Joseph Mitchell of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did. He’d been thinking about New York since a visit in 1918 when he was ten. After one look at the bustling city he told his father: ‘This is for me.’ His father was not pleased then or later. At the World-Telegram while Mitchell was still in his twenties, the paper liked his stories so much they put his photo up on the side of their delivery trucks. The year he turned thirty the city’s most ambitious magazine, the New Yorker, hired him away. Two years after that, in the annus mirabilis of 1940, Mitchell published three stories of the hard to describe but unforgettable kind that give a writer a reputation for life: ‘Mazie’, about a woman who sold tickets in a skidrow movie theatre; ‘Lady Olga’, about the sideshow life of a bearded woman; and ‘The Old House at Home’, about a neighbourhood tavern that had been selling ale mainly to elderly gents with Irish names since 1854.
Mitchell wrote a lot of other great stories, too – ‘fact pieces’, the New Yorker called them – and over time a growing body of devoted readers made him about as famous as a writer who never earns a lot of money can be. The last of his fact pieces was ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, about a Greenwich Village character who claimed for decades that he was writing an epic oral history of our time, but wasn’t. The Gould piece was published in 1964. Mitchell died in 1996. What Mitchell was doing during that final 32 years – he went to the office every day, fellow staffers said they could hear him typing, he met annually with editors to describe what he was working on – is the central challenge faced by Thomas Kunkel in his new life of the writer, Man in Profile. Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the Fulton Fish Market, subject of some of Mitchell’s best writing. Mitchell took all these projects seriously for a time. But the project that was connected most closely to his name during his final decades was a book variously described as a memoir of growing up in North Carolina, a small piece of which he actually wrote; or a book about his father, which is what he told quite a few people, including me.
Here I ought to digress to say that Joe Mitchell and his wife, Therese, lived across the street from my future wife, Candace, while she was growing up in New York City. The Mitchells had moved into 44 West 10th Street, Kunkel tells me, in 1942. I remember a smallish, two-bedroom apartment, sixth floor rear. The next year rents were fixed by federal law to prevent wartime gouging by landlords and for many decades thereafter the Mitchells and a lot of other New Yorkers lived in ‘rent control apartments’, which meant rents could be raised only minuscule amounts, which meant that in effect they grew cheaper and cheaper. In time a rent control apartment was as good as a bequest from a rich uncle. But the odds are good that the Mitchells would have stayed put anyhow; Mitchell disliked change, ever more deeply as the years passed. Some landlords tried to drive tenants out but not Mitchell’s, a slender Belgian named Schwenger, who looked a little like a poet, and lived in the building with his dark-haired, smartly dressed wife and his little boy, who seemed as delicate as a sparrow. The Mitchells were there in the 1960s when Candace and I met and married and moved into her house at 43 West 10th, and they were still there in 1982 when we moved out of the city. Mitchell never left, except for visits home to North Carolina which gradually lengthened after the death of his father, and in the usual, final way that all of us leave, as Mitchell himself might have put it.
It was Candace’s mother, Barbara Bancroft, who introduced me to Mitchell. Everybody knew everybody back then. I was in Mitchell’s apartment once or twice – something to do with Christmas – but just about all our conversations took place in the street or in the lobby of 44, where I often came and went around drink time on a visit to one of Barbara’s friends, Ruth Tremain, who had taught maths to Army Air Corps pilots at Yale during the war. She was a strong chess player and we played often while I was writing a piece about Bobby Fischer. Because I had married Candace, on whom Ruth doted, she let me win a few games, but that didn’t last long. Ruth knew Joe Mitchell, of course. He and I had a long talk in her apartment one year when Ruth invited people in to watch the annual Halloween parade from her apartment windows overlooking 10th Street.
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