by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Joseph Mitchell: Keep a Notebook, Not a Journal

Keeping a journal is right up therewith eating right, sleeping eight hours a night and getting regular exercise in the realm of stuff that we all think we should do – because there’s no question that doing it is a good thing.

But a freshly published Joseph Mitchell piece in the New Yorker suggests – no, doesn’t suggest; makes pretty damn clear – that the mystery of Mitchell’s thirty-year writer’s block is no mystery at all. He stopped writing reported pieces for publication when he started living mainly in the past; and he started living mainly in the past when . . .

I know the exact day that I began living in the past. I didn’t know it then, of course, but I know it now. The day was October 4, 1968, a Friday. I had recently been in what I guess could be called a period of depression, during which, on the advice of a doctor, I had begun keeping a detailed diary, really a journal, and I have continued to keep it, so that I have a record of everything of any consequence that happened to me on that day and on almost every day of my life since then. On that day, according to my diary, a dream woke me up around 4 A.M. In this dream, I was standing on the muddy bank of a stream that I recognized, because of a peculiar old slammed-together split-rail bridge crossing it, as being the central stream running through Old Field Swamp, a cypress swamp near my home in North Carolina. I had often fished in this stream as a boy. In the dream, I was fishing for redfin pike with a snare hook hung from a line on the end of a reed pole …

Mitchell tells the story as if it’s the dream that made all the difference; but it’s the setup to the dream that tells us what we need to know. He had begun to keep a journal and to record everything of consequence that happened to him.

Truly, could there have been anything worse for an outward-looking virtuoso of curiosity like Mitchell than to put down his reporter’s notebook and take up a journal, which turned him even further inward than he in his depression already was?

Better for him to take a walk along the lower Manhattan piers the way his precursor Melville did — and to bring his notebook with him.

Maybe I am reading Mitchell’s history through mine. This much I know: the day I stopped keeping a journal – sometime in 1996; I am happy not to know the day – is the day I started to become a writer.

  1. etr-gu posted this