Customer Reviews

My Ears Are Bent

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The good news is that all of the Mitchell virtues displayed in "Up In the Old Hotel" are emphatically present in this welcome collection of his earlier work for divers New York newspapers of the Depression era. Whether interviewing boxing promoters, or anyone in else George Bernard Shaw or the purveyors of Harlem "voodoo" products, Mitchell never lost his sense of courtly curiousity or his unerring ability to choose just the right word to express the outre character and often heartbreaking earnestness of his human subjects. Here's a worthy companion to sit on the shelf between A. J. Liebling's "Back Where I Come From" and "Up In The Old Hotel." It it also, by the way, a far better buy than the newly-republished "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon," the lion's share of which was reprinted in "Up In The Old Hotel."

Couldn't get my hands on this book fast enough.

The delight of My Ears are Bent lies in seeing the early output of one of America's best-ever writers. It's a little like watching a great artist in the process of creation. All of the elements are there - the fascination for the darker sides of human nature, the peaks into odd little corners of old New York, the genesis of some of his recurrent themes.

While Mitchell's later New Yorker work contained wit and very subtle, very dark humor, some of the pieces in My Ears are Bent are laugh-out-loud funny. And some of it is positively chilling - his absolutely stone-faced report on witnessing an execution leaves one feeling nothing but creepy.

But while there's some great stuff here, the book is uneven. For one thing, Mitchell was working for a newspaper when these stories were written, cranking out text at a ferocious volume, and didn't have the time to create brilliance he was later afforded at The New Yorker (to say nothing of the gem-cutting skill of New Yorker editors). And it's also clear that at the time these stories were written, Mitchell did not yet have the subtlety and flawless control displayed in his later work.

One caution: I suspect that some readers may find some of the descriptions of various ethnic groups - particularly African Americans - condescending or worse. These stories clearly reflect a somewhat different ethic than we expect to see today.

On a standalone basis, this is NOT a fabulous book. . I gave it the 4 stars because of Mitchell's importance as a writer, the fascination of being able to so clearly see his skills evolving, and because anyone who was touched by Mitchell's later writing MUST read it.

--GVI

A Joseph Mitchell anything is worth my time, but after having read UP IN THE OLD HOTEL, other writings will suffer by comparison. The works in this particular volume are a compilation of Mitchell's newspaper stories from the 1930s. While Mitchell's prose is sharp and illuminating, the subject matter comes off as slight compared to Mitchell's other labors. Mitchell had such a reputation for wanting his magazine stories to be perfect that these newspaper stories have the sense of being rushed to the presses.

Having said that, there are some great moments in the book. The book has a nice profile section of 1930s cartoonists, which is just the kind of subject matter that Mitchell handles well in that it gets past the part that everyone sees to the part Mitchell wants to know about. The section on Voodoo is hysterical and very much like his later New Yorker work. The book ends with a funny profile of playwright George Bernard Shaw.

If you have never read Mitchell, start with UP IN THE OLD HOTEL, but if you are already a fan, there are enough gems in this collection to make it worth your while.

"Up in the old hotel" was a fantastic book, with Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker stories. Perfect stories in poetic, crystalclear prose. Pure joy. The stories in "My ears are bent" were written before he became a writer for the New Yorker, and they are absolutely great. They have a kind of rough quality that makes the New Yorker stories seem too polished in comparison, too perfect. And I was a fan of these stories! But this book is, although it may seem a little less perfect, even better. A treasure!

My Ears Are Bent first published in 1938 is quintessential Joseph Mitchell, and that's saying quite a bit as many would call him the best writer to ever work at the New Yorker. The pieces included in this volume were written prior to his tenure at the New Yorker, years he worked as a writer for The World, The Herald Tribune, and The World-Telegram. His beat, his love, his passion was New York City, and for that we are the beneficiaries as he captured what is now a lost time and place with humor, grace, and piercing reportorial eye. His words mirror sights, sounds, emotions and, yes, even smells and tastes.

One is tempted to say that he knew and interviewed people from all walks of life, but it is more accurate to say that many of his subjects were from the periphery of life. There is Miss Mazie, a flamboyant blonde former burlesque dancer with a heart of gold who owns a small movie theater in the Bowery. She sits in a tiny ticket booth each night with her small dog in her lap. It never bothers her that "Sometimes a bum goes in there at 10 o'clock in the morning, and at midnight he is still there, sleeping in his seat, snoring as if he owns the joint." After all, Miss Mazie reasons everyone needs a place to sleep. She never turns down a panhandler, has never met a man good enough to marry, and dreams of becoming a nun. However, as she says, "I am practically a nun now. The only difference between me and a nun is that I smoke, drink booze, and talk rough."

