Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell Cape 186pp, £9.99 in UK
This is a small book with nothing on the jacket but the title, the author's name, and a series of endorsements - Salmon Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Beryl Bainbridge, Ian McEwan. In spite of them all, I disliked it.
It's certainly not because the author can't write. Joseph Mitchell was on the staff of the New Yorker for many years and was a stunning writer in exactly the style the New Yorker indulged, and indeed excelled, in: conversational essays about small and even inconsequential matters, full of incident and descriptive detail; usually written with an emphasis on atmosphere, a strong "sense of place" - especially if the place is New York, as it usually has been - and usually if not always written at length.
Mitchell's book is all of the above, especially the last. It consists of two articles, the first written in 1942, the second in 1964. Both are profile essays of the eponymous subject, an eccentric - conveniently embracing word, that - who bummed his way around New York from roughly 1915 to 1950, cadging meals and lodgings and stopping one in three to discuss his life's work, "The Oral History of the World."
Born into a respectable Massachusetts family, Joe Gould followed family custom long enough to get through Harvard without distinction and then set out in the direction of New York. He held a series of nondescript jobs until the afternoon his mission to record oral history struck him with such force he had to give up paid employment. Real history, as he later told the author, is not about kings and battles and dates, it's about what people said and how they said it. If the idea wasn't quite original, Joe's pursuit of it was. His method was to fill up children's copybooks with accounts of conversations snatched at random as he wandered the city, then store batches of filled copybooks in secret hiding places. By 1942, when Mitchell became intrigued, the oral history was reputedly 12 times as long as the Bible.
Mitchell wasn't the only one intrigued. Several publishers tried to wheedle the copybooks from Joe and though now and again a small literary journal succeeded in printing an extract, no one got hold of more than an isolated fragment. Just the same, Joe the oral historian became a celebrity. He acquired friends and supporters across New York, reliable sources of income, a meal, a space on a loft floor. For a while he had an anonymous patron, a wealthy woman who supported him with a monthly retainer.
His portrait was painted by a respected artist, and an Italian restaurant fed him spaghetti to frequent the premises and attract tourists seeking New York colour. He was a fixture at Greenwich Village parties, where it was his habit to get exuberantly drunk and hop around the room imitating a seagull.
All of this is related in Mitchell's 1942 article, titled "Professor Sea Gull", rightly described by Ian McEwan as "a little masterpiece of observation and storytelling". I was charmed, too. It seemed hauntingly familiar, I supposed because it was such quintessential New Yorker stuff.
After a few days I realised it was hauntingly familiar because it is in my 1954 Penguin edition of McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, a very successful collection of Mitchell's articles first published in 1938. This is a little treasury of sketches, and I'd forgotten Mitchell wrote it. For some reason Cape doesn't mention it in the notes on the author in this book. By the time I finished it, I wished they had chosen to honour him posthumously - he died only last year - by simply reprinting McSorley's.
As it was, I moved on to the second article even more charmed to discover the author was an old friend. This piece, written after Joe's death in a psychiatric hospital, is five times the length of the 1942 article and recaps much of the earlier material for about the first third of the narrative.
Then, just as you are completely lulled, everything begins to change in slow motion. As each decade descends into the next, the story Mitchell tells in his wry, genial way drifts steadily into something darker. Greenwich Village mores gradually become less captivating and offbeat, more tiresome and pointless. Joe's free-spirited and open-handed friends begin to appear suspect, hypocrites doing good to feel well. Worst, of course, is Joe himself, growing older and much less engaging; dreary, then sordid and finally slightly nasty.
I can't do better than quote Doris Lessing: "You are led by the hand from what seems like amiable reminiscence about New York bohemia into deeper and unexpected waters." And it is done so masterfully you hardly know what happened. Mitchell never shifts his tone and gives no hint of Joe's secret until the last pages, letting it emerge as natural and ordinary, and all the more pathetic for that.
Thus the endorsements from such an impressive range of sources. "The reporter as artist," Salmon Rushdie pronounces. "Any novelist of New York would be delighted to have invented Joe Gould." Martin Amis expands on the point: "If Borges had been a New Yorker, he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret. But this, alas, is a true story. In coolly elegant prose Joseph Mitchell fully acquaints us with its desperate pathos."
Alas? But the begged question is whether the reporter has any damned business being an artist with true stories. What annoyed me so much about this book was the fact that I did forget, over and over, that Joe Gould, so skilfully exposed to incite my amusement and revulsion, wasn't an invention.
It's an old argument. Either journalists have a right to invade privacy and use people if it is going to do a power of good - acquainting readers with pathos, and so on, or they don't.
The regret is that this might have been a fine novel, if at some point in his long acquaintance with Joe Gould Mitchell had done the decent thing and created a fictional character based on him.
Mary Maher is an Irish Times staff journalist