This Old Man Read online

  ALSO BY ROGER ANGELL

  Let Me Finish

  Game Time

  A Pitcher’s Story

  Once More Around the Park

  Season Ticket

  Late Innings

  Five Seasons

  The Summer Game

  A Day in the Life of Roger Angell

  The Stone Arbor

  Copyright © 2015 by Roger Angell

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear on this page.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Pearson Education, Inc.: Foreword by Roger Angell from The Elements of Style, 4th Ed., by E. B. White and William Strunk, copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., New York, NY. Tilbury House Publishers: Foreword by Roger Angell from One Man’s Meat by E. B. White, copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission of Tilbury House Publishers.

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Angell, Roger.

  [Works. Selections]

  This old man : all in pieces / Roger Angell.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-54113-8 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-54114-5 (eBook)

  1. Angell, Roger. I. Title.

  PS3551.N46A6 2015

  818′.5409—dc23

  [B] 2015018255

  eBook ISBN 9780385541145

  v4.1_r1

  a

  FOR LAURA AND LILY AND CLARA AND EMMA

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Roger Angell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Horse Talk

  Lineup

  The Little Flower

  Me and Prew

  Past Masters: E. B. White

  Foreword to “One Man’s Meat”

  Foreword to “Elements of Style”

  Moose Tales

  Family Lines

  “The Night After Christmas” and “I Am the Very Model…”

  Long Gone

  Who Was That?

  Past Masters: Harold Ross

  Man of Letters

  Off We Go

  Congratulations! It’s a Baby

  Past Masters: Mark Twain/John Hersey/ Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Huckleberry Finn

  Hersey and History

  Disarmed

  The Late Show

  Past Masters: Donald Barthelme

  Don B.

  Long Gone

  Dial Again

  The Crime of Our Life

  Past Masters: Vladimir Nabokov

  Lo Love, High Romance

  Greetings, Friends!

  1998 Greetings, Friends!

  2009 Greetings, Friends!

  Ice Cream and Ashes

  Two Emmas

  Six Farewells

  Bob Feller

  Duke Snider

  Bob Sheppard

  Edith Oliver

  Michael Muldavin

  Anna Hamburger

  Past Masters: V. S. Pritchett

  Marching Life

  Long Gone

  Life and Letters

  More Time with the Britannica

  Past Masters: William Maxwell

  Six Letters

  Ann Beattie

  Nancy Franklin

  John Henry Angell

  Wylie Daughty

  Herbert Mitgang

  Ray Smith

  West Side Story

  Crying Man

  Storyville

  La Forza del Alpo

  The Darien Connecticut Def Poetry Jam

  Past Masters: William Steig

  The Minstrel Steig

  Four Farewells

  Earl Weaver

  Gardner Botsford

  Joe Carroll

  Elwood Carter

  Innings

  Barry and the Deathly Numbers

  Nothing Doing

  Yaz’s Triple Crown

  Three at a Time

  Zim

  Class Report

  Jackie Robinson Again

  Six Letters

  Daniel Menaker

  Ron Fimrite

  Tracy Daugherty

  Charles McGrath

  Charles Simmons

  Robert Creamer

  Here Comes the Sun

  Over the Wall

  The Wrong Dog

  Andy’s Haikus

  More Haikus

  Six Letters and a Memo

  Anonymous

  Tracy Daugherty

  Bobbie Ann Mason

  Tom Beller

  Philip Levine

  Sam Field

  Inter-Office Memo: To David Remnick

  Past Masters: John Updike

  John and the Kid

  The Fadeaway

  Middle Innings

  Mo Town

  Sox Top Sloppy Cards

  Chinny-Chin-Chin

  Papiness

  This Old Man

  Spinked

  Extra Innings

  Derek’s MMM

  S’Long, Jeet

  Boggler

  Ahoy, the Series!

  The Best

  The Silence of the Fans

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap of patented, vitaminized kibble. In no time the meal is gobbled down and the dish licked clean and, like as not, poked noisily about the kitchen like a hockey puck, amid waggings. But I can recall another era, when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut. It went down just as fast and probably did no harm, but what I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. A mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything. A dog’s breakfast.

  Most of these entries are New Yorker pieces of mine that appeared in the magazine over a span of decades; many of them are short and light, and a majority quite recent. Longer pieces include book reviews and Profiles of heroes of mine, now departed. There was plenty of old stuff for me to look over when I was getting this meal together, and every selection had to pass a sniff test. Readers are invited to do the same, and to skip about, make a grab, turn back. There are swatches of old letters and some obituaries, but not much mourning. There are Talk of the Town pieces and Comment pieces and sidebars and online posts. Also verses and scribbled notes and family doggerel. A photograph of me, at ten, pitching a softball to my mother. A photograph of me in front of an assemblage of Hall of Fame ballplayers delivering an address at Cooperstown in July, 2014. There’s more baseball, sometimes in the form of blogs, and often on reassuringly familiar topics: Big Papi, Derek Jeter, postseason pain.

