My Ears Are Bent Reader’s Guide
By Joseph Mitchell
READERS GUIDE
“Mitchell is the great artist/reporter of our century. . . . A Mitchell sentence is sleek, graceful, and rambunctious. . . . His pieces . . . are layered and deep and full of resonances.”—Vogue
The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are meant to enliven your group’s discussion of My Ears Are Bent, a classic collection of reporting by an essential American writer, one of the handful who can be said to have breached the divide between journalism and literature.
Introduction
Joseph Mitchell never stopped seeing himself as a reporter. His writing has the virtues of all great journalism: self-effacement, close observation, a reverence for facts, and a masterful use of detail. Factor in his supple, muscular sentences, as functional in appearance and as unexpected in their changes of direction as boomerangs, and it’s clear why Mitchell still commands the reverence of novelists and journalists alike.In these pieces, most of which originally appeared in the storied journals the New York Herald Tribune and the New York World-Telegram in the 1930s, Mitchell trains his eye on some of the city’s most vivid human fauna and tunes his ear to all the registers of their speech: the elegant and the uncouth, the somber and the hilarious, the guileless and the too-smart-for-its-own-good. Mitchell arrived in New York on the day after the 1929 stock market crash that signaled the start of the great Depression. His portraits of the city lack the gauzy, romantic glamour of Fitzgerald’s or the heartless, preening glamour of Tom Wolfe’s fifty years later. They are rougher grained and more brightly lit. The only time Mitchell seems to have set foot in the Waldorf was to interview a hungover Huey Long. Mostly, he spent time in gin mills (including Gilligan Holton’s atmospherically named Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill in Harlem), burlesque houses, gospel revival halls, promoters’ offices, and homeless shelters. He hung out with narcotics cops and potheads, a salesman of voodoo paraphernalia and maimed veterans of the First World War, with sweltering passengers on the boat to Coney Island and the captain of the night boat to Albany, who waxed indignant about his vessel’s reputation as a floating den of liquor and lechery. He watched a comely young woman perform a reverse striptease that she claimed would put the ordinary kind out of business. He watched the State of New York electrocute three men who had murdered a drunk for his insurance money.
Precisely observed, deftly reported, and filled with humor, irony, and compassion, My Ears Are Bent showcases a writer who might justly be called New York’s Chekhov.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. Mitchell recalls that in an average workday he might interview an Italian bricklayer who looked like the Prince of Wales, a “lady boxer,” and a theatrical agent with a sideline in racing cockroaches. What does that suggest about newspaper work in the 1930s? About New York during the same time? Does the book’s division-into sections headlined “Drunks,” “Cheese-Cake,” “Come to Jesus,” etc.-convey the same freewheeling social fluidity? In which of these different worlds does the author seem most comfortable?
2. How does Mitchell reconcile his taste for “conversation just as it issues forth, relevant obscenity and all [pp. 13-14]?" With the stringent standards of gentility then prevalent in newspapers? What strategies does he use to circumvent those standards? Do Mitchell’s subjects sound racier than they really are, or does he manage to make their depravity sound innocent? You may want to look at “The Year of Our Lord 1936, or Hit Me, William,” “Nude, Definitely Nude,” “It is Almost Sacred,” “The Marijuana Smokers,” and “I Know Nothing About It”.
3. Mitchell is not so much a storyteller as a portraitist, which is to say that he seems less interested in narrating action than in revealing character. How does he go about this? Discuss his use of dialogue and detail in the profiles of the saloonkeepers Dick and Gilligan; the exotic dancer Florence (aka ‘Tanya’) Cubitt, Elder Michaux, Mrs. Anna di Massa Agnese and her American family, George Bernard Shaw, and the suave anarchist Carlo Tresca.
4. Much of Mitchell’s writing is comic or contains a comic element. How would you characterize his sense of humor? Does he make fun of his subjects or simply report the things they do and say? And what makes the latter so funny?
5. From time to time a darker note creeps into Mitchell’s writing, especially in the section entitled “The Biggest City in the World.” Is this just because of a change in subject matter-say, from strippers and sporting men to the homeless, hospitalized war veterans, and condemned murderers? Or does Mitchell’s voice change as well? How does he modulate his style as he takes on different kinds of subject matter? In what ways does his style remain distinct, regardless of what he is writing about?
6. Many of these pieces are concerned with work, whether of the kind done by vice cops, exotic dancers, a manufacturer of ostrich-feather fans, oystermen, gospel preachers, an ASCAP investigator, famous writers and entertainers, and journalists like the author himself. What aspects of work most interest Mitchell? In what way are his strippers like evangelists, his policemen like the criminals they arrest? What lines of work does he appear to hold in high regard? Is news reporting one of them?
7. My Ears Are Bent is divided between portraits of individuals and social panoramas, the latter including such milieus as backstage-at-the-Apollo burlesque theater, the Municipal Lodging House late on a winter night, and the rooftops of the Lower East Side in the middle of a blasting summer. Compare the ways Mitchell approaches these genres. How does he lend life and energy to his individual profiles? How does he give his crowd scenes a feeling of intimacy?
8. In obedience to the code of his profession, Mitchell rarely says what he feels about his subjects. But does this mean he is dispassionate about them? How do you imagine the author feels about Gilligan Holton or Rosita Royce, Peter Arno or George M. Cohan? Which of these characters does he seem to admire? Which does he seem to hold in disdain? Are there any he seems to love?
9. Many of Mitchell’s characters are misanthropes and express their misanthropy with considerable pungency. Witness Gilligan Holton’s campaign of abuse against two well-heeled customers; Mazie Gordon’s wish that one of her drunken beneficiaries “go die” [p. 101], or George Bernard Shaw’s cheerful suggestion that since “the world at present is not fit for children to live in,” the small beneficiaries of the Children’s Aid Society be given “a gorgeous party and then, when they have eaten and danced themselves to sleep, turn on the gas and let them all wake up in heaven [pp. 289–290]” On the evidence of these pieces, is Mitchell also a misanthrope? If not, why?
In Their Own Words:
Some of Mitchell’s subjects holding forth on a variety of topics:
Tanya Cubitt, popularly billed as ‘Queen of the Nudists,’ on her occupation: “It keeps us out in the open. It doesn’t keep us out late at night, and we have a healthy atmosphere to work in. My girl friends think we have orgies and all, but I never had an orgy yet. Sometimes when the sun is hot, nudism is hard work [p. 68].”
Jack Pfefer, wrestling promoter, on his clients: “Oh, hell . . . it is like the circus with elephants that wear shoes and eat off plates. I am so sick of freaks sometimes I have to go to the opera to quit my nerves from jumping [pp. 108–109].”
Gilligan Holton, on the odds in the impending Joe Louis-Max Baer fight: “Yes, sir, unless a tornado strikes, Joe will win. When Mr. Baer stick his head out it’s going to be touched. Like a man stick his head into the dumb-waiter and a ice wagon fall on it [p. 128].”
Harry Lewis, incarcerated pickpocket, on the insanity defense: “I would like to have a psychiatrist go over me because I am sure there is something wrong somewhere . . .” I must have a twist in my brain [p. 214].”
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and social thinker, on a proposal to convene a literary congress for the suppression of war: “Why should they suppress war? War is just a method of killing people. There are a great many people who ought to be killed [p. 279].”
