JOSEPH Mitchell, who was born 100 years ago tomorrow, has been called the "New York James Joyce". Less grandly, he was also dubbed the "poet laureate of Fulton Fish Market": the area of lower Manhattan whose daily life he long chronicled. But by the time he died, aged 87, Mitchell was almost as well known for what he hadn't written.
In 1964, after a quarter of a century spent filing reports and features for the New Yorker, he suddenly ceased production. The epic case of writer's block that followed was notable not only for its duration - 32 years - but because nothing else about his working routine changed.
He continued to turn up at the magazine every morning and would spend the day in his office, except for a 90-minute lunch break. After his death in 1996, a colleague recalled: "Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained." He never wrote anything either, at least for publication.
During his earlier, productive period, Mitchell was perhaps best known for the pieces later collected as McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.
McSorley's Ale House, founded by a 19th century emigrant who had fashioned it after a pub in his native Omagh, rivalled the fish market as an inspiration for Mitchell's writings, which centred on its core clientele: "a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling about the place". If Mitchell was New York's Joyce, this was his Dubliners.
Although he came to be seen as the quintessential Manhattan-ite, Mitchell was in fact a southerner, reared in the swampy cotton-and-tobacco country of North Carolina, where he tuned what one admirer called his "great ear for talk".
Joyce was an acknowledged influence too. Late in life, Mitchell described himself as an "obsessive reader of Finnegans Wake". Which may explain his love of the sprawling quotation, as in this excerpt from one of his great semi-fictional characters, the eponymous hero of another collection: Old Mr Flood. Mr Flood is discussing his belief that "nobody knows why they do anything". To illustrate, he tells the story of a New Jersey farmer, who has just collected a consignment of drink and is returning home on the train with it when a drummer sitting opposite asks him what time it is. The farmer, who has just consulted his pocket watch, refuses to say. The drummer tries again, without success, and finally demands an explanation.
"If I was to tell you the time of day," the farmer said, "we'd get into a conversation, and I got a crock of spirits down on the floor between my feet, and in a minute I'm going to take a drink, and if we were having a conversation I'd ask you to take a drink with me, and you would, and presently I'd take another, and I'd ask you to do the same, and you would, and we'd get to drinking, and by and by the train'd pull up to the stop where I get off, and I'd ask you why don't you get off and spend the afternoon with me, and you would, and we'd walk up to my house and sit on the front porch and drink and sing, and along about dark my old lady would come out and ask you to take supper with us, and you would, and after supper I'd ask if you'd care to drink some more, and you would, and it'd get to be real late and I'd ask you to spend the night in the spare room, and you would, and along about two o'clock in the morning I'd get up to go to the pump, and I'd pass my daughter's room, and there you'd be, in there with my daughter, and I'd have to turn the bureau upside down and get out my pistol, and my old lady would have to get dressed and hitch up the horse and go down the road and get the preacher, and I don't want no God-damned son-in-law who don't own a watch."
One of Mitchell's last pieces for the New Yorker, tellingly, was Joe Gould's Secret. It was a novella-length portrait of a character who frequented Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 50s, hob-nobbing with the literati while living in poverty. And in what came to acquire autobiographical resonance during Mitchell's later life, the piece centred on Gould's claim to be writing a massive volume called: The Oral History of Our Time.
After 1964 - when Joe Gould's Secretappeared - Mitchell never claimed to be working on anything so grand. But such work as he did promise, whenever colleagues inquired, proved equally illusory.
He emerged from his silence in 1992 to write a short introduction to a retrospective of his writings, Up in the Old Hotel, a book that became a best-seller. In this, he acknowledged his debt not only to Joyce, but also to a Mexican painter, Jose Posada, who specialised in comic engravings of skeletons mimicking human activity.
Re-reading his old work after so many years, he confessed to being pleasantly surprised at how much "graveyard humor" it contained, explaining that such humour remained central to his outlook.
He seems to have retained it to the end, despite his problems. "Life is a mess," Mitchell said at 84. "But you wouldn't want to miss it."