From reporting notes, journals, and correspondence, and from three interviews Mitchell gave late in life to a professor of journalism named Norman Sims, Kunkel extracts a picture of Mitchell’s journalistic practice that he doesn’t know quite what to do with. On the one hand, he doesn’t regard it as a pretty picture; he uses terms like “license,” “latitude,” “dubious technique,” “tactics,” and “bent journalistic rules” to describe it. On the other, he reveres Mitchell’s writing, and doesn’t want to say anything critical of it even while he is saying it. So a kind of weird embarrassed atmosphere hangs over the passages in which Kunkel reveals Mitchell’s radical departures from factuality.
It is already known that the central character of the book Old Mr. Flood, a ninety-three-year-old man named Hugh G. Flood, who intended to live to the age of 115 by eating only fish and shellfish, did not exist, but was a “composite,” i.e., an invention. Mitchell was forced to characterize him as such after readers of the New Yorker pieces from which the book was derived tried to find the man. “Mr. Flood is not one man,” Mitchell wrote in an author’s note to the book, and went on, “Combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past.” In the Up in the Old Hotel collection he simply reclassified the work as fiction.
* * *
Now Kunkel reveals that another Mitchell character—a gypsy king named Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the subject of a New Yorker profile published in 1942—was also an invention. How Kunkel found this out is rather funny. He came upon a letter that Mitchell wrote in 1961 to The New Yorker’s lawyer, Milton Greenstein, asking Greenstein for legal advice on how to stop a writer named Sidney Sheldon from producing a musical about gypsy life based on Mitchell’s profile of Nikanov and a subsequent piece about the scams of gypsy women. Mitchell was himself working on a musical adaptation of his gypsy pieces—it eventually became the show Bajour, named after one of the gypsy women’s cruelest scams, that came to Broadway in 1964 and ran for around six months—and was worried about Sheldon’s competing script.
“Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did,” Mitchell told Greenstein. Therefore “no matter how true to life Cockeye Johnny happens to be, he is a fictional character, and I invented him, and he is not in ‘the public domain,’ he is mine.” Mitchell’s Gilbertian logic evidently prevailed—Sheldon gave up his musical. But the secret of Johnny Nikanov’s wobbly ontological status—though Greenstein kept quiet about it—had passed out of Mitchell’s possession. It now belonged to tattling posterity, the biographer’s best friend.
What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.
This and other instances in the reporting notes about Mitchell’s tamperings with actuality cause Kunkel to ask: “Should the reputation of ‘Mr. Hunter’s Grave’ suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He adds primly: “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”
The obvious answer to Kunkel’s question—the one that most journalists, editors, and professors of journalism would give—is yes, of course, the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” should suffer now that we know that Mitchell cheated. He has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.
As a former journalist and professor of journalism (he is now president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin), Kunkel might be expected to share these dire views; but as Mitchell’s biographer, he can’t bring himself to express them. He clearly disapproves of Mitchell’s “tactics,” but he venerates Mitchell and hates to show him up as Mitchell hated showing up Joe Gould. His own tactic is to invoke the pieties of journalism. “Of course, today’s New Yorker, or any mainstream publication, would never knowingly permit such liberties with quotation; they would take a dimmer-yet view of composites being billed as ‘non-fiction.’” And: “The dubious technique would not really disappear from the print media’s bag of tricks until the general elevation of journalistic standards several decades later.”
Kunkel magnanimously excuses Mitchell and other of the early New Yorker writers for their subprime practices because they didn’t know any better. Of course, Mitchell and his New Yorker colleagues such as A. J. Liebling knew very well what they were doing. On October 14, 1988, Mitchell told Norman Sims:
My desire is to get the reader, well, first of all to read it. That story [“The Bottom of the Harbor”] was hard to write because I had to wonder how long can I keep developing it before the reader’s going to get tired of this. Here and there, as I think a fiction writer would, I put things that I know—even the remark the tugboat men make, that you could bottle this water and sell it for poison—that are going to keep the reader going. I can lure him or her into the story I want to tell. I can’t tell the story I want to tell until I’ve got you into the pasture and down where the sheep are. Where the shepherd is. He’s going to tell the story, but I’ve got to get you past the ditch and through these bushes.
* * *
Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.
