The Lost World of Joseph Mitchell

In times past, people like Joseph Mitchell and Alfred Kazin, young men in an exciting city, could walk the streets and probe the neighborhoods of their fair metropolis discovering the characters, the disparate worlds of 20^th century New York and not get mugged, stabbed or beaten, but return with stories to beguile readers even in this new century in this very different world.  Those were the days.

Kazin was a critic, an intellectual American force.  His forays were side trips, alternate excursions between essays about literature and writers and art in America.  He walked because he had to think; one act precipitated another.  His feet kept moving because he had somewhere to be (the public library, where he wrote some of his early work), all the while pondering the words and texts he wrote about inside out and back again.

Joseph Mitchell came to writing and walking from the direction of journalism on a beeline into Manhattan.  A product of the farming life in North Carolina, Mitchell arrived in New York on the eve of the Great Depression and found work at the New York Herald Tribune and later, the New York World-Telegram before landing at The New Yorker under legendary editor Harold Ross.  He received some sage advice from one of his editors that “To really learn a city quickly…a reporter should live close to the areas he’s covering.  And he should walk, constantly…it’s vital to walk and take in as much as you can.”  The story is recounted in Thomas Kunkel’s excellent new biography of Mitchell, Man In Profile:  Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (Random House, 2015).  Mitchell took that advice to the fullest, and although the world and the man are mostly gone now, we revel in the stories and use them as evidence of what journalism once was in this American life.

His stories and characters are legendary:

Joe Gould and his mythical An Oral History of Our Time; the denizens of Old McSorley’s Saloon; his tales of the old Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan; and the assorted circus performers, gypsies and other street characters that made their way into print through Mitchell’s typewriter.

Kunkel takes us through the streets in Mitchell’s shadow, and we learn the behind-the-scenes stories of stories, a treasure trove of insight into the life of New York through wars and peace and world events.  Mitchell’s portrait of that world was in miniature and found on the street, and as Kunkel recounts, his profiles and stories were the result of hard work with Mitchell sometimes filing several pieces a day when he worked for the newspapers.  Mitchell even made the weather a story, writing an impressive set of descriptive pieces about a “particularly oppressive heat wave that had the city in its grip.”

Mitchell’s writing has a nostalgic tone, a kind of melancholy strain that permeates the most effective evocation of a time past.  His work has a lyrical sadness that Kunkel says is simply part of who Mitchell was, an observer, a celebrator of street life and people.  One of the more revealing aspects of this biography is not the well-known writer’s block Mitchell suffered from 1964 until his death, but his penchant for utilizing fictional elements within his journalism.  Any student of The New Yorker lore knows of Mitchell’s daily routine after 1964 of going to the office, closing the door, and typing away only to emerge in the afternoon with nothing to show for his efforts, at least nothing to publish.  Kunkel addresses this.  He tells us that Mitchell, always a meticulous perfectionist, simply was never satisfied with anything to consider it finished and publishable.  There were fragments left behind:  at least three major chunks of a memoir have been published in The New Yorker in recent years, and they are well worth the reading, but they also leave a reader desperately wishing he had finished.  One section in particular just ends, almost in mid-sentence, leaving the reader hanging.

What Kunkel does in his biography, though, is fully air out and discuss the fictional elements in Mitchell’s work, the composite characters, the imagined dialogue and scenes.  Joseph Mitchell was doing so-called New Journalism before practitioners of the craft, like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson arrived on the scene.  Kunkel says that Mitchell was too much of a perfectionist to simply make things up.  He grounded “his stories in authoritative research, and lots of it.”  He goes on to say that “Mitchell’s main tools were the reporter’s classic ones—strong legs, acute observation, and unparalleled listening skills, not to mention the patience to engage in serial interview conversations with his subjects.”  Harold Ross encouraged Mitchell in his shaping of the story using fictional techniques, and knew full well when his writer was compositing characters or recounting long paragraphs of monologue from several conversations.  Undoubtedly, Kunkel asserts, this kind of fudging would not go on in journalism now, but in the dry, camera-captured stories of today, something is missing, some human truth that Mitchell managed to capture with his innovative technique.  The camera does not lie, but it also tells us a sterile story.  Mitchell’s work brims with life and grit and real world color.