  There’s a rough chronology to this, but the book can also be seen as a portrait of my brain at ninety-four: a different serving, with good days and bad days in there, some losses and recurr
ing afterthoughts right next to a midnight haiku, a fugitive great movie, a party conversation reborn. A later piece, which has provided my title, presented itself unexpectedly one morning, and ran in The New Yorker’s anniversary issue in 2014. It has brought a rush of personal and posted mail, a prize, and more kindness than anything else I’ve written. That was a good day.

  HORSE TALK

  Horses once abounded in New York, with a hundred and twenty thousand of them still in residence in 1908, when a reporter called them “an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life.” Their numbers declined precipitously thereafter, trailing off into art and sentimentality—who doesn’t remember the Steichen photograph of a misty, soft-edged Flatiron Building, with the silhouetted horse cab and plug-hatted cabbie in the foreground? Horsepresence took another hit last month, when the ancient Claremont Riding Academy, on West Eighty-ninth Street, closed its doors, reducing our equines to that redolent line of tourist-pullers on Central Park South. A few older city types (this writer among them) can remember cloppier times. The appearance of flower vendors, with their brilliantly hued horse-drawn wagons of blooms, was once a certain sign that another city spring was at hand. Taken along to the theatre by your parents, and in among the dressed-up, perfumed, and excited hordes in the West Forties before curtain time, you were watched over by godlike city mounties, unmoving atop their enormous steeds. (At school, ambivalently, you heard that these same Cossacks sometimes dealt less sweetly with political demonstrators in Union Square. Want to lift the embargo on Spain? Want to free the Scottsboro Boys? Bring along a handful of marbles to drop on the pavement: police horses hate marbles.)

  Back to the stage: when the musical “Annie 2” opened, in 1989, the dog playing Sandy several times missed a bark cue in the second act: a vital bit of business in the plot. Quizzed urgently by the director and producers, Sandy’s handler said that the one thing that always made his thespian mutt bark was the sudden sight of a horse. At the next performance—and then at every performance thereafter—an assistant stage manager donned a full-sized horse head and stepped into sight in the wings on cue, producing the arf. Back to cops: when the mounted-police stable in the Squadron A Armory, on East Ninety-fourth Street, was closed, in 1966, a woman (it was my wife) alighting from a Madison Avenue bus at twilight was almost knocked flat by a riderless police horse, stirrups flying, which came wildly past her on its way home to its old barn. A minute later, a cab pulled up and an embarrassed policeman in jodhpurs got out, shaking his head, retrieved his animal, and trotted off toward their new stable, way across town.

  Something’s sad about horses, and not just Barbaro. Who ever expected that they would be not just less frequent on the Central Park bridle path but gone for good? I walk my dog, Harry, on the path every day, and now it turns out that the end of horseback riding in New York is my fault, along with global warming. The recent proliferation of dogs and joggers and baby strollers on the broad, stony old bridle path had led to the dwindling numbers of Claremont customers. Some days you never saw a horse at all. A week before the shutdown, Harry and I were close to the giant plane tree on the northeast bend near Ninety-seventh Street when a clockwise equestrienne came walking toward us on a gray horse. She wore jodhpurs, black boots, a black top, and a black helmet, set straight on her head. She sat up tall, her spine strong, her heels tilted back, her hands at rest with the reins, her crop held at an angle. She looked straight ahead. Everything exactly right.

  Harry, a smooth fox terrier, watched the horse and horsewoman with his usual extreme interest, giving this horse the attention it deserved. Here it came, five yards away, picking up its stonelike, clomping feet. Huge black holes for nostrils, legs knobbed like furniture, ears aloft, and the curved, satiny, massive rear end lifting and putting down the great package with springy ease. The nearer eye, straight above us, took us in and rolled away. The smell of the great animal—nothing else is like it—arrived and then went by. I don’t always know what my dog is thinking but this time I did: Holy shit!

  Talk, May, 2007

  LINEUP

  The ballpark in this treasured spring-baseball photograph is a stretch of meadow or rough lawn in Bedford, New York, an upper-Westchester exurb where my mother and stepfather found a modest spring-and-summer rental in the first years of their marriage. Judging by the post-blossoming young apple tree just down the third-base line, this opening day fell on a mid-spring Sunday in, let’s say, 1931. Since the photo is undated, I base its time on the size of the pitcher, who is me, at ten and a half. The batter is my mother, Katharine White, and the tweedy, cautious catcher is my seventy-nine-year-old grandfather, Charles Spencer Sergeant, a retired executive of the Boston Elevated Railway. Not a great athlete, perhaps, but a man with a strong conceptual awareness of foul tips.

