Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel *****

I've known Up in the Old Hotel by reputation for many years and finally got around to reading it. It's a collection of pieces from The New Yorker in which Mitchell profiles colorful downtown New York characters; as the back cover has it, "saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old 'seafoodetarian." I procrastinated because I was afraid that its down-and-out milieu meant a romantic writing style akin to the Beats or Charles Bukowski, of which I am not a fan.

My apprehension was misplaced. Mitchell has a straightforward journalistic writing style, "curiosity without judgement." He presents each person in their own terms, as if they were bank presidents or celebrities for whom there is no question about the value of getting to know them.  "Even when Mitchell wrote about circus freaks or barroom types, there was no kitsch in his portraits." Collectively the pieces combine into a rich portrait of New York during the first half of the 20th century.

The first half of the book concentrates on the area around the Bowery during the 1930s when it was becoming seedy after losing its status as a theater district. After a brief foray into Mitchell's (less successful) fictional pieces, it turns its attention to the Fulton Fish Market and the then-dying culture of fisherman in New York Harbor. The last hundred pages revisit Joe Gould, one of the protagonists from the first section who was working on "An Oral History of Our Time."

Mitchell is a master at placing his subjects in their context. For instance, his piece about Commodore Dutch, a vagrant who considers the friends who give him money as constituents paying dues for membership in the Commodore Dutch Association, incidentally provides a view into the operations of Tammany Hall. Politics is also in the background of Mitchell's account of the lost traditions of "beefsteaks." He puts all exposition into the mouths of his characters, such as when he has Henry Lyons explain the mechanics of shad fishing from the deck of his barge to an audience that is occasionally distracted by the rhymes of schoolgirls jumping rope ashore. 

Writers would certainly benefit from studying and emulating Mitchell's approach. They would be greatly assisted in this task by the final piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," which provides something like a commentary track for the creation of the earlier profile "Professor Sea Gull" as well as giving substance to the idea that Mitchell identified with his subjects.

Susan Schaller, A Man Without Words ***

The titular Man Without Words is a deaf Mexican immigrant who reached adulthood without learning a language. The author meets him in a community college classroom where she is working as an ASL interpreter. She becomes intrigued by the question of how he understands the world and how she might bridge the yawning gap between them. She struggles, with no educational training, to find an effective way to communicate abstract concepts such as color and time.

I agree that these are fascinating questions, but was frustrated by Schaller's approach to them. Although she said she wanted to understand his worldview, she regularly implies that his languagelessness meant he couldn't have a worldview ("what would it be like to have to invent and project meaning onto the world without any information or clues, without any feedback?"). She imagines his mind as a blank slate despite the fact that he had survived as an agricultural worked for 10 years. Whenever she asserted that Ildefonso completely lacked a concept, say time, I thought, "He couldn't get along without some concept of time that is surely different from yours in interesting ways." Similarly, she believes that his lack of language means he can't communicate with people despite clear evidence to the contrary. I didn't feel like I could trust her interpretation of their interactions, and regretted that she didn't really try to plumb his point of view.

Imagining Ildefonso as a blank slate helps support Schaller's savior syndrome. "Compared to Ildefonso, I was a god"! In the latter chapters, she considers herself the sole advocate for languageless people and deaf children. Her author biography states that she is "currently revolutionizing education by using ASL storytelling."

Grace Paley, The Collected Stories ***

I came to Grace Paley's Collected Stories with high expectations. Paley has a reputation as "one of the great writers of voice of the last century." and that reputation comes almost entirely from her stories. I anticipated a deep sense of character and of place (mid-century Jewish Bronx).

Her stories are far more experimental than I expected. The subjects are mundane and realistic, but the style is knotty and literary. They strike me as being very much like poetry, not in the sense of being lyrical but in being concentrated and built around images rather than narrative. And like poetry, the stories require concentrated attention from the reader -- and often go over my head.

The prose is filled with unique perspectives and interesting turns of phrase, but alas I will forget them because the stories rarely kept my attention or built to a larger point.