Joseph Mitchell is one of the earthiest journalists the
New Yorker ever produced, and if you’ve never read
McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon or Joe Gould’s Secret, you’ve
missed two of the most genuine, huge-hearted collections of essays ever
written about America. Mitchell’s ear for dialogue and his ability to
naturally draw astounding stories out of real New Yorkers is nearly
supernatural. This year marks the centennial of Mitchell’s birth, and
his work is being reissued in new editions. Ordinarily, this sort of
thing reeks of a marketing ploy, but here it’s an opportunity to
celebrate the lesser-known work of a true great.
The Bottom of the Harbor begins with a Mitchell classic, “Up
in the Old Hotel,” the story of a restaurant named, through a series of
unfortunate circumstances—involving a previous owner’s unpleasant
nickname and the perverse games of some local fishmongers—Sloppy
Louie’s. Mitchell frequents Sloppy Louie’s and one day, he and Louie
buck up enough courage to explore the building’s long-abandoned second
floor. And that’s about it: For 43 pages, Mitchell discusses the
history of the building and its surrounding waterfront block. Though
the whole story spans maybe an hour and a half in real time, it
lavishes the reader with engrossing digressions, from rotting cow
corpses to a tiny widow who always brought her own silverware to the
restaurant. Other stories in the volume, from a study of what the
bottom of New York’s harbor is really like to a piece aptly titled “The
Rats on the Waterfront,” are solid pieces of journalism struck through
with humorous digressions and the ramblings of supporting characters,
like secret passageways lining the work. The latter story almost
backhandedly reveals a narrowly averted Black Death plague epidemic
that nearly destroyed New York City in 1943 and was kept secret for
over a decade afterward.
My Ears Are Bent is almost more interesting because it’s the
collected work of pre–New Yorker Mitchell, a newspaperman
who’s still figuring out his game but is a preternaturally gifted
storyteller. There are some similarities with the later
work—Mitchell got his start on the waterfront that would later
make his name, but his newspaper stories feed more prurient interests,
including interviews with strippers and evangelists and voodoo priests.
Even with all the sensationalism, the most shocking elements of his
stories are always the people who he meets, such as a waiter who
“…was in the Italian army during the war, and he believes his head
was shot off and that the doctors got the head of an Austrian and sewed
it on his neck. He claims that the new head is not satisfactory because
it is the head of a young man and often urges him into adventures in
which the rest of his body is not particularly interested.” There is
nothing ordinary about Joseph Mitchell’s New York.