Nick Tanner in New York writes:
Hugh G Flood, the creation of veteran New Yorker columnist Joseph Mitchell, is a spry nonogenerian determined to live till the afternoon of his 115th birthday by eating only seafood. The stories in which Mitchell first captured Mr Flood and his companions in the Fulton Street Fish Market in Manhattan have just been republished in paperback, having been out of print for several years.
Mitchell was one of the pioneers of reportage in the United States, and "these stories of fish-eating, whisky, death, and rebirth," first published in the New Yorker in the 1940s, are seen by many as the most distilled example of his work. "I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual," Mitchell wrote in a preface, explaining that Mr Flood is an amalgam of several old men who used to inhabit Fulton Street. "I am obliged to half the people in the market," he admits, and it was by listening to their early morning conversations that he was able to absorb the jokes, tales, rituals and legends that buzz through the stalls that still open every day at dawn on the shore of the city's old financial district.
Mr Flood himself is a survivor. Rejecting the tranquility of extreme old age, he rises each day at five and stumps around the market, handling the catch, bantering with fishermen and throwing back whiskey. His strict diet sprang from his observation of the hardiness of old fishermen; "When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses," he says, "I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth." Mitchell uses Mr Flood's wanderings in the market to pull together a fascinating cast of old-time New Yorkers, an ex-policeman who is obsessed with catching the illnesses he hears about on the radio he was given as a retirement gift, a huge fishwife who claims to be skinny under her thirteen layers of clothing, a fishing boat supplier who "dislikes the fish market and despises fish." Mitchell's descriptions of Fulton Street are enlivened by a constant pulse of berating, cajoling, and reminiscent voices, which finally take over the narrative, each story ending not with Mitchell's observations but with an anecdote from one of his characters.
Today the market is still there, although it is expected to relocate to the north of Manhattan before long. Many of the old orange warehouses Mr Flood once admired are still standing, and the marketplace itself remains the dank, sodden place he would have recognised. The morning I chose to wander round it also played host to a huge rainstorm, and the constant clatter of rainwater striking the coloured canvasses and pooling six inches deep in the gutters gave the impression that the whole place had been dragged that morning out of the ocean. Most of the stallholders had already called it a day, and the ones that remained trudged around in grim yellow overalls, looking like they were in a storm at sea. The only active inhabitants were a group of gulls padding around in the damp black slurry, bolting down piles of what could be crab carcasses or discarded paper. The bright signs of the fish stalls stood out in the rain, Mount Sinai Fish, Best Buy, C G Dino's Seafood, while behind it all the spidery form of Brooklyn bridge stretched across the East River and disappeared into the white mist.
Today the old buildings are hung here and there with For Sale signs, and the pervading atmosphere is that of a place clinging tenaciously to its past, while the vast towers of the financial district and the quaint, sanitized plaza of the adjacent Historic District creep ever nearer. But the market itself will survive its imminent move, the need to distribute the vast catches of the Atlantic fishing fields providing a continuity among all the changes in the city. It is a continuity that Mitchell understood, and one that can be felt in the speeches of Mr Flood and the meticulous descriptions of the market traders. For anyone interested in the way New York patched itself together from countless traditions and languages, these funny, tender stories could hardly be bettered. Mitchell combined a journalist's sharpness with a novelist's deep feeling for character, and the republication of these stories allows the voices that he painstakingly and lovingly recorded to be set loose once again.
Old Mr Flood, by Joseph Mitchell, was published by MacAdam/Cage in April.
