La fabulosa taberna de McSorley y otras historias de Nueva York

by Joseph Mitchell, Álex Gibert (Translator), Marcelo Cohen (Translator)

Mujeres barbudas, gitanos, sibaritas, camareros, obreros indios, bohemios, visionarios, fanáticos, impostores y toda clase de almas perdidas circulan en este recopilatorio de veintisiete crónicas publicadas en la sección del New Yorker dedicada a los perfiles de los personajes más exóticos de la ciudad. Personajes todos de carne y hueso que conforman un fresco extraordinario de las décadas 30 y 40 del siglo pasado, una época dorada en la que se fraguó el gran crisol que fue y sigue siendo la ciudad de Nueva York.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, New York, Short Stories, Journalism, History, Memoir

472 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Joseph Mitchell was an American writer who wrote for The New Yorker. He is known for his carefully written portraits of eccentrics and people on the fringes of society, especially in and around New York City.
-Wikipedia

Reviews

[Graychin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon is a world of a book – a lost world, you might say. It’s a collection of New Yorker pieces that Mitchell wrote mostly in the late 1930s and 1940s. These typically involve Mitchell hanging about at grimy old New York City bars or visiting peoples’ homes and listening to them talk. But, O, the people! Street preachers, saloon keepers, bearded ladies, gypsy kings, child prodigies, social crusaders, homeless drunks, aged Tammany Hall toadies, Central Park cave dwellers, steel-walking Mohawks, etc.

Mitchell’s writing is clipped and dry and masculine. His humor is dry too, and tending toward the morbid. The distance which he manages at once to sympathetically reach across and yet to coolly insist upon between himself and his subjects (and between himself and his readers) will be a point of fascination for any thoughtful reader.

Reading McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, you feel like you’re watching a magician summon up within the scope of a ten-inch crystal ball all the variety and glory and pathos of the human condition in exquisite and particular detail – but no sooner are you offered the astonishing, keen vision of it than the inky black smothers it up. You’ll ask yourself excitedly, “What did I just see?” and you’ll lean in to look again.

An unforgettable book.

[Gare Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a chance to meet Joe Mitchell late in his life in the late 80s and early 90s when his books were out of print. A friend of a friend worked as a fact-checker at the New Yorker where he went every day to write, although his was probably the most debilitating case of writer's block ever: decades without publishing a word after Joe Gould's Secret, my favourite work by JM. Funny thing is, I always imagined the blocked writer would be downcast, depressed or a slave to alcohol or drugs. JM was dignified (very proper in an olde Southern way), engaging (asking more questions of me than I had a chance to ask of him) and seemingly very happy indeed. Brendan Gill walked into his office while we were having coffee and were soon cackling about some anecdote from yore. He seemed surprised that anyone too young to have been around in his glory days had an interest in him. I had found a copy of McSorley's in a used bookstore in the mid-80s and snapped it up only because I knew his name from a mention in a Liebling bio. (Liebling had been my first real New Yorker hero. My mother bought a copy of The Sweet Science for me when I was 12 or 13. I didn't know what hit me but I was hooked.) Funny that JM and AJL were friends--at least I think so, because their approaches to life and writing seem to be worlds apart. No one turned a tighter phrase than JM while JL was all about big flourishes. JM found telling nuance in the everyday, the seemingly mundance and the little man, while AJL focused on big characters and extraordinary events. When I read McSorley's almost 30 years back it captured a NYC that was dying. Now it's strictly a historic document but it rewards reading and re-reading.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to find a copy of a collection of short stories from the New Yorker about New York. It’s an older book, but it’s not out of print. Nevertheless, I couldn’t find it at any of the bookstores I tried while I was in New York.

Instead, a kindly bookseller directed me to this book. It turned out to be exactly the type of book I was seeking. It’s a collection of pieces that Joseph Mitchell wrote about odd New Yorkers he ran across in his work as a journalist during the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. It is actually a book within a book, in a recently published collection of out-of-print books by Mitchell, titled Up in the Old Hotel.

