As for Mitchell’s own dilemma, Shawn pledged to do what he could, and not long afterward he raised Mitchell’s weekly pay to just under three hundred dollars. He did this in part by incorporating the magazine’s annual employee bonus into the writer’s regular wage. This was a significant concession, because The New Yorker’s bonus participation by staff had traditionally been an unpredictable, on-again-off-again affair—another of Mitchell’s bones of contention.
This gesture seemed to mollify Mitchell, who, as a writer who wasn’t writing, knew he didn’t have the strongest negotiating position. He and Shawn resumed their usual relationship and sporadic story meetings, which in time basically evolved into an annual session in which Mitchell updated him on what he was working on. If what Mitchell had been working on for a decade remained a mystery to most people at the magazine, Mitchell said it was not a mystery to Shawn. Mitchell was being “sidetracked” by a variety of things, he readily acknowledged to the editor, including the fact he was spending more time helping tend to the family’s farms in North Carolina. But Shawn figured that “sooner or later” his patience would be rewarded.
After one of these meetings, in April of 1977, Shawn “was encouraging” about the progress Mitchell had reported, according to a note in the writer’s journal. Shawn, as usual, didn’t press Mitchell on a completion date. He did, however, offer some reassurance to Mitchell, who by now was worried about whether even Shawn might reach the point of exasperation. “He gave me the impression—I didn’t bring the matter out in the open—that I can stay at The New Yorker and keep on trying to finish it as long as I want to—or as long as I can hold up,” Mitchell wrote.
And he was making progress—slow progress, admittedly. From the copious notes he left from this period and from the three opening chapters that exist, it seems his intention was to toggle between his two worlds, North Carolina and New York, and that the familiar theme of exile would figure prominently. One journal note, for instance, recounts the day when, while walking in Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, he made the “discovery” that he was “not a New Yorker, never felt myself to be…I am a North Carolinian…Walking along the cemetery path, or up one of the hills, the vista, sudden realization: I am not going to be buried here. That is what cuts me off. I have always known it in the back of my mind. I don’t belong here, I have not really thrown in my lot with these people.”
At least through the first half of the seventies, Mitchell was pursuing this narrative as vigorously as he had anything in a long time. He maintained a folder of notes, clippings, and miscellany, which he always reviewed before going back to North Carolina; he used this material to construct lengthy “to do” lists for each trip, and they clearly were those of a writer reporting on the details of his own past: “Find out the year the old barn was torn down and the truck garage was put up”; “Try to find out the year I was baptized”; “Get photographs of the four sides of the house”; “Measure the circumference of the trunk of the black walnut tree at the Butler Place”; “Check on names of roads, such as White Pond Road, Old Rowland Road”; “Get a copy of the history of Ashpole church.”
—
In the draft of Mitchell’s personal narrative, the first chapter is a sweeping portrait of his adopted home, New York. It manages to convey a life’s worth of impressions of the city, but with no sense at all of being rushed or overwrought. The opening paragraph sets the tone as only Mitchell can:
In my time, I have visited and poked around in every one of the hundreds of neighborhoods of which this city is made up, and by the city I mean the whole city—Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond. I have gone to some of these neighborhoods only once or twice, but I have gone to others—or to certain streets in them—over and over and over again, sometimes for reasons that I clearly understand and sometimes for reasons that I dimly understand and sometimes for reasons that I don’t understand at all. Certain streets haunt me and certain blocks in certain streets haunt me and certain buildings in certain blocks in certain streets haunt me. At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well-known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wild flower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and tantalizingly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic it is exhilarating), or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between East Broadway and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Southern Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.