In the title piece of The Bottom of the Harbor, a short work of great subtlety about the ability of fish and shellfish to survive in polluted water, Mitchell mentions a small area of the New York waterfront where, in contrast to the general foulness, “clean, sparkling, steel-blue water” can be found. This image of purity in the midst of contamination could serve as an emblem of Mitchell’s journalistic exceptionalism. He has filtered out the impurities other journalists helplessly accept as the defining condition of their genre. Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.
Kunkel pauses to shake his head about “a strain of perfectionism” in Mitchell, “an obsession for his writing to be just so.” “Mitchell would patiently cast and recast sentences, sometimes dozens of times, changing just a word or two with each iteration until an entire paragraph came together and seemed right,” Kunkel wonderingly writes, and adds, “All this fussing was exceedingly time-consuming, even for a magazine writer.” Kunkel’s naïveté about writing is evident,
but his picture of Mitchell at work only confirms and amplifies our sense of his artistry.
Much has been made of the fact that after “Joe Gould’s Secret” Mitchell published nothing in The New Yorker, though he came to the office regularly, and colleagues passing his door could hear him typing. I was a colleague and friend, and I always assumed that the reason he wasn’t publishing was because he wasn’t satisfied with what he was writing: he had been producing work of increasing beauty and profundity, and now the standard he had set for himself was too high. Mitchell spoke of James Joyce, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ivan Turgenev, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot as writers he read and reread. This was the company he was in behind his closed door. We should respect his inhibiting reverence for literary transcendence and be grateful for the work that got past his censor.
The New York Review of Books, 2015
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Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel
WOMEN AT WAR: A CASE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
The First Stone, by Helen Garner, is a work of personal journalism that can be likened to a novel with an unreliable narrator. It is the story of the author’s thwarted attempt to write a “quiet, thoughtful account” of a case of sexual harassment in Melbourne, Australia, and of the remarkable, almost vertiginously turbulent narrative she was forced by her frustration to produce instead. Two young women have filed complaints of indecent assault against the Master of Ormond College, a residential college of Melbourne University, where they are students. One woman, pseudonymously named Nicole Stewart, says that, six months earlier, the Master, while dancing with her at a student party, put his hand on her left breast; and the second, pseudonymously named Elizabeth Rosen, says that during the same party he made indecent suggestions to her in his locked office (and felt her up as well).
When Helen Garner, who is an Australian novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, reads about the first woman’s complaint in the newspaper (she reads about the second woman’s complaint a few weeks later), she is stunned. Garner came of age in the early years of the women’s movement and is possessed of a finely tuned feminist consciousness. But this case seems to her a very betrayal of feminism and its claims to good faith. Has the world come to this? she thinks. He touched her breast and she went to the cops? Impulsively, she dashes off a letter to the accused, a middle-aged man she calls Colin Shepherd:
Dear Dr. Shepherd,
I read in today’s paper about your troubles and I’m writing to say how upset I am and how terribly sorry about what has happened to you. I don’t know you, or the young woman; I’ve heard no rumours and I have no line to run. What I want to say is that it’s heartbreaking, for a feminist of nearly fifty like me, to see our ideals of so many years distorted into this ghastly punitiveness. I expect I will never know what ‘really happened’, but I certainly know that if there was an incident, as alleged, this has been the most appallingly destructive, priggish and pitiless way of dealing with it. I want you to know that there are plenty of women out here who step back in dismay from the kind of treatment you have received, and who still hope that men and women, for all our foolishness and mistakes, can behave towards one another with kindness rather than being engaged in this kind of warfare.
The sending of this letter is the act that fuels the book’s plot—it is the mistake whose consequences we watch the author helplessly struggle to undo for two hundred pages. After Shepherd is acquitted in court of both women’s charges (for lack of proof) but is predictably ejected from the university, to which he is no longer of use as a “good father” figure, Garner decides to write about the case and “its wider meanings.” Although sympathetic to Shepherd, she is hardly convinced of his innocence. She has lived in the world long enough to know that men are beasts and that the probability is strong that Shepherd forgot himself at the party. She happily sets about her journalist’s task of interviewing both sides, getting each antagonist’s version of what happened, and then writing her “truthful, calm, and balanced” account. But it is too late: she has shot herself in the foot with her letter to Shepherd. She did what a journalist must never do—she showed her hand too early—and Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen, who have read the letter (Shepherd couldn’t resist circulating it), naturally refuse to speak to her. Garner’s increasingly desperate and hysterical efforts to interview the young women are the action of the book.
