Bowery Botanist

MCSORLEY'S WONDERFUL SALOON --Joseph Mitchell -- Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

Joseph Mitchell is as gloomy as only a humorist can be. For years he has been studying, with the prying patience of a botanist, the queer human weeds he finds growing in the dingier interstices of Manhattan's bum-littered Bowery. But Mitchell is saddened when readers of The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines chuckle at the results of his researches, these 20 profiles and stories, now collected for the first time in book form. For Humorist Mitchell professes to find nothing comic in his wacky human jujubes. He says he does not caricature them. Instead, he describes them with a loving exactness which gives them an odd dignity. Such humor as they have, he implies, is incidental. It results from the lighting of an infallible eye on a fallible object.

Focus and locus of most of Author Mitchell's studies is the environs of McSorley's Old Ale House, which for 88 years has resisted change just off Cooper Square, where Manhattan's skidroad--the Bowery--ends. McSorley's has also provided a haven for Manhattan's literary transients--writers, newshawks, painters, poets (grateful Poet e. e. cummings once immortalized mcsorley's: "Inside snug and evil. ... the Bar tinkling luscious jigs dint of ripe silver with warmlyish wetflat splurging smells waltz the glush of squirting taps. . . ." The venerable saloon still has soup bowls instead of cash registers, gas lights over the bar, a rack of clay and corncob pipes for free smokes on the house. Under portraits of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley is a brass plate: THEY ASSASSINATED THESE GOOD MEN THE SKULKING DOGS.

Once McSorley's was home to 18 cats. At feeding time, no matter how brisk business was, Bill McSorley would leave the bar and bang the bottom of a tin pan. "The fat cats would come loping up, like leopards, from all corners of the saloon." If Bill wanted to close up while customers were still drinking their ale, he would drum on the bar with both fists, shout: "Now, see here, gents! I'm under no obligoddamnation to stand here all night while you baby them drinks."

Women are still firmly excluded from McSorley's. Once a Greenwich Village feminist, disguised as a man, ordered an ale from Proprietor Bill McSorley. She downed first the ale, then her hair. Then she scrammed. Said the amazed McSorley between a moan and a bellow: "She was a woman! She was a goddamn woman!"

The city just outside McSorley's is less cozy but just as queer. It has yielded Author Mitchell specimens like:

> Mazie, who has a "genuine fondness for bums and is undoubtedly acquainted with more of them than any other person in the city." Every day Mazie gives away from $5 to $15 in small change to Bowery down-&-outers. Says Mazie: I been as free with my dimes as old John D. himself."

For 21 years Mazie has presided at the ticket cage of the Venice Theater, on Park Row, where the Bowery begins. "Some days I don't know which this is, a movie-pitcher theater or a flophouse. . . . Pitchers with shooting in them are bad for business. They wake up the customers." But she adds with pride: "Nobody ever got loused up in the Venice."

> Joe Gould, "the last of the bohemians," otherwise known as Professor Sea Gull Professor Bloomingdale, The Mongoose. Gould tells what it took to make him: "old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard, and 25 years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food." Joe professes never to be without his "three Hs" -- homelessness, hunger, hangovers. On winter nights he sports a layer of newspapers between his shirt and undershirt. He is 5 ft. 4, weighs 95 lb., and trims his cinnamon beard every other Easter. Twenty-six years ago he began a mysterious work-- An Oral History of Our Time -- a chronicle composed entirely of chance conversations on the Bowery and elsewhere. He has been working-on it ever since. The unfinished manuscript (the fruit of more than 20,000 conversations) contains 9,000,000 words in longhand, is eleven times wordier than the Bible. So far no publisher has nibbled.*

> Cockeye Johnny, self-styled King of the Gypsies. Says Johnny: "To the Department of Welfare, I may not be no king and to the King of England, I may not be no king, but to those poor, persecuted gypsies that I run myself knock-kneed looking after their personal welfare, I am king." A gin drinker, Johnny mixes it with Pepsi-Cola, calls it old popskull, consumes five quarts of gin a week. Johnny believes there are but two kinds of merchandise: "lost and unlost. Anything that ain't nailed down is lost." Johnny gets easily worked up over the idea of a job. "I despise to work," he says. "Gypsy men ain't built like ordinary men. They ain't fitted for shovel work. They're high-strung and they rupture easy."

* Gould reported last week that Scribner's is interested in a fragment of his Oral History. Says Joe: "Willkie called his book One World. Mine will be called A Million Worlds. There are as many worlds as there are people, each having his own world. " Asked whether he liked his own world, Joe said: "I haven't decided yet."

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