The History and Mythology of New York through Archaeology

“From time to time, to scare thoughts of death and desolationI get up early and go to the fish market in Fulton. I usually arrive around five thirty and I go around through the old market and the new market (…) At that time, shortly before the hustle and bustle begins, the overflowing stalls pile up between forty and sixty species of fish and seafood coming from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and half a dozen foreign countries. The misty dawn of the docksthe fuss that the fishmongers make, the smell of seaweed and the spectacle of that abundance always gives me a well-being that sometimes borders on the euphoria”.

Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996) was a strange simple guy. It was enough for him to mix with reality, in this case in one of the bellies of the New York that existed between the 1930s and the 1960s, sandwiched between the crack of the bag Wall Street and culture popto reconcile with the transcendence of existence. He immediately forgot, even if it was temporarily, the troubles of his profession –he battle journalism–, which forced him to walk tirelessly, talk to strangers and summarize his impressions in a few pages, not always paid as they should. With such an ordinary trajectory, no one would have said that in his narrow skeleton –sheltered from the cold and the draft of the Hudson by a three-piece suit, to which a hat crowned Stetson– inhabited the Homer who would write the epic (without epic) of the great North American metropolis from the beginning of the 20th century.

It is enough to read his chronicles for the miracle to happen: net writing, amazing testimonials, stories of beings of flesh and blood, pure orality. A portrait from life made with a precision similar to that of the paintings in the school of flamenco paintersexcept that, in his case, the landscape – background of a peasantry – is a city turned into a monument of steel and glasspointing towards the sky, which without melancholy leaves behind its past tense of mud and frost to mutate into the (urban) metaphor of the new and definitive modernity.

Mitchell, who came to the Big Apple from North Carolinain one of those migrations from the South of the plantations and the great agrarian lords – his father belonged to the fourth generation of a Baptist family of cotton and tobacco growers–, he was fascinated by nature, but he developed his career as a newspaper writer in the most artificial capital of his time, where Lorca I would discover, after coming from Cuba, that other Andalusia in the Caribbean, the gray horror that capitalism inoculated in the secret soul of men. It seems that he never fully got over this contrast. When she died in the mid-nineties –larynx cancer–, his daughters wrote as epitaph on his grave a verse from a sonnet Shakespeare: “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”.

the birds of new york, especially the seagulls, were the object of his silent devotion. He also enjoyed the brick architecture of factories and warehouses, abandoned or destroyed, scenes of a flow of a thousand lives (and deaths) to which he agitated emigration, fear, hunger and hope. The metropolis of the East Coast of the United States in which he lived, like the Buenos Aires of Roberto Arltwas at that time a space in full change of skin: workers on the docks, steel industrialists in the hotels, a Babel of languages ​​and infinite destinations intertwined. Sometimes with tragic outcomes. This was all the nature that I could investigate. To her he would dedicate her task as a chronicler, which began in the event pages of the newspapers The World, The New York Herald Tribune y The New York World-Telegram, and would end in The New Yorkercradle of long-winded journalism.

In this magazine he would publish profiles with some of the leading figures of his time, just like Velazquez did with the Habsburgs and Goya with the Bourbons. Unlike the Spanish masters, Mitchell would immortalize, above all, anonymous individuals, to whom he gave a public name that has endured –after his disappearance– thanks to his writings. In his way, it was a craftsman. His journalism condenses the flavor and the essential object of the trade: portray things and people as they are at an exact moment in time. If his excellent chronicles retain such well-deserved prestige, it is due to the miraculous patina of fugitive time, material with which we are made –Shakespeare, again– the Humans.

We come from time and it is time that kills us. Magic happens between the two moments: what seems vulgar, everyday, worn out, perhaps due to having it too close at hand and using it excessively, one day becomes extraordinary. People, places, objects. Buildings, corners, warehouses, taverns, hostels. Mitchell wrote about these things with disconcerting thoroughness, but unlike the avant-gardefascinated just a few years before by the futurismthe machine and the mechanical industries, the North American journalist does not conspicuously insert his own yearnings about their characters and itineraries.