Kunkel cites a letter from editor Don Frank to Mitchell as they wrestled with publishing an anthology of his writing.  In it, Frank quotes Eudora Welty on Walker Percy:  “only a judicious portion of this truth is the factual kind; much of it is truth about human nature, and more of it is spiritual.”  More than anything, this sums up Mitchell’s work.  He captured the truth even when using fictional tools to get there.

When his beloved wife, Therese passed before him, Mitchell’s later years were difficult as he battled depression and cancer.  Kunkel writes that in his final days, Mitchell told his family “There was so much I still wanted to do.”  He died on May 24, 1996, and with him, an era of journalism came to a close.  In the waning pages of his biography, Kunkel provides a melancholy image of his subject at the end of his life.  “Then Mitchell, who throughout his life had found so much beauty and comfort in graveyards, was laid to rest in the Floyd Memorial Cemetery, next to Therese.  As he once wrote in his journal:  ‘An old man walking alone down a cemetery path, [you] can tell by the way he walks that he knows exactly where he is going:  among all these graves, he has a certain one in mind.’”

Thomas Kunkel writes eloquently about Joseph Mitchell throughout the book.  As with his previous, connected biography of Harold Ross, he brings to Mitchell’s life story a clear-eyed yet elegiac tone that suits his subject’s writing style and oeuvre.  For students of journalism and American life in the 20^th century, this is an excellent snapshot of an era long gone, but still mourned.

For Joseph Mitchell’s work, check out the following books:

Up In The Old Hotel (Vintage, 1993)

My Ears Are Bent (Vintage, 2008)

Story

Col. Charles E. Shelton

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”  Gustave Flaubert

In the early days of the Vietnam War, Charles Shelton, was shot down over Laos while taking reconnaissance photographs of Viet Cong and Laotian military POW camps on the shared border between the two countries.  It was his thirty-third birthday.  His plane was armed only with cameras, but his fighter jet escorts saw his parachute deploy, watched him float to the earth and land in the steaming jungle, and they talked to him repeatedly over his radio throughout the night.  He spent three days hiding from Viet Cong and Laotian patrols before being captured and transported back to one of the very prisons he had been sent to photograph.  Over the next years, he was tortured and beaten and robbed of his freedom.  In return, he killed three Viet Cong interrogators with a folding chair while he was locked in chains.  He attempted to escape numerous times.  He refused to be beaten into giving information, to the point that his captors were so afraid of him that they put him in the ground in a coffin-sized space with steel bars on top.  He was continuously guarded in this confined space by two soldiers with machine guns over the span of several years.

Back in the world, his wife, Marian Shelton, refused to give up the search for her husband.  She petitioned congress, the president, and military leaders.  She interviewed men who escaped or were released from the same prison where she suspected Charles was held.  She requested classified documents through the Freedom of Information Act.  She also continued to raise their five children alone, never losing faith that her husband would one day return.

Over the years, there were sightings of him:  in other military prisons, in China, in a number of Viet Cong strongholds.  During his captivity, Charles was promoted to the rank of colonel.  He did not appear when Vietnam exchanged the final POWs in the 1970s, when the official word was that all prisoners had been returned.  One report Marian received on her husband was that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with the Vietnamese to pay a ransom for the return of certain high ranking military men still held captive, including Charles Shelton.  When the time came to pay, Nixon and Kissinger were embarrassed by the fact that the Pentagon had announced that all U.S. service men had already been returned, either alive or dead.  Because they did not want to appear to be liars, they reneged on their deal and the Vietnamese sold the remaining soldiers to China.  Marian still would not give up.  She traveled illegally to Laos and Vietnam to examine for herself the prisons where her husband was allegedly held captive for all those years.  She fought and fought, often in the deepest, darkest despair, holding out that her husband or his remains would be found.

President Ronald Reagan mounted a rescue attempt in the 1980s.  Supposedly, the covert operation involved a group of Hmong tribesmen in the region who managed to find Charles and another well-known prisoner, David Hrdlicka, and secret them out into the jungle to rendezvous with American forces.  Along the way, an enemy patrol happened upon the rescue attempt and Charles and Hrdlicka were forced to play as if they were captives of the Hmong.  The tribe claimed they had found the two soldiers wandering in the jungle and were returning them to the prison.  The operation failed.  In the end, President Reagan promised Marian that Charles’ case would remain open as a symbol for all the American soldiers who were lost and never returned during that awful war.

