Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  This last point in particular resonated with Mitchell. After exposing the truth of the oral history, he launches into a sidebar that is as remarkable as it is jarring. Mitchell spends more than one thousand words detailing the big novel of New York City that he got it into his head to write when he was a newspaperman in his early twenties. Highly autobiographical in nature, it was to be a great, roiling ocean of a novel, and Mitchell discusses at length the characters, the main plot, the subplots, the settings, the mood. He even recounts actual speeches by some of the characters. Here his protagonist—a young, Southern-born, Baptist-raised newspaperman who considers himself an “exile”—emerges with some friends from a Harlem nightclub and encounters an elderly black street preacher, who would figure prominently in the tale:

  Like the Baptist preachers the young reporter had listened to and struggled to understand in his childhood, the old man sees meanings behind meanings, or thinks he does, and tries his best to tell what things “stand for.” “Pomegranates are about the size and shape of large oranges or small grapefruits, only their skins are red,” he says, cupping his hands in the air and speaking with such exactitude that it is obvious he had had first-hand knowledge of pomegranates long ago in the South. “They’re filled with fat little seeds, and those fat little seeds are filled with juice as red as blood. When they get ripe, they’re so swollen with those juicy red seeds that they gap open and some of the seeds spill out. And now I’ll tell you what pomegranates stand for. They stand for the resurrection. The resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and your resurrection and my resurrection….”

  This was extraordinary; it really did seem the entire novel was all right there—in Mitchell’s head. “But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it,” he confesses. “Even so, for several years I frequently daydreamed about it, and in those daydreams I had finished writing it and it had been published and I could see it. I could see its title page. I could see its binding, which was green with gold lettering.” Put another way, Gould’s oral history was no less real than Mitchell’s novel—and Mitchell’s novel was no more real than Gould’s oral history. It was a sobering, even courageous admission from a writer, and it explained Mitchell’s expiation of any lingering resentment for Gould and any lingering guilt he felt for playing along with the fiction of the oral history years after he knew the truth. “Those recollections [about the novel] filled me with almost unbearable embarrassment,” Mitchell continues, “and I began to feel more and more sympathetic to Joe Gould.”

  Mitchell’s comparison of his unwritten novel to Gould’s unwritten oral history is an explicit nod to a point that many observers over the years have made: There were many startling similarities between Joe Gould and Joe Mitchell. Both came from small towns; both were raised in successful, influential families; both were expected to go into the family business; both considered themselves disappointments to their strong-willed fathers; both felt the gravitational pull of New York; both felt like eternal exiles; both made their life’s work the telling of other people’s stories. As one of Mitchell’s friends and New Yorker colleagues, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, noted, over the course of the two pieces the writer has merged with his subject. “Then we realize that Gould has been Mitchell all along, a misfit in a community of traditional occupations, statuses, and roles, come to New York to express his special identity; finally we realize that the body of Mitchell’s work is precisely that Oral History of Our Time that Gould himself could not write.”

  Three decades later another critic, Christopher Carduff, proffered a similar, but more menacing, notion: that Gould “is Mitchell’s nightmare vision of himself: he’s the over-educated, over-reaching, seized-up artist-journalist as Madman. In this final Profile, Mitchell’s graveyard humor yields to horror as the distance between reporter and subject closes.”

  Late in his life, Mitchell talked openly about his connection to Gould. “To me a very tragic thing [about the Joe Gould Profiles] is the story of so many people who bit off more than they could chew—and I’m one of them, you know,” he told Norman Sims. At another point in their discussion, when Sims asked why Mitchell found Gould so compelling, he replied, “Because he is me.”

