NOTES ON A REPORTER-STYLIST | August 25th 2008

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Decades on, Joseph Mitchell's journalism still feels fresh. Garth Risk Hallberg examines a man who immortalised the fading treasures of a changing city ...

This summer marks the 100th birthday of the late Joseph Mitchell, who helped to redefine the art of journalism. In 1938, when Mitchell wrote his first profile for the New Yorker, the notion of the reporter as stylist was still a novelty. By 1992, when the omnibus "Up in the Old Hotel" hit bestseller lists, it was ubiquitous. The recent republication of Mitchell's finest collection, "The Bottom of the Harbor", brings back into focus innovations that have faded into familiarity or fallen into neglect. It couldn't have come at a better time. Our current crop of reporter-stylists would do well to study the qualities that make this book remarkable.

Chief among these is patience. Contemporary magazine journalism often seems torn between ratifying conventional wisdom and railing against it. The twin temptations of sensationalism and contrarianism hover over online discourse, in particular. Not that technology is solely to blame; as a newspaperman in the 1930s, covering the Hauptmann murder trial and interviewing George Bernard Shaw for the Herald Tribune and the World-Telegram, respectively, Mitchell was near the centre of the media circuses of his day. Once the New Yorker freed him from deadline pressure, however, Mitchell conserved his attention for (and lavished it on) subjects he felt it might dignify.

It turns out just about anything is fascinating if you look at it hard enough. What Mitchell chose to look at, in his increasingly lengthy "profiles", were the remnants of Old New York that were disappearing beneath the city's relentless growth: waterfront rooming-houses ("Old Mr Flood"), petty criminals ("King of the Gypsys"), Epicurean ritual ("All You Can Eat for Five Bucks") and, in "The Bottom of the Harbor", the maritime life of a city most people forget is an archipelago.

In contrast to his colleague and friend A.J. Liebling, Mitchell was an elegist. Yet what strikes one about "The Bottom of the Harbor" is its lack of sentimentality. Of the harbour's pollution, Mitchell observes, "The sludge rots in warm weather and from it gas-filled bubbles as big as basketballs surge to the surface. Dredgemen call them 'sludge bubbles.'" Even as he laments the transformations of modernity, his language--brisk, declarative, reportorial--is recognizably our own. As the sentences pile up, however, Mitchell the stylist begins to assert himself. "Nevertheless," he writes,

there is considerable marine life in the harbor water and on the harbor bottom. Under the paths of liners and tankers and ferries and tugs, fish school and oysters spawn and lobsters nest. There are clams on the sludgy bottom, and mussels and mud shrimp and conchs and crabs and sea worms and sea plants. Bedloe's Island, the Statue of Liberty Island, is in a part of the harbor that is grossly polluted, but there is a sprinkling of soft-shell clams in the mud beneath the shallow water that surrounds it.

English teachers tend to reduce literary style to rules of thumb--use active verbs; subordinate rather than conjoin--but Mitchell violates them conspicuously. He seizes on the neglected verb "to be" and, through repetition, makes it new. As in the Old Testament (which, not coincidentally, also favours intransitive verbs), the act of description becomes an assertion of truth. Luckily for his readers and his subjects, Mitchell is a connoisseur of nouns and adjectives. Here, for example, is Harry Lyons, one of the "Rivermen" from the article of that name:

He is one of those short, hearty, robust men who hold themselves erect and swagger a little and are more imposing than many taller, larger men. He has an old-Roman face. It is strong-jawed and prominent-nosed and bushy-eyebrowed and friendly and reasonable and sagacious and elusively piratical.

That Mitchell's judgments feel so credible, so final, is not merely a stylistic effect; it is a product of his deep immersion in his subjects. By the time of "The Rivermen", Mitchell was spending years on each piece. He himself became a part of the stories he was telling, and the rhythms of his subjects' voices became indistinguishable from his own. His finest profiles are built on dialogue as much as description, and he is a master of it. Mr George H. Hunter, an elder of an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in the Staten Island community of Sandy Ground, explains his Sunday routine thusly:

"After dinner, we sit around the table and drink Postum and discuss the Bible, and that's something I do enjoy. We discuss the prophecies in the Bible, and the warnings, and the promises--the promises of eternal life. And we discuss what I call the mysterious verses, the ones that if you could just understand them they might explain everything--why we're put here, why we're taken away--but they go down too deep, you study them over and over, and you go down as deep as you can, and you still don't touch bottom."

By convention, dialogue is the most unmediated part of any narrative, and the syntax of this passage is clearly Mr Hunter's. The repetitions and the expository thrust, however, express Mitchell's own sensibility. And here again we see the reporter-stylist taking a risk. Having put aside the newspaperman's artifice of objectivity, Mitchell is straining, like a fiction writer, for a deeper kind of fidelity--in this case, to the way things feel when one talks to a kindred spirit. This makes us nervous in the James Frey era, but Mitchell was writing in an age when the journalist did not merely amass authority, but was willing to risk it, in pursuit of truth. As he put it in a 1995 interview, "You can pile up facts, but it won't be true. Inside a fact is another fact, and inside that is another fact. You've got to get the true facts."

At times, Mitchell's artful arrangement of dialogue proves less than flattering for his subject. In his pieces on the Greenwich Village vagrant Joe Gould, Gould's bloviations reveal him as a manipulator, a self-aggrandizer, and, to put it mildly, an eccentric. Yet there seems to be no record of any Mitchell subject--even "nonsensical and bumptious and inquisitive and gossipy and mocking and sarcastic and scurrilous" Joe Gould, or the men of whom "Old Mr Flood" is a composite--complaining of misrepresentation. Nor should there be. Mitchell's generous brand of irony wonders at human excess, but refuses to look down it. Of all of Mitchell's excellences--patience, style, judgment--his compassion may be the hardest to capture, or to match.

It bears noting that any reporter's achievement is also, in part, his editor's. The New Yorker's William Shawn pretty much let Mitchell do as he pleased, and the articles in "The Bottom of the Harbor" are unconstrained by "news hooks", "angles" or counter-intuition. Paging through celebrity profiles in more recent New Yorkers, or the cavalcade of provocations that is the Atlantic Monthly (Rumsfeld misunderstood; feminism bad for women; Google making us stupid) puts me in mind of an early Mitchell piece called "Obituary of a Gin Mill", about the rebranding of a joint called Dick's Bar and Grill. Of the eponymous bartender, Mitchell complains, "In the old days he never acted that way."

Yet, unlike Dick's gin joint, Mitchell's "Obituary" is no artefact. It is patient, truthful, wry and understanding--qualities we could use more of in our magazines and newspapers. Which is why, at 100, Joseph Mitchell still feels fresh: not because he speaks to our concerns, but because, as he might put it, he speaks to our condition.

Photo credit: Maryland Stuart; American Academy of Arts and Letters Archive

(Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of "A Field Guide to the North American Family", and is a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction. He contributes to the literary weblog, The Millions.)