The last known sighting of Charles Shelton was in the late 1980s.  He would have been at that time more than twenty years in captivity.  Reports from CIA operatives and other agents in Vietnam and China said he was now a toothless old man, still being held prisoner, teaching English in China.  Marian continued her fight to find her husband, or to bring home his remains.  Her children grew up.  One became a Jesuit priest, another an actor.  In a strange irony, John Shelton, the actor, played his father in an episode of the television program Unsolved Mysteries.

In a tragic denouement to the story, Marian Shelton, in despair over never finding her husband after three decades of battling with the United States government and the governments of Vietnam and Laos, went out in her backyard in 1990 and shot herself.  She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, one of the few civilians given such an honor.  The now adult children decided they had enough of a war that took both their parents, and asked the American government to declare Charles dead.  An empty tomb marked with his name is next to Marian’s grave at Arlington.

The narrative of us is constantly disappearing, yet it is also constantly renewed.  New stories form as older ones die away.  We die twice, once when we physically die, and a second time when everyone alive who remembers us dies.  Few of us will have the immortality of a Shakespeare.  Therefore, human culture always needs the storytellers, the documentarians, to tell the world the stories of the past because the past is always telling us what the present means and what the future might hold.  The language of narrative and the writers of stories are imperative to the world and human society.  A culture locked in amnesia is a culture destined to die sooner rather than later.

It is exactly because of these limitations of life—the paradox of human beings:  how do we live in a world where we are destined to die?—that makes writing so important.  The wise human being knows the lyrical melancholy of this life, the impermanence and suffering outlined and accepted as tenets of human culture within, to cite one example, Buddhism.  Job in the Bible is another example of the human being beset upon by the forces of the world and existence.  Like him, we face trials every day.  We are challenged every day.  We must rise up, like a phoenix from the ashes of the past to renew and live this new era.  We live the cycle of seasons from the moment we rise in spring to when we lay ourselves down in the fall of the year and transcend into the dead of winter.  All is cyclical; that is the way of this world.  We must jump in and do what we can, where we are, with what we have.  That is my model as a writer—tell the best story I can, as truthful and prescient as possible with the tools I am given.

Why is this need to tell the story so critical?  Ultimately, telling the story is to invite healing.  Often, the story festers like an infected wound and the storyteller, by opening it up to the community, drains the wound and cleans it out so that healing can begin.  This is apparent in the recent wave of shootings of black men by police officers.  The community is festering with unrest, with discrimination, with hatred and bigotry.  Only through story—both sides of the story—told with objectivity and equality, can the community begin to heal.  Understanding is key because fear of the “other” only breeds hatred and violence.  And the “other” is really us.  We attempt to distance ourselves with words and categories and racial language, but we are all human.

In the realm of writing as an art, I am a witness.  I bear witness to injustice and I tell the story.  I bear witness to discrimination, to heartbreak, to the ravages of disease, to the loneliness of the individual.  I document the pain, suffering and impermanence, not so that it will end, because it will not, but to help others recognize their own challenges in the lives of others.  I bear witness to the fact that no person stands alone—we must die alone, but we are in concert with others who have crossed over before us.  Dying is not unique; we all die, and in that, we seek comfort.  This life is not the end, but a stage in a longer existence stretching over the horizon to infinity.  All of us are a part of the Over-soul, the Atman so revered in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and adapted in nineteenth century America by the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.  We carry a piece of the soul of humanity, all of us interconnected.  However, because we all die, because we all share similar experiences and stories, does not mean we are expendable or lack uniqueness, or that our stories do not deserve the telling.

All acts are spiritual.  All art is spiritual.  The corporeal part—the physical book, the painting on the wall, the cellist on stage—these are things we can feel (and read), see and hear.  Art appeals to the five senses, certainly, but it also raises the human spirit.  We are reminded by art of the ethereal beauty of being alive.  The Spirit moves through human beings; it embodies and lives within the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen, the musician’s notes on the staves.  It is the human being who brings the Spirit out into the world.  It is through art and culture, language and experience, that we transcend our base nature.  It is how we deal with sorrow and joy, the tragedy and exhilaration, of living day to day.

In the end, there is no more powerful attraction than the words, “Let me tell you a story…”  It is a magical incantation that summons the ghosts of the past and the dreams not yet realized.  It is the story of a family who waits across the years for a father to return home.  And the story must be told.

