The Receptionist

by Janet Groth

  I protected myself from the full force of it, making a semigraceful retreat from the hotel. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the last time I was ever to see Professor Blum. He wrote me an ill-typed note from a hospital bed in Shreveport later that year. After describing at length the indignities he had suffered from a stroke, he said he hoped to be able to get home to New Orleans to die. Within a month, he got his wish.

  For me, once home in Austin, there was no more delay. I spread the manuscript out on the kitchen table and reread it. The truth of what Morgan Blum had said, and the pain of acknowledging it, took me by force. I had one of those moments of renunciation I thought happened only in Henry James. It was as though each previous positive reinforcement of my talent had only been waiting for a really resounding piece of negative criticism. Before it, I lost any confidence I’d had and yielded to the negative view, giving up without a struggle. I gathered the manuscript in my arms, went out the back door, and threw it in the garbage can. After closing down that lid, I no longer dreamed of becoming a novelist. But I never lost the sense that inwardly, in some essential way, I belonged in the writing game.

  A quite unexpected booster of my low morale as a would-be writer and a definite vote for my being “one of them” was my friend and longtime lunch companion Joseph Mitchell.

  Among his peers at The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell was the most admired writer of fact in the magazine’s history. The articles he turned in from 1937 to 1964 were not numerous, but they managed to give sharp, clear pictures of whole worlds now largely passed from the scene: the old Bowery, the New York Harbor life of tugboats and shad fishermen, the Fulton Fish Market, and the old neighborhoods and graveyards of Brooklyn and Staten Island. In them he created indelible portraits of Irish barflies, lowlifes and prostitutes, Scandinavian sea captains and Italian fishmongers, and a Gypsy subculture residing in Manhattan—people he defied any reader to denigrate by identifying them as “little people”: “They’re as big as you are, whoever you are,” he admonished.

  His fact pieces, some of which were collected in McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon in 1943, were recognized by other writers as models of their kind and have since been identified as precursors of the nonfiction novel and the new journalism, terms coined by Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe to describe what they had been doing when they wrote In Cold Blood and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Of course, incorporating into nonfiction such fictional techniques as foreshortening, dialogue, and artfully arranged scenes structured so as to bring out underlying themes was a method that had been employed not only by Mitchell but by A. J. Liebling, Lillian Ross, and numerous other New Yorker writers (and, Joe told me, by newspapermen writing features and sports) for decades. After Capote and Wolfe discovered it in the 1960s, the method was used to good effect by Hunter Thompson and others, including Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. But no one’s employment of it surpassed Mitchell’s.

  Joe could cover the life of a historic Irish bar by cataloging in vivid detail the hundred years’ worth of yellowing photographs and framed memorabilia that lined its walls. And his drawing of character through speech and gesture in “Professor Sea Gull” was worthy of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The “Professor” was Joe Gould, a Village vagrant, fallen from high estate, who cadged drinks by asking patrons to support his epic writing project, an “Oral History of the World.” Gould told Joe that this “Oral History” was “my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.” Joe’s marginal people may have been eccentric, but they were never cute. The Gypsy scam artist in “The King of the Gypsies” is a case in point: Joe follows her through a hokkano baro (wallet switch) in which she systematically fleeces an old woman of her life savings by preying on her fear of cancer. It is bone chilling.

  Joseph Mitchell was a slender, handsome, straight-featured man of average height whose hair silvered early and seemed to go with his impeccable tailoring and courtly southern manners. When he died, in 1996, The New Yorker filled five pages with three generations of New Yorker contributors pouring out their tributes. That Joe, a writer of clearly superior talent, was known to be struggling with a monumental writer’s block, which prevented anything of his from appearing after 1964, only seemed to increase the sympathy and esteem of his fellows.

  He had a distinctive way of speaking, too, that one of his ad­miring chroniclers described as “stammering with a marvelous coherence”—one sentence never quite getting completed “before the next . . . tumbled from his brain.”

