The grammar of hard facts

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker. By Thomas Kunkel. Random House; 366 pages; $30.

“AT ANY hour of the day or night,” wrote Joseph Mitchell, “I can shut my eyes and visualise in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets.” That, for Mitchell, was New York, where he worked as a reporter—starting in 1929, when he arrived as a college dropout from a small town in North Carolina, until 1964, when he submitted his last piece to the New Yorker.

Researching a story, Mitchell could spend whole days on the bus, taking notes on what he saw out of the window, or wandering around a cemetery to identify the weeds that grew there. Mitchell, wrote one critic, could “achieve the same effects with the grammar of hard facts that Dickens achieved with the rhetoric of imagination.” He came to be widely imitated. Calvin Trillin dedicated one of his books “to the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—Joseph Mitchell.”

Meticulousness, however, had its price. Once a newspaperman filing many articles a week, Mitchell started taking months, then years, on his magazine stories. He spent half a decade writing his final profile. Then, for more than 30 years, he arrived every day at the New Yorker office without ever submitting another piece. According to a revealing new book, Mitchell’s colleagues even started searching his bin for clues about what he was doing.

Mitchell’s subject was life at the periphery of his metropolis. At the long-vanished New York Herald Tribune, he began his reporting career by, as he put it, “hoofing after dime-a-dozen murders.” The young writer could be jaunty and jokey. “I think, as a matter of fact,” he wrote, “that burlesque strippers are a great deal like elephants: when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.” He relished precise description. When, at 26, Mitchell covered the executions of three men convicted of murder, he noticed that the electric chair rested on exactly three sheets of rubber carpet.

Proud of his vigilance, the young Mitchell claimed: “A newspaper can have no bigger nuisance than a reporter who is always trying to write literature.” Just eight months after these words were published Mitchell began working full time for the New Yorker, where his ambitions turned literary. More and more he found himself evoking the past. His humour grew reflective and wry and a touch metaphysical. He wrote about the decline of New York beefsteak parties, which had begun admitting women and consequently lost an appreciation for “the man who let out the most ecstatic grunts, drank the most beer, ate the most steak, and got the most grease on his ears”; and about a downtown dive, Dick’s Bar and Grill, whose modernising renovation caused Mitchell to reflect: “I am aware that it is childish, but sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter.”

Mitchell was eulogising worlds he was often too young to have known personally. As he aged, the traces of these pasts—one could call them the pasts of his own past—began to fade. The New York Mitchell had explored as a young reporter was vanishing. In response, his stories darkened. In his profile of George Hunter, an elderly resident of New York’s remote Sandy Ground community, Mitchell follows Hunter around the local cemetery as the old man talks of long dead neighbours. At his own future grave-site, Hunter falls into a gloom. “It won’t make any difference,” he says of his burial ceremony. Mitchell would go on to publish only three more articles.

It is just one of the enlightening discoveries of Thomas Kunkel’s biography that Mitchell continued trying to produce new work until the end of his life. Among Mitchell’s papers Mr Kunkel found drafts of three chapters of an unfinished autobiography, all of which have now been published in the New Yorker, most recently this past February. Mr Kunkel shows how Mitchell struggled for years to alight on a subject representative of his increasingly general sense of displacement. He was, the author contends, “a gifted writer who was trapped by his own expectations”.

Mr Kunkel, who depicts Mitchell as saintly, worries a lot about the most telling discovery of his research: the famous reporter made things up. Kunkel determines that Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, one of Mitchell’s beloved profile subjects, was a composite character invented by Mitchell. He uncovers reporting notes and editorial memoranda that indicate that Mitchell regularly altered experiences and quotations referred to in his stories.

Mitchell did not think this light fictionalising would discredit his work. In its early years, before literary journalism had become popular in American magazines, it was not so unusual for the New Yorker to run composite profiles. The practice has long since been banned at the magazine, which ran its own review of Mr Kunkel’s book and addressed what is clearly a difficult issue. Mitchell, at least, felt his technique could conjure a major literary effect. “He is truer to life than I would’ve been able to make him had he been a real person,” he said of Nikanov.

Fanatical reporting and occasional invention did not seem contradictory to Mitchell; each was a means of finding beauty in the mundane. How to classify his approach may remain an open question. It would be inaccurate to call it nonfiction, but Mitchell’s editors were not alone in thinking he got his stories just right.