t a l l a p e

Combination of two things in today’s post. First, some thoughts on Joseph Mitchell, now that I’m nearly done with Up In The Old Hotel; and from that a reaction to a statement that a friend made the other day: “Sometimes I feel like reading is just a waste of time.”

Joseph Mitchell was a writer for The New Yorker for many years, and Up In The Old Hotel is a collection of the pieces that he wrote from the late 1930′s through the early 1960′s. In them he profiles some of the more interesting characters in New York City and elsewhere, focusing not on the titans of industry or the drivers of capitalist society, but on the margins of the “polite city.” He had a fascination with the Fulton Fish Market, through the stalls of which seemingly half of New York City’s protein passed each day; and with the men who supplied the product to those merchants. He wandered the Bowery area, and the late-night haunts in Greenwich Village, and wrote about the people hidden there, in plain sight.

His portraits are, at once, sympathetic and quite honest. He speaks of the faults and the oddness of his subjects, and doesn’t try to minimize their marginal status; he isn’t willing to judge them for their predelictions, however, or ridicule them because they’re a little bit different. He simply documents their lives, and writes about the way that they interact with the rest of the city, or the rest of society. At times there is admiration in his prose: “Dragger Captain”, a profile of Ellery Thompson of the Stonington, CT dragger-fishing fleet, stops just shy of being classified as hagiography. There is never unkindness.

His subjects are enough to draw my attention, but his writing is what holds it. We live in an age where most reporting reads like the script for a nightly newscast, 2-sentence quotes sprinkled in the midst of 1-sentence analytic paragraphs. I don’t know if that style existed in Mitchell’s day, but I do know that Mitchell didn’t succumb to it if it did. His paragraphs are full and vibrant and don’t end until they should end, and are full of the confidence that the reader will care enough about the topic to read through to the end. He will, at times, include lists: lists of the dragger boats from the Stonington fleet that have been lost over the years; lists of the founding families of the Sandy Hook village on Staten Island. And he will always, always, let the subject speak for himself.

The example of Joe Gould is a perfect one here. Gould was a staple of Greenwich Village for years, a rather strange man who claimed to be working on Joe Gould’s Oral History, a massive work collecting everything that he heard, saw, or experienced. Mitchell befriended him, and wrote a profile of him titled “Professor Sea Gull” in 1942. In it, Mitchell allows Gould’s own words to sketch his life; Gould’s own words draw the picture for the reader. Mitchell himself intercedes only to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle, the little bits of fact that are needed to truly understand the perspective of the speaker.

It is rare, these days, to find a magazine article that will indulge the subject by letting him speak at length. It is yet more rare to find a magazine article that will let the subject’s speech drive the direction of the piece. Mitchell lets those he interviews talk at length, and he quotes them at length — paragraph after paragraph of the words of the people about whom he is writing — and though those words the reader is able to get a full and wonderful mental image.

And thus we come to my second topic, why reading?

The power of words on paper, I think, lies in that mental image, and the ability of the reader to form his own understanding of the situation. In reading Mitchell, an image is created of the characters about whom he is writing, an image that is just as real as the one that Mitchell himself had. It may not be precisely the same image, but it would lose something if it were; a distance would be created between the reader and the experience if we had to imagine ourselves inside of Mitchell’s eyes, a distance that doesn’t exist if we simply need to imagine ourselves in our own eyes but looking upon a certain scene.

There is, certainly, something to be said for personal experience; for trying new things, going new places, conquering our own fears and expanding our horizons. But there is something, too, for allowing our imaginations to take us to those places and those situations without worrying too much about perfect fidelity. Words allow us to be somewhere else, to be someone else, because we are transformed by them (one hopes), and not because we become someone else. We are being altered, and gaining new understand, when we allow ourselves to be sucked in by someone’s prose.

It’s the question of the “best self”, and one way to approach it. We can seek to be our best selves through interaction with our own knowledge, and emotions, and the world around us, and that’s all well and good. But it’s not everything. There is some part of us that needs to understand how other people have approached the world, how they do approach the world, and what other people have discovered in their own quests to find their best selves, their ideal lives, and their perfect places and moments.

So why words on paper? Because it’s one more way to move toward that thing that we are all seeking: our ideal self, our own perfect existence, and the ability to understand how our own moments alter us.