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[music]

David Remnick: I'm David Remnick. And this is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Roger Angell first wrote for The New Yorker in 1944, and in the 70 years since he's published just about everything imaginable. He's been fiction editor, he's written an annual Christmas poem, he sat in as a movie critic for Pauline Kael and reviewed Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Last year, his essay on aging, and loss, and love won the National Magazine Award. That piece, This Old Man is the title piece in his new book, but chances are, if you know Roger Angell's work, you probably know him as the best baseball writer in the history of the game and for this, he was inducted two summers ago at Cooperstown in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Let's hear a little bit of his speech at that induction.

Roger Angell: This is a thrill for me, as well as an honor. The roster of honorees is stuffed with old heroes of mine, like Red Smith and Tom Meany, and with baseball writer friends who have also been models and heroes. Folks like Jerome Holtzman and Peter Gammons and Bill Madden, who were so quick to put me at my ease in the clubhouse and to fill me in whenever I turned up again. My gratitude always goes back to baseball itself, which turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and exacting, so easy looking, and so heartbreakingly difficult that it filled up my notebooks in seasons in a rush, a pastime indeed.

David Remnick: That was an amazing day, Roger. I just wonder, a year and a half later, looking back at it, what it meant to you. You've been writing about baseball for a long time, since the early '60s.

Roger Angell: I was extremely anxious before, and I was anxious about-- well, so many friends of mine that were coming up this enormous distance, so I thought was not going to be very good. I actually was using a little Maalox near the end, and I lost some weight, but the minute I got there, it was just terrific.

David Remnick: You had to invent a voice for this, you had to figure out a way of covering baseball. God knows that baseball, especially when you began, was the focus for sports writers. In fact, in the '50s, the [crosstalk] prestige sports were boxing and baseball.

Roger Angell: Yes, and baseball. I approached it with sheer terror. I didn't know what I was doing. I was a baseball fan, I'd been a writer, but I'd not written about baseball or only a little bit. I was very self-conscious talking to the players, really quite scared.

David Remnick: Why is that?

Roger Angell: Well, I felt that they would know more than I did. They wouldn't-- "What's this guy doing here?", I was shy and a little bit nervous, so what I did was to sit in the stands at first and because I had felt-- I didn't realize that nobody was writing about the fans, and I was a fan and I could sit in the stands and be a fan and also be a writer.

David Remnick: Is the press box a bad place to cover things from?

Roger Angell: No, I don't think so, but once you get used to it. I wasn't that eased in the press box yet.

David Remnick: One of the things that always amazed me about your baseball writing is that you have a tone of a happy man, of someone who's going at this at his leisure, and that all the difficulty of writing, which we know to be the case, is somehow way out of the frame, that there is this voice of someone just in love with what he's watching, that's hard to achieve.

Roger Angell: Well, it developed over the years. I mean, I didn't really plan it in advance. It was some kind of me.

David Remnick: What was the kind of sports writing that you couldn't stand? What were you trying to avoid?

Roger Angell: Actually when I started, Shawn said--

David Remnick: William Shawn, the editor at the magazine for decades?

Roger Angell: William Shawn, my editor said, "Why don't you get on the spring training and take a look?", and he said, "We don't want to be sentimental. We don't want to be the tough guys. Those are two things to avoid."

David Remnick: Did Shawn know anything about baseball?

Roger Angell: Nothing. My first piece, he came into my office, [unintelligible 00:04:11], my first piece in that spring training, and he pointed to a page placed on the page and he said, "What's this?" I looked and I said, "That's a double play, Bill." He said, "What's a double play?" I explained it to him and his cheeks glowed with excitement.

[laughter]

It was something new.

David Remnick: Did you find it harder to talk with players as time went by, as you got a little older, did you gravitate more toward coaches and managers than players?

Roger Angell: Once they call you "sir", you're in big trouble. I gravitated toward good talkers as I've said before.

David Remnick: Did they thin out was what I mean, did the good talkers become less and less numerous?

Roger Angell: Yes, I think so. When I got over 80, it was impossible for me to talk to players really because they would say, "sir". Also, as you've said, the habit of talking openly as a person, not as a very well-paid celebrity, semi-celebrity ball player, is pretty well gone.