From that present tense, Mitchell in the second chapter immediately plunges into the past, to his beginnings in Fairmont. That opening passage:
It is odd, to begin with, that I ever had any connection with New York City at all. The great majority of my ancestors have been farmers or mixed up in some way with farming, and I come from a part of the country—Robeson County, North Carolina—where the people tend to stay put. One day recently I was in the Local History Room of the Public Library. While waiting for a book to be delivered from the stacks, I dawdled along the open shelves that line one side of the room, killing time by reading titles, and I came across a set of volumes on each of whose spines was lettered: “CENSUS 1790 / HEADS OF FAMILIES.” I opened the first volume and saw that the full title was “Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790.” I got down the volume for North Carolina and took it over to a reading table and looked up Robeson County and found it, and then I looked up the section in the lower part of the county in which I was born and grew up and in which most of the people in my family still live and found it, and then I started going down the columns of names. The names were not listed alphabetically but evidently in the order that they were taken down by the census taker as he made his rounds. I had not gone far before I began to smile with the pleasure of recognition, for many of the old names suddenly and unexpectedly come upon were very familiar and dear and magical to me, and I soon saw that a much higher proportion than I had ever realized of the names that are around in my section of Robeson County today were also around as far back as 1790. 1790 names are, in fact, with a few newer ones, the most numerous and the most characteristic names of the countryside today—Pitman, for example, although now generally spelled Pittman, and Lewis and Inman and Grimsley and Musslewight or Musslewhite (now spelled Musselwhite) and Hedgepath (now spelled Hedgepeth) and Griffin and Grantham and Thompson an
d Mitchell and Ashley and Townsend and Atkinson and Bullock and Purvis and Leggett and Jenkins and Page and Oliver and Barnes and Gaddy and Rogers and Strickland and Harding (now spelled Hardin) and McMillen (now spelled McMillan) and Ivey and Watson and Hunt and Hill and Stephens and Oxendine and Stone and Davis and Britt and Lockileer (now spelled Locklear) and Taylor and Turner and Lee and Lowry. When I go down to Robeson County for a visit, and ride around the countryside with my father or one of my brothers or sisters or brothers-in-law or sisters-in-law or nephews or nieces or cousins, these are the names that I see most frequently on the fronts of stores and filling stations and sawmills and cotton gins and tobacco warehouses and on the sides of trucks and on roadside mailboxes and on miscellaneous roadside signs.
Having set up this New York–North Carolina dichotomy, Mitchell then produced a much shorter third chapter, in which he discusses how he came to live in the past and what that means. He admits he’s not altogether pleased to find himself in this position. “I am not entirely satisfied with the phrase living in the past as a description of my way of life,” he writes; “it makes me sound like some kind of sad old recluse, but living in the past is the closest I can come to it….” Then he tries to explain himself.
I should also say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts—my own past; my father’s past; my mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters…the pasts of a score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being uniquely strange—only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world-strange—but whom, since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now think of—without taking a thing away from them—as being strange, all right, no doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or archetypically strange or even Ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right….
This excerpt comes from a single labyrinthine sentence that accounts for more than half of the entire chapter. It sweeps across the decades from Fairmont to the Fulton Fish Market, with long digressions on three of Mitchell’s “strange men and women”: Lady Olga (“I was exiled by my own flesh and blood”); street preacher James Jefferson Davis Hall (“The end of the world is coming! Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now!”); and gypsy Madame Mary, beneath whose kind, grandmotherly mien, Mitchell said, was a calculated genius for finding vulnerable people and a “mercilessness with which she could gradually get hold of [their] money.” A twelve-hundred-word sentence, however virtuosic, can’t help but come across as a kind of literary parlor trick. But Mitchell constructed it this way to establish that these many pasts of his were inseparable from one another, that they flowed from and into one another seamlessly, even inevitably—a virtual river of experiences. This third chapter was to function as the book’s jumping-off point and provide the raison d’être for Mitchell to look back over his life and plumb the connections, as well as the tensions, between his real and adopted homes.
As it happens, all three chapters also represent excellent illustrations of another favorite Mitchell technique: the list. In such instances Mitchell pulled together example after example of what he was writing about, in almost staccato fashion, as seen in the Fairmont chapter’s march of household names: “…and Griffin and Grantham and Thompson and Mitchell and Ashley and Townsend and Atkinson and Bullock and Purvis….” In lesser hands this could be a mere writerly tic, but Mitchell used a list to accomplish a number of things at once. It subtly conveys authority—the narrator was on the scene and has an extraordinary grasp of the material he’s writing about. It puts across his keen powers of observation—nothing, even the most seemingly insignificant detail, is beyond his seeing and interpreting. Finally, a Mitchell list always has a music to it; he labored to get its “sound” as right as its weight and pace. And so, when he visits the graveyard with Mr. Hunter, he doesn’t merely indicate that the gravestones are being overtaken with weeds and unruly wildflowers. He tells us they are “ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bed-straw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet” and so on. If the reader has scant idea what most of these plants are, we know the author most assuredly does. As the writer Luc Sante observed, “Setting these objects side by side in a row has an effect that is both as plain as Shaker furniture and as expansive as a cinematic tracking shot.”
