Old Mr. Flood

OLD MR. FLOOD
BY
JOSEPH MITCHELL

WITH A FORWARD BY
C
HARLES
M
C
G
RATH

ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-979-1

M P Publishing Limited
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Copyright © 2005 by Joseph Mitchell
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.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchell, Joseph, 1908-1996
   Old Mr. Flood / by Joseph Mitchell.
 
Three short stories
   ISBN 1-59692-114-5 (alk. paper)
 1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Older men—Fiction.
 3. Retirees—Fiction. I. Title.
   PS3525.I9714O43 2005

MPP 2010

Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith, cover and
author photograph by James Hamilton

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 
For Jack and Sandra Mitchell

B
ACK IN THE 1970’S,
when all of Joseph Mitchell was out of print, you could with a little luck still come across a used copy of “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon” or “The Bottom of the Harbor.” At one point I owned copies of both, but then foolishly lent them to friends, who are presumably still hoarding them, just like whoever it was who walked off with the New York Public Library’s sole copy of “Old Mr. Flood,” which today is still listed as “missing.” This present edition is the first I’ve ever set eyes on.

The original “Mr. Flood” is the rarest of rarities, sort of like the mysterious black clams that Mr. Flood, who knows his seafood, is so high on-shellfish so unusual that few people have ever seen them, let alone eaten one. And to extend the analogy in a way that Mitchell, the least metaphorical of writers, never would, the book also resembles the black clam, the Arctica islandica, in being the best and most intense of its kind. This shortest of Mitchell’s books, barely over a hundred pages, is also the most Mitchellian, the one that in distilled and concentrated form sums up all the others. If your library were to contain only one Mitchell book, this should be it, and you should probably chain it down.

I first read “Old Mr. Flood” the way most of us lucky enough to work at
The New Yorker
in the 70’s and 80’s did—in the original three magazine installments, which came out in 1944 and 1945. If you were a young person at the magazine then, reading “Mr. Flood” was a sort of rite of passage. Eventually, if you were lucky enough, some senior figure—Calvin Trillin, perhaps, or Philip Hamburger or William Maxwell—would decide that you weren’t completely hopeless, and suggest that you might want to look at some Mitchell.

His work, like that of everyone else who had
ever written for
The New Yorker
, was collected in a big black scrapbook, the original magazine columns cut out and pasted, family-album style, on large manila sheets that decades later still smelled of rubber cement. The scrapbooks were shelved alphabetically in the magazine’s library, the spines hand-lettered in white ink, and except perhaps for “Salinger, J. D.”, I doubt that any was more carefully pored over than “Mitchell, Joseph.” The pieces collected there were recognizably
New Yorker-
ish, in that they were stylish, meticulous, often surprising and offbeat, but they were also unlike anything else in that entire library. They were in a voice, at once classical and vernacular, that seemed to come out of nowhere (or maybe the part of nowhere that Twain also sprang from) and that none of Mitchell’s many admirers have ever come close to imitating. If Mitchell wasn’t the single best writer who ever appeared in
The New Yorker
, then it was a tie between him and E. B. White.

What added to the mystery and allure of those scrapbooked Mitchell pieces, and especially of the “stories of fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth” that make up “Old Mr. Flood,” was that the author
himself, though he had famously not published for years, came into
The New Yorker
, where he had an office, all the time. A Mitchell sighting was a regular occasion but an exciting one all the same. Joe was formal and courtly: he wore a suit every day-—beautiful worsteds in fall and winter; seersucker when the weather was warm-and either a fedora or a straw hat. He was also shy and a little bit secretive. He once began a conversation with me by saying, “Don’t tell anyone, but I read something interesting in
The Times
today…”

He was a famously good listener, who would nod his head repeatedly at no matter what you told him and say in his soft Tarheel accent, “Ah know, Ah
know.”
But if he felt comfortable and you got him on the right subject, he was also a brilliant and tireless talker. While blotting his head on a hot summer day in a
New Yorker
men’s room, he once astonished me by reeling off from memory entire poems by Elizabeth Bishop. On another occasion he explained to me the doctrinal differences between North Carolina Baptists and Methodists with all the zeal of a Zwingli or a Melancthon. This conversation also took place in the men’s room,
and I was gone so long somebody came in to look for me. But in my experience his favorite subjects were his beloved “J.J.”—James Joyce, that is, whose work he read over and over—and the Fulton Fish Market, the setting, as it happens, of “Old Mr. Flood,” and the place where for some reason Joseph Mitchell, the son of a North Carolina tobacco farmer, may have felt most at home.

Much has been made in recent years of the fact that “Old Mr. Flood” is partly fictional—that, as he wrote in the introduction to the book, “Mr. Flood is not one man” and that these stories, though “solidly based on facts,” are “truthful rather than factual.” In retrospect, it’s hard to understand why people at the time were so surprised. Nowadays, the title and the main character’s name are often taken, wrongly, to be an allusion to Edward Arlington Robinson’s famous poem “Mr. Flood’s Party.” (Mitchell later said that at the time of writing he had never read the poem, which makes it one of very few gaps in his literary knowledge.) But Flood is clearly a watery pseudonym nonetheless, and he shares a birthday—July 27—with the author himself. Flood is a composite, Mitchell says, but he is
also an alter ego, who has countless things in common with his creator: love for the fish market, fondness for a drink every now and then, a habit of collecting stone and iron ornaments from old buildings, a ready ear for a good story, and, most of all, what Mitchell called a “graveyard sense of humor.”

Flood, it’s not too much to say, is Mitchell as he sometimes imagined himself, truthfully if not altogether factually, and the world of the book is a kind of alternate universe—it’s the real, recognizable New York but enhanced a little, so that, for one thing, if you stick, like Mr. Flood, to a sensible diet of whiskey and fish, you really can hope to be a hundred and fifteen years old. The book ends, we should remember, under a full moon, when people, especially “the Irish and the Scandinavians and the people who come up here from the South,” get a little larky and delusional. The dream in this case is an almost Shakespearean one, in which life is transformed by the spell of storytelling.

THESE STORIES OF FISH-EATING
, whiskey, death, and rebirth first appeared in
The New Yorker
. Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past. I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts. I am obliged to half the people in the market for helping me get these facts. I am much obliged to the following:

Mrs. James Donald, proprietor; James Donald, head bartender; and Gus Trein, manager, of the Hartford House, 309 Pearl Street.

Louis Morino, proprietor of Sloppy Louie’s Restaurant, 92 South Street.

Drew Radel, president of the Andrew Radel
Oyster Company, South Norwalk, Connecticut.

The late Amos Chesebro, one of the founders of Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham, Stalls 1, 2, and 3, Fulton Fish Market, and the late Matthew J. Graham, of the same firm. Mr. Chesebro died in December, 1946, lacking a few weeks of reaching the age of ninety-three.

Joe Cantalupo, president of the Cantalupo Carting Company, 140 Beckman Street. Mr. Cantalupo is an antiquarian; he collects prints and photographs of old buildings in the fish-market district and environs. His company, which was founded by his father, Pasquale Cantalupo, sweeps and hoses down the market and carts the market trash—broken barrels and boxes, gurry, and discarded fish—to the city incinerators. His trucks are decorated with this sign:

F. Nelson Blount, president of the Narragansett Bay Packing Company, Warren, Rhode Island. Mr. Blount dredges black clams.