I come from a cushy little suburb set twenty miles up Lake Michigan from Chicago. It’s a place devoid of an epic heritage. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a seedy or shameful or interesting quarter in this town. There are no dark alleys, no teeming streets, no outdoor markets or bazaars. Like most suburban-spawns, my early life lacked variation and adventure. Anything seen as dangerous or subversive was corralled and contained in the library and movie house. From the day I first came to miss things that weren’t there, I dreamed of living in an apartment in New York City. From Illinois, Manhattan looked to be a place of fantastic characters, edgy street-debate and impossibly drawn-out evenings.

_Several years later, when I finally made it to New York, and moved into an east-side studio with a view of Queens and the 59th Street bridge, I found the city a wildly different place than I had imagined. There were no profound bums, no tough yet tender-hearted cabbies, no overheard conversations riddled with truth. People on the street seemed distressed and downcast and everyone had an explanation for this condition. It was said to be the fault of crack cocaine or wilding gangs or a reflection of the gloomy national mood. Whatever the cause, the consensus was that New York, in the last several years, had become a colder, less forgiving place.

_It was about a month after my arrival that I was introduced to The New Yorker pieces written by Joseph Mitchell a half century earlier, and it was as if someone had handed me a copy of The Thousand and One Nights in the burned-out remains of Sadaam Hussein’s Baghdad. These stories, which were recently reissued as part of a Mitchell compilation, Up In The Old Hotel, (Pantheon, $27.50), read like a baedeker to an imagined city that has ceased to stand even in the minds of believers. In his first New Yorker book, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which appeared in 1938, there’s a profile of a bearded lady, a Gypsy King and an old man determined to outlaw the use of profanity. Taken together, these pieces paint a compelling picture of the Manhattan that existed between the world wars: an island of flophouses and bowery bums and simple men who speak great truths.

_More than just the details of daily life, though, McSorley’s captures the way people talk. In his book, The Big Money, John Dos Passos suggests America is the speech of her people, and it’s as if Mitchell, not content to generalize, set out to proves this. He constructs vast panoramas from the chatter of city folk; like Georges Seurat, Mitchell builds landscapes from thousands of colorful dots. As a reporter, he encouraged people to speak in the kind of honest open-ended sentences that often say more than the speaker is aware of. While speaking of her circus, the bearded lady sums up New York in general. “If truth was known,” she told Mitchell in 1940, “we’re all freaks together.

_In story after story, Mitchell uses such talk to build a loose frame behind which meaning lurks. The writer hints at his method in a profile of Joe Gould, a homeless street wanderer and Harvard graduate who claimed to be working on the world’s longest unpublished book, “an Oral History of our time.” In describing Gould’s work, Mitchell illuminates his own:

“Gould puts into the oral history only things he has seen or heard. At least half of it is made up of conversations taken down verbatim or summarized...‘what people say is history,’ Gould says. What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan—is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.' "

_After reading the pieces in McSorley’s, I spent several long afternoons looking up the old river-front hotels and Village saloons where Mitchell found his subjects. Though most of these places have been erased or turned into theme restaurants, I was happy to see the remains. I was learning to recognize the bits of authenticity that still crop up, here and there, like half-rotten teeth some dentist didn’t have time to pull.

_Even more than an urge to see old New York, McSorley’s left me with a desire to read more Joe Mitchell. But when I began to call around to bookstores for titles and prices, I found that all his books had long since gone out of print. Actually, the last story Mitchell published ran in The New Yorker in 1964. Like a nonfiction J.D. Salinger, he seems to have tired of publishing, if not writing altogether. His absence from bookstores and magazine racks has not, however, robbed him of an audience. Over the years, a literary cult has gathered around his work (reading it, discussing it, searching for copies of it) and when I let it be known I was in the market for the old books, several people volunteered advice—where to look, who to ask. I was eventually able to procure all his New Yorker titles (McSorley’s, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, Joe Gould’s Secret) by wading through musty stacks in the store-fronts of antique bookshops.