The Shelton Family today

Aggiornamento

The sky is the most amazing cerulean blue.  Families lounge on blankets listening to the lyrical passions of the Mariachi music.  There is the flash of color and brilliant white of the Ballet Folklorico dancers.  Away from the stage, children create chalk designs on the sidewalk leading to the mansion, a place steeped in the history of El Pueblo de Los Angeles.  There is the smell of tacos in the air, a gustatory salute to the street cuisine of the city.  Through a shaded door into a quiet room, pilgrims make their way in reflective splendor around a labyrinth drawn on a cloth and laid out on the floor.  Back out in the sunlight, there are voices and languages under a canopy of trees.  In the distance is the dome of St. Vincent de Paul’s Church, a Los Angeles cultural monument and the second Roman Catholic house of worship to be consecrated in the city.  On this perfect spring day, every act is a prayer, every word contains a universe of resonance across the City of Angels.

The Catholics of the city have come to the Doheny campus of Mount Saint Mary’s University to conclude a three-year series of symposia entitled Vatican II@50, co-sponsored by Loyola Marymount University.  The Second Vatican Council was convened a half century ago by Pope John XXIII and over the course of three years, from 1962-1965, revolutionized the Church in modern times.  Vatican II is easily the most important event in the Catholic Church in the 20^th century.  It was there in those convocations, synods and discussions that the Church welcomed a new age.  The Council was so significant, so far reaching and all inclusive, that the ramifications are still being felt and its missives and documents are still being studied and implemented.

At this event, called Aggiornamento!, the celebration of culture took center stage.  In Los Angeles, Catholic culture is Latino/a culture because the city, since its formal inception in 1781, has been decidedly Hispanic.  However, Catholic Los Angeles includes Filipino, Vietnamese, Irish, and many other ethnicities and cultures.  The Catholic Church encompasses the world, and the so-called Third World now accounts for a large percentage of new Catholics each year.  It is significant that Pope Francis hails from South America, the first pope to originate from somewhere other than Europe in more than 1200 years.

At the Doheny campus, all cultures had representation, but there was no doubt the assembled group had a strong Latino flavor like the city itself.  It was also readily apparent that culture, fellowship, and a celebration of differences took precedence over dogma or catechesis.  Aggiornamento! was all about celebrating faith community across racial and economic lines.

In all of this spring weather and celebration, my thoughts wandered to the darker shades of the labyrinth that is the journey of faith.  Like life, it is often difficult to chart a course through the minefields of clashing belief systems and points-of-view.  Instead, we must follow the turns and twists of fortune and fate.  I wonder if the bishops and cardinals, the theologians and scholars gathered at that sacred Council ever imagined the self-proclaimed Islamic State as they drafted the document “Nostra Aetate,” or “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.”  It is much the same as wondering if the founding fathers of America envisioned school shootings when writing the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Council wrote regarding other faiths, including Muslims, that “The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions.”  They echoed Justin Martyr in the belief that all religions “reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”  The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could hardly be considered “enlightened” when they behead non-believers like journalist and Catholic James Foley, to cite just one of their many victims we see being slaughtered or burned to death on the evening news.

Jim Yardley, writing in The New York Times on February 21, 2015, said that “Mr. Foley’s death in Syria transformed him into a symbol of faith under the most brutal of conditions.”  Allegedly and under great duress, Foley converted to Islam in an attempt to save himself from beheading.  However, James Martin, S.J., editor at America, “expressed doubts about the genuineness of his conversion.”  Those captured and imprisoned with Foley also said they questioned the conversion.  Some said he engaged his captors in a discussion of Islam and his own Catholic faith.  He often read the Quran and seemed to relish his prayer sessions five times each day.  His mother said he was always interested in studying other faiths, “but she still strongly believes that her son died a Christian and that his conversion was an act of practicality.”

Did the convocation at the Vatican during those years of discussion and change ever envision this kind of self-proclaimed jihad, or holy war from their Muslim brethren?  The participants in Vatican II probably had the historical Catholic persecution of Muslims in mind, namely the Crusades and were attempting to find a way to draft an apology for past crimes and forge a new direction for Catholic-Muslim relations.  “Although in the course of the centuries many quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems,” commentators write, “this most sacred Synod urges all to forget the past and to strive sincerely for mutual understanding.”  However, in a footnote, they assert that there were Muslim Crusades as well.  “Those were ideological wars,” they wrote.  “This Council, as it also makes clear in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, wants to disassociate itself from war.”

