours. “I really don’t know how they did it,” said Nora.
Therese Mitchell, daughter of Scandinavian immigrants, and Joseph Mitchell, who could trace his North Carolina roots to the Revolutionary War, brought markedly different yet complementary styles to their parenting. Whereas Therese was a true free spirit, her husband was regimented, the train conductor, the benign disciplinarian. Therese would “saunter down the street whistling ‘Bloody Mary Is the Girl I Love,’ ” recalled Nora, while Mitchell would shush his daughters’ speaking ill of someone lest others on the crowded sidewalk overhear. “He was in charge of Christmas cards, hanging pictures, seeing that our homework was done and making final decisions on all major purchases,” Nora wrote. “She figured out tips, created elaborate recipes, avoided PTA meetings….”
Aside from his book research, Mitchell generally didn’t bring his work home, which he considered a place reserved for family and friends. He certainly never wrote there. As with all parents, Therese and Joseph Mitchell made their most important imprint on their children with the example of their own relationship. Nora and Elizabeth grew up witnessing the small, easy rituals that suggest a contented marriage is also a satisfying friendship. “Sixteen (or twenty or forty) years with the wrong woman,” Joseph would sing as he brought Therese coffee or kissed her in the tiny kitchen. “It’s good enough for the likes of you” was her invariable response. After dinner they often read, he sitting on one end of the living room couch, she lying across the length of it, her feet in his lap.
The Mitchell daughters were decidedly products of their parents’ combined temperaments and talents. Firstborn Nora had the bigger personality; she was quicker to act on an impulse and more rebellious as an adolescent than her younger sister would be. While Elizabeth was quieter, she had her father’s gift of observation and missed very little. City kids, they were both intelligent and intuitive, and they went to a series of excellent (mostly private) schools in New York (although Elizabeth’s high school years were spent at a boarding school in Pennsylvania). They had less interest in grades, however, than in the tumultuous world around them. As such, both grew up with strong social consciences that would eventually inform their careers—Nora as a probation officer specializing in juvenile offenders, and Elizabeth in her work with those suffering from severe mental illness.
Their father was as fastidious in his domestic habits as he was in his writing. He cleaned fruits and vegetables with soap before preparing them. He washed his raincoat and seersucker suits in the shower. He whisked the lint off his daughters’ clothes before letting them go outside. He donned a coat and hat to take out the garbage. “He spent hours brushing his teeth and flossing and gargling and carrying on,” Nora recalled. He reflexively straightened pictures on the wall if they were crooked. He loved vacuuming the family’s small apartment, and nothing quite set him on edge like a dirty bathtub.
Mitchell’s daily routine was equally tidy. Each morning he would sit on the couch and spread the day’s papers on the floor before him, reading with a razor blade in his hand to slice out those stories he wanted to save. He always polished his shoes and he always made the family breakfast. When the girls were young, he always walked them to school; Nora recalls that for several years their route took them past a women’s detention center, sometimes as the new arrivals were just rolling up from night court. He would return from work at 6:00 P.M.
—often as not, on the dot. “He was so canonical that his key in the lock usually coincided with the Church of the Ascension bells, and as a result I usually burst out crying whenever I hear church bells,” Nora once wrote.
They adored living in the Village, with its quirky neighborhoods and byways, its funny angles, its shops and clubs and churches and family restaurants and dives all coexisting contentedly. It truly was a village then; neighbors knew everyone and watched out for one another, especially the children. But the Mitchells took full advantage of the wider city’s cultural offerings. One weekend they might visit the Museum of Modern Art and the Russian Tea Room; another would be the Cloisters; another would see them traipse off to Staten Island in search of spring wildflowers.
He “was more attached to home and place than anyone I ever knew or heard of,” said Nora. “He knew the significance and provenance of every arrow and pottery shard, the names of every native weed, flower, snake, bird and fish, the family names and serpentine connections of everyone within fifty miles….” After Mitchell joined The New Yorker and had an increasingly pliant work schedule, his homecomings to Fairmont became longer and more frequent. That continued after Nora and Elizabeth were born. The family spent a sizable portion of each summer in North Carolina, usually traveling south by train—an exciting adventure in itself—and occupying their own compartment with double-deck berths. At other times of the year Mitchell would go to Fairmont by himself, to talk over the family business and simply to stay connected. “He…spoke to his family every Sunday [on the telephone], wrote and received hundreds of letters and always knew if the camellias were blooming, if the tobacco had been put in and if the tomatoes were still coming,” Nora said.
Credit 11.1
Mitchell with young Nora and Elizabeth in Central Park.
After enough trips, Mitchell’s daughters began to understand that their father’s polite patience and courtly manner were earmarks of a Southern gentleman. But he also had an irritable side, and he made no effort to hide it from his family. As was evident from his stories, there was much about the modern world that rankled him. “He generally thought people were pretty horrible,” Nora remembered. “He hated the board of education. He hated psychologists. He had a big list of people he didn’t like.” And when he was forced to speak of these distasteful human beings, a favorite Mitchellism was “goddamned son of a bitch”—as in, “Goddamned sons of bitches let their dogs go to the bathroom all over the sidewalk and then go home and listen to Vivaldi!” or “Goddamned sons of bitches ruin good fish by putting paprika on it!” Mitchell was frequently thwarted by machinery, and Nora particularly recalled one occasion where he kicked a balky gumball machine in a subway station. “I told him…how that traumatized me,” she added, “and he apologized and felt terrible.”
Mitchell’s professional acquaintances sometimes felt his ire, as well. When his British publisher brought out The Bottom of the Harbor, Mitchell was understandably peeved that the word “harbor” was changed to the British spelling “harbour” on the cover and jacket copy yet the American spelling was retained throughout the text. He surmised, no doubt correctly, that the British publisher had simply photographically reproduced the American-edition text to save money. But Mitchell found the naked inconsistency maddening and insulting to readers. “As I said, either ‘harbour’ or ‘harbor,’ it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me,” he vented in a letter to his agent, “but God damn it, not both.”