  When I was the eighteenth-floor receptionist, I saw a good deal of Joe. Not at first, since his office was on twenty and there was not much visiting between floors. However, we happened to fall into conversation on the F train one evening as he was traveling the four stops down to his home in Greenwich Village and I was going downtown by the same route to attend a graduate seminar in the Elizabethan lyric at NYU. Joe remembered that encounter and used it as part of the letter of recommendation I asked him to write for my application to the NYU doctoral program. (It would take me fifteen years to earn that PhD—but more of that later.) He said the passion I expressed for Shakespeare’s courtship sonnets on that occasion had impressed him as the mark of a potential scholar, and remarked that it was all the more impressive because it followed eight hours’ labor at a not very relaxing hub of journalistic industry. This must have been in about 1968. Our innocent yet not quite innocent friendship really began in earnest in 1972 when we were part of a group of people who left a gallery showing of the New Yorker artist Ed Koren’s work to have drinks at Costello’s, a bar (and former speakeasy) originally located under the tracks of the Third Avenue El.

  The place had long been a hangout for New Yorker writers: John McNulty, James Thurber, and Joe Liebling among many others, including Dorothy Parker and Edmund Wilson. Something somebody said prompted me to paraphrase Lily the cloakroom maid in Joyce’s story “The Dead.” “Oh the men nowadays is only all palaver and what they can get out of ya,” said I. Joe, whom I later discovered to be an enthusiastic member of the James Joyce Society, attending meetings every month or so in the upstairs rooms of the Gotham Book Mart, perked up immediately and, for the rest of the night, directed his attention exclusively and intensely to me. Although we did not have a copy of Dubliners before us, nothing would do but that we should go over “The Dead” nearly line by line—both of us having read it many times—in order that we might trace the way Joyce moves the story most beautifully and meaningfully toward Gabriel’s epiphany, with the snow falling and casting its universal glow of reconciliation generally, “all over Ireland” (symbolizing, we agreed, the descent of the Holy Spirit).

  From then until I left the magazine in 1978 we had lunch together every Friday. (The exceptions were during the term I taught up at Vassar, when, because my classes were on Friday, we switched to Monday.) When it became clear that my lunches with Joe were to be a regular thing, I thought it only polite to offer to pay my own way. Joe laughed and said it was all taken care of—he was paying for them out of his “Scandinavian royalties.”

  I learned a great deal from Joe in the course of those luncheons, about his enthusiasm for writers other than Joyce, among them Siegfried Sassoon and Kafka. I also heard a fair amount from him about his own work. Some of the intensity and humor of our mutual involvement in these conversations is captured in the photo Jill Krementz took of us at the fiftieth anniversary party. There we stand—much too close. So inappropriate. It is February 21, 1975, in a ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. The New Yorker is celebrating its own birthday, as it does every year, only instead of being basically a supper-dance after office hours, usually at the St. Regis, this year everybody is in formal attire and the waiters are passing glasses of champagne. Jill Krementz, a photographer who often supplied the author photos for book jackets, is snapping photos of the event
at the Plaza in a low-key, unobtrusive way. Joe and I are clearly not even aware that our picture is being taken. We found out only months later when we were—as was everyone on the staff—offered the opportunity to buy five-by-seven black-and-white glossies, as many as we wanted, or could afford, at Ms. Krementz’s price of twelve dollars apiece.

  Joe is looking his usual dapper self, while I am in my “babe” mode, blond hair drawn back in a chignon, wearing a slinky gown of floor-length black jersey, the hem just touching my black suede pumps. I am holding my glass of champagne at a dangerous angle, nearly tipping the contents over the brim. Joe is much more firmly in control of his goblet, but as I happen to know, that is only because the contents of his are no more tipsiness-producing than good-quality ginger ale. We stand leaning intimately into one another no doubt partly for better audibility in the noisy ballroom, but a much funnier explanation is provided in the “caption” Joe presented to me as a farewell present when I left the magazine.

