Memoirs of an Editor!

Our book today is Memoirs of an Editor, a big, bustling 1924 volume by Edward Mitchell, who was for a long time the editor-in-chief of the old New York Sun, a position he took over from his semi-legendary predecessor, Charles A. Dana, a brilliant and recondite figure who was always the smartest person in any gathering. Dana cut his rhetorical teeth in the brawling world of Boston journalism, and Mitchell, who was born in Maine, followed in that same path, taking a job as a full-time deadline hack for the dear old Boston Daily Advertiser while it was under the brilliant but ramshackle leadership of Edward Everett Hale, who gets several loving pen-portraits early on in Memoirs of an Editor:

My acquaintance with Hale was made at a house in Beacon Street. The city desk had sent me to report a reception where Lucretia Mott was the guest of honor. Serene in the dignity of great achievement, the placid little lady of eighty, in a drab garb of the Hicksite Friends with starched white cap and kerchief, stood quietly in the centre of a multicolored and very vocal group. I am glad to have seen her, though nothing in the chronicles of abolition or woman’s rights could then compete with the invention of the heavenly contrivance for ascertaining longitude. The creator of the brick moon and of Philip Nolan came in, unkempt as usual as to hair and beard, untidy in attire, and not overgraceful in his movements, but engaging in the personal approach. Many things were possible to him, but you felt it was impossible for him to be “well dressed.”

The odd, slightly unsettling fly-on-the-wall tenor of the passage is perfectly indicative of what the young Mitchell was like during what he’d later come to think of as his apprentice years in Boston. Hale liked him, in that disinterested and forgetful way Hale liked almost everybody, and the Daily Advertiser was as tough and fun a proving-ground as any deadline-writer could hope to have. And Boston itself did her part to season the young man – and gave him a generous store of good anecdotes, almost all of which find their way into Memoirs of an Editor at some point or other, like the time he was again a fly on the wall, this time at one of the city’s most beloved institutions:

One day some years ago, Mr. Sanborn was scanning the shelves in Goodspeed’s bookshop in Boston, with back turned to the spot where the proprietor was talking with a customer. A lady came in and inquired of Mr. Goodspeed about the value of a single folio volume she owned of Piranesi’s plates of Roman antiquities. The customer casually remarked to the bookseller that he had all the twenty-eight or twenty-nine volumes of Piranesi. Mr. Sanborn, who had been listening and could no longer contain himself, wheeled around and said:

“I congratulate you, sir; I congratulate you! Do you happen to be aware that you have a very rare possession, sir a most valuable possession?”

The felicitated and instructed stranger happened to be J. P. Morgan, Jr.

Once Mitchell moves to New York and begins his long association with the mighty Sun, the narrative of Memoirs of an Editor really starts to flex its muscles. We see an almost endless gallery of famous movers and shakers in politics and society; we watch the great issues of the day being hashed out in the halls of power; we gain the intimate access to the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and, later, Theodore Roosevelt, that only a writer at the country’s most powerful newspaper could give us. We also get a long and loving portrait of Charles Dana in all his moods, and through it all there’s Mitchell’s signature low-key puckish good humor lifting the whole thing above the ranks of musty Edwardian memoirs. It brings a smile to your face, the relish with which he commits to the written page the stories that had set many a dining room to roars of laughter over the decades – including the time, when he was still a very young man, when a gloomy doctor told him if he didn’t pack up immediately and go to Colorado to take up peaceful sheep-farming, he’d likely die before the decade was out. At Dana’s insistence, he went to see a different doctor, a certain old specialist named Doctor Flint, who wrote him out a prescription and suggested he might live past that projected decade. Forty years had passed since then, as Mitchell loved to point out, and in this present volume, he not only reproduces the written prescription for the amusement of his readers, but he also distills the meaning of it all in a quintessentially Mitchellian aside:

Heaven bless the optimists! In Doctor Flint’s profession and in every other, in the pulpit, in the sanctum, and at the speakers’ table after the half-cups are filled; for it is the optimists who keep the world a-going.

The world of Memoirs of an Editor has transformed itself out of existence in the century since this book appeared and disappeared; Mitchell is another of those countless authors who’ll never been reprinted, never consulted, and never found in libraries, since his books will never be digitized for electronic holdings. But if you find this book somehow, you should read it; a lost era lives again in its pages.