`The Best Talk is Artless'

Spending almost 30 years as a journalist and out of professional necessity talking and listening to thousands of strangers, often at the most desperate moments in their lives, and advancing the conversation to the point where they volunteer the insight or information you’ve been waiting for, constitutes the finest therapy money cannot buy. Most reporters, like most of us generally, start out moderately introverted. With time, they develop a professional extroversion, a form of self-confidence that permits them to encourage confidence in their sources. They don’t necessarily become gregarious, the life of the damn party, but they are no longer hobbled by shyness or timidity. Some, and I’m among them, acquire a taste for good conversation.

One of the great reporters, one of the few to transcend daily journalism and turn it into literature, was Joseph Mitchell, long of The New Yorker and best friend of the equally great A.J. Liebling. Seldom does a season pass without my return to them, sometimes for a fondly remembered passage, sometimes for all of, say, Old Mr. Flood. From them, and their confrere Whitney Balliett, I learned the art of the sentence. In the following excerpt from Mitchell’s My Ears Are Bent (1938), his first book, a selection of pre-New Yorker newspaper pieces, he writes:

“Do not get the idea, however, that I am outraged by ear-benders. The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W.C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. 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 meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.”

That’s the sort of therapy I was talking about. The humanity is obvious, but it never spills over into a self-congratulatory display of sensitivity. Humor undercuts what might otherwise be mistaken for folksy, proletariat-slumming romanticism, especially in a passage dating from the highly politicized nineteen-thirties. Mitchell and Liebling, not Strunk and White, shadowed me through my years as a newspaper reporter, and they still hover nearby. When Mitchell died in 1996, I wrote a memorial column for my newspaper in upstate New York. Here’s how it starts:

“I learned of Joseph Mitchell’s death in the kindest possible manner – from a fellow admirer of the great New Yorker writer.

“That was May 25, the day after Mitchell died in his beloved New York City at the age of 87. Afterward, numb and sad in a way that can only be assuaged by time, I drove my son to Lock 7 [of the Erie Canal] in Niskayuna, to watch the sun set on the river and to talk with the fishermen.

“Mitchell loved fishermen and life along the water, and inevitably I recalled the opening line from `Up in the Old Hotel,’ which always reminds me of Ishmael’s apologia for going to sea on the first page of Moby-Dick:

“`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.'”

And here’s the conclusion:

“Toward sunset at Lock 7, my son and I spoke with three Puerto Rican men who had been fishing and gabbing since 7 a.m. They’d caught buckets of fish, and returned them all to the Mohawk [River].

“My Spanish is shabby and their English was only slightly better, but one of the guys joked about opening a pescaderia – a fish market.

“Joe Mitchell lives.”

I was puzzled Sunday afternoon when I couldn’t find this column in my Mitchell file. I took a copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon from the shelf and there it was, tucked among the brown pages. A few days after the column appeared, I ran into the former editor of my newspaper, a funny, deeply cynical man, at a jazz club in town. He had retired before I joined the staff but we shared an enthusiasm for jazz, journalism and Italian cuisine. He had enjoyed the column and insisted I accept his copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Until then I had thought Buddy Otaviano’s reading consisted exclusively of paperback mysteries, but he loved Mitchell. Buddy died a few years later.

Joe Mitchell lives.