  May 18, 1978

  Dear Jan:

  It is entirely possible that some people may not believe it, but what is going on in this picture, as you and I know, is a discussion between two Bible students. An exegetical discussion. My recollections of some of the events at The New Yorker’s Fiftieth Anniversary party are quite hazy (after all, it was over three years ago), but I distinctly remember that just before Jill Krementz took this picture you and I were talking about the New Testament and you interpreted a certain verse in Galatians, I think it was, as seen in the light of a similar verse in Second Thessalonians, and at the exact moment Jill took the picture I was telling you how very much I admired your interpretation.

  As ever,

  Joe Mitchell

  Joe thought I should frame the picture and caption and hang them in my new office when I got to the University of Cincinnati, where I was headed to an assistant professorship. Perhaps foolishly, I regarded them as too personal and hung them in my office at home instead. The real cream of Joe’s jest is that it held a good degree of truth. Whatever we may have been saying in that moment at the party, a lot of our conversation over the six years or so when we met on those Fridays and lunched together, concerned, if not biblical, certainly literary passages, having to do with whatever books the two of us happened to be reading at the time. Indeed, our long quasi-platonic movable feast was made up largely of book talk.

  Joe was having a problem with drinking in those days, and a few times after that evening at Costello’s he called me at home or simply showed up at my door and came in for some rather lachrymose talk about Joyce and the dead and Irish literature and his many topics of interest. These were very uncomfortable visits from my point of view. I had a much-loved alcoholic father who still caused me great pain from time to time in consequence of his being unable to handle drink. To have attracted the attentions of an older man I admired (who was an unsuitable companion for me not only because he was old enough to be my father but because he was married), and to have him, too, turn out to be a drinker, seemed a pattern I was destined to repeat over and over in my life. At the University of Minnesota it was a professor of sociology; in New York thus far it had been not only Joe but half a dozen other writers and editors from the magazine. Here, there was greater confusion and pain for me than there had to be, since it was I who kept getting my father into the act.

  I insisted that these nighttime visits stop, and after that, things went much better for our friendship; gradually it took the form of a daytime hour or two spent discussing poetry, drama, reportage, and fiction. We even called them our “literary lunches,” and at some point in the 1970s I came in for some special treatment because of them. Harriet Walden was Miss Terry’s successor as manager of the secretarial staff. It was part of her mandate to accommodate senior writers’ predilections whenever possible. Mrs. Walden recognized the ritual of these Friday lunches as so important to keeping Mr. Mitchell happy that she always instructed my lunch-hour replacement to eat early so as not to miss her midday meal if I were to come back, say, half an hour or even an hour late. How do I know that this consideration was being shown not to me but to Mr. Mitchell? I don’t. It was just one of a thousand little points about my job and my role at the magazine that were tacitly understood. I may have made them all up. But I don’t think so.

  In the early years the places we went were already long venerated as lunch spots by Joe and his pal Joe Liebling. The two of them once took me to their favorite seafood restaurant, the Red Devil, on West Forty-Eighth Street. There they thought it great fun to see me squirm as the waiter brought their order for me: baby squid prepared in its own ink, a hairy concoction that seemed to sprout seaweed and feelers and eyes. Everything at the Red Devil got served in its own ink, or its own shell, or with its spine and bones intact. There was no such thing at the Red Devil as eater-friendly food. Bibs were routine, and old-timers like the two Joes knew how to dismantle, debone, deshell, and generally suck the daylights out of all the creatures of the deep that came before them. I was mightily relieved when the Red Devil lost its lease and was forced to close.