The first chapter of Mitchell’s memoir is essentially complete. The second chapter is largely complete, although near its close it stops mysteriously, mid-anecdote, and it’s not clear from his notes how Mitchell intended to end it. The brief third chapter seems complete. But after drafting these opening sections—about twelve thousand words in all—Mitchell seems to have stopped the writing (if not the reporting), and he left no overt indication as to where he planned to take the story line. On the contrary, from his jumbled papers one gets the impression that he didn’t know himself.
Nonetheless, several aspects of the book do seem clear. Given the effort Mitchell was making to reconstruct his own history and that of Fairmont, there is no question that the North Carolina part of his life was going to figure prominently; it was not just there for biographical context. On the other hand, it was still going to be essentially a New York story—his New York story. Since Mitchell had settled on autobiography, it wouldn’t exactly be the book he’d sketched out in “Joe Gould’s Secret”; in spirit it was probably going to be closer to the idea he’d pitched, unsuccessfully, to St. Clair McKelway back in the mid-thirties, about the young arrival from the South trying to figure out New York even as he was trying to figure out himself. And without doubt the people and places that had helped Mitchell do just that—Joe Cantalupo and Ann Honeycutt and the gypsies and preachers and sideshow performers and McSorley’s and the Fulton Fish Market—would all make appearances.
But how to write that? Obviously the two worlds, North Carolina and New York, were going to be held in some kind of juxtaposition. Yet it’s not known if, from a structural standpoint, Mitchell planned to continue caroming back and forth or if the two worlds would somehow eventually merge in his narrative. Now confronted with that question, the writer seemed puzzled. Indeed, the third chapter drops him at a fork in the road, and not knowing which direction he wanted to take may be the reason he simply stopped where he was.
—
On the fortieth anniversary of their marriage—the 1931 elopement, that is, not the second, “formal” wedding a year later—Mitchell and Therese had decided to splurge by dining at Gage and Tollner, a Brooklyn establishment that since 1879 had kept alive the spirit of the gaslight age. They didn’t go there often, because it was pricey and rather out of the way. But Mitchell thought it “the best restaurant in the city,” which, given his sophisticated palate, was saying something. Much as he loved its seafood, the house specialty, what Mitchell valued most about Gage and Tollner was what it stood for—the “old furnishings and old Negro waiters and old ways of doing things.” Therese had a crab dish with Lyonnaise potatoes and some wine; Mitchell had the striped bass with a baked potato and two bottles of Bass ale. The meals cost eighteen dollars; Mitchell tipped their waiter three dollars and sent over another dollar to the restaurant’s head-waiter, a friend.
They passed a lovely evening reminiscing, about that fateful train ride out to Greenwich and about all the things, good and bad, that had transpired since. It was typical of Mitchell that in his cryptic journal notes about that night he recorded more about the cost of the food and tips than the substance of their conversation. In this instance, however, it’s not difficult to surmise. They may have compared notes on what they had been reading; Mitchell’s tastes were as eclectic
as ever, but no more so than Therese’s, who avidly consumed everything from popular novels to Thomas Hardy to the New York Post, all of which she liked to read sprawled on the couch while she smoked trim cigarillos and popped Good & Plenty candy. They may have talked about Mitchell’s memoir in progress. They likely discussed their New Yorker friends and how, as they all became parents together, Therese began to make photographic portraits of their children. And certainly they talked of Nora and Elizabeth, the young women they had become, and the families of their own they were starting.
After dropping out of Vassar, Nora in time would obtain her college degree, as her father had predicted. Along the way she met a Princeton student named John Sanborn, who (much to Mitchell’s delight) would become a tugboat captain. They married in 1962 and by now, a decade later, had two children, a boy and a girl. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s young adulthood, like Nora’s, was not exactly a straight trajectory. She began college at Transylvania University in Kentucky but left after several years. She had recently met and married an Atlanta man named Hal Curtis, a development that relocated her to Georgia. In the next few years they would have three children—two girls and a boy—before eventually divorcing. In time Elizabeth, too, would obtain her college degree, by attending classes at Agnes Scott College and Oglethorpe University.
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