Putting aside a recent dip into life’s and the electronic world’s bumpy lessons (illusive wifi presence) that mauled a useful column into unintelligible mush, ventures into new territory are exciting, metamorphosing experiences. But such change demands both unwavering and lively attention. Thus the Zen Master Ikkyu’s brusk command when asked by a student for “a maxim of highest wisdom.” Ikkyu slashed his brush across his tablet: “Attention. attention, attention!”
This spring two lessons regarding Ikkyu’s wisdom arrived: In The New Yorker, a reminder from a friend passing on his way to Argentina, and in this newspaper.
The New Yorker magazine April 27 published a penetrating piece on one of its well-known writers, Joseph Mitchell. He was a staff writer for the magazine from 1938 until his death in 1996. One of his books was a favorite of Manhattan bar aficionados. It is an attractive, lively long-run history of the McSorley’s Ale House, a day-time favorite of my friends and my wife and I, and located not far not far from where we lived in Manhattan. Simply because of its impressively long history, it was a writer’s dream.
Located at 15 E. 7th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues) it is said to be New York’s oldest bar. It’s been serving light and dark McSorely’s Ale for 161 years (meaning since 1854). The idea of my friends was to get there before those with conventional jobs ended their day and started coming in. Old timers would start their move to bar-room areas where they and their friends had somewhat of a buffer from “outsiders.”
Abraham Lincoln visited there after giving his famous Cooper Union address in 1860. The chair which he is said to have used is kept behind the bar. Other notable patrons: Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Lou Gherig and Woody Guthrie. Among the notable items ornamenting the cluttered walls is a pair of boots that Joe Kennedy received as a trophy from his bootlegging days, and a pair of Harry Houdini’s handcuffs.
The floor is covered in sawdust, and mugs of ale are sold by the pair – not one at a time.
Women weren’t allowed in until a “controversial” 1970 Supreme Court case. But I took one of my wife’s then nubile sisters to McSorely’s and eventually stood guard at the bathroom door for her. A ladies room was finally squeezed into place in 1986.
In other words, with more than a century’s existence combined with New York’s packed “downtown” history, McSorley’s was a writer’s dream of material, particularly for a writer from a magazine called “The New Yorker.”
Joseph Mitchell was a writer’s writer – and revered among his fellow scribblers. His professional influence still abides: “Blocks of foursquare declarative sentences, a patient layering of detail, passages of precisely rendered dialogue, a tone of quiet amusement.” These are still recognizable in the work of New Yorker writers such Ian Frazier, Mark Singer and Alee Wilkinson.
Mitchell called the affect “wild exactitude,” a style that’s hard to describe without (space-consuming) quotations. He dressed like a businessman and tended to keep a businessman’s hours: Nine to to six, turning out two and three features a day.
But then, imperceptibly to some, Mitchell’s characters began to resemble him – though readers, not knowing Mitchell, didn’t recognize this. But some New Yorker writers began to talk of this “coincidence’” Or was it something more permanent?. That and the fact that slowly his characters seemed to some to begin to resemble the author. Then in 1964, Mitchell not merely went into his office every work-day at nine in the morning and emerged at six in the afternoon. But a quite notable change was that no one heard any sounds of production – no typewriter clacking. And then it gradually became apparent that he wasn’t turning in his usual stack of work, a production count for which he was famous.
He was trying – unsuccessfully? – to wrestle with a writer’s greatest nightmare: writer’s block. He had hit a wall. And the subjects of his most recent work that had slowly, almost secretly become to resemble each other – and their author. Some reluctantly wondered if the characters in the stories that did rarely appear were being “made-up.”
Because of his early incandescent work and its influence on many of his cohorts, his employer never pressed him for new material. Yet most veteran writers tackled by this temptation, would have abandoned the office, to cultivate and mine new material, unfamiliar but revelatory characters. Certainly New York was overflowing with them. Mitchell stayed on at the New Yorker until his death in 1996.
Writer’s block: every word-slinger fears it. It attacks, usually, for no known reason. And thus it seems to have no right-at-hand cure. Having tons of very good background material, an attractive pile of knowledgeable research can prohibit getting blocked. That much stuff is too inviting, it simply looks too “useful” to leave ignored.
(This is the first of a two-part series.)