  Our next stop was the Blue Ribbon, a general favorite with New Yorker writers, and I had gone there with Brendan Gill and others. But after Liebling’s death and the closing of their old haunt on Forty-Eighth Street, Joe and I often sought out this ancient German Brauhaus on West Forty-Ninth as a welcome refuge. Other ethnic restaurants followed, like the Teheran on West Forty-Fourth between Fifth and Sixth, a Middle Eastern restaurant, where the little lamb croquettes and dolma never varied and always pleased. There was also a Greek restaurant called the Parthenon on Eighth Avenue between Forty-Sixth and Forty-Seventh Streets, which hung on long after the Blue Ribbon was demolished for new construction. Here the waiters were old and tended toward the surly (“No! No more roast lamb! Too late!”). But Joe would only smile at me behind the huge grease-stained menu and drawl, “As my mama would say, ‘We’ll just have to rahse above it.’ ” The Parthenon served a lovely lemon soup, excellent lamb (when we were not too late) and new potatoes, rice in grape leaves, and baklava or, even nicer, kataifi, a honey-and-nut mixture in a shredded wheat–like base.

  While on our luncheon circuit, Joe always insisted that I have a drink, conveying the idea that even if he was “on the wagon” it gave him pleasure to know that others could still enjoy a glass of chilled retsina at the Parthenon or appropriate white wines with our seafood at the Red Devil. We would often arrive separately, a gesture, I think, toward discretion, should our regular departures together through the lobby of the New Yorker office building be noticed and gossiped about. (As indeed we all gossiped about the frequently sighted comings and goings of Lillian Ross and Mr. Shawn, arm in arm.)

  One day as Joe arrived for our lunch at the Blue Ribbon, his color was ashen. I asked him why he was so pale and sweaty and looked so unwell. He told me that he was the victim of really vicious migraines and that he felt one coming on that noontime. “I even know what brought it on,” he said, wrinkling his nose and leaning forward in the confiding posture that often accompanied his most intensely felt revelations. The cause had been Zoë, as I shall call her here. She was the second wife of a rather famous professor who had written for The New Yorker from time to time. His first wife was an even more famous writer, known mainly because one of her New Yorker short stories was an often-anthologized favorite with students of high school and college English. Joe told me that soon after the professor was widowed he married one of his students, Zoë. Five years later, the professor, too, died. Joe went on: “For some reason—well, it was a great deal my own fault for feeling that I ought to provide a sympathetic shoulder—Zoë formed a habit—I was barely aware of it until it was too late to back out of it easily—of coming in on the train every month or two and dropping by my office to ask me if I would take her to lunch, which very soon began to be a burden to me, and when I heard from her this morning that she was coming into town—and even though I was able to avoid lunch—I wasn’t altogether able to a
void a drop-in visit to my office, a visit of the most exquisite torture.” Here Joe paused for a full stop before winding up. “And that is what brought on this goddamned migraine.”

  I reconstruct the breathless sentences as best I can, but I am sure they were better constructed as they came, fully edited, tumbling out of Joe’s mouth. Distraught as he was, he insisted on staying and seeing me have a proper meal and would not leave until I had finished. He even had a cup of coffee himself, because he very much wanted one in any case, but also because it was thought to bring relief to sufferers of migraine by opening the blood vessels of the brain.

  After the death of Joe’s wife (his beloved Therese, always pronounced reverently by Joe as “Tair-EHZ”), our luncheon repertoire expanded. Joe would find that he was not expected at either his daughter Elizabeth’s or his daughter Nora’s of a Saturday—he was, I believe, regularly in their company on Sundays—and so would call to see if I was free. We then made pilgrimages to places like Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and to restaurants important to Joe the travel time to which couldn’t be accommodated during the week, even by the relaxed standards of my office lunch hours. I remember having soft-shell crabs at Gage and Tollner, shad roe at Sloppy Louie’s, lutefisk at a Norwegian restaurant in Greenpoint. The South Street Seaport was an abomination to Joe, but the waterfront had been his scene, and he took me for a scornful look around at what was left of it. On another occasion we paid a mournful visit to Bleeck’s on Fortieth Street, even though he was on the wagon at the time, because the old newspaper hangout he’d loved from his days on The World and the Herald Tribune was about to close. He made sure that I had a Dewar’s and soda and that I took my time about it.