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Abstract
Joseph Mitchell (1908–1996) wrote about unusual New York people for The New Yorker. For journalists like Mitchell, a name identifies a “who,” an essential component of a news story even more central to a profile. For Mitchell, however, names are strangely significant: they are textual loci at which narratology, epistemology, and ontology enmesh. The balance of these categories and their mutual engagements are idiosyncratic and define Mitchell’s style. It is a style that proves how intellectually and emotionally powerful journalistic uses of names can be. A catalog of names confirms one’s knowledge of phenomena by reconstituting it narratively. Naming in narrative is a mode of knowing one’s experience. But maybe the stakes are higher: maybe names insist on the reality of the things named. Onomastic specificity underwrites our ontological confidence, but the ontological significance of names is never wholly persuasive, not even when justified within a narrative. Confronting its limitations, as Mitchell did, brings on melancholy. Joy and melancholy wrought of names are intimately related in Mitchell’s style and integral to it, as, after all, they are to living.
Notes on contributor
Michael Adams is Professor of English Language and Literature at Indiana University. He is editor (with R.D. Fulk and Laurel J. Brinton) of Studies in the History of the English Language VI: Evidence and Method in Histories of English (De Gruyter, 2014) and From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (OUP, 2011), as well as author (with Anne Curzan) of How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction 3/e (Pearson, 2012).
Notes
1 Mitchell’s supposed writer’s block is the stuff of legend and much explained. Renata Adler, another New Yorker writer, attributes it to the editorial regime of William Shawn: “The magazine’s ambivalence in precisely the matter of publication was remarkable. There began to be feeling that it was vulgar, perhaps morally wrong to write” (1999: 23). Rundus (Citation2005: 79–83) runs through a number of possible explanations, and Sims (Citation2007: 178–184), following Stanley Hyman, extends one of them, involving Joe Gould, the subject of two of Mitchell’s books. Rundus (Citation2005: 80) resists the claim that Mitchell stopped writing completely as overblown, and he was apparently writing his autobiography, or attempting to write it, towards the end of his life (Rundus, Citation2005: 71; see also Mitchell, Citation2013). Though I am not concerned here with Mitchell’s writer’s block per se, I do argue that Mitchell’s relationship to names and naming participated in the malaise that was both symptom and cause of that block.
2 An account of Mitchell’s status among writers would strain the compass of this article, but since Mitchell’s narrative uses of names and naming are significant in part because of his reputation, that status must not be overlooked. Rundus (Citation2005: 63–64) helpfully digests the epithetical views of a wide range of notable writers and critics, most of their names familiar to most readers of this article: “He was the angel of the odd or the imp of the perverse, the paragon of reporters, a national treasure, a buried treasure; he was the Manhattan Meistersinger [...] he was the best reporter in the country, the New Yorker’s finest reporter, the finest writer on the New Yorker, the New Yorker writer who set the standard [...] a formidable prose stylist and a master rhetorician, a reporter for all climes and seasons, an immortal [...] a measuring stick of journalistic integrity, the poet of the waterfront, our poet laureate of entropy, a very careful writer, an essential writer ...the greatest master of the English declarative sentence, the great artist-reporter of our century, the best writer in America.”
3 Gypsy and related forms used to designate the Romani people are clearly pejorative and should be avoided, but the cultural awakening that leads to that judgment had not yet occurred when Mitchell was writing the articles in question, and so he uses what was in the 1940s and 1950s the stylebook approved term. This was true, not only of Gypsy, but of the further diminishing, uncapitalized gypsy, which follows a pattern of typographical pejoration explained by Allen (1988). Though Roma is sometimes used now to designate the people in question, it also — according to some — has pejorative connotations, and so the preferred form is Romani, for both language and people, both noun and adjective.
4 Sims (Citation2008: 102–103) lists names of writers and works who had influenced Mitchell. He may have transcribed the list just as it was spoken by Mitchell, though he only says, after interrupting it, “The list of models goes on.” We have no idea whether the list is extracted by Sims from a larger, discursively more varied context, or whether Mitchell in fact reeled off yet another list in conversation, like that of the race horses. Referring to Sims, however, Rogers (Citation2009: 47/a) quotes Mitchell as saying in that interview, “‘We [he and A.J. Liebling] talked a lot about books but not our own writing. We preferred to talk about how Stendhal did it,’” and follows it with this claim: “He [i.e., Mitchell] then added a long list of literary models he admired.” This may be merely a misreading of Sims’ account, but if so it is nonetheless telling: anyone who admires Mitchell, who knows Mitchell’s style, expects him to do some reeling, so Rogers’ may be a true misreading. As Aloff (Citation1993: 18/d) puts it, in any one of Mitchell’s stories, “[t]here will probably be at least one Joycean catalogue of lingo or proper names.” Joyce, of course, is in the list of influences reported by Sims.
