Roger Angell, perhaps best known for his New Yorker articles on baseball, died last week at 101.
I must have had Angell on my mind, because I woke very early yesterday morning wondering at length and in great detail about the relative advantages and disadvantages of being a left- or right-handed first baseman. It seemed to me that a lefty would have the advantage: his body is naturally in position, so he’d hardly have to turn to throw to second, third or home plate with his power arm.
But what do I know? I’ve had no interest in the sport since October 8, 1957, the day Walter O’Malley announced the villainous act for which those of us old enough to remember it shall never forgive him: he was moving the Brooklyn Dodgers from Ebbet’s Field in Brooklyn to Chavez Ravine in LA. (I only recently learned that Robert Moses, master parkway-builder and relentless racist neighborhood-destroyer, was the villain who killed the deal that would have kept the Dodgers where they belonged.)
After I got nowhere with that 5am loopy question, I got up to see what Roger Angell had written about it. If the question had been enough to trouble my sleep, surely he had tackled it. No one has ever written so well about baseball. His writing on baseball was so good that if I read the first paragraph, I’d read the piece through to the end: I could no more avert my eye than I could from watching superb tango dancers, a bodily activity in which I have even less interest than baseball. But my computer’s search engine led me astray; I was quickly distracted; I never got to first base.
I first read New Yorker editor David Remnick’s loving obit, “Remembering Roger Angell, Hall of Famer.” Then I came upon three beautifully-written Roger Angell articles that struck home.
The first was “Dry Martini,” his history of the cocktail’s place in American life in film, fiction, theater, and fact, and in his own daily life for a very long time, as it has been for Diane Christian and me. It was by then a little before 6am, too early in the day to go downstairs to try out his martini technique, so I reread the article. It tops film director Luis Buñuel’s brief riff on the same subject as the best thing about dry martinis I’ve ever read.
Next was “Storyville” (1994), his comments on his decades as the New Yorker’s fiction editor. Like every writer, I’ve had good and bad experiences with editors over the years; I’ve received impersonal rejection slips half the size of a parking ticket; real rejection letters with my name at the top and signed by a person saying “This time you almost made it”; and letters saying “Come on in.” This is the first time I’ve read what that variety of exchanges is like from the other side of the desk. Every aspiring writer or editor should read it. Twice.
The third was “This Old Man,” an article he wrote in 2014 about being 93, mostly fully functional above the neck but working with a machine having some replacement parts and some parts that have gone more or less awry. A time of life when most of the people you hold close are dead. That sentence, I realize now that I’m 86, is not an oxymoron. To paraphrase Faulkner’s “The past isn’t over; it isn’t even past,” our dearest dead may not be in the room, but that doesn’t mean the conversation is over. Angell names some friends and lovers who populate his silent conversations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought, not “What would Bob (Creeley), Bill (Kunstler) or Warren (Bennis) have said?”, but rather as if what they said or what I just said was in a conversation right now. Sometimes I’ll talk about those conversations with Diane; more often, I’m the only one who hears them. Trust me: all conversations aren’t said aloud.
He also writes eloquently about how being around long enough lets you become a connoisseur of death. In various ways. That infuses the article, even the very funny parts. You’re 93: he’s in the room.
If you’re of an age, Angell’s article will resonate for you from start to finish. If you’re not here yet, it will give you as good an idea as you’re likely to find of what the ride is like—if you last long enough and are lucky enough to have the right kind of ghosts as part of your daily life. Drink up.