I'd never heard of the book UP IN THE OLD HOTEL. An on-line writer friend sent it to me. I was surprised. Was not expecting a gift from her. We are in an on-line writing group, but gifts aren't a norm. But, Barbara, that is her name, decided I needed this book.
The author is Joseph Mitchell. The book is a compilation of three of his books (all being collections of essays he wrote for "The New Yorker") from the decade before the Great Depression to the late l960's. The essays focus on the vivid but usually unseen people, places, and happenings in the underbelly of New York.
Both Barbara and I had lived for many years in New York. Both relished the city's raucous possibilities, glitz, glamour, raw honesty, ugly beauty, and its opportunity to let us be anonymous and to have the space to explore ourselves.
The book is a treasure. Mr. Mitchell has written about walking around ancient cemeteries in sparsely populated parts of Staten Isaland looking for wildflowers on graves whose markers have sunk into the soil; about the men who worked and walked, casually, on the dizzingly high steel girders that rose as Manhattan's skyline was built; and up-close looks at how the thirties economic crash affected the less affluent in the city.
In one of the Depression-era pieces, Mitchell writes about a couple who had been living for a year in a sewer "cave" in Central Park. A "good soul" local landlord discovered them and offered them a temporary rent-free apartment. Mitchell's editor at the "Herald Tribune" sent him to interview the couple.
He found them poor, down they said, to their last seven cents after buying two sandwiches and a carton of milk for lunch. Mitchell wrote the story and it ran on the newspaper's front cover. A deluge of letters and contributions as well as two job offers poured in.
Mitchell immediately headed to their apartment with the money, totaling $88.00, and the two job offers He encountered an angry landlord. "What'd you write about them for? I've had all sorts of people over here. Baskets of food, mail, money...it's insane." (Mitchell with the couple's permission had included their address.)
The landlord said,"You go in and see what you've created." Mitchell found the couple stone drunk, balloons floating around the ceiling. The woman said they reminded her of the circus. The man was smoking a big cigar and both were a long way from their cave misery .
When Mitchell tried to give them the money and the job offers, the woman became angry. "Why did you lie about us? You said we had only seven cents left. We had seventy cents. We have some pride." And despite more efforts to leave the money and job information, the woman grabbed her gin bottle and screamed for Mitchell to get the ** out of her apartment. He scooted and the bottle of gin flew over his head and broke on the wall.
"I laughed," he wrote. "And I hadn't been laughing very much. Reporting during the thirties was not much fun. Finding scene afer scene of deprivation, crisis and financial disaster. "So I bought them another bottle of gin and had it delivered" A couple of weeks later, curious, Michell dropped by the apartment and was told by the landlord that one night a chauffeur-drived Cadillac with an affluent looking passenger had come and scooped up the couple.
"I'm going to put them to work," the Caddy owner said, and they were off. Mitchell got this Good Samaritan's address and in about a year looked him up. "I'd like to know how the couple is doing" he asked. The man laughed. "Well, they worked real hard for a couple of months and then just took off. Said they were going back to the Park. To tell you the truth, I think living in the cave had soured them for inside living. Who knows?"
Mitchell writes what the reader does not expect to hear. About the bearded lady who describes the inside workings of the professional "freak show" life and introduces him to her fourth husband who she spends most of her time cooking elaborate dinners for when not at work or on a tour.
Then there was the Reverand Mr. James Jefferson Davis Hall, a self appointed
preacher to men and women in New York's Bowery. Although he was an ordained Episcopal priest, Hall chose to refer to himself as "having the gutter as my pulpit." Mitchell's account described how Rev. Hall's loud sermons which were delivered in an oddly disquieting voice had the power to make even nonbelievers, even Mr.Mitchell, feel just a little Uneasy.
According to Reveand Hall, he had gone into the Louisiana swamps for a year and practiced screaming invectives to snakes and invisible degenerates and prophesizing the tortures of hell.
Mr. Mitchell followed the Reverand around the city and noted how he was particuarly worried about the female drinkers.
"Free livers!" he would yell. "They've gone hog-proud and hog-wild, wearing britches, wearing uniforms, straining their joints for generations to come with high-heel shoes. They're turning into Indians. Their mouths smeared and smiddled and smoolded with paint. And their cheeks, and their fingernails And what color do they pick? Old Scratch's favorite. The mark of the beast."
Mitchell's work resonates the atmosphere of this city I love. His prose is compelling. It is crisp and able to create interesting and often heartwarming scenes without sentimentality. Mitchell wrote from his heart. His interviews resonate with his genuine interest in his subjects. He cared about the recipe for cocunut custard pie which the 87 year old Black man had whipped up for him to take home. He knows the people he interviews are part of the city's blood and that is part of him. There is no separation or sense of condescension.
It's the kind of writing I try to do. Making each piece, word, and characterization honest to the bone. (Published by Vantage books. $l6.00 paperback.) Claire Holcomb
