Up in the Old Hotel

Rating:
Summary: Mythical New York
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: an exquisite collection of classic essays
Review: Joseph Mitchell may be the finest, most fluid writer I have ever read.

His prose in "Up In The Old Hotel" is sandbaggingly wonderful; it is a remarkable blend of the journalistic eye for detail and the novelist's ability to turn a phrase. Mitchell's evocative description the famous pub in "McSorley's Wonderful Old Saloon" puts the reader in the bar with him. And in addition to describing places with attention and nuance, Mitchell is equally adept at bringing to life a cast of Old New York characters that range from a street preacher to a movie house ticket seller.
In the end, Mitchell's greatest achievement is that he evokes a time and place like few works of nonfiction ever do. Writings about New York City are everywhere, but good writings about the Apple aren't so easy to find. And along with A.J. Liebling's "The Telephone Booth Indian," "Up In The Old Hotel" is about as good as it gets.

Rating:
Summary: an exquisite collection of classic essays
Review: Joseph Mitchell may be the finest, most fluid writer I have ever read.

His prose in "Up In The Old Hotel" is sandbaggingly wonderful; it is a remarkable blend of the journalistic eye for detail and the novelist's ability to turn a phrase. Mitchell's evocative description the famous pub in "McSorley's Wonderful Old Saloon" puts the reader in the bar with him. And in addition to describing places with attention and nuance, Mitchell is equally adept at bringing to life a cast of Old New York characters that range from a street preacher to a movie house ticket seller.
In the end, Mitchell's greatest achievement is that he evokes a time and place like few works of nonfiction ever do. Writings about New York City are everywhere, but good writings about the Apple aren't so easy to find. And along with A.J. Liebling's "The Telephone Booth Indian," "Up In The Old Hotel" is about as good as it gets.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing, curious 20th-century viewpoint
Review: Joseph Mitchell was a masterful journalist and storyteller. These essays and stories are highly recommended.

Only one thing strikes me as odd upon re-reading this book: the only people he writes about are low-lifes, basically. Bums, drunks, and the Bowery are quintessential Mitchell topics. One imagines that he inherited this odd tendency from writers such as George Orwell, and that it was part of the unquestioned (and unquestionable) socialism which made the 20th century such an unpleasant time.

That is to say, it is at least arguable that a highly talented journalist and raconteur would seek to use his talent documenting people who have talent, intelligence, drive, and ambition: to describe to others how these people went about contributing to the world, and even changing it. Graham Robb, for example, has spent many years researching and reporting on three Frenchmen of literary genius: Balzac, Rimbaud, and Hugo. Joseph Mitchell would apparently never have dreamed of doing such a thing: his memorable characters inhabit the slums, and the restaurants and taverns in the slums.

As a result, this book may strike future generations as an extended exercise in slumming.

None of this can detract from Mitchell's excellence at his craft! This book is highly recommended!!

Rating:
Summary: A pleasant fascinating look at New York City
Review: Joseph Mitchell writes and I become the wiser. His first story on McSorley's Irish Pub prompted my visit to same last week when I visited NY. The visit made me pick up Mitchell's book and read it all over again. Every story is worthwhile despite subjects that would, at first, seem uninteresting. His profile of Joe Gould was one of the best pieces of non-fiction writing I can recall. If only a dozen guys in the world could write this way about real people.

Rating:
Summary: Magical! Mitchell weaves tapestries with words!!!
Review: Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel is by far the best book that I have read by an Amerian writer. His words paint pictures so vivid that I could smell the ale from the saloons, hear the laughter from the comrads, feel the salty sea air around Fulton's Fish Market, and tast the diner/coffeepot food. Mitchell succeeded in creating nothing less than magic in these stories. Each is so independant, but yet together they weave incredible tapestries. The New York that Mitchell portrays here is one that could only be viewed from these stories. The way that the people and places are captured will preserve their memories for ever in the minds of his readers. An excellent book, I personally recommend to every lover of the American Dream

Rating:
Summary: One of the best non-fiction writers of the 20th Century
Review: Mitchell might've been a genius. This is an incredible book filled with personalities and observations of the human condition that are simply unforgettable. His depictions of people and places are deeply felt, and New York is as alive as it ever was. A true classic. Astoundingly good.

Rating:
Summary: A Terrfic Look at NYC Characters in a not so long ago age!!
Review: Mr. Mitchell's lazer beam ray into just about every nook and cranny of Manhatten from around 1930 to the early 1960's, will make you wish you were his sidekick. Originally a Southerner,his reporting and stories makes us believe that outsiders, who are curious about everything in their new surroundings, may be the ones who know it best. And his empathy for even those who appear the lowest in the social stratum shows that there is something special in all of us. My personal favorite is hearing the police detective describe some of the shady tricks that some gypsies, ususally recently from Europe, were up to in getting certain naive homemakers to part with their money. Some con game!! But every yarn is true and enjoyable. Don't miss perhaps the most famous, about Joe Gould's Great Literary Work "In Progress."...All in all, a special voyage into the labyrinths of our greatest city!

Rating:
Summary: human comedy/mystery
Review: 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 New York he knew so well. But like Joe Gould, his masterwork does not appear to have been committed to paper.

There are many fine essays in the book, but you really should, at least, read these two Joe Gould profiles. They stand as masterpieces of the journalist's art on their own, but when Mitchell's subsequent problems are taken into account and the eerie parallels become clear, these stories become transcendent and genuinely haunting.

GRADE : A+

Rating:
Summary: human comedy/mystery
Review: 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 New York he knew so well. But like Joe Gould, his masterwork does not appear to have been committed to paper.

There are many fine essays in the book, but you really should, at least, read these two Joe Gould profiles. They stand as masterpieces of the journalist's art on their own, but when Mitchell's subsequent problems are taken into account and the eerie parallels become clear, these stories become transcendent and genuinely haunting.

GRADE : A+