In an interview on First-Person Narratives

Your final book is Up in the Old Hotel.

Joseph Mitchell is one of my heroes. He was one of the writers responsible for making the reputation of The New Yorker magazine in the late 1930s and early 40s. He was a reporter who specialised in writing profiles of people in New York, often quite eccentric people – a woman with a beard, a child prodigy – such as an incredible piece called The Mohawks in High Steel about the Mohawks [a Native American people] who don’t seem to struggle with vertigo, and who work along the girders at the top of skyscrapers. He was particularly interested in the waters around New York. In a way he was their laureate. He wrote about the oystermen and the clam fishermen, the Fulton Fish Market [in the Bronx] and the trawlermen, the culture around shellfish and fin fish, the seafood coming in from the bays of Maine and Long Island and so on.

How do they read?

They’re incredibly vivid and moving stories, and often they feel closer to short stories than newspaper or magazine articles. They have an amplitude – there seems to be a hinterland or a space around them, for the imagination to fly in. Often his strategy is to build up portraits and impressions through quite short, declarative sentences, like stones in a cairn.

Sometimes he brings in the first person, as in the essay that gave the collection its title, “Up in the Old Hotel”. It starts in a restaurant on the harbour, Sloppy Louis’, which is at the bottom of a derelict hotel. Mitchell talks to Louis, the Italian proprietor, and initially it’s a portrait. But then Louis tells him about a lift that goes up into the upper storeys of the building, that he’s never used even though he’s owned the restaurant for years. Mitchell and Louis go up in this lift together, to the first floor and then the second, and Mitchell describes it as a coffin. There are deserted rooms in the hotel, full of dust and cobwebs and ghosts, and the story suddenly has this strangeness. It’s verging on the mythic dimension – they’re making a journey into the afterlife, they’re going into death, into otherworldly spaces.

But Mitchell is most famous for two essays that were collected in the book Joe Gould’s Secret. They are both portraits of this man Joe Gould, a hobo who tramped around Manhattan claiming he could speak different seagull languages and was working on a great work called The Oral History of Mankind. In the first essay, Gould is a loveable eccentric, full of colour, funny, a bit loopy. But in the second essay, written about 20 years later in 1965, there’s a completely different tone – darker, rather sinister and macabre, slightly frightening. Joe Gould is no longer a loveable eccentric. And it runs into the story of Mitchell’s own life. The story goes that after he wrote the second essay, Mitchell carried on going into his office for 30 years until he died, but he never published another article. As though he recognised something of himself in Joe Gould, the man who was working on this comprehensive history of mankind, a work that may not have existed at all.

Do you think that has something to say about the first person? That if you get too close to yourself, you clam up? That you should keep your back to yourself, even when you write autobiography?

There are so many ways of revealing yourself as a writer – your personality, your sensibility. You don’t just blurt it out. You don’t say: My name’s Joseph Mitchell, my name’s William Fiennes, and I’m such and such a person. You reveal yourself in your curiosity, in where it takes you, in what details you choose to foreground. As Fellini said, “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” Mitchell’s collected essays are a self-portrait, even though he hardly ever says anything about himself. Most of his pages are taken up with observations about his subjects, or just the subjects talking and talking. And yet still we have a sense of a man – like Primo Levi – in love with the world, in love with his fellow man, and passionately interested in other ways of life, in other experiences. At the same time you get a glimpse of somebody who’s susceptible to melancholy, who’s drawn to graveyards and the gloomy side of things. Those two energies co-exist – a rapture at being alive, and a recognition of how difficult it might be.