  In a coda that Mitchell surely would have appreciated, a collection of Gould’s writings—apparently unknown to Mitchell—was found “hiding in plain sight” in the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University. It turned out that Gould gave the journals to the painter Harold Anton for safekeeping. Anton tried to find a publisher for them but, not succeeding, sold them. The journals in turn were acquired by the library. The content in the collection of eleven dimestore composition books “bolsters rather than contradicts Mitchell’s suspicions about the Oral History,” according to a news account about the discovery. The pages and pages of “blotchy, messy script” give a detailed, if mundane, accounting of Gould’s life from 1943—interestingly, the year Mitchell confronted Gould—to 1947. “The diary’s 1,100-odd pages are first and foremost a record of baths taken, meals consumed, and dollars cadged,” said the report. “It’s clear that Gould’s favorite subject was himself.” Gould documented his peculiar routine almost every day. The entry for August 4, 1943, begins: “Queen Elizabeth’s Birthday. Bugs got on a rampage. As a consequence I got up late.”

  The notebooks also reveal that Joseph Mitchell was a reliable, and generous, contributor to the Joe Gould Fund.

  CHAPTER 13

  INTO THE PAST

  Once, walking across the George Washington Bridge around sunset, about a third of the way over, I was caught in a wind-and-rain storm so fierce that I thought it would blow me off, and I lay down flat on the walk for half an hour or so, when some policemen in a patrol car saw me and rescued me. Sometimes I dream about this, only, in the dream, I am not on the George Washington Bridge, I am riding through a storm on top of an airplane. I am somehow or other sitting on top of an airplane riding through a storm.

  —From Joseph Mitchell’s journal, circa early 1970s

  —

  For many a New Yorker, the single best thing about the city is the cultural buffet. Artists themselves, Joseph and Therese knew the layouts of the major museums as well as they knew the subway lines. They regularly took in book readings and photographic exhibitions and neighborhood chamber concerts. They adored the movies, mainstream or art-house. They were enthusiastic theatergoers. Mitchell was particularly taken with the stage, which might be expected of a writer who could recite Shakespeare and Joyce from memory and for whom elaborate monologues were the pistons of his own stories. And as has been seen, several of those stories enticed producers to approach him about adapting them for stage or screen.

  One of the first times that happened was back in 1942, when, only a few months ahead of his initial piece on Joe Gould, Mitchell turned out his “composite” Profile of Johnny Nikanov. In the years afterward, Mitchell remained in touch with New York’s gypsy community, and he was an active member of the international Gypsy Lore Society. Then in 1955 he had revisited the subject with the Profile of Daniel J. Campion, a New York police captain who oversaw the unit that tried to keep up with the city’s confidence men and women. Campion was the city’s top authority on gypsy families and their elaborate scams. He was Mitchell’s tour guide for a mesmerizing journey into the lives of the gypsy women who ran sophisticated con games. One of these games, the bajour, involved separating a victim from her savings after the fortune-teller removed a “hex” from it. (Bajour victims were almost exclusively women, who opened themselves to the scam after having their futures read.) The story, primarily conveyed in several extended Campion speeches, was a smart and readable bookend to Mitchell’s first gypsy piece.

  For several years after the second piece, Mitchell was again approached by producers, who wanted to use his gypsy tales as the basis for a Broadway musical—and, as was evident in his fierce response to Sidney Sheldon’s uninvited attempt to do the same, Mitchell closely guarded his authorial rights. As usual, most of
the promising-sounding inquiries fizzled out. Then a producer named Edward Padula persuaded a Texas banker-cattleman-impresario named Harris Masterson to invest four hundred thousand dollars in the idea, and suddenly the project was a go. In June of 1964 the new musical comedy Bajour was announced. Its star would be Chita Rivera, the singer and dancer perhaps best known for her role as Anita in West Side Story. And playing the role of “Cockeye Johnny Dembo”—the musical’s stand-in for Cockeye Johnny Nikanov—was Herschel Bernardi.

