The Bottom of the Harbor

Joseph Mitchell--The New Yorker fact writer, whose birth, in North Carolina, 100 years ago is being celebrated by the reissue of this 1959 collection--was deeply versed in classical literature and in the fiction of James Joyce, and he loved the populist death art of Posada. He didn't let any of them get in the way of his journalism, though: they fueled his imagination, but he didn't require that they fuel ours, too. Anyone who reads for the first time the six New York waterfront and river stories in "The Bottom of the Harbor" is given everything needed to absorb what Mitchell has to say on every level in the prose, itself. And such beautiful prose it is--full of rhythmic texture and patience, of lists as melodious as scat singing, and of knowledge worn so lightly it can only be felt. Sometimes, Mitchell's writing is so seamless that it doesn't even seem human: it is both very modern and evocatively biblical in that way. Mitchell was unquenchably curious about everything and everyone connected with the harbor, beginning with the hard-working fishermen and other workers, whom he presents with sympathy and matchless skill. And, yet, the human interest here is only one layer of his marvelous literary constructions. A strong recurring theme is the wasteful degradation of the environment in search of commercial gain. Another is the frailty of any individual life. Yet another is the poetry produced by the artless arrangement of names for fish or for wildflowers. And still another is the magic of stories, and of stories within stories, and of stories within stories within stories--the magic of suspended time. Although some of what Mitchell mourns has actually since improved, such as the ability of the Gowanus Canal to support underwater life, for the most part the New York harbor of 2008 has lost much of what he chronicled elegically 50 or 60 years ago. Even so, Mitchell's world--personal, individual, reflective, informed, invested with considerations of mortality shot through with graveyard wit--remains vital and real and so accessible that it would be dangerous to let high school, much less college students get their hands on the book. It might prompt a tragic optimism in them that it's possible to make a living as journalists by trying to write this way, a possibility as long gone as the once-thriving oyster beds around the shores of Manhattan. A note about years: the pieces in "The Bottom of the Harbor" are arranged according to their tones and subject matter to make the book a good reading experience, rather than according to the chronology of their first magazine publications. If you look at them from the earliest to the latest, though, you find that the early ones are written in the omniscent third person and then, as the years go on, the voice goes into the first person, increasingly confiding on the page. "Mr. Hunter's Grave," first published in The New Yorker in September 1956, and described on the jacket flap as "widely considered to

When Joseph Mitchell died in 1996 at the age of 87, the obituary that appeared in the New York Times, May 25, 1996, called him the "chronicler of the unsung and the unconventional." Mitchell began his career as a writer for The New York Herald Tribune in 1929. His career spanned the 1930s to the 1960s. He joined The New Yorker in 1938, and the pieces he contributed to that magazine have continued to gather momentum, taking on a life of their own. The six essays offered in this collection, a revised edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, were first published between 1944 and 1959. Mitchell came to New York from rural North Carolina, and quickly found a fascination with life in the city. His essays, a combination of oral history, natural history, and psychological observation, reflect his love for the people and the surroundings of New York, with a special emphasis on fishermen and others involved in life around the harbor. The first essay in the collection, "Up in the Old Hotel," is a kind of mystery--from a restaurant on the ground floor of a building near the Fulton Fish Market, Mitchell leads the reader to wonder along with him what the abandoned floors above may hold. It is this idea of mystery, things hidden from view, which permeate his stories. Whether he is describing the rat infestations on board ships in the harbor or the wild flowers growing in graveyards, his eye for detail is captivating. The narrative in each essay unfolds slowly, following a kind of wandering trajectory like the paths Mitchell takes to visit the individuals whose stories he relates with charm. The Bottom of the Harbor is a book to be enjoyed slowly. The characters and settings are vividly drawn. The historical detail will delight those readers with an interest in New York's past, and the oral histories will captivate those readers who have a penchant for dialogue and psychology. Armchair Interviews says: First-class essays all will enjoy.

The people that Joseph Mitchell introduces the reader to in these character sketches are representative of a New York that no longer exists and their stories are nostalgic and sentimental. But there is more here than that. Mitchell writes with a respect for his subjects regardless of their circumstances that reveals a true observer of life at work. Without a hint of judgementalism he takes the time to understand and the reader is rewarded and enriched as a result. This collection is particulary good and Up In The Old Hotel contains more of the same style. The latter book is more readily available although I found a copy of this at the Strand bookstore off Union Square.

He really does take you places. Places you may have been before, but in a time we'll never know again. As I'm reading, I'm careful to catch every word, afraid of missing out on the world he's revealing to me. This is the first I've ever read of Mitchell, but he's already one of my favorite authors. Journalism at its finest.

There are so many good things I could say about The Bottom of the Harbor. Mitchell's writing style is clean easy to read without lacking in depth and texture. The stories themselves are fascinating and off beat. But the best part of the book are the characters Mitchell writes about. They come alive through his portrayals and you will find yourself thinking about them, their thoughts, and their ways of life long after you stop reading.The book contains six separate stories, each about 40 (short) pages long, so you can absorb them at your own pace without losing the thread. Personally, I had a hard time putting the book down.