I was fascinated by a little story that I discovered about Mitchell that I ran across while researching his life further. Mitchell interviewed a down-and-out fellow back in the thirties who claimed to be writing an enormous book, compiled in many volumes, about New York that consisted solely of conversations the fellow had had with people he met. A number of literary figures befriended this fellow over the years. Many years later, in the sixties, after the fellow passed away, Mitchell searched for the volumes of the book and he was dismayed to discover that the book was a figment of the fellow’s mind, that nothing had ever been written. After writing this piece, Mitchell never wrote another word for publication, though he went into work every day for many years.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back when I was fatally depressed and anxious, people would always tell me to take a bubble bath, which infuriates me to this day. Now that I am temporarily a normal amount depressed and anxious, taking a bubble bath does seem to help. So I dumped a big chunk of crusted together Epsom salt in the tub, and some strident grapefruit exfoliant, and put the hot water tap to full blast. The tub is a clawfoot tub, with air all around it, so it cools off too quickly unless the water is burning hot. I settled in and sucked on a grimy vape pen from a corner store like a cigar, and started this book. I read it while the foam bubbled up, and until the last little island of bubbles, in the shape of a breast, slowly tickled and popped out of existence. I stopped reading to watch that. This book is about eccentrics, and the lively loneliness of city life, and it's perfect. Jay always gives me the perfect books. It was a Three Kings Day present. I felt like a king in my bath. So here I am reading and writing again, and taking baths.

[Dustincecil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading in public schools!

It's like thumbing through an incredible scrapbook full of old friends.

An article written by Kelly Hogan discussing life on a tour van brought me to this (up in the old hotel) and I wish I could call her up to say "thanks"!

is anyone writing like this today?

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret.

I had to return Up in the Old Hotel to the library before completing the other books, so - for now - can only review McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.

Each of the articles by Joseph Mitchell contained in this book is wonderful: beautifully written, and chronicling the mavericks, the marginal, the unusual and the idiosyncratic from the New York City of the 1930s and 1940s.

Each story lovingly brings to life some extraordinary characters. I will never forget Joe Gould, aka Professor Sea Gull, who was writing "The Oral History" that was already 11 times the length of the Bible; or Lady Olga the bearded lady who had appeared in "Freaks"; or Commodore Dutch; or the King of the Gypsies; or Mazie P. Gordon who presided for 21 years over the ticket cage of the Venice Theatre. Really, this stuff is solid gold.

Next time I visit New York I shall visit as many of the places detailed in this book as I can, if only to gaze wistfully at the spot with the vivid recollections of Joseph Mitchell's wonderful articles to imbue each location with a special and magical significance.

I will be returning to Up in the Old Hotel to read the rest of these wonderful articles - I recommend you do the same.

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has started a few conversations on the train with people who know the place. It's a collection of essays from the New Yorker published in the 1930s and 40s, This-American-Life-Like portraits of eccentric New York personalities and some little-understood ethnic groups, from the gypsies who made a living telling fortunes to the Calypso musicians who will die before they sing another man's song to a community of Native Americans who specialize in skyscraper construction. There's the drifter called Santa Claus Smith, who begs for food and transportation and then writes fake checks on butcher paper for huge amounts of money to his benefactors, payable to a defunct bank; the man who runs a curiousity shop/dime museum out of his apartment and the bearded lady who works there after a lifetime as a traveling circus freak; a couple who moved into a cave in Central Park to wait out the Depression; a homeless man who rides the trains all day, writing a 20,000 page book of world history and philosophy; a man who makes his living by holding a yearly ball for an association he made up himself; a preacher by telephone; the man who founded the Don't Swear League; the sort of people anyone else would overlook and write off as a crazy bum. There are also some descriptions of lost New York traditions which I wish were still in existence: the beefsteak dinner, a huge ball held by a politician or other influential person where only steak, kidneys, and beer is served, and the clam bake. The heyday of a certain gin mill by Washington Square, and the extensive history of McSorley's itself. There's so much information and folk history in this book, you can't keep it all in your head, and you wonder about the man who spent his fifty-year newspaper career in these dive bars talking to these overlooked people and telling their stories. It goes beyond human interest into anthropology, in the amount of detail with which he delves into the lives of gypsies, bums, and street preachers, people no one would think to take seriously, especially in those days. I wish there were six more volumes of it.

[Russell Bittner · Rating 5 out of 5]

“'Do you care much for clams?’

“I sat down on the bucket and told him that one Sunday afternoon in August, 1937, I placed third in a clam-eating tournament at a Block Island clambake, eating eighty-four cherries. I told him that I regard this as one of the few worth-while achievements of my life” (p. 304).