  I can’t take my eyes off my mother. Her uniform, which appears a tad formal, is a well-cut suit skirt and a silk blouse, both in keeping with Sunday-outing styles of that time. Despite a certain wariness in her gaze and upper body, her stance is excellent—her weight mostly over the slightly flexed back leg, her front foot stepping boldly forward in preparation for the swing, which will initially take the bat up and back, then swiftly down into the reversing pivot and full-body turn that precede and accompany her Tris Speaker–esque, closed-stance cut at the ball.

  (Credit 2.1)

  My pitching form is O.K., too. Yes, I look more like a center fielder trying to cut down a speeding baserunner at third base or home, but give me a break, guys. By the looks of me, I go about eighty-two pounds here, and the angle of my arm shows an instinctive understanding of the physics of the fling. Only the greatest athletes seem to have this somewhere within them, an elegant je ne sais quoi that marks the Mathewsons and Mayses of each era and warms the hearts of even the idlest, most distant onlooker. The photographer, who is my stepfather, E. B. White, has snapped the softball in first flight, only a blurry yard or two out of my grasp, and this good fortune, taken with the tilt of my follow-through, allows us to supply the invisible arc of the sphere, a combined heater and changeup that will parallel the lower profile of the apple tree and, descending, cross the plate hem-high: a pitch taken by my mom for a called—called by me—strike one.

  Way to go, kid.

  Post, March, 2014

  THE LITTLE FLOWER

  Like every other New York kid who came into his teens in the nineteen-thirties, I had President Roosevelt by heart (chin, cigarette, Groton accent, T.V.A., soak the rich) but felt much closer to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Stubby under his operatic black hat, hilariously busy, looking by turns indignant, disbelieving, and delighted, the Little Flower had piercing dark-brown eyes and a thick jaw that looked punishing when he was talking about fat-cat landlords or Tammany bosses but often fell into an engaging, half-open smile. He ran New York for a dozen years like a manic dad cleaning out the cellar on a Saturday afternoon. The La Guardia voice was high-pitched, excitable, and whiny—I should know, because I listened to it, from the next room, for the better part of nine hours one January day in 1936, while I waited for our interview. Well, maybe not “our”—it’s not as if he knew I was coming.

  Home from boarding school on Christmas vacation, I had taken the subway down to City Hall with my friend David Maclay, each of us being in need of a celebrity interview as part of the tryout for a school newspaper. We weren’t competitors—David’s new school was in Pennsylvania, mine in Connecticut—but we were emboldened by our eight prior years together as classmates at the progressive Lincoln School, on West 123rd Street, a fountainhead of juvenile overconfidence. Mulling potential interviewees, we had rejected Fred Astaire (too far away) and Joe Louis (too scary) before settling happily upon the Mayor, who was just then winding up his second year in office. Arriving at eight-thirty in the morning, notebooks in hand, we presented ourselves before the Mayor’s secretary in City Hall—a youngish, not unfriendly fellow whose name I have forgotten.

  “Press,” I announced.


  “Here for a—uh, interview,” David said.

  “No appointment, I take it,” the secretary said. He carefully wrote down our names and the names of our publications, and showed class by not asking our age, which was fifteen. “Take a seat, boys,” he said. “It may be a while.”

  We had expected this, and had come prepared with magazines but not lunch. Eagerly, patiently, wearily, we sat and watched and listened as politicos and petitioners, City Council members, women in hats, editorialists, judges, commissioners, and real-estate magnates arrived, were greeted within, reappeared, and took their leave. Even when the tall door to La Guardia’s office was closed, we could hear the ceaseless mayoral yammer, rising in impatience or laughter, cajoling and caressing in argument, like an offstage tenor in a bad opera. Longer than an opera. Noon came and went, the light crept across the dusty windows of our chamber. Noticing us at last, a motherly looking woman on the Mayor’s staff brought us a couple of chicken sandwiches and an Oh Henry! bar. We sat on. Dark had fallen outside when the secretary, emerging from a brief exchange with Hizzoner, beckoned us forward. “You’re on,” he said, “but make it snappy.”

  I can remember La Guardia’s dishevelled black hair, and the tough gaze that flicked over us while he gestured us toward a couple of chairs. He was in shirtsleeves. The mayoral feet, below the mayoral leather chair, did not quite touch the carpet.

  “Reporters—right?” he said. “What’ll it be, fellas?” Whatever it was, it didn’t go well. We had some questions about the transportation system, I think—the Mayor had been promising to take down the El lines along Sixth and Ninth Avenues—and maybe about his campaign against smutty burlesque shows.

  “But I’m on record about all that,” he said, breaking in. “What else?”

  “Is Tammany Hall about to—” David began.

  “Nah!” he said, holding up one hand. “Not a chance!”

  (Credit 3.1)

  We weren’t quite done. “Sir,” I said, reading from lines that David and I had put together during our long wait, “each of us is in the ninth grade in a really good private school. Do you believe that there are any students in the New York public schools who are getting the kind of education we are?”