  Explaining the show’s development to his father, Mitchell wrote, “My share in the proceeds, if and providing it is a success, will be comparatively very small, but if a musical comedy is a hit it can bring in so much money that even a small share can amount to something. Of course, if it isn’t a success, I won’t get anything out of it, nor will anyone else, and the Texas banker will lose his $400,000.” Given how long the project had taken to go from idea to adaptation, Mitchell tried to keep any enthusiasm in check. But a letter to friend Rose Wharton in October of that year made it clear that he had been bitten by the Broadway bug. “One day the producer called me up and asked me to come to some of the rehearsals and I tried to put him off,” Mitchell said, “but a few afternoons later I went over to the theatre, intending to stay for just half an hour or so, and before I knew it I was hooked. I stayed all afternoon, and next afternoon I slipped away from the office and went again.”

  He and Therese rode up to Boston for a tryout performance, where they reveled in the opening-night excitement. As he told Wharton:

  Afterwards, we went over to the Ritz-Carlton with the producer and his staff and some of the cast to wait for the reviews. As the reviews came in, one by one, the press agent stood up and read them aloud. Two were slams, one was yes-and-no, and two were enthusiastic, and it was fascinating to watch the reactions of the actors and actresses. And I was amazed at my own reaction—instead of feeling uninvolved, I found that I felt quite passionate about it. After all, I didn’t write it, and it was none of my doing, but it was based on my work. And now, back in New York, I find myself walking three blocks out of my way every morning on the way to work in order to pass a big billboard advertising Bajour. My name is the smallest name on the billboard, you have to stand up close to see it, but it’s there, and I do enjoy seeing it.

  Bajour opened on Broadway on November 23, 1964, at the Shubert Theatre in New York. Mitchell had prevailed on his father, now widowed a little more than a year, to come up from Fairmont for the Broadway opening. But middling reviews and not especially memorable songs made it challenging for Bajour to attract a profitable audience. The producers tried a variety of measures to keep interest in the show up and costs down to survive into spring, when it was hoped the April resumption of the New York World’s Fair would boost Broadway attendance generally. But Bajour closed on June 12, 1965, after a respectable run of two hundred thirty-two performances.

  —

  The adrenaline rush of being in the center of a Broadway production helped Mitchell counter the despair he was still experiencing after the deaths of his mother and Liebling. So, too, did the praise he continued to garner from all quarters about the Joe Gould sequel. In recent years The New Yorker had run some of the most powerful, high-impact nonfiction in its history, including Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Yet from a reader standpoint, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” which unfolded one surprise after another, was one of the magazine’s most talked-about stories in memory. Fans included Mitchell’s fellow staffers. “No one on the eighteenth floor is doing anything else but talking about the Profile today and agreeing that you are our finest writer, by far,” one young colleague wrote him when the story appeared. Other critics agreed when, in the fall of 1965, Joe Gould’s Secret—consisting of the original 1942 Profile and the two-decade-hence reprise—was brought out in book form by Viking. “Joseph Mitchell is one of our finest journalists, unique in his compassion and understanding for the haunted little lost men such as Joe Gould,” declared the novelist Dawn Powell, who knew Gould well. “He transforms a forlorn, intolerably pathetic gentleman panhandler into an engaging, Dickensian orphan rogue.”

  But it would be a later review and career assessment, by Mitchell’s friend and colleague Stanley Edgar Hyman, that really began to put Mitchell’s full body of work into a more literary context. In a piece that harkened back to Malcolm Cowley’s appreciation three decades earlier, Hyman, writing in The New Leader, essentially asked the question: In focusing on Mitchell’s journalistic acumen, have we sold him short on his art? He rushed to answer his own question. “Mitchell is a formidable prose stylist and a master rhetorician,” he wrote, adding what would become an oft-repeated summation of the storyteller: “He is a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter, a humorist only in the sense that Faulkner is a humorist.”

