Joseph Mitchell, the Fado Player of Old New York | babelia

If there is a character with a mythic aura in the golden age of American journalism, this is it Joseph Mitchell. His life and personality are as captivating as anything this wistful old New York raconteur wrote, an elegant chronicler who in the 1940s set the tone forever. new york model, that long, good and beautiful journalism that would later inspire TaleseWolfe, Breslin, Capote, Didion, Thompson and all that band that wrote wrong. A sensitive spirit who coined an immortal phrase worthy of being engraved in newsrooms and palaces: “Ordinary people are as important as you, whoever you are”.

Yes: Mitchell is the author of Joe Gould’s Secret, the famous book about an eccentric New York village bum who ate ketchup and who wrote a magnificent “Oral history of our time”, made up of everything he had heard on the street and which he would then write down in thousands of notebooks. And yes: Mitchell is also famous for having suffered one of the most exaggerated blocks in the history of writing. After completing the second installment on Joe Gould with an unexpected ending, he has not published more. The journalist spent thirty years frequenting the offices of the New Yorker every morning. He went to the newsroom, locked himself in his office and heard himself typing on his old typewriter. But he never published anything again. Mitchell was silent. And so the myth grew.

His Best Chronicles: A Feast for Lovers of New York and a journalism manual, are collected in McSorley’s fabulous tavern, published in Spanish by Jus five years ago. This anthology refines the virtues of a narrator who has artfully raised the journalistic profile of nobody and nothing. Who focused his interest and his prose on seedy bars, old boarding houses, bearded women, charismatic gypsies, fanatical preachers, blockbusters and bohemians of all stripes. There are no little people, Mitchell insisted. Perhaps he said it because, despite the well-branded suit and elegant crooked hat, that taciturn man in love with yesterday has never forgotten his origins.

Born on a cotton and tobacco farm in Robeson County, North Carolina, Joseph Mitchell arrived in New York the day after crack of 29.

He was 21 years old and that meeting was a crush. She fell in love with the big city as only a romantic outsider can. The key to fueling that burning passion was the advice his first director at the gave him Herald Tribune: to be a good reporter, walk. This is what Mitchell has been doing all his life. Walking, in solitary ballads, through every corner of New York. Look at it, listen to it, feel it; discovering him every day in a sort of daily addiction that he maintained until the end. This is how he recounts an exceptional book published in 2015 and which deserves to be translated into Spanish: man in profile, an exquisite biography by Thomas Kunkel on the life of Joseph Mitchell.

Now, five years later, the author is back in Spanish bookstores. Maybe he’s a smaller Mitchell than we’ve seen so far. Perhaps I sin for the excess of long enumerations and anachronistic details. But a Mitchell is always a Mitchell, and… bottom of the port collects six major pieces written between 1944 and 1959. As announced Lucia Santi in the prologue they constitute the epitaph of the port of New York and of what most interested Mitchell: its people, its traditions, its places, its environments.

The engine that activates Mitchell is invariable: what’s behind the apparent. That and common lives. Like Louie’s, with his bizarre gait of a veteran waiter haunted by the remains of an old hotel full of drunks, retirees, crazy old men and itinerant sailors. Lives like skipper Roy’s, who dreams of the hundreds of decaying ships rotting at the bottom of the harbour. Like that of Poole da Bahia, which tells how every year, in mid-April, the bodies of suicide bombers, bastard children, sailors and even gangsters emerge in a point of the port. Lives like that of Ellery Thompson, a sad-eyed Yankee whose family has been fishing in those waters for three hundred years; a philosopher of the sea and an amateur painter who hates haste and who is able to sum up the whole story in one sentence: “A blind man leading a blind man out of the frying pan and into the embers”.

In addition to the excellent first report, there is another text that stands out in this volume. It takes place in Sandy Ground, an almost uninhabited city. It was born with the oyster boom that joined the shores of Brooklyn, Queens or Manhattan until pollution of the Hudson wrecked the business. Mitchell visits that city and sees a shadow of what it used to be. With empty porches. With the echo of children’s voices already extinguished. There he will spend a whole day with Mr. Hunter, an old man who accompanies him to the cemetery overgrown to show him his tombstone, already prepared and with the only white of the date of death. The nostalgic touch, always tempered by that point of humor and vitality which his chronicles exude, is supplied by Mr. Hunter with a line: “Every morning the world begins again.” Something similar happens with the chronicles of this non-fiction employee: each chronicle of him renews faith in literary journalism and in Joe Mitchell’s secret: work hard, publish little and never stop walking.

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