David Remnick: It's because it's a big difference when the ball players are making a bet as much as a solid orthodontist and now they're making as much as an oligarch.

Roger Angell: Sure, but you did pay attention. [unintelligible 00:05:21] I would carry notes and write endlessly long notes and keep my ears open and listen for something. I remember being outside the office of Jim Frey, the Kansas City manager, after his great star George Brett had another extraordinary day at the plate, and I'm waiting to go in to see the manager and there are two old coaches at their lockers just outside the door in their underwear and clogs talking to a couple of country guys. One of them says to the other, "Everything that George hits goes through the infield like a stream of milk."

[laughter]

This country image and I've wrote it down. Wow. Thank you. [laughs]

David Remnick: You wait days for things like that in the non-fiction game. Roger, you practiced non-fiction as it were by night and fiction by day. For years and years, you were the fiction editor of The New Yorker. To this day, you read short stories for us and in the fiction department. Tell us a little bit about what that life is. What does it mean to be a fiction editor?

Roger Angell: The image of an editor is somebody who is taking away the wonderfully original perfect writing of a young, talented, or brilliant writer.

David Remnick: Crushing their spirit forever.

Roger Angell: It isn't quite that way. Writing is very hard, as you know. It's really hard to get it right for anybody. If you're doing it all your life and it's still hard to write a good sentence and a good paragraph sometimes. The flood of fiction that we buy had great variety. Some of the best fiction writers we had needed heavy, heavy editing.

David Remnick: Who for example?

Roger Angell: Well, I came aboard in the '50s and John Cheever was still writing, and I saw off Cheever proof which had just all the way through, all the way down every column, there was heavy editing by an editor. He did not write finished copy. What he wrote was great, but it needed a lot of tailoring.

David Remnick: That's an amazing thing to hear, that John Cheever, who reads in this incredibly crystalline way, was edited onto a fare-the-well.

Roger Angell: Well, edited with him. We'd never edited without the writer being there. There was never anything that was added to a fair story or taken away without the writers being right there and agreeing to the process.

David Remnick: How did he react to the editing, to know that each sentence was getting altered in some way?

Roger Angell: Well, I think Cheever hated the editing, but then knew that he needed it. His editor was a wonderful editor, was my editor when I was writing fiction [unintelligible 00:07:48] and they got along well, but he wasn't a very good-tempered writer, let's say, and so I don't think he took too happily to it, but the process becomes a very intimate one and the writer depends and counts on the editor and they're doing this together.

You're there, either on the phone or by letter or somewhere, side by side, looking at the text, and you're going through it. In fiction editing, a very significant thing, the tone is right. Is this too cynical? Is it too sentimental? Is it too brisk? Is it too distant? The difficulty lies on the page. Between the two of you, you're trying to get this right, to tone something out, take something out.

David Remnick: Did any writers refuse this process at all?

Roger Angell: Some are much more difficult than others, but as a writer myself, I relied on my editor. I knew that I needed editing like everybody else. I had very close relations with wonderful editors like [unintelligible 00:08:48] or [unintelligible 00:08:49], Ann Goldstein.

David Remnick: Was this bred-in-the-bone with you? I think some of our listeners will know that your mother really had singular responsibility for introducing serious fiction to The New Yorker. Katharine White was the person who brought real fiction to The New Yorker, and you must have grown up hearing about this process and knowing this process.

Roger Angell: Yes. My stepfather was E.B. White, who was E.B. White and writing for the magazine every week, and my mother and stepfather's house was full of galleys and pencils and eraser rubbings and conversation about the magazine and about Harold Ross and about the writers of the day. Sure, I paid close attention, but I wasn't planning to be a New Yorker editor or to be a New Yorker writer.

David Remnick: What were you planning on?

Roger Angell: I was hoping to be maybe a [unintelligible 00:09:43] herpetologist with my first day in. I did pay attention and they were doing the same thing. My mother was editing Vladimir Nabokov and people like that.

David Remnick: How did Nabokov take editing?

Roger Angell: [unintelligible 00:09:58] The famous Nabokov editing was by the great New Yorker founding editor, Harold Ross, who loved clarity above all, and was not classically or much educated, but loves clearness. In the middle of some terrific Nabokov mem-- I think part of his speak memory pieces, his wonderful memories about his family. There's a line at the dinner table and somebody says, "Pass the nutcracker." One of Harold Ross's endless queries, and he always had about 20 or 30 queries, but every piece of copy, he said, "From the evidence we've been given so far, I would have assumed that the Nabokovs were a more than one nutcracker family."

