Jobs and Sprees and Sorrows

William Fiennes

• Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell
  Cape, 200 pp, £9.99, October 1997, ISBN 0 224 05107 5

Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs’. Mitchell was the laureate of the waters around New York. He recorded the arcana of the rivermen. He described the harbour’s abundance of shellfish and finfish – not just common finfish like flounder, alewife, sea bass and ling, but also the rarer strays from southern waters: lookdowns, hairtails, goggle-eyed shad. He loved Fulton Fish Market: ‘the smoky river-bank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell’. His stories are filled to the brim with seafood – with oysters and eels and sturgeon, and littleneck and cherrystone clams raked up from the mud of the Long Island bays.