I devoured the recent biography “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” hoping to find secrets about writing. Nobody wrote nonfiction better than Joe Mitchell, who for decades enthralled readers with his profiles of barkeepers, carnival freaks, fishmongers, homeless intellectuals and other noncelebrities.
The book, by Thomas Kunkel, revealed a secret all right, but at first I fought against the truth of it. I kept wanting there to be a more complicated formula for such splendid writing. I made a list in my head of the reasons Mitchell had an advantage over the rest of us mere mortals.
The creative types he ran with included A.J. Liebling, his best friend, and Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker. You’d have to draw a certain amount of inspiration and lots of calories supping with a Liebling or a Ross, for heaven’s sake.
He was a dapper dresser. He thought enough of his profession and himself not to skulk around in blue jeans and a T-shirt that says “What Happens at the Pig, Stays at the Pig.” Maybe if you lift yourself above the rabble sartorially, the rest follows.
He used liberally a literary license. Supposed facts were often fiction.
Some of his best-known characters were composites, a journalistic trick reporters get fired for today. He compressed dialogue and made his subjects say things in the order he wanted to hear them. It was the reporting equivalent of photo-shopping.
He had all the time in the world to write a story. After producing prodigiously for a couple of New York newspapers, he went to The New Yorker where a writer could take his time, conduct countless interviews with the same subject, mull over material for months and then write the story.
He used certain clever devices. He often made long lists, telling you what was on a city block, or on a shelf. The details were important and evocative.
And he used soliloquies, letting his main character tell the story himself. A Mitchell sentence might go on for pages, or reach 1,000 words.
He succumbed to the most legendary writer’s block in literary history. He went three decades without writing a single story, all the while being paid by one of our most respected magazines.
Maybe that was the secret to his success: a long, paid vacation!
But if I am honest, which I try to be, there was one, and only one, rather simple reason why Joseph Mitchell wrote arguably the best and most effective nonfiction ever produced on a regular basis.
He walked the streets.
Mitchell didn’t sit at a computer typing key words into the search engine of Google. He didn’t have research assistants who did all the legwork and reported back with what he needed.
He walked the streets of New York — all of its boroughs — every day of his working life. He knew the bars and the restaurants and the bridges and the lowly wildflowers that sprouted through sidewalk cracks. He knew the city. He knew its architecture and its people.
In the end, I had to admit that was essentially “Joe Mitchell’s Secret,” which was no real secret at all. He did the old-school, shoe-leather reporting necessary to elevate human stories to literature.
And his work, fiction or nonfiction, flawed or perfect, has lasted.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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