[laughter]

David Remnick: I was looking through some letters that came to Harold Ross, and Roald Dahl, who wrote all those great children's books, but also a number of things for The New Yorker, memoir pieces for The New Yorker, wrote a scathing letter to Ross complaining about the editing and number of commas that had been injected into things. He says, "It's as if you would take a great comma shaker and sprinkled commas throughout my copy."

Roger Angell: That's correct. Well, that was our style, yes, but it's lightened up a little bit.

David Remnick: Roger, what does age do for your writing? How does it affect things? How does it either deepen your work or make it more difficult? What's the effect of time on a writer's side?

Roger Angell: I'm not sure. I'm aware of my waning powers, I really am, but I'm not writing long pieces, I'm not going out there and dread it on a 10,000 or 12,000-word baseball piece. I'm not sure.

David Remnick: And that's a matter of what, getting up and down stadium steps or--

Roger Angell: Well, getting up and doing the interviewing and doing the traveling and taking the time, a lot of hard work. It's hard for me to get around, it's hard for me to see, it's hard for me to hear a little bit and I'm doing much-- I'm very happy to fall back and do posts and blogs.

David Remnick: This is the amazing thing, you are in your mid-90s, I hope you don't mind me saying, I think you're perfectly aware of it, and yet sentence by sentence, you're as funny and as touching and as good a writer as you ever were and you've taken to the internet in a way a lot of people resisted but you took right to it.

Roger Angell: Well, I liked the brevity of the bar, you can make it quite short or you can just go on as long as you want to go and then just stop. It's sort of like making a paper airplane.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Roger Angell: No, I used to love to make paper-- I made great paper airplanes, and then you throw it out the window and it goes a little ways, [unintelligible 00:12:44] beautifully and then goes out of sight and is forgotten forever, and that's like a blog.

David Remnick: Do you like the immediacy of the internet?

Roger Angell: Yes.

David Remnick: [unintelligible 00:12:51] a post and it's six o'clock, it's there and bang, you're getting a--

Roger Angell: Well, it's taking me till the middle of the afternoon sometimes.

David Remnick: Fair enough.

Roger Angell: No, I can sort of see the end when I'm starting, which is not bad.

David Remnick: Tell me about this new book. You've put together an enormous range of things. You've got in here some obituaries that were published in The New Yorker online, you've got a couple of long sustained essays that we'll talk about, some baseball writing--

Roger Angell: Letters.

David Remnick: The book is called This Old Man by Roger Angell, All in Pieces.

Roger Angell: This Old Man, Roger Angell, All in Pieces. Well, I'm a little tired of the joke in the title already.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Tell me about the book itself.

Roger Angell: Well, I wrote the piece This Old Man. I started the piece in 2013, I think late in the year, and I think [unintelligible 00:13:52] about February or something like that.

David Remnick: Came as a complete surprise to me, just [unintelligible 00:13:55] on my desk, done.

Roger Angell: I wrote it in different pieces. I didn't quite know what I was doing. It was about physical debility, and it starts off with a description of my arthritic hands.

David Remnick: Which you say, the tips of your fingers look like they've been the subject of torture by the KGB.

Roger Angell: If I point my forefinger at you like a pistol and fire it up, aim for your nose, I hit you in the knee.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Roger Angell: I had described some of the everyday debilities of age. I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I knew that loss was at the middle of this. I had lost my wife, we had been married for 48 years, and I had lost a daughter, and a beloved dog of Carol's and mine, went out to a fifth-floor window in the middle of-- thrown in panic, jumped out the window on the fifth floor and was killed. Losses for people my age are common.

Ed Hersey, a wonderful poet, lost his son and wrote a great book about it last year. He says that anybody over the age of 65 has a 100-pound bag of cement of loss on his shoulders. Writing about the loss of his son and he says, "You can't make a story out of it. You can't do that with a life." I didn't know how to touch on these subjects, and I didn't know if I wanted to even.