So writes Joseph Mitchell in his essay titled “A Mess of Clams.” Is this stylized prose? Not on your life – his prose isn’t even extraordinary. What is extraordinary is the voice of Joseph Mitchell: direct, down-to-earth, with sentiments and observations unpretentious even in the punctuation – in short, much like the man I imagine Joseph Mitchell to have been if Calvin Trillin’s Foreword is to be believed. And why should it not be?


The following paragraph (from the title piece “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,” on p. 19, and from which the entire collection takes its title), is, I believe, as good as any for a second citation: “To a devoted McSorley customer, most other New York City saloons are tense and disquieting. It is possible to relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. Also, the barely audible heartbeatlike ticking of the old clocks is soothing. Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue intern once remarked that for some mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial than psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.”


The last three essays in this collection (beginning with “The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County”) take us back to Mitchell’s birthplace and the fictional town of Stonewall, North Carolina. Everything about these essays reeks of authenticity, and I had the feeling I might as well have been reading a bit of fiction by the likes of Mark Twain, Erskine Caldwell or Carson McCullers.


Is it fair to call Joseph Mitchell’s prose ‘timeless’ and ‘ageless?’ I think it is. In its description of places, people and events that are as foreign-sounding as anything at either of the two poles of this planet, the heart, soul and skin of Mitchell’s prose simply doesn’t age or seem in any way dated. For this reason, I think it’s fair to call him a ‘classic’ – and to venerate his work accordingly.


RRB
09/03/15
Brooklyn, NY

[Jack Laschenski · Rating 5 out of 5]

27 New Yorker articles by Joseph Mitchell, a graceful writer.

Only the first is about McSorley's - still extant which I have visited several times.

The rest are about "little people and their world":

A ticket taker at the Venice Movie Theatre
A real bearded lady from the circus world
Gypsies and their lives in NYC and the US
Mohawks working high steel - and their reservation life
The Deaf-Mutes club in NYC
Clam diggers from Long Island
Turtle growers in the South
etc.

Fantastic!

[R.E. Graswich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure inspiration to the nonfiction writer. Pure joy to the reader. Mitchell brings old New York alive in this classic examination of nothing and everything. Just re-read for fifth time. Better with each serving.

[GK Stritch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in the day when NYC still had a soul, Joseph Mitchell wrote wonderful stories. I enjoyed the historical insight, especially stories from the Bowery and Village.

[Gert De Bie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een boek dat bijna 3 jaar op mijn nachtkastje bleef liggen en dat ik in kleine stukjes tot mij nam. Nooit liet het me helemaal los, en telkens opnieuw greep ik er naar terug.

De reportages die Joseph Mitchell midden jaren '30 schreef over doen en laten in New York vormen samen niet alleen een indrukwekkend tijdsdocument, maar zijn tevens intrigerend en aangenaam leesvoer. In een toegankelijke stijl neemt hij je mee naar het oudste staminee van't stad, laat hij je kennis maken met Mazie, de vrouwelijke buitenwipper van een filmzaal, stelt hij een dovenclub aan je voor, belicht alle zigeunerfamilies van de stad en hun lepe truken, vertelt over de ondergang van het fascisme in Black Ankel County of laat je kennismaken met de Mohawk, een indianenstam die zich specialiseerde in bruggenbouw.

Mitchell belicht zo de rafelranden van de maatschappij, neemt je mee naar stukken stad die voorgoed verdwenen zijn of waar je toch nooit zou komen. "McSorley's Wonderbaarlijke Saloon schets een prachtbeeld van een vergane tijd, geschreven met veel empathie voor de buitenbeentjes, rebellen of excentriekelingen van het New York van de jaren '30. Schoon.

[Hilm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the first three articles:
- The Old House at Home
- Mazie
- Hit on the Head with a Cow

My takeaway is that McSorley’s, which is the focus of the first article seems like an interesting place to visit the next time I’m in New York. A quick search on YouTube suggests that the place still exists and open for business.

The writing itself is characteristics of a New Yorker article. It reads tightly, about the people of New York from the time it was written. Ordinary people, local weirdos. Barkeepers, their customs, movie theater workers, homeless folks. No one a biographer would devote years of their lives for.

But I don’t deeply care about them, I don’t live in New York and surely they’re all dead now. The world in the 1930s is very different with the present day, nearly a century later. (The structure of the world could feel the same, but the trappings today are entirely modern.) So I wonder, why am I reading this book? (Also, as the foreword noted, some people who knew the people profiled here thought that these were inaccurate characterization of these individuals, and they were entitled to their opinions.)

