Joseph Mitchell was a writer's writer and a terrible mystery sat at the terminus of his career. It was the kind of mystery he might have written about. For after writing about the forgotten and the plebian, the noble and the never-known, he suddenly stopped writing altogether, a victim, it seems, of his own perfection.
Mitchell got his start in the dailies, but he will be remembered for his work for the New Yorker, where he epitomized a style of writing which elevated the quotidiean to the stature of...well, the Quotidiean. By paying minute attention to the rhythms and especially the words of his subjects he created riveting accounts of fishermen, a boarded up hotel, an dank bar, rats, and anything else he could wrap his sanguine yet turbid mind around. Fish were a special preoccupation, along with livelihoods dredged from New York's waters. "Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to the Fulton Fish Market," he began one famous piece. He could evoke history so vividly that it seemed to sit as fresh before the reader as this morning's iced coffee.
Mitchell daily showed up at his office at the New Yorker for the past 30 years. He didn't publish a word.
But what a torrent preceded the drought!
There's no way to epitomize such a writer; he has to be read. But let us end with an extended quote, from a 1947 New Yorker article called Dragger Captain:
All the captains except Ellery ship the young, combative, bronzy blue-green [lobsters] to Fulton Market and keep the culls and jumbos for their own tables. (The culls are those that have recently molted and whose new shells have not yet hardened, and those with one or both claws snapped off in fights or while mating. The jumbos are the sluggish, barnacle-incrusted, stringy-meated giants–old ones, who can be captured only in nets, since they have grown too big to go through the mouths of traps;the record for the fleet is a cock lobster that weighted twenty-two pounds and was fit only for salads and Newburgs. Ellery does just the opposite. He selects the fiest he catches and sets them aside for himself and his crew and ships the rest. "Let the rich eat the culls," he says. The third man in a three-handed rfishing crew is supposed to do the cooking, but Ellery attends to most of it on the Eleanor; he is one of those who believe that to get a thing right you have to do it yourself. He is a matchless lobster chef. He boils and he broils and he makes lobster chowder, but most often he boils. He puts a tub of fresh sea water on the little coal stove in the cabin and heats it until it spits. He wraps his lobsters in seaweed and drops them in, half a dozen in a batch, and times them with a rusty alarm clock that hangs from a cup hook on the underside of a shelf aboce the stove; after exactly fifteen minutes he dips them out. He lets them cool slowly, so that the meat won't shrink and become flavorless and rubbery, the common condition of cold boiled lobsters in restaurants, and then he heaps them on the cracked ice in the ice bin in the forward fish hold. He and his crew–Frank, the mate, and Charlie, the third man–reach in and get a lobster any time they feel like it. They eat them standing on deck. They smack them against the rail to crack the shells, pluck out the tail and claw meat, and chuck the rest overboard. one fall day, out on the Hell Hole, the three of them ate fourteen in between meals.
Mitchell died May 24, age 87.