Collector Of Lost Souls

By Stefan Kanfer

TITLE: UP IN THE OLD HOTEL

AUTHOR: JOSEPH MITCHELL

PUBLISHER: PANTHEON; 716 PAGES; $27.50

THE BOTTOM LINE: A cult figure returns in a new collection of old masterworks.

He still comes into the office almost every day. New staffers frequently ask about the identity of the reticent 85-year-old with the soft North Carolinian accent. "A cult figure" is the usual answer. Sometimes they are referred to the dedication in a book by humorist Calvin Trillin: "To the New Yorker reporter who set the standard -- Joseph Mitchell." Hardly anyone else refers to Mitchell as a New Yorker reporter these days. After all, he has not published a word in 27 years.

Mitchell's reputation rests on four books: McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (1942), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1960) and Joe Gould's Secret (1965). They have been out of print for decades. But Pantheon Books has altered all that. Several years ago, the publishing house went through a convulsive change of management. Since then it has been the subject of intense debate and gossip. Could the new Pantheon survive under current business conditions? What kind of writers would it attract? If this anthology of Mitchell's best work is any indication, the publishers are on the cusp of a renaissance. Crowded with the author's favorite subjects ("visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the-end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy kings and old Gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks"), Up in the Old Hotel is the shortest 718-page volume of the year.

In the first entry a Manhattan bartender recalls some patrons in his native Ireland. "There were Falstaffs among them -- that is, they were just windy old drunks from the back alleys of Ballyragget, but they were Falstaffs to me. And there were Ancient Pistols among them. And there was an old man with a broken-hearted-looking face who used to come in and sit in a chair in the corner with a Guinness at his elbow and stare straight ahead for hours at a time and occasionally mumble a few words to himself, and every time he came in I would say to myself, 'King Lear.' " Readers of that passage will not wonder that Mitchell has attended meetings of the James Joyce Society for the past 30 years.

Long before the invention of the tape recorder, Mitchell managed to catch cadences of speech and pin down quirks of personality. A bearded lady refuses to let the doctors examine her: "When they get their hands on a monsterosity the medical profession don't know when to stop." A man who calls himself a king of the Gypsies is asked his age: "Between forty-five and seventy-five . . . My hair's been white for years and years, and I got seventeen grandchildren, and I bet I'm an old, old man." (His story was so enchanting that a Broadway musical, Bajour, was based on Mitchell's profile; it ran for 234 performances during the 1964 season.)

A nonagenarian looks back: "In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what's the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can't hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face on that woman so clear it hurts."

In Mitchell's hands the city skyline, tugboats, river barges, even rodents have a singularity that others overlooked: "A lust for blood seems to take & hold of the brown rat. One night, in the poultry part of old Gansevoort Market, alongside the Hudson, a burrow of them bit the throats of over three hundred broilers and ate less than a dozen. Before this part of the market was abandoned the rats practically had charge of it. Some of them nested in the drawers of desks. When the drawers were pulled open, they leaped out, snarling."

As rich, informative and diverting as these pieces are, they are accompanied by a melancholy undertow. Mitchell's home base recently underwent its own convulsive change of management. There remains the hope that an improvement is in the wind. Failing that, Up in the Old Hotel will not only celebrate a New York that is gone. It will also recall a New Yorker that, like so many of the people Mitchell interviewed two generations ago, exists only as a wistful memory.