I did so actually through the loss of the dog. I'd written a piece about losing my wife, losing Carol [unintelligible 00:15:29], which began this process. I waited six months. Just after the first Obama election, she died in April. I said she didn't know this news and she didn't know about the hurricane that fall. A lot of things she didn't know. I said the dead don't know what's happening. The dead leave quickly. I quoted a Kenneth Koch poem, saying "Les morts vont vite," the dead go quickly. There's a line in that, which says," No more scenes in the bedroom, no more waiting in the hall, waiting to say hello with mixed feelings." Perfect line.

I described the death of Harry, this dog, and then threw in that Carol and I wept. We couldn't get over weeping for him. He lay in our bathroom, between us on the floor. We'd [unintelligible 00:16:21] back and forth. I said, "We were also weeping for my daughter, Callie, who'd committed suicide a couple of years earlier, and events that we knew couldn't just get our minds around in any way, but it was for both.

I don't want to dwell on this. I didn't want to make much of this because everybody's experienced loss. There are many changes of moods through this piece. I patched the thing together and some of the sad paragraphs that are hard to take are often followed by a joke or a lighter moment. There's some actual jokes in there and it's okay because I like to take jokes. I count on jokes myself. I'm known to tell jokes.

David Remnick: There's also the opposite of loss. There's new love.

Roger Angell: Yes. When this was happening, I was finding someone new in my life, my present wife, Peggy, and this was going on.

David Remnick: Desire.

Roger Angell: I wanted to say that, and time was going by, and I was still engaged in life. I said that old people are like everyone else. We need connection, we need love, we need intimate love.

David Remnick: A hand on the shoulder. There's sex. The piece ends with, in a sense, life against all other things.

Roger Angell: Against all odds, yes. I wanted to say what was happening with me, which happens with other old people. Old people fall in love, old people have-- they have a love life, have intimate connections, they have sex lives. People don't like to admit this, mostly their children.

David Remnick: Because they're somehow revolted by it.

Roger Angell: I think people are getting over this because it's now known. It's not something to be repelled by. It's something to be grateful for. This brings up something else, which I've noticed with writers that I've dealt with. Now and then, if a writer lives long enough-- This didn't just happen much with American writers, which is the famous thing about American writers. There are no second acts in American lives for writers. Writers that go on and on, often go back, as I did, go back to the same subjects again and again.

He went back to his mother, to the sandstone field farmhouse, to his father, to his teenage courting years, and did the same story, really, again and again, but much better each time with increased feeling. Some of the very best stories he wrote for us were at the very end.

The same thing happened with another writer of mine that I edited over a period of 40 years, V.S. Pritchett, a great British writer. In his middle 80s, suddenly got in this amazing hot streak writing some of the greatest stories of his life, full of life, full of sex, full of amour, and adventures, and comedy, and childhood things, all rushing out of him. I think that all of us do this at any age because we basically go over the same material in our minds again and again, the stories that really mean a lot to us. It's not that we're trying to get them right, but we're trying to-- We're not trying to change the outcome, but we're trying to keep them or to say, "Was this the way it was?"

Psychologists and experts on the subject say that this is what memory is. It isn't just a defensive thing to protect us from falling out of a tree when a tiger's passing by, but it is a trying out of a scenario again and again, because it may be of use. That's what memory is. This is why the same scenes recur. After I wrote scenes, a lot of this personal stuff, I used to have dreams I think about over, and once I put them down and get them published, I don't think about them anymore. It's very strange, it goes away.

David Remnick: When you go back and read your earlier stuff, do you recognize it? Does it feel like you?

Roger Angell: Not the very early stuff, no. It feels like Hemingway.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Can you relate it all to a decision like Philip Roth's to stop writing?

Roger Angell: Well, I haven't got there yet. I'm thinking of not blogging anymore because I don't think my blogs are quite up to what they were.

David Remnick: I'll be the judge of that. Please keep going.

Roger Angell: No, I don't want to stop. I like to have it still going on a little bit and then this way once again, I think I'm extremely lucky. I'm 95 and still writing. My goodness. I'm startled and very happy.

David Remnick: I'm happy to be here with you always, Roger. Thank you very much.

Roger Angell: Thanks. Thank you, David.

[music]

David Remnick: The great Roger Angell, El Supremo. He's the author of many books on baseball, and most recently, the collection of essays, This Old Man.

 

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