Finished Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Joseph Mitchell, “Man in Profile.” It really should have been called “Joe Mitchell’s Secret.” Because it does seem like JM’s secret — that he was making shit up all along — is the explanation for his 36 year long writer’s block.
The story in brief: in the late 30s and 40’s Joe Mitchell writes a series of timeless profiles of unsung New York characters for the NYer, and the fact checkers let him slide when it comes to verifying the quotes or even the reality of the people he is profiling. In fact, it seems his classic profiles of these unsung New York heroes aren’t based on any one person in particular. Amazing! The greatest profile writer in the magazine’s history is actually a fabulist! But Kunkel, like most critics of his book, lets this slide.
Then Mitchell writes perhaps his most famous profile, the 1942 “Professor Seagull,” of Greenwich Village street person Joe Gould and his unseen masterpiece, the “Oral History,” although Mitchell never actually sees Gould’s book and has reason to suspect it doesn’t exist. And again the Nyer fact checkers don’t look into the matter too closely. As the years go by Mitchell, according to Kunkel, becomes increasingly distraught over the fact that — Oh My God — he may have published a profile in the New Yorker that wasn’t actually true! (Of course, he’s been doing this all along.) The idea eats away at him, until, 22 years later, he publishes a piece that is perhaps the longest and most readable Correction Notice ever published — “Joe Gould’s Secret,” which is that the “Oral History” doesn’t exist — and that is the last thing he ever publishes.
Kunkel has a line in the book, spoken by Mitchell, “Joe Gould is me.” But that doesn’t seem quite right. Joe Gould was Joe Mitchell’s secret. His secret guilt over the practice of nonfiction fiction that made him famous.
