New Yorker Writer Flexed His Mussels

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all, in the words of the book’s author’s note, "connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City."

Mr. Mitchell writes about a restaurant in the old Fulton Fish Market, and its encyclopedic menu of things like shad roe and herring roe and mackerel roe and cod cheeks, and its proprietor, Louis Morino, and Morino’s hometown of Recco, Italy, and Morino’s reluctance to enter the disused upper stories of his restaurant building. He writes about oystermen, and about an old black town in Staten Island called Sandy Ground, and about a town on the New Jersey side of the Hudson called Edgewater, and about rats.

As Luc Sante points out in his foreword, Mitchell makes liberal use of the conjunction "and." The eyes of the brown rat, for example, are "sharp and shiny and joyless and resentful and accusing." Mitchell has a joyful and earnest knack for discovering wonder in the mundane, and, like an old-fashioned naturalist, is a great maker of lists. He lists the wildflowers that overgrow the graves of the Sandy Ground cemetery: cat brier, trumpet creeper, wild hop, blackberry, morning glory. He lists fish and shellfish brought up by a dragger in Stonington, Conn.: hermit crabs, surf clams, blood clams, mussels, moon snails, pear conchs. He lists ship channels in the Lower Bay: Ambrose Channel, Chapel Hill Channel, Swash Channel.

He keeps himself largely out of the way, delivering his information in a good-natured and interested but unfailingly even tone, and he steps aside as often as he can to let his subjects—Louis Morino, owner of Sloppy Louie’s; Mr. George H. Hunter, of Sandy Ground; Captain Ellery Thompson, of Stonington—speak for themselves. They speak in long monologues delivered in styles that seem to vary greatly and to be distinctly their own, but which, upon closer examination, are just as informative and economical as Mitchell’s other prose. He doesn’t shy away from saying "I," or pretend to any special objectivity, and he does begin more than one piece with a casual mention of the thoughts of death and gloom that have driven his explorations of the riverfront communities of New Jersey and Connecticut and the more rural corners of Staten Island. But having made such pro forma nods toward self-disclosure or intimacy with the reader, Mitchell changes the subject so thoroughly that he essentially disappears. When Mr. Hunter needs to get his attention, for example, at one point in "Mr. Hunter’s Grave," he calls out not "Joe" or "Mr. Mitchell," but "Hey, there!"

The benefit of such self-effacement is that it allows for an extraordinary degree of intimacy between the reader and the subject of the piece; after reading The Bottom of the Harbor, I feel as if I’ve been to Sloppy Louie’s for cod cheeks and scrambled eggs, as if I’ve sorted out trout on the Eleanor with Captain Thompson. With curiosity and attention and courage and persistence, Mitchell sought out fascinating personal adventures and relationships and then, when writing them up, removed from them his person.

One can’t help wondering what this cost him: After writing his long and penetrating profile of Joe Gould, a man who was the sort of tragic, self-deluding bum supposedly writing a great book that every writer, somewhere deep in his heart, fears he may be, Joseph Mitchell famously stopped writing. For the last 32 years of his life, he went to his office at The New Yorker, shut the door, and produced nothing.

IT'S NOT SUPRISING that he has so many imitators. He is engaging and lucid and easy to read. You could even say that he writes according to a formula, in the same sense in which light and gravity operate according to formulas.

And it’s not surprising that his imitators mostly fall short. It calls for a special genius to arrange the names of shellfish into a list that reads like music, and to balance such lists with a narrative that moves the eye along, and to do this all while convincing a reader, without making any special fuss, that walking down to Fulton Street and eating a shad roe omelet can be the most exciting thing in the world.

Will Heinrich is on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at wheinrich@observer.com.