Joseph Mitchell, the chronicler of a New York who …

A man in a fedora walks into a building on 43rd Street in New York every morning. The elevator ride to his office is done without opening his mouth, with a smile and a cordial gesture he corresponds to the greetings he crosses on the way. Inside his cave, as the colleagues who admire him say, the noise of a typewriter is not heard; Nor is her warm voice talking on the phone, questioning sources, checking stories. Few journalists at the end of the 20th century had a personal office in the newsroom of the New Yorker. Joseph Mitchell kept his own room until his death in 1996, despite not having written a single line in the last thirty years of his life..

During his blue period, no director dared to fire him. Less to take away the privileges that he was adding from the years in which Harold Ross founded the weekly. Mitchell, with his signature, had contributed to feeding that two-faced, cannibalistic narrative monster, which created the magazine’s own style: an already classic tone, where journalism and literature bite their tail until it bleeds and hurts. In several obituaries that followed his death, his colleagues recalled that none of them could imagine the writing without Mitchell; without his skinny, arcane shadow, elegant as a Tom Wolfe without the veneer of pop. A diaphanous copy of himself, which entered the office at midmorning, would cut off at two hours to go to lunch at some inn on the block and, in the afternoon, would return to fulfill his work shift. That is, to get into the ring to fight with their ghosts or with what was left of them, after making sure that the door to his office was properly closed.

Among the old and new journalists who stepped on the 43rd Street newsroom, a question circulated that pointed outward but that, with the guttural voice of an oracle, did not stop resounding and tormenting the interior of each one. Between coffees, cigarettes and another round of beer, one more! They wondered: when did Joseph Mitchell screw himself up? Or, in your professional variation, when did you stop writing and why? But let’s pause. Before trying a vague hypothesis for an answer, let’s start at the beginning. Who was that devoted Joyce journalist who was silent for three decades? What merits did you do to maintain the privilege of having an exclusive office in the magazine that receives summaries, short stories, chronicles, from writers and journalists from all over the world? What was its literary value for Salman Rushdie to consider it a “hidden treasure” of American literature, or for Martín Amis to compare it to Borges, or for the genius of Doris Lessing to praise and recommend it for being “authentically original”? In itself, who was Joseph Mitchell and why, young and not so young chronicler, is it worth reading?

The crash in the life of Joseph Mitchell happened as in his country in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. Born in North Carolina in 1908, at the age of twenty-one, in the midst of an economic meltdown, he emigrated to New York without a college degree under his belt. Among his virtues as a chronicler, to make up for noble deficiencies, he had a southern accent and manners that went against the modern maelstrom of the city that grew in width and height. At the same time, he knew how to balance his eye to observe the different layers of time that were in each corner, in each tonality, in each street that -during the interwar years- were populated by Irish, Italians, Chinese and Gypsies. But, in particular, Mitchell had a quasi-religious willingness to listen, accompanied by a gentle, empathetic, authentic gesture that managed to accommodate interviewees with his company. In other words, Mitchell did not seek to become invisible or blend in with what he sought to narrate; his method consisted in finding the singular in repetition, in the delivery of time, of his time, in trusting the rhizome of the conversation more than the guide of questions.

McSorley’s Fabulous Tavern and Other New York Stories, the book that restores Mitchell’s place in Argentine libraries, compiles a sample of New York characters in chronicles that Mitchell wrote in the interwar period, his most productive time. As Alejandro Gibert Abós says in the preface, in order to know who he was, one had to ask “who he was with.” His texts include the Reverend Hall who says “my pulpit is the street”, Commodore Dutch who created an annual gala to benefit himself, a couple of cavemen who live in a cave in Central Park, a child prodigy who captivated, an Indian who builds skyscrapers that pierce the clouds and the sky, the charming Mazie, the Venice cinema box office and the fairy godmother of desperate beggars. People and characters of a New York that no longer exists, that was dying out when Mitchell walked it from end to end and he proposed to write it, portray it, honor it, like an archaeologist of a present that was fading behind him.

One of the protagonists of Mitchell’s chronicles is Joe Gould, Professor Seagull, in his words, “the last bohemian in Greenwich Village.” Harvard graduate, vagabond by vocation, unpublished writer of the monumental Oral history of our time -which includes dialogues, portraits, individual texts ranging from the translation of the sound of the seagulls to the story of an old Hungarian drug dealer-. Mitchell upon meeting Goud felt a strange brotherhood. As with many of his interviewees, after the report was published, he continued to frequent him without any journalistic intention. However, the fascination for Gould led him to write, in addition to the wonderful chronicle that integrates The fabulous tavern the classic Joe Gould’s Secret, the only translated book available in our country.

That creative peak was the beginning of his paralysis. Since then his productivity has waned, while his introspection has broadened. As if Mitchell had seen himself in Gould’s mirror, recognized in his words, his projects, his ambitions. In recent years the ghost of Gould haunted him. Like him, Mitchell also ended up adrift in New York, chasing stories that he could no longer write or at least did not dare to publish. Mitchell became a man out of his time, a talented writer who did not live up to his own expectations; a homeless man with a roof, with the key to an office that bore his name in a lost newsroom on Calle 43.

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