(2 of 3)
"THERE'S A SUBWAY HANDY"
If Dickens had returned 100 or 150 years later, he would have found little changed. Here the poor are not only among us but in front of us. Capitalism creates enormous inequalities; proximity makes them a daily encounter. A billionaire's wife, as she dashes from the front door of her Fifth Avenue penthouse to the waiting limo, is compelled to catch a glimpse of the homeless man asleep in his urine. This might explain New York's status as the most liberal of all cities, if it weren't that the barrage of need and squalor thickens the skin of its middle-class citizens — gives them "New York nerves." The poor in the subways become a species of performance art; the poor on the streets are no more than a peripheral piece of soot that our practiced eye automatically washes out.
Privilege in the suburbs is isolation from poverty: from the sight of it and thus from the minding of it. In a city like Los Angeles, the car is an isolating influence; I'm in my tank, I stare ahead, I am my own community; everyone else is just traffic. On a trip to L.A. a while back, I decided to see the Watts Towers, Simon Rodia's hand-hewn steel-and-wire spires. I was astonished to find it took an hour to drive there from Hollywood, and suddenly I realized that the Watts riots of 1965 must have seemed as remote to the average Angeleno as if they'd occurred in Santa Barbara. New York's riots, in Harlem the year before, took place a single A-train stop from midtown. The price of urban revolution here has always been one subway token. Or less: the jump of a turnstile.
New York, really, is its subway system. Since the system's inception a hundred years ago — a thrilling amalgam of civic ambition, engineering brilliance and heroic hard work — subways have been the arteries that get everyone everywhere, fast and relatively cheap. The system's decay in the 70s, when the graffiti vandals decorated nearly every car with artwork that screamed gaudy hell at passengers who were already frazzled enough, was an unmissable part of the city's decline into bankruptcy and violence. When the subways were cleaned up, people felt better; they could get to work rumpled but undefiled.
The subways also epitomized the density of New York living. This congestion — the traffic jam of ambitions, an accidental elbow in a clogged subway — creates Manhattan melodrama. It doesn't tell us we're all in this together. We're in it separately. But we do recognize that we are all in it. The knowledge of a shared destiny energizes and sustains many of us, enervates and defeats others. We may take as our model either Fiorella La Guardia, the Italian Jew whose verve and acuity raised New York out of a Depression ("Writing New York" includes a canny prcis of his work by master builder-destroyer Robert Moses), or the young copyist in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (also in "Writing New York") who, in a private depression of almost Gandhian defiance, kept telling his employer, "I would prefer not to."
Whether we are activists or passivists, the city is big enough to embrace us all, and all parts of us. It embraces multitudes, it contradicts itself; Central Park doesn't just have Woody Allen on the West Side and Mia Farrow on the East of all that mountain greenery, it has the Plaza Hotel on the South side and Harlem on the North. In his 1954 prose poem "Meditations in an Emergency," O'Hara celebrated this messy too-muchness: "One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes — I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."
This verse, each letter attached to a pike in a fence a couple hundred feet long, snakes through the yacht basin between the World Financial Center and the Hudson River. It withstood the blast of the WTC buildings two blocks away and is there to inspire strollers with the ingenuity of the poet who wrote it, the good sense of the bureaucrat who chose to display it and the impotence of the bombers who couldn't destroy it.
JOE MITCHELL'S SECRET
"It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and the bums."
— Joseph Mitchell in "My Ears Are Bent"
As Mitchell saw it, fear of the powerful made city editors cautious and newspapers the archives of lies. So after nine years at The World, the Herald-Tribune and the World-Telegram (newspapers mergers occurred as quickly and often as fatally as media mergers would later: by 1966 seven papers — the World, Telegram, Sun, Journal, America, Herald and Tribune — had briefly conflated into the World-Journal-Tribune), Mitchell left daily journalism for The New Yorker, where he stayed until his death in 1996. He also carved out his own beat: the nuts and the bums, the jetsam of the S/S Manhattan, the little people whose daily passage Jane Jacobs chronicled.
They are the stars of "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories", a collection of Mitchell's New Yorker pieces. We meet the ticket taker at a Bowery movie house, the Iroquois beam-climbers who helped build New York's skyscrapers, the bearded lady in a Times Square freak show, the denizens of a dozen raffish bars and seafood joints. In one booth at the Minetta Tavern is Joe Gould, Mitchell's most famous "creation" (Ian Holm played him in a movie, "Joe Gould's Secret," based on a Mitchell article and book), the Harvard-educated hobo who claimed to have compiled a History of the World. And everywhere are New York's oldest citizens: rats, rats by the millions, whose doings I will trace in another column, when I summon the nerve.
My favorite Mitchell character may be Philippa Duke Schuyler, a gifted child of nine, the daughter of a Negro journalist and a white writer. "Philippa reads Plutarch on train trips, eats steak raw, writes poems in honor of her dolls, plays poker, and is the composer of more than sixty pieces for the piano... She began composing before she was four, and she has been playing the piano in public, often for money, since she was six." It is a beguiling and touching sketch — the more so to those who know of Philippa's later life as a wanderer over four continents, a journalist and author (of five books), a just-short-of-brilliant concert pianist, a lecturer for the ultra-right John Birch Society and a lay missionary in Vietnam. On May 9, 1967, she died in a helicopter crash evacuating children and clergy from Hue to Da Nang. She was 36.
For bringing the lives of Philippa and Gould and hundreds of other New Yorkers to the pages of The New Yorker, Mitchell was rightly, if somewhat fulsomely, revered. The 1992 publication of "Up in the Old Hotel" was a career-defining event comparable to the 1978 issuing of John Cheever's stories. Newsweek said that Mitchell had created "what Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism." That's almost exactly wrong. Mitchell's prose didn't dazzle or force itself on the reader; it was a silent guide, as he was journalism's best listener. Indeed, as he matured he removed fancy metaphors and first-person interpolations from most of his work; the "I" disappeared, the "eye" took over.
I and eye take a stroll together in an earlier, just as valuable Mitchell collection, "My Ears Are Bent," first published in 1938 and reissued last year. For a young man just up from Robeson County, North Carolina, getting a job as a reporter was like being given instant citizenship papers in the anarchic republic of New York. Idealism is the first casualty. "I have seen six men electrocuted," he writes in the introduction to that first collection, "and once a young woman who had been stabbed in the neck died while I was trying to make her lie still, and one night I saw a white-haired cop with a kindly Irish face give a Negro thief the third degree, slowly tearing fresh bandages off wounds on the Negro's back..."
"THE BEST TALK IS ARTLESS"
I suspect that Mitchell's rural upbringing made some sights of the big city shocking (he wrote that New York "women are remarkably narcissistic"). I bet it also gave him an air of courtliness that helped him get people to talk — the kind he wanted to hear. "The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way the meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels." Here's Gill Holton, a Lenox Avenue gambler, predicting a Joe Louis victory over Max Baer: "When Mr. Baer stick his head out it's going to be touched. Like a man stick his head into the dumb waiter and a ice wagon fall on it."
Often, the talk his editors wanted was from big shots, businessmen promoting themselves or wallowing in rancor. Mitchell, a working populist, hated hearing from them and yearned for reprieve, parole into a city full of freaks and loan sharks and ferryboat captains, and girls in their summer dresses. "After interviewing one of those gentlemen you go down in the elevator and walk onto the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work; you feel that it would be better to cheat, lie, steal, stick up drugstores or stretch out dead drunk in the gutter than to end up like one of those industrial leaders with a face that looks like a bowl of cold oatmeal."