As Garner pursues the young women, we see that more is at stake than the fate of a piece of journalism, that something beyond journalistic zeal impels her, and that her dilemma as a reporter reflects dilemmas of more fundamental kinds. In her attempt to shatter the Cordelia-like silence of Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen, Garner seeks out their young feminist supporters, abjectly pleading with them to intervene for her; but she is met at every turn with coldness and condescension. During a particularly humiliating interview with one of these chilly interlocutresses, an officer of the university Student Union, Garner begins to twig to the “wider meaning” of her quest:
Her seat was slightly higher than mine; she was looking down at me, and the light from the high north-facing window behind her was so strong that I had to keep blinking and turning away to rest my eyes. I felt terrifically at a disadvantage, as if I were importuning her. In fact, this sense of being out of date, irrelevant, reminded me painfully of certain days when I have visited my daughter and she had gone about her business in the house as if I weren’t there. So this is about middle-aged mothers and daughters then.
Garner goes to a feminist of her own age for comfort:
I related to my friend my pathetic bravado in the presence of the fierce young Women’s officer from the Student Union. “I practically pleaded for her respect,” I said. “I talked about abortion law reform, demos and police and so on—I said, ‘We put our bodies on the line’—but she just looked at me coldly—she didn’t give a shit about our magnificent heroism.”
We sat at the table howling with laughter. “It’s a dialogue between generations,” said Angela Z—, wiping away her tears.
“It’s not a dialogue,” I said, blowing my nose. “It’s a fucking war.”
* * *
The war between the generations is a peculiar war, unlike a war between nations. One of the sides—the older generation—is in love with as well as threatened by the other. The old try to warm themselves at the fire of the young. King Lear is about (among all the other things it is about) a man trying to escape death through incestuous sex. A middle-aged teacher sexually harassing a student is an actor trying to remain in a play where he has no lines. What makes The First Stone such an extraordinary book, a book unlike any other study of sexual harassment, is Garner’s enactment—in her obsessive pursuit of Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen—of the very misdemeanor she has set out to investigate. Although her purported goal is “balance,” it is as a very unbalanced person that she represents herself. “I wanted to find Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart and shake them until their teeth rattled,” she writes upon receiving another rebuff from the young women. “I gnashed my teeth so hard I saw stars,” she writes on hearing they have agreed to give interviews to a writer from Vogue. “Vogue!” These are not the reactions of a seasoned journalist but the ravings of a rejected lover. “I felt so much sympathy for the man in this story and so little for the women,” Garner had wonderingly written at the beginning of her account, worrying that “my feminism and my ethics were speeding towards a head-on smash.” Now she is in the grip of something to which feminist theory and ethical belief are irrelevant, and which has degraded the original object of her interest to the status of worthless money. Garner’s interview with the ruined Master is a perfunctory affair. She listens to his denials politely but indifferently. Only the interviews she can’t get excite her.
In the end, Garner all but “knows” that Shepherd did it, not because she has discovered any evidence of his guilt but because of her experience as a woman. If she cannot wrest the young wome
n’s version of what happened from them, she will supply an equivalent from the store of her own memories of being importuned. She recalls an incident from her youth: she was sitting in an empty train compartment, contentedly reading, when a loutish middle-aged man, who had been drinking, came in and engaged her in an unwelcome and tedious conversation, from which she felt helpless to extricate herself, and then asked her for a kiss, which she helplessly gave him. Garner meditates on the “strange passivity” that overcomes women in these situations:
What was my state, that allowed me to accept his unattractive advances without protest? I was just putting up with him. I felt myself to be luckier, cleverer, younger than he was. I felt sorry for him. I went on putting up with him long past the point at which I should have told him to back off. Should have? What should is this? What I mean is would have liked to. Wanted to but lacked the … the … Lacked the what?
Another shaming memory—this one of more recent vintage, involving a male masseur who kissed the back of her neck and then her mouth while she lay near-naked on the massage table, and whose importunities she once again accepted without protest (she even paid for the massage!)—gives her further empathetic understanding of Nicole and Elizabeth’s behavior: of why they had accepted the Master’s unattractive advances without remonstrance, and only much later lodged their complaints against him. She writes:
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