I didn’t know Joe Mitchell well. Of course I knew who he was when Kevin Begos suggested I joined them for lunch at the Oyster Bar, and over the course of the next few years I met with him perhaps a dozen times, at his office at The New Yorker, at 830 Broadway, or in a restaurant like The Oyster Bar. We had a few things in common and one of the things that interested him about me was that I’d known Djuna Barnes very well and Barnes was someone he’d wanted to get close to but couldn’t.

The reason for Kevin’s luncheon was because he’d been charged to oversee the Limited Editions Club’s production of a fancy edition of Joe’s legendary book, The Bottom of the Harbor. Kevin thought it might make sense to illustrate the book with photogravures taken from Berenice Abbott’s photographs of the New York City waterfront in the 1930s. It was a good idea; most of Joe’s stories were set in those years.

It was a complicated process, not because of Berenice, but because Susan Blatchford, who was overseeing Berenice’s affairs in those days, was always trying to get as much for an Abbott signature as possible because that was her only source of income and in 1990, when the book was in production, the years when there were large editions of  Abbott photographs were long over. In any event, the project went forward, but the book was issued in an edition 250 copies, but with only Joe’s signature.

At one of our meetings I asked Joe to sign my battered copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. He said he be happy to. He took the book and said he’d give it back to me the next time we met, which he did, some months later. This is what he wrote in the book:

For Hank O’Neal Whose curiosity and tolerance as well as his Mark Twainian relief for the eccentricities of the human race have allowed him to be at home in worlds as far apart as the world of Ty Cobb and the world of Eddie Condon and the world of Djuna Barnes. Remembering a lunch with him and Kevin Begos at the Oyster Bar Restaurant in Grand Central on one of the last days of 1990 during which the subject of conversation ranged freewheelingly from the perfectionism of that great photographer Berenice Abbott to the contradictions involved in working for the CIA to the sadness one feels late on in life trying to figure out what happened to a collection of baseball bats and Indian arrowheads of one’s boyhood to the fact that the ugliness of a catfish seen a long time ago in Texas can turn one against the eating of fish let alone clams and oysters for the rest of one’s life. With best wishes for the New Year December 28, 1990. Joseph Mitchell.

What an incredible listener he was. I said all these things to him and much more but he was able to remember the right things to make sense of what I was all about and sum me up perfectly. He wrote this inscription on one page, in what appears to be one take. No words are misspelled. Nothing is crossed out. And he nailed his subject, just as he had all those other eccentric characters that live so vividly in the best stories that ever appeared in The New Yorker. 

There was never any new writing from Joe, the inscription in my book may have been one of the longer things he wrote in the 1990s, but over the years he always sent me inscribed copies of the reissues, but never with anything but a name. There was no need. He’d said everything he needed to the first time.