Now and again friends also saw the edgier, impetuous, even darker side of Mitchell. All his life he enjoyed socializing over drinks, and his list of favorite New York haunts was long—Costello’s, McSorley’s, Bleeck’s, Chumley’s, the White Horse, the Cortile, and many others. There were times when Mitchell would get so deep into his cups that he might forswear drink for months or even years. When he was drinking, however, Mitchell generally kept his wits about him—but not always, and what might happen then was anyone’s guess. A friend recounted a night in the late thirties or early forties when Mitchell suddenly appeared at a favorite bar near the Village, walked without a word past several acquaintances to the back of the room, sat in a chair facing the wall, and loudly began singing the hymn “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.” The owner, who knew Mitchell well, came back and told him to cut it out because he was beginning to startle the other patrons. “Listen, Nick,” Mitchell snapped, “when I feel like I want to sing a hymn I’m gonna sing that hymn and I’m gonna sing it the way I want to sing it. This time I got the urge to sing a hymn to myself, so I sung it.” The owner told Mitchell he was crazy. Mitchell agreed—and said what he usually said when so accused, that it was all because, as a boy on the farm, he’d been hit on the head by a cow.
Then again, Mitchell when drinking could abruptly turn raucous or vulgar, irritable or sometimes simply maudlin—could “suddenly become a different person,” according to Philip Hamburger. He recalled once when he and Mitchell and several friends were in a bar, and had been there awhile. In the course of the evening’s conversation, a fellow New Yorker staffer—“a very fine writer, but a son of a bitch,” Hamburger said—pronounced that a woman of their mutual acquaintance was ugly. This affront enraged Mitchell, and he loudly berated the man in front of everyone. “The very notion that anybody would call a woman ugly made Joe wild,” Hamburger said. At other times, excessive drinking prompted Mitchell to hold a room with lengthy soliloquies from Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.
By all accounts, such mischief abated considerably once Mitchell became a father and reined in the late-night salooning. Besides, by this point the writer was quietly dealing with a more pronounced concern than the occasional bender among friends. From his journal notes, it’s clear Mitchell at this time was experiencing regular bouts of depression, which would plague him, in varying degrees of severity, for the rest of his life. Mitchell had always been prone to melancholia and tended to have a glass-half-empty perspective on things, anyway. (“You know, you’re a pretty gloomy guy,” Harold Ross once told him.) But what he was beginning to experience now was clinical depression. The predisposition to depression ran in his family, and Mitchell’s distress over the changes transforming New York only served to fuel the attacks. Over the years his doctors prescribed a number of medications to mitigate the condition. These worked well enough for Mitchell to mask his depression from his daughters, who used to tease their father about his well-known hypochondria but didn’t realize until years later what a serious and chronic illness he battled for so long.
Indeed, except for the stray outburst triggered by a dirty bathtub, Mitchell’s children remember kindness and patience as the central qualities of their relationship with him. Nora recalled an example from when she was college age. After receiving a classical education at the Lenox School, a private and then all-girls prep academy on the Upper East Side that didn’t have many Greenwich Village kids, Nora went on to Vassar. But after a year there, her indifference to exams caught up with her and she dropped out. She dreaded what her father might say when he came to retrieve her, but there was no ranting or recrimination. Instead, Mitchell simply quoted Ecclesiastes about the race not going to the swift or the battle to the strong, “but time and chance happeneth to them all.” And that, Nora said, “is generally the way he reacted to our vicissitudes”—not with condemnation but with patient support.
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In April of 1959, Mitchell published the last of his stories centered on the region’s waterways, “The Rivermen.” The story related the life, history, and traditions of the little community of Edgewater, New Jersey, which was wedged into a narrow strip of land between the Hudson River and the Palisades, just across from the George Washington Bridge. Edgewater had long been connected to the shad-fishing industry, and it still was, though it was down to only several dozen shad fishermen and represented a way of life that was receding like an ebb tide. In the Edgewater of Mitchell’s telling, modern commerce is literally crowding out the past, seen symbolically in the large aluminum fac
tory that has been built in a U-shape in order to preserve Edgewater’s ancient cemetery; indeed, the only way to access the latter is to go through the gates of the former. The critic Noel Perrin, writing an appreciation of Mitchell many years later, would note his “genius for finding real-life metaphors,” citing as an example this passage from “The Rivermen,” which focuses on the rosebushes growing in that graveyard:
Coarse, knotty, densely tangled rosebushes grow on several plots, hiding graves and gravestones. The roses that they produce are small and fragile and extraordinarily fragrant, and have waxy red hips almost as big as crab apples. Once, walking through the cemetery, I stopped and talked with an old woman who was down on her knees in her family plot, setting out some bulbs at the foot of a grave, and she remarked on the age of the rosebushes. “I believe some of the ones in here now were in here when I was a young woman, and I am past eighty,” she said. “My mother—this is her grave—used to say there were rosebushes just like these all over this section when she was a girl. Along the riverbank, beside the roads, in people’s yards, on fences, in waste places. And she said her mother—that’s her grave over there—told her she had heard from her mother that all of them were descended from one bush that some poor uprooted woman who came to this country back in the Dutch times potted up and brought along with her. There used to be a great many more in the cemetery than there are now—they overran everything—and every time my mother visited the cemetery she would stand and look at them and kind of laugh. She thought they were a nuisance. All the same, for some reason of her own, she admired them, and enjoyed looking at them. ‘I know why they do so well in here,’ she’d say. ‘They’ve got good strong roots that go right down into the graves.’ ”
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