  Like all artists, Mitchell works in broad and enduring themes—and he had been for some time, Hyman argued. As proof, he circled back to Mitchell’s stories collected in McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon two decades before. “McSorley’s was enthusiastically reviewed and had a considerable sale, but no one seemed to notice that the forms of reporting were being used to express the archetypal and the mythic: that Mazie might run a Bowery movie house but is an Earth Mother nevertheless; that Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the king of thirty-eight families of slum gypsies, is simultaneously a Winter King; that McSorley’s looks very like an ale-house but is in fact a Temple.” Hyman went on to trace how Mitchell’s rural Southern childhood helped shape his recurring themes—finding humanity in the world’s less fortunate, the loss of Eden. He discussed the abundance of resurrection images in Mitchell’s stories and noted that his Profile of the Mohawks “has already become a classic of imaginative ethnography.” But now Mitchell had perhaps reached his apotheosis in Joe Gould, Hyman said. On the surface it would seem a kind of comic account of a colorful loser, but “read less superficially, the book is a pathetic and moving account of a ‘lost soul’ who had been an unloved boy.” And it is written “in the bubbling, overflowing manner of James Joyce. Mitchell sees Gould ‘sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square.’ ”

  If Hyman’s appreciation was a bit overwrought, it was widely read and discussed, considerably nudging along the growing realization that Mitchell—long recognized as a first-rate journalistic talent—was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction. It was an especially apt time in American letters for someone like Hyman to put Mitchell into this broader perspective. The period was witnessing the emergence of a movement that would come to be termed “the New Journalism.” In the fall of 1965, only a few months before Hyman’s piece appeared, Mitchell’s own magazine serially published Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the seminal example of the so-called “nonfiction novel.” Gay Talese, Michael Herr, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and other young, prodigiously talented practitioners were bringing a new cheek to their nonfiction stories, a contemporary (and often cynical or satiric) attitude, and a personal voice. Consistent with the other social and cultural tremors shaking America in the middle and late sixties, the New Journalism was a reaction to the staid, entrenched conventions of the print media. The youngsters were thumbing their noses at their “square” elders as surely as the rockers and realists and postmodernists in other artistic fields. The New Journalists were at least as attentive to their writing as to their subjects—often to a highly self-conscious degree. Indeed, as with Tom Wolfe, that self-consciousness could be the point.

  Eventually some critics—including some of the New Journalists themselves—claimed the achievement of something new in pushing nonfiction writing into the realm of literature. But astute observers, like Hyman, countered that New Yorker writers like Mitchell, Liebling, Lillian Ross, and John Hersey actually had been well out ahead of them. Or as a later New York
er nonfiction master, John McPhee, succinctly put it, “When the New Journalists came ashore, Joe Mitchell was there on the beach to greet them.”

  Not that Mitchell, for his part, had much use for such debate. Years later, in recalling his early days at the magazine with fellow newspaper transplants like Liebling, Meyer Berger, and Richard O. Boyer, Mitchell explained how they talked constantly about what they wanted to accomplish. It was less about inventing a new form, he said, than it was about finding a fresh way of interpreting what they considered the most fascinating and complex city in the world. They certainly respected antecedent efforts at a New York realism, such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but now that style felt “stilted.” They sought more-naturalistic voices and approaches, and for inspiration they scoured the new publications then popping up in Europe. Of course, this was happening at a time when Harold Ross was quietly but deliberately opening up The New Yorker to different approaches to nonfiction. “We never thought of ourselves as experimenting,” Mitchell said. “We were thinking about the most direct way we could write about the city, without all that literary framework. To speak directly.” Mitchell would never be comfortable with any label of his work, which he simply considered foursquare writing that he hoped was revealing of the human predicament. He also may have resisted categorizing because he knew, unlike the general public, the extent to which he bent journalistic rules in his stories. Yet as he said in a cryptic but emphatic journal note, probably sometime in the early seventies: “I was a reporter, and then I became a magazine writer, and then I became at least in my own eyes simply a writer AND I PROFOUNDLY DESPISE SUCH TERMS AS NEW JOURN, CREATIVE JOURN.”