When somebody suggested that he wrote about the 'little people,' he replied that there were no
    little people in his work. 'They are as big as you are, whoever you are,' he said.
        -OBIT : Joseph Mitchell, Chronicler of the Unsung and the Unconventional, Dies at 87 (Richard Severo, NY Times,  May 25, 1996)

One day, it would have to have been the very early 70's, we were in the car with my grandfather, driving through the Bowery, and he pointed out the window at one of the derelicts and casually mentioned : I went to school with him.  School, in this case, was Harvard Law School, back when that still meant something.  He said that the guy had fallen on hard times and had refused repeated offers of help, so we drove on and he went along his merry, though entirely demented, way.  Had this occurred just a few years earlier, that bum might well have been Joe Gould, whom Joseph Mitchell immortalized in the pages of The New Yorker.

Up in the Old Hotel is a collection of Mitchell's otherwise hard to find essays, in which he lovingly describes haunts like the Fulton Fish Market and McSorley's, one of the last bars in America to admit women, and profiles various fisherfolk and colorful denizens of New York City's nether regions, most famously, Joe Gould, the bohemian character with whom he is inevitably and eternally linked.  Mitchell first wrote about Gould in 1942, in a piece called, Professor Sea Gull.  Mitchell's great skill as a writer was to let his subjects seemingly speak for themselves, but to in fact render their words in compulsively readable fashion.  This works particularly effectively with Joe Gould who was a fountain of words anyway.  The story relates how Gould, a Harvard grad, subsists on practically no money (one of his tricks is to make a soup out of the ketchup in restaurants), his propensity for making a spectacle of himself as he starts flapping his arms and declaiming poetry in the "language" of sea gulls, and his life's work, the nine million word Oral History of Our Time.  Within the pages of hundreds of composition books, of the kind we used to use in school, Gould claimed to be writing a history of the world in the form of the conversations of ordinary people as he heard them speaking every day ""What people say is history."  It was this idea that beguiled Mitchell and his readers, made Gould into a minor celebrity, and ultimately formed a tragicomic link to Mitchell's own career.

You see, Mitchell gradually came to suspect that Gould's magnum opus did not really exist.  When, upon Gould's death, Mitchell went in search of the Oral History and could find only a few garbled fragments, he decided, with some qualms, to expose the hoax that he had such played a central role in propagating.  The result was the elegaiac Joe Gould's Secret which was written in 1964 and proved to be the last piece Joseph Mitchell ever published.  For the next thirty years he showed up at The New Yorker every day, went into his office and seemed to work, but never produced a word.  He became legendary for his "writer's block," a staple figure in the many novels featuring a New Yorker like magazine, such as Bright Lights, Big City. Rumor had it that he was emulating his hero James Joyce and writing a Ulysses-type novel set in the New York he knew so well.  But like Joe Gould, his masterwork does not appear to have been committed to paper.

There are many fine essays in the book, but you really should, at least, read these two Joe Gould profiles.  They stand as masterpieces of the journalist's art on their own, but when Mitchell's subsequent problems are taken into account and the eerie parallels become clear, these stories become transcendent and genuinely haunting.

(Reviewed:06-Oct-00)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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