Mitchell describes the most interesting athlete he ever interviewed, a second-rate ball player who later became known as Billy Sunday, a memorable Christian evangelist; he chats with a very young Gene Krupa, and a 60-year-old George M. Cohan. Not one to be attracted only to the famous he pens unforgettable lines about an 81-year-old woman just arrived from Ischia. She's taken aback by the city but feels quite at home once she is in her son's grocery story among the scent of olive oil and chunky Parma hams.

Each of the articles and short stories in this collection is filled with wit, empathy, and understanding. Mitchell is one of a kind and so are the people of whom he wrote.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

Joseph Mitchell's newspaper writing is Mitchell at his best; young, fresh and delightful. He tells in 1500 or so words booklength stories made all the more powerful by the brevity.
A text book on writing and reporting.

Drunks, cheesecake, Jesus, sports, work, poverty--these topics were the early obsessions of one of the best feature writers to walk the streets of New York City.

After eleven years as a reporter for three New York newspapers, Joseph Mitchell shifted to The New Yorker. He once called his early newspaper writing "a different kind of writing," but even if the articles collected in My Ears Are Bent serve as records of his apprenticeship, they still are an impressive and interesting set of feature stories.

All of these articles were written between 1929 and 1938, but the characteristics of Mitchell's later writing--painstaking attention to facts and visual details, immersion reporting/observation, humor, and a compassionate liking for the oddballs, the poor, and the fringe radicals--are all present.

Mitchell enjoyed moving past New York's businessmen and politicians and showing his readers some characters from the vast array of humanity that always populates a great city.

He let his interview subjects talk, while he listened. One scene in which he encounters a young woman with an idea for a "reverse striptease" is vintage Mitchell: "`Now look,' she said, unnecessarily. `This is the way I start my act.'" The word unnecessarily is an example of how he could blend dry humor and efficiency in ways that few writers are disciplined enough to manage.

The Chicago Tribune's Christopher Borrelli reminds us that Mitchell's interviews are "not verbatim--of course . . . Mitchell was a reporter before tape recorders. But it's not fiction either." Mitchell's genius as a reporter was his ability to find interesting people that his readers almost certainly never would meet and to share with us detailed portraits that forced our recognition of our common humanity. Borrelli calls Mitchell "the reporter's reporter, the finest The New Yorker ever produced (then and now, and possibly forever)."

Readers of contemporary journalism, New Journalism, and creative nonfiction will enjoy many of the articles in this book, and in fact, My Ears Are Bent is a reminder of just how old many tactics of good writing really are.

Armchair Interviews says: This book is well worth your time.

That the pieces in this collection are actually juvenilia is astounding; Mitchell wrote these essays while in his twenties and working as a reporter for the respective New York dailies the Herald Tribune and World. Many of the themes that the great man would hone and develop for Ross's New Yorker are here, in nascent form. Dick's Bar, which he would later bemoan as a casualty of repeal and the bar fixture industry (seriously) is still in it's full glory -- that eminent editor of the "greatest afternoon newspaper in the United States" imitating a tree frog. Interestingly, Mitchell as he appears in these pages drinks "nothing stronger than Moxie." Frequent quoting of interesting, slightly disreputable characters is here as well. New Yorkers that miss the eccentric oddballs that used to be a staple of their city need look no further than this volume to recapture a sense of them.

I would, however, advise those who aren't familiar with his material in "Up at The Old Hotel," to read those articles first, but if you are a fan you will find nothing to disappoint. Some probably remember Jimmy Breslin's accusation of racial prejudice against Mitchell when this collection came out, so I braced myself for out-dated and ugly stereotypes; although there is some of the former Mitchell certainly doesn't come off as a racist. I suspect Breslin had his own doubts at subjecting a 1930's reporter (he never styled himself as a sociologist or opinion writer) to Millennial revisionism. And that Mitchell was just, after all, a journalist is the most impressive thing about his writing.

I enjoyed this collection of Mitchell articles, but it is really something that I think is for his hardcore fans. Readers will notice that some of the material -- in some cases, almost word for word -- became more polished articles later that appeared in his better known "Up in the Old Hotel" collection, and others in "Bent" simply aren't as lyrical, as you would expect since he was writing for newspapers and not, as later, The New Yorker.

Stories are well crafted, but the subject matter didn't interest me. Not bad, but I wouldn't buy it again.