5 A reader might suppose that I am cherry-picking examples and perhaps exaggerating a peripheral feature of Mitchell’s style into a central one. In fact, Mitchell’s work is rife with the sort of naming illustrated in the examples chosen for the main text of this article. A quick survey of Up in the Old Hotel yields, for instance, a large number of lists of names (Mitchell, Citation1993: 6, 53, 55, 59, 86, 103, 106, 119, 120, 125, 134–135, 178, 221, 222, 253, 254, 269, 272, 281, 301, 305, 358, 369, 386, 392, 397, 405, 412, 418–419, 465, 467, 470, 471, 504, 506, 518, 521, 537, 538, 542, 578, 580, 585, 614, 633, 637, 648, 649, 667, and 677). Every list cited here has at least three items. Contiguous pages listed separately contain distinct lists. I may well have missed some lists along the way. Some lists are supplied by the narrator; others are provided by subjects of the articles, but selected for the narrative by the narrator, so, in terms of narrative, attributable to him (see n. 6). Some gaps between page numbers listed above are filled by quotations in the main text of this article. By the count in this note, there are 50 lists, 37 items in the book’s table of contents — of quite various lengths — covering 716 pages in total. But the lists listed here barely express Mitchell’s onomastic interests: they cover personal names, place names, and titles of songs, etc., but not folk taxonomy or genealogies, nor yet names appreciated for their sound or color, nicknames, or the act of naming. “The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County” (1939) does not contain any lists, but it does focus on Messrs. Catfish Giddy and Spuddy Ransom, as well as Uncle Bowleg, which is probably, when it comes to names, all that needs to be said.
6 In the early journalism, too, one notices tendencies in Mitchell’s style — the examples cited here are neither unusual nor isolated in My Ears Are Bent; see Mitchell (Citation2001: 31, 122, 123, and 125) for more instances of this sort of implied or potential but unrealized list. Mitchell ended an item about the New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator William Steig with “Asked to name some cartoonists whose work he respects, he began with James Thurber and named about twenty” (2001: 274). Again, later Mitchell would have reported the names Steig reeled off. This is not to say, however, that the early journalism never includes lists of names (see Mitchell, Citation2001: 68, 145 and 151) or focuses on names and naming (see Mitchell, Citation2001: 110 and 136).
7 Reflecting on his art, Mitchell explained, “‘The creative aspect of [such reporting] is the particularity of the facts that you choose, and the particularity of the conversations that you choose, and the fact that you stayed with the man long enough to get a panoply of conversations from which you can choose the ones that you decide are most significant’” (Sims, Citation2008: 99). There is a lot of onomastics in those facts, or in the particulars of conversations that supply Mitchell with facts to quote. The architecture of any of Mitchell’s essays depends on selection.
8 In turning to Russell, I am not suggesting that he is right, but rather that he evinces a certain attitude about names and naming relevant to intersections of ontology, epistemology, and narrative in Mitchell’s work. I might have turned instead to Saul Kripke, who in “Naming and Necessity” (1972) sees names as meaningful designators, rather than as indicators without meaning. For Kripke, meaning arises from contexts in which the designated exists — even fictional characters exist in some contexts. Because it proposes the ontological efficacy of names and naming, we might think of Kripke’s attitude towards names as more “optimistic” than Russell’s. I have chosen Russell because this article ends with melancholy, and his onomastic “pessimism” better fits my argument.
9 Of course, older citizens may occasionally forget names they have long known well, but Mitchell was intensely concerned to remember names. Sims (Citation2007: 172) relates, “During one meeting, he told me a story about a New York anarchist, Carlo Tresca, from the thirties. He couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant where they met once. Losing that detail at age eighty-one annoyed him. He called the New Yorker fact-checking department to see if anyone could retrieve for him the name of a restaurant that had probably been out of business for forty years.” Today, of course, he might have checked Wikipedia on his phone, but such tenacity in recovering the name suggests that it had more importance for him than it would have had for many, who would wait for it to occur to them later or shrug the forgetting off.
10 This name-avoidance may have been a psychopathological reflex, too. Mitchell remembered of his childhood that his father once “was unhappy [...] when he found that Joseph had written his name on the ceiling of the old train depot, and chided his scion, ‘Don’t write your name in public places’” (Rundus, 1995: 6), an admonition somewhat inconsistent with the writing life, but never far from his recollection.