_These texts were expensive, cracked and yellowing, but rather than sour me on the writer, they added to his attraction. Once tracked down, the old books have the feel of underground documents that contain hidden truths about the city’s past—slides viewed after the apocalypse. Though the new compilation is long overdue, many of his fans are less than thrilled with the reissue: it’s as if an esoteric religious text had been thrust into the public spotlight.

_Though none of this will change how Mitchell’s words read on the page, the new collection may alter the way his work, as a whole, is considered. For the first time, nearly all of his stories have been set side-by-side in a single volume. And one gets the impression that this is how Mitchell intended it all along. Although his subjects and settings changed, he was always at work on the same basic story. The various articles, which ran as profiles, reporter pieces and fiction, seem the scattered installments of a single book. This might explain why Mitchell stopped publishing. He wrote two profiles of Joe Gould, and the second one—his last published piece—is the most honest, unsentimental exploration into human character he ever made. In it, he disassembles the myths of art and poverty he spent much of his career constructing. “Joe Gould’s Secret” may have been the only possible conclusion to Joe Mitchell’s book about old New York.

_Up In The Old Hotel, which is chronologically ordered, also shows how Mitchell’s choice of subject matter evolved. His early pieces were sharp profiles of the oddballs and cranks who then populated New York. He came to the city from a tobacco farm set in the rugged hills of North Carolina and, in order to define his own sense of the city, he may have found it necessary to seek out New York’s eccentrics. In the down-and-outers of the Bowery and Times Square, he found a tragedy and melancholy that often seems absent from those who inhabit the mainstream. Mitchell explained how he came to recognize this quality in Joe Gould:

“In my eyes, he [Joe Gould] was an ancient, enigmatic, spectral figure, a banished man. I never saw him without thinking of the ancient mariner or of the Wandering Jew or of the Flying Dutchman, or of a silent old man called Swamp Jackson who lived alone in a shack on the edge of a swamp near the small farming town in the South that I come from and wandered widely on foot on the back roads of the countryside at night, or of one of those men I used to puzzle over when I read the Bible as a child, who, for transgressions that seemed mysterious to me, had been ‘cast out.' "

_As his writing progressed, Mitchell came to find this same puzzlement in figures at first less striking. By 1961, when his book, The Bottom of the Harbor, appeared, he had given up the circus-profile in favor of pieces about merchant seamen and restaurant proprietors and philosophical old men. He had hit on a spectral quality that haunts even mundane things; Mitchell could find mystery at an I HOP. But over the years, people have confused this ability with the reality of New York—a city always more imagined than real. Even in the Thirties and Forties, the great talent of the city was not to provide writers with a strange, compelling world, but to attract people who saw the world in a strange and compelling way. The same sensibility that once attracted Mitchell to the “Concert of Freaks,” later led him to the riverside rodent:

“Anyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away, its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of Judas and the stool pigeon, of soullessness in general. ”

_Some say Mitchell’s love for the raffish and novel, a love of street-life and wine-induced wisdom, has no place today. Things like chain restaurants and malls and television sit-coms have made the world so repetitious and predictable that all the mystic has been eclipsed from daily life. Mitchell, I think, would disagree. New York is still a great city, and all great cities are enigmatic places, it’s simply a matter of learning to see it.

_The ability to see something, of course, has everything to do with where you happen to be standing, and Mitchell’s vantage point always seems a step removed from the action. The resulting voice is comic and understated, forever aware that the world is a dimming place. A passage from his 1960 article, “The Rivermen,” seems to pinpoint the geographic location of this voice; a place where the conditions are in flux, but the topography beneath the clouds is stable and trustworthy.

“From the streets, there is a panoramic view of the river and the Manhattan skyline. It is a changeable view, and it is often spectacular. Every now and then—at daybreak, at sunset, during storms, on starry summer nights, on hazy Indian-summer afternoons, on blue, clear-cut, stereoscopic winter afternoon—it is astonishing.”