Up in the Old Hotel

I was so engrossed in this book that everything else stopped for me for about a week. Joseph Mitchell's language is easy and clever, always informational and so entertaining that you read every word instead of skipping. The sentences themselves are so beautifully crafted that you find yourself anticipating their rhythms in your head as if following along with a beautiful melody. Not only does he tell you more than you'll ever want to know on any subject he writes about, but he does it in such a respectful, compassionate way to the subject of his attention that you can't help but love him. My favorite story was "Up in the Old Hotel." Throughout this entire tale, I was entirely riveted waiting for the disclosure, excited in a way that only the very best movies elicit. When I'd read it, I laid the book down and thought about it for a long time. It was such a cliffhanger, and deeply interesting. Joseph Mitchell has definitely had his influence on other writers -- for instance, I seem to sense that Susan Orlean ("The Orchid Thief" -- another excellent book crammed full of interesting information and human insights) who also works for "The New Yorker" is a disciple of his. I will definitely be revisiting this book to experience his magical world, and I have it in my library of "don't lends".

One day, it would have to have been the very early 70's, we were in the car with my grandfather, driving through the Bowery, and he pointed out the window at one of the derelicts and casually mentioned : I went to school with him. School, in this case, was Harvard Law School, back when that still meant something. He said that the guy had fallen on hard times and had refused repeated offers of help, so we drove on and he went along his merry, though entirely demented, way. Had this occurred just a few years earlier, that bum might well have been Joe Gould, whom Joseph Mitchell immortalized in the pages of The New Yorker.Up in the Old Hotel is a collection of Mitchell's otherwise hard to find essays, in which he lovingly describes haunts like the Fulton Fish Market and McSorley's, one of the last bars in America to admit women, and profiles various fisherfolk and colorful denizens of New York City's nether regions, most famously, Joe Gould, the bohemian character with whom he is inevitably and eternally linked. Mitchell first wrote about Gould in 1942, in a piece called, Professor Sea Gull. Mitchell's great skill as a writer was to let his subjects seemingly speak for themselves, but to in fact render their words in compulsively readable fashion. This works particularly effectively with Joe Gould who was a fountain of words anyway. The story relates how Gould, a Harvard grad, subsists on practically no money (one of his tricks is to make a soup out of the ketchup in restaurants), his propensity for making a spectacle of himself as he starts flapping his arms and declaiming poetry in the "language" of sea gulls, and his life's work, the nine million word Oral History of Our Time. Within the pages of hundreds of composition books, of the kind we used to use in school, Gould claimed to be writing a history of the world in the form of the conversations of ordinary people as he heard them speaking every day ""What people say is history." It was this idea that beguiled Mitchell and his readers, made Gould into a minor celebrity, and ultimately formed a tragicomic link to Mitchell's own career.You see, Mitchell gradually came to suspect that Gould's magnum opus did not really exist. When, upon Gould's death, Mitchell went in search of the Oral History and could find only a few garbled fragments, he decided, with some qualms, to expose the hoax that he had such played a central role in propagating. The result was the elegaiac Joe Gould's Secret which was written in 1964 and proved to be the last piece Joseph Mitchell ever published. For the next thirty years he showed up at The New Yorker every day, went into his office and seemed to work, but never produced a word. He became legendary for his "writer's block," a staple figure in the many novels featuring a New Yorker like magazine, such as Bright Lights, Big City. Rumor had it that he was emulating his hero James Joyce and writing a Ulysses-type novel set in the Ne

Yes, as the other reviewers have already noted, it's true that Mitchell captures a sense of place and character as well as any writer working today, but the real reason to buy this book is the opportunity it will give you to revel in the rhythm of some of the most hynpotic sentences you will ever read by an American writer. If you think I'm exaggerating, then just open the book to a piece called "The Rivermen" (pg 574) and read the opening paragraph, in which Mitchell describes the Hudson River and his sighting of a sturgeon: " ... it rose twice, and cleared the water both times, and I plainly saw its bristly snout and its shiny little eyes and its white belly and its glistening, greenish-yellow, bony-plated, crocodilian back and sides, and it was a spooky sight." If you love sentences like this, get this book. I've been teaching college composition for a dozen years, and can think of no better model for clean, elegant prose.

Joseph Mitchell may be the best writer ever to have worked on the 'New Yorker' staff (the other contenders would include Edmund Wilson and A. J. Liebling). Every story in this long book is worth reading, and re-reading; the later pieces, from 'The Bottom of the Harbour' and especially 'Joe Gould's Secret' are tours-de-force of reporting. Mitchell invests his characters with so much life that they take on almost mythical proportions, without ever sacrificing their humanity. Although Mitchell often chose to write about people on the margins of society -- a homeless beggar like Joe Gould, a bearded lady, the hard-drinking Hugh Flood -- he never did so in a patronising manner. He admires these people not because of their struggles or hard lives, but despite them: he sees them, and makes us see them, as fellow human beings, not social welfare cases. Mitchell freely admits that listening to Joe Gould was a strain, and that Gould could be, like people who own houses and property and know where their next meal is coming from, selfish and mean-spirited; far from making Gould unattractive, this serves to make him come alive - homeless people don't become plaster saints, and it's silly to pretend otherwise. A key component in these stories is Mitchell's own persona, which is much like his prose style: quiet, unassertive, but immensely attractive. It is a great pity that, for whatever reason, Mitchell fell silent for the last thirty years of his life; but any sadness can be assuaged by dipping back into 'Up in the Old Hotel', where Mitchell's brilliant handling of detail and character -- and his shapely way with the structure of a profile, always dovetailing to a perfect close -- can be sampled time and again.

While strolling in Soho, a friend dragged me by the ear into a small bookshop, bought this book for me and told me I had to read it. This kind of situation seldom works out for the best -- so many people have pressed mediocre books into my hands over the years, and I have slogged through them out of guilt. This volume hooked me from the start -- I very nearly missed by plane back home that day, as I became so deeply engrossed in it. Mitchell somehow managed to hold on to a wide-eyed wonder and appreciation for all things human throughout his long life. To read this book is to understand that below the surface of things -- old abandoned hotels, the oysters on one's plate, the raving lunatic on the street corner -- is a complex, moving, eloquent, fascinating story, available to anyone who would invest the necessary time, effort and love to extract it. Few of us can summon the necessary energy, but Mitchell could. I can't think of anyone who would fail to be interested in these stories, but New Yorkers past and present should, in particular, find this book fascinating.