It would seem now that the world has a war with Islam, and that no disassociation is possible.  The group of radical Muslims presents a threat not just to Catholics, Jews and other religions and ethnicities, but to the world.  Even Pope Francis has called for an end to the persecution of Christians in the region.  ISIS continues to grow, and their atrocities become even more bloody and heinous with each passing week.  This is difficult to reconcile with lines in the Vatican II document that state:  “Upon the Moslems, too, the Church looks with esteem.”  These radical Islamists fly in the face of the idea that “On behalf of all mankind, let them make common cause of safeguarding and fostering social justice, moral values, peace, and freedom.”

These were my thoughts on this beautiful early spring day in Los Angeles.  There is a darkness on the horizon, one that is fraught with danger and uncertainty, that overshadows how we must appreciate other cultures and other faiths as stated in the documents from that convocation fifty years ago.  The prescient nature of the Second Vatican Council documents has presented many challenges to Catholics around the globe.  How do we greet the modern world using precepts and teachings that go back 2000 years to a simple carpenter’s son who wandered the desert where modern radicals now blow themselves up in colossal acts of self-immolation?  How do we live in a world where an offer of an olive branch or a call to recognize a “ray of truth” in another faith results in the most brutal of murders?

In the self-proclaimed Islamic State, there is nothing “true or holy.”  In fact, all humanity and compassion have evaporated in the heat from the fire of self-righteous hate and bigotry.  The day of reckoning is here; the world must respond against such atrocities.

More than anything, the situation indicates that faith is a living thing, always changing in response to a transitory and often brutal world.  Faith teaches many lessons in the face of human and worldly imperfection.  Catholics celebrating an opening of doors to the modern world fifty years ago know that old habits die hard and new challenges are always ahead.  This is what the participants in Vatican II understood.  We must accept challenges to our beliefs and continue forge on.  We must try to find the Imago dei in the faces we meet, even those who appear on CNN each evening holding a knife to the throat of a helpless and bound victim.  Yes, those faces continue to attack the world with explosives, guns, knives and murderous intent, but if we are to follow the lessons of Christ, we must still reach out to embrace them, and that might prove to be too much of a challenge this time.

So on this beautiful day near downtown Los Angeles, with the Mariachi’s guitars and the trumpets and the dome of St. Vincent’s, the faithful gather to celebrate, to pray, and to hope, against all evidence to the contrary, for a better world ahead.

Bibliography

 

Abbott, Walter M., Joseph Gallagher, eds. The Documents of Vatican II With Notes and Comments by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Authorities. Piscataway, NJ: New Century Publishers, Inc., 1966.

Yardley, Jim. “Debating a Change of Faith Under Brutal Captivity.” The New York Times. New York, NY: The New York Times Co., 21 February, 2015. p. A6.

Caterpillar To Butterfly

A Catholic Prayer for the Dead:

God our Father,

Your power brings us to birth

Your providence guides our lives

And by your command we return to dust.

Lord, those who die still live in your presence

Their lives change but do not end

I pray in hope for my family, relatives and friends

And for all the dead known to you alone.

In company with Christ

Who died and now lives

May they rejoice in your kingdom

Where all our tears are wiped away.

Unite us together again in one family

To sing your praise forever and ever.

Amen.

Do we cease to exist when we die, or are we changed into another form?  Do we move from this earthly dimension into another dimension, one regulated by science and physics rather than religion and faith?

Is the pattern reflected in nature—caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly?

In some ways, though, the caterpillar is inherent within the butterfly.  But from another point of view, it is difficult to see the caterpillar within the newly emerged butterfly.

This corresponds to us not being able to see and interact with those who have died.  They seem lost to us, yet we feel their presence, real or imagined, sometimes for the remainder of our lives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the Over-soul, the entire fabric of life that shrouds the world, a tiny piece of which is given to us when we are born.  When we die, our piece rejoins the entire soul of existence.  Therefore, we are all, every living thing, part and parcel of this Over-soul.  Hindus call this atman, a Sanskrit word meaning breath or essence.

Although we cannot physically touch those who are gone, we can access them because they are a part of this larger soul of existence.  We feel their presence because their breath remains, their essence continues, long after the physical decay of this earthly vessel we call a body.

And so, we go on.