SAINT MAZIE

A few weeks ago I wrote a review for Caught By The River of Thomas Kunkel's excellent biography of the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell - Man In Profile : Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker - http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/05/man-in-profile-joseph-mitchell-new-yorker-andy-childs/. Pleasingly, the book seems to have garnered a great deal of praise and attention and will hopefully have introduced Mitchell's timeless prose to a whole new audience. The wonderful compendium of his best work - Up In The Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) - is still available and hopefully always will be. The second piece in this book is of particular interest at the moment. It's called Mazie and is a short profile of "a bossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P.Gordon....a celebrity on the Bowery....has a wry but genuine fondness for bums....and each day gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery" (a very large amount actually, this being the late 30s). By day Mazie worked, practically lived even, in the ticket cage of the Venice movie theatre which her family owned and from where she presided, like some street-wise, life-hardened matron and angel, over the destitute and the down-on-their-luck inhabitants of the Bowery. 

Joseph Mitchell should always be remembered first and foremost as a great writer and chronicler of New York life, but there are two perhaps more newsworthy elements to his story that will seemingly always resurface in any discussion of his life. The first is the last thirty years of his life working for The New Yorker and never publishing a word, and the second is the revelation, relatively soon after they were published it must be stated, that some of his celebrated profile pieces on various individuals were in fact composite creations. Hugh G.Flood (in Old Mr.Flood), King Cockeye Johnny (in King of The Gypsies) and Mr.Hunter (in Mr.Hunter's Grave) didn't actually exist. In the hands of a lesser writer this underhand blurring of fact and fiction would have devalued the journalistic merit of his work. With his impeccable eye for detail and detached perspective though Mitchell succeeds in creating characters that perfectly represent the essence of the places and the time that he's writing about and they are as real to him as any living person could be. 

In his earlier, shorter pieces like Mazie however there was no room or necessity for any fictional embellishment. Or so Joe Mitchell thought. And so I also thought until I discovered that all of last week and this week BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime is a book called Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg (Serpent's Tail) which is apparently a novel that imagines the life and times of Mazie and "honours an extraordinary life and heralds a completely original approach to writing historical fiction. Weaving together fictionalised diaries, writings and interviews, Attenberg has constructed an utterly convincing portrait of Mazie Philips, which is also a deeply moving portrait of New York as it passed through the First World War, Prohibition, the boom of the '20s, and then the terrible depression of the '30s."
So it seems that in an audacious manner that Joseph Mitchell would have surely approved of in his courteous Southern-gentlemanly way, Attenberg has taken the essence of Mazie's story (with perhaps only Mitchell's original seventeen-page piece as source material) and brought her to life in a way that feels as credible as it does remarkable. I'm only going on what I've heard on the radio - I have yet to get my hands on a copy of the book - but the voices and narrative sound thoroughly authentic to me. Despite the increasing and bewildering insistence on radio and TV to use English actors for American parts, Samantha Spiro does a very creditable job as Mazie's voice and the supporting voices are equally good. It's riveting radio and I can only assume that the book is even more rewarding.