Anyway this made me think about Humans of New York (on Instagram? Facebook?) and how HoNY feels very much like a direct kin of this book.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 A book filled with profiles of the real people who occupy New York City, unique and before it's time.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually, I've just read the first half of this 700 plus page collection of sketches, the section titled "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon", made of 27 sketches, or they could be called profiles, of characters that Mitchell met and got to know in New York City. They are individuals who would otherwise be forgotten, as most of us will be, but brought to life by Mitchell who found interest in their stories.

They're both men and women, that Mitchell met while wandering around the city, many of them found in bars, cheap hotels, and on the waterfront. They're eccentrics, many of them slightly crazed, but all of them are interesting. Mitchell draws out their stories, and in one aptly titled sketch which indicates his general approach, "I Couldn't Dope It Out," he describes a couple in a diner who constantly fight and still stay together. Mitchell never figures out why, but he is always trying to "dope out" a character and his motivations for acting the way he does.

He describes men like Commodore Dutch who for 40 years made his living by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself (it worked, more or less). There is Arthur Colborne who devotes his life to the abolition of swearing int he city. There is Joe Gould, "Professor Seagull", who says he is writing the oral history of Greenwich Village, one that is going to be nine times the length of the Bible.

Occasionally, Mitchell goes back in his own life, (one occasion being a shot of Mussolini or Hitler in a newsreel that reminds him of his past), as when he writes "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County" about his early life growing up in the l920's (Mitchell lived from 1908 to l996) in North Carolina and his experiences with the small town absurdities of the Ku Klux Klan.

In a way you could say that all of Michell's sketches are a bit absurd. Why should we care about these characters, many of them down and out. One of my favorites, "The Cave Dwellers" is about a couple who claimed to have lived in a cave in Central Park during the Depression. They didn't cause any problems, so officials left them alone. But then a news story about them brings attention, and donations so they are able to leave the cave and move into a cheap hotel which, not surprisingly, doesn't bring them any real satisfaction.

There is "Santa Claus Smith", a bearded old fellow who wanders around the states, writing bogus checks on a non-existent bank which people often accept. Mitchell tries, but doesn't "dope this one out" either. In fact he is non-judgmental about all the characters he writes about. Their actions are strange, often bizarre, but not criminal, and he obviously takes satisfaction in chronicling their lives.

All of this is enough to keep me reading in the second half of UP IN THE OLD HOTEL.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read! Most of it was written from 1939-1940 and set in New York City by Joseph Mitchell who was a writer for New Yorker Magazine. The characters that he brings to life from the streets of New York are quirky, eccentric, and very interesting! I don't know if this book is available as a separate book but it is included in a book called UP IN THE OLD HOTEL. I read this relatively slowly as I wanted to appreciate each story and each character or group he described. One of my favorite characters has a sequel book called Joe Gould's Secret which I am anxious to read.

[Franziska · Rating 2 out of 5]