Your writing works like a movie camera. Record, describe, transcribe, listen, ask and collect everything that is in sight. It sticks to the available materials, generally without excessive nobility. With them he chisels the lintel of a temple –prosaic New York, with its neighborhoods and alleys and passages– where luxury and horror coexist. Of that world, already disappeared, deals the bottom of the porta collection of portraits about the wet Hudson coastline, which Anagrama has just published, in translation of Alex Gibert, with a brief but substantial introduction to Lucy Santeformerly known as Luc (idem).

Saint, one of the best physiognomists of places and places of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, when bonfires were still lit on many avenues to keep warm on the long winter nights, given over to drugs and taken over by the squattersleft by the hand of God (dollar), highlights the passing condition and, at the same time, immortal of the territories portrayed by Mitchell. When the journalist tired them with his feet, between 1944 y 1959, the port docks lived their golden (commercial) age. Two decades later they no longer existed. an omen, almost abysmal, of the transience of what seems stable and permanent to us. And a disturbing analogy of our own existence, which we believe guaranteed until we we perish.

Mitchell was (knowingly) doing archeologyalthough instead of an excavation he chose journalism, which is still another temporary genre, with an ephemeral claim, although (these chronicles show it) it can be enduring by its power to grasp the present before it disappears. The author of Joe Gould’s Secretthe book that would give him the literary respectability that the establishment used to deny the newspaper writerswhere he tells the story –in two stages– of an amazing clochards illustrated, creature of the streets of Bowery and the squares of Village, practiced a variant of naturalism. He intended to fix, through the rigor of his descriptions, a world that he knew in extinction.

Mitchell’s costumbrismo, unlike the Hispanic or the French, both tending towards melancholic elegy, for those who the passage of time is a tragedy and reality is summed up in the picturesque, flees from idealization. The description of doomsday suffices for him. It’s like a portrait of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius. the bottom of the port is the map of port new yorkand bestiary (modern) of beings and rooms and a story in the manner of Arabian Nightswhere one story leads to anotherbraiding the tapestry of a life (collective) seen from a succession of first persons.

Of course, Mitchell isn’t rude enough to put himself in the draw. In the portraits of him – learn, adanistas of digital journalism! – there are hardly any traces of the atosigante egotismo. And yet the author of Street Life He does not stop talking about himself, even though he does it, as is the norm among gentlemen who write in the newspapers, through intermediaries, such as Joe Goulda twin brother of his own mask, loaded with similarities with their personal life that they are –hawk eye!– verifiable y certain.

Mitchell does not invent reality. He uses it as a resource to articulate his gaze. He delegates all the attributes of his authorship to his creatures. Its spaces, such as the disappeared market of Fulton or the market of Washington Square that existed since the 18th century, function as an intimate extension of his soul. His panorama of the New York port is comprehensive: people, children, fishermen and homeless people, trades and misfortunes. a rosary of random fates and sensory sensationsmenus of the day and bad moods that run loose, as big as buffaloes, in search of the remains of all shipwrecks.

Sante describes Mitchell as a “low-key, skinny, melancholic and introverted” writer who knew how to listen and I asked without violating to his interviewees, from whom he extracted biographical data and tasty expressive turns. Sometimes all the soul of him. His, according to his biographers, was broken. He journalist American, according to his biographers, suffered for years from a depression of whose evidence he had no clinical knowledge until his decline, when he understood that he was incapable of facing another blank page. From the mid-sixties until his death, for thirty long years, he went to his office The New Yorker, but I would no longer post new articles. He wrote unfinished drafts and a version of his memories.

Thus is understood the sacrifice What should it mean to the author of Old Mr. Flood going out to hunt ordinary characters on the street. Nothing of this effort is perceived in his style, which is exemplary. Precise, effective, exact. No bragging. No verbal excesses. Naked and expressive. Quite an achievement. The rhetorical artifice remains hidden from the eyes of the reader, who upon reading his stories finds life as it happens. Sante compares his language –functional but suggestive, full of camouflaged irony– with the photographs of Walker Evans and the pictures of Charles Sheeler.

His prints are full of flavor – see the story of Louis MorinoGenoese emigrant, owner of the Sloopy Louie’sthe Fulton restaurant where Mitchell used to stop, who had the garden of his house full of fig trees to smell in Industrial New York the perfume of his childhood in the tiny Italian town of Recco–, supremely atonal phrases and that miracle that is he zero degree of writing. A superb view of a lost New York, made with a travelling as amazing as that Orson Welles use in Touch of Evil.