Credit: The above photo of Joseph Mitchell is by Therese Mitchell; it appears in the February 16, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Joseph Mitchell’s “A Place of Pasts.”
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Joseph Mitchell - The New Yorker's Long-Line Champ
There’s a line in
Joseph Mitchell’s "A Place of Pasts" (The
New Yorker, February 16, 2015) that is a startling 1,183 words long. I
believe this is a New Yorker record.
The sentence is as follows (take a deep breath):
And I should also
say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a
spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts: my own past; my father’s past; my
mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters; the past of a small
farming town geographically misnamed Fairmont down in the cypress swamps and
black gum bottoms and wild magnolia bays of southeastern North Carolina, a town
in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back
to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I
am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all
heart-wrenchingly homesick; the pasts of several furnished-room houses and
side-street hotels in New York City in which I lived during the early years of
the Depression, when I was first discovering the city, and that disappeared one
by one without a trace a long time ago but that evidently made a deep
impression on me, for every once in a while the parlor or the lobby of one of
them or my old room in one of them turns up eerily recognizable in a dream; the
pasts of a number of speakeasies, diners, greasy spoons, and drugstore lunch
counters scattered all over the city that I knew very well in the same period
and that also have disappeared and that also turn up in dreams; the pasts of a
score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives,
impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out
freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while
working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being
uniquely strange, only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world strange, but whom,
since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now
think of, without taking a thing away from them, as being strange all right, no
doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically
strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or
archetypically strange or even ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned
pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right, three good examples of whom
are (1) a bearded lady who was billed as Lady Olga and who spent summers out on
the road in circus sideshows and winters in a basement sideshow on Forty-second
Street called Hubert’s Museum, and who used to be introduced to audiences by
sideshow professors as having been born in a castle in Potsdam, Germany, and
being the half sister of a French duke but who I learned to my astonishment
when I first talked with her actually came from a farm in a county in North
Carolina six counties west of the county I come from and who loved this farm
and started longing to go back to it almost from the moment she left it at the
age of twenty-one to work in a circus but who made her relatives uncomfortable
when she went back for a visit (“ ‘How long are you going to stay’ was
always the first question they asked me,” she once said) and who finally quit
going back and from then on thought of herself as an exile and spoke of herself
as an exile (“Some people are exiled by the government,” she would say, “and
some are exiled by the po-lice or the F.B.I. or the head of some old labor
union or the Mafia or the Black Hand or the K.K.K., but I was exiled by my own
flesh and blood”), and who became a legend in the sideshow world because of her
imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes
imaginatively brutal remarks about people in sideshow audiences delivered
deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow-freaks grouped around her on the platform,
and (2) a street preacher named James Jefferson Davis Hall, who also came up
here from the South and who lived in what he called sackcloth-and-ashes poverty
in a tenement off Ninth Avenue in the Forties and who believed that God had
given him the ability to read between the lines in the Bible and who also
believed that while doing so he had discovered that the end of the world was
soon to take place and who also believed that he had been guided by God to make
this discovery and who furthermore believed that God had chosen him to go forth
and let the people of the world know what he had discovered or else supposing
he kept this dreadful knowledge to himself God would turn his back on him and
in time to come he would be judged as having committed the unforgivable sin and
would burn in Hell forever and who consequently trudged up and down the
principal streets and avenues of the city for a generation desperately crying
out his message until he wore himself out and who is dead and gone now and long
dead and gone but whose message remembered in the middle of the night (“It’s
coming! Oh, it’s coming!” he would cry out. “The end of the world is coming!
Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now! Any hour now! Any minute now! Any second
now!”) doesn’t seem as improbable as it used to, and (3) an old Serbian gypsy
woman named Mary Miller—she called herself Madame Miller—whom I got to know
with the help of an old-enemy-become-old-friend of hers, a retired detective in
the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, and whom I visited a number of times over
a period of ten years in a succession of her ofisas, or fortune-telling
parlors, and who was fascinating to me because she was always smiling and
gentle and serene, an unusually sweet-natured old woman, a good mother, a good
grandmother, a good great-grandmother, but who nevertheless had a reputation
among detectives in con-game squads in police departments in big cities all
over the country for the uncanny perceptiveness with which she could pick out
women of a narrowly specific kind—middle-aged, depressed, unstable, and
suggestible, and with access to a bank account, almost always a good-sized
savings bank account—from the general run of those who came to her to have
their fortunes told and for the mercilessness with which she could gradually
get hold of their money by performing a cruel old gypsy swindle on them, the hokkano
baro, or the big trick; and, finally, not to mention a good many other
pasts, the past of New York City insofar as it is connected directly or
indirectly with my own past, and particularly the past of the part of New York
City that is known as lower Manhattan, the part that runs from the Battery to
the Brooklyn Bridge and that encompasses the Fulton Fish Market and its
environs, and which is part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive
me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home.
What an
extraordinary construction! Mitchell has written other long lines. For example,
there’s a 435-word beauty in his "Street Life" (The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013). But none of them come
close to the length of his “A Place of Pasts” creation. Is it the longest
sentence ever to appear in The New Yorker?
I can’t think of any that are longer. There’s one in Ian Frazier’s great
"Authentic Accounts of Massacres" (The New Yorker, March 19, 1979; included
in his 1997 collection Nobody Better,
Better Than Nobody). But when I counted up the words, it came to 354 – not
even in the ballpark. Another candidate that came to mind is the remarkably
long sentence in Roger Angell’s "Here Below" (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006), in which he observes his mother
at the dinner table and imagines her “immediate deep concerns.” I just finished
checking it; it contains 458 words. Therefore, to the best of my knowledge,
information, and belief, Mitchell’s amazing 1,183-word assemblage is the
longest sentence in New Yorker
history. I hereby declare Joseph Mitchell to be the magazine’s long-line champ.
Credit: The above photo of Joseph Mitchell is by Therese Mitchell; it appears in the February 16, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Joseph Mitchell’s “A Place of Pasts.”
Labels:
Ian Frazier,
Joseph Mitchell,
Roger Angell,
The New Yorker
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