Die Kurzgeschichten in diesem Buch spielen alle in Nordamerika in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts, viele davon in New York. Wie man schon der Inhaltsangabe entnehmen kann, stellt Mitchell vor allem die Exoten und Sonderlinge der Gesellschaft in den Vordergrund (Zigeuner, Indianer, Taubstumme, Straßenprediger, Arbeitslose) und auch Kneipen spielen oft eine tragende Rolle.
In nahezu allen Geschichten gibt es kaum Handlung, viel mehr lässt der Erzähler (zum Beispiel in einer Bar/Kneipe) einen Vertreter der entsprechenden Personengruppe zu Wort kommen und dieser erzählt dann , teilweise sehr monolog-lastig. Dieses immer wiederkehrende Prinzip ging mir mit der Zeit ziemlich auf die Nerven.
Sicher auch deshalb haben mir die ersten beiden Kurzgeschichten am besten gefallen. In der ersten Geschichte geht es um eine Kneipe mit dem Namen "McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon", die von einem irischen Einwanderer im 19. Jahrhundert gegründet wurde, und Mitchell beschreibt darin ganz unterhaltsam die verschiedenen aufeinanderfolgenden Besitzer und das besondere Flair der Kneipe.
Erzählen kann Mitchell also durchaus. Schade, dass es (zumindest von meinem Standpunkt aus) mit den anderen Geschichten nicht so geklappt hat. Viele haben mich ratlos zurückgelassen und konnten auch vom Erzählfuß nicht überzeugen. Zwar ist es interessant zu lesen, welch' skurrile Vereine und Einnahmequellen es beispielsweise in New York gibt (oder gab), aber der Gesamteindruck passt eben nicht. Schade.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book in the larger collection "Up in the Old Hotel." I cannot recommend "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon" enough. Joseph Mitchell, as David Remnick quotes Mitchell in Remnick's introduction, writes of and is interested in NYC's "...visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy kings and old Gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak shows." Mitchell's interest provides a time machine for the reader to 1939 and the immediate years that follow. Each chapter focuses on one person, one fascinating individual, and you get to travel with one person at a time (and Mitchell) all over NYC. I learned that the Mohawk tribe dominated residency in the Gowanus, near me, at the time. I found out how NY steak dinners took off and about lady boxers, a museum in a man's Harlem basement apartment, and my favorite discovery was to learn of the people who worked the turtle soup market and trade in Chinatown and Little Italy. This favorite part, naturally, is a result of one turtle proprietor claiming his dock companion, a fox terrier, was 25 years old. An impressive feat for any canine, and it was all because the man fed the dog nothing but turtle meat. Now whether or not this culinary claim was factual didn't and doesn't matter. The fact Mitchell takes us to meet the man who would make such a claim is. This collection is grand, all around.

[Jen]

Many of the pieces in this book first appeared in the New Yorker in the 1930s and 1940s, and it's hard to imagine writing that captures the spirit of the city at that time better. There isn't a lick of action in here; it's all wonderfully-drawn short vignettes of the characters that give New York its charm--Commodore Dutch, who collects dues for a society with no other mission than to support him; tough, tender-hearted Mazie, owner of a dime movie house; Lady Olga, a famous bearded lady; Joe Gould, who may have written the world's longest unpublished manuscript--as well as saloons, saloons, and more saloons, usually of the shady, dive-y sort. (The shadow of Prohibition looms even larger in this book than the Depression.) The last few pieces are set in the south, but it's the New York ones that make this a classic.

[Gabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this series of portraits of New York (and a few southern at the end) characters from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The only problem is not knowing how fictionalized it was. The library had it shelved under fiction, but at the very least the title essay seems to be entirely true, as far as I can tell. The essays are funnier the more I can believe that they are actual people and the quotations, actual quotes from actual people. I know David Sedaris has admitted to brushing up the truth a bit for the sake of comedy, hopefully Mitchell was only doing a little light massaging of the truth as well and not wholesale fabrication of quotes and characters like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass.

[Bert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joe Gould and many other carefully crafted tales from the City of the American Century. New York portraits from the past, the King of the Gypsies in particular a wonderful piece. This is what we missed, and will never be able to come close to again. Freakin Guiliani!

the title story holds a place in my heart for McSorley's was the birthplace of the A. Cornell finger-stache "Helloo!" routine... brilliant.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these portraits of idiosyncratic New Yorkers in the late 30's to 1940. I can remember remnants of the City Mitchell describes from my youth in the 60's and 70's. However, reading these stories back to back is not terribly engaging. They were originally published in the New Yorker, so readers got them as treats probably not more frequently than monthly. This would be a great book to own and come back to from time to time.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a craft. Mitchell wrote with a brisk, convivial style that falls easily into the background. He's full of wit without being cynical, full of fondness without being (too) sentimental. The picture he paints of an old New York City (1939 to the late 40s) is worth studying in its own right, but Mitchell is the most entertaining docent one could ask for.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh gosh, I just love this book! It is probably too long for most people and they would not be interested but I just so enjoyed hearing about people and places in New York from 100 years ago (or close to it). What an amazing journalist/observer Joseph Mitchell was!

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. read this.

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading this a while ago. I was enjoying it, but it was so out of date I got irritated and put it down. Perhaps one day it'll be finished.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Joseph Mitchell. He is the best. I've read this book four or five times. It makes me happy.

[patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just read the first chapter and I'm hooked.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The father of New Journalism. Wolfe, McPhee and Talese all acknowledged their debt to Joseph Mitchell, and this was his best book.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of newspaper and magazine articles from the 30's to the 50's - Wildly varied in subject, invariably entertaining.