by Roger Angell
Losing the mixed pleasures of just-arrived letters may not mean as much in the end as what we’re missing by not writing them. Writing regularly to several people—a parent, a friend who’s moved to another coast, a daughter or son away at college—requires one to keep separate mental ledgers, storing up the weather or the idle thoughts or the disasters we need to pass on. We’re always getting ready to write. The letters out and back become a correspondence, and mysteriously take on a tone of their own: some rambly and comfortably boring; others cool and funny; some financial; some confessional. They stick in the mind and seem worth the trouble. A few years ago, I began exchanging letters with a celebrated baseball biographer, Robert Creamer, who lived in Saratoga Springs, New York. I first knew him when he was a young writer for Sports Illustrated. Our letters started with news about old friends and maybe something about Roger Clemens; later, because of our age, there were paragraphs about loss.
John Updike was the last New Yorker writer to use the mails. He wrote his stories and novels and reviews on a word processor but avoided e-mails. He reserved a typewriter for his letters and private postcards. These last mostly contained compliments—a good word to an unknown writer whose novel he’d happened upon; a piece he’d liked in the magazine—but he also permitted himself room for a whine or something cranky. Somewhere he complains about a sprained right pinkie that’s messed up his typing—the finger that has all the best letters. What’s certain also is that he expected to be preserved; every jam-packed small card touchingly begins with the full date—Oct. 24, ’03, and so on—in the top right corner.
These collected and delivered messages need not come from the gifted or famous few, or even from someone we know, in order to hold attention. Until recently, tourists stopping in a roadside antique shop could expect to find stacks of anonymous old local postcards lying in a box: relics of family yard sales, no doubt. I know one that depicts a stiff-sided, two-story summer structure, with a narrow porch and a printed “The Mountain Ash Inn” label. It was mailed in 1922 or 1932: the circular cancelling stamp is smudged and it’s hard to be sure which. The two-line address, in a nice cursive, is “J. M. Voss” over “P.O.,” nothing else, and the message reads, “Ida and her uncle went to Swans Isl after all but return tomorrow. Supper Tuesday.” It’s signed “Do.”
This would be an e-mail now but an invitation without a future. I’ve kept the original—it’s in my summer cottage in Maine—and I’m accepting. How was Swan’s Island, Ida? What’s for supper?
Comment, January, 2012
MORE TIME WITH THE BRITANNICA
Last week’s announced cancellation of any future printed editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica came as another dull shock—a predictable shock, if that’s possible—but it woke me up today with a clear vision of myself at the age of twelve sitting in our living room in New York, with my nose deep inside Volume XXIV (“Sainte-Clair Deville to Shuttle”) of the Eleventh Edition and once again perusing my favorite entry of the entire twenty-nine-volume work, “Ship.” I was a sailor only in a metaphoric sense, which is to say that I was a curious reader and a boy, and thus eager to embark upon any multi-paged, profusely illustrated and diagrammed chunk of information that came my way. My wakeup brought with it some remembered black-and-white photographs of Lord Nelson’s stripe-decked Victory and those plumb-bowed dreadnoughts of my father’s generation. The Eleventh, of course, was the most popular and acclaimed edition of them all—the Koh-i-noor, the Cary Grant of the genre. It was published in 191l, the same year my old man graduated from college, and I think he must have picked up ours early on; by the time I got into it—and into “Aboukir” and “Armor” and “Muscular System” (great drawings), “Reptiles” and “Zanzibar,” along with “Ship”—each slender, blue leather-bound volume would leave a crumbly dust of learning in my lap when I got up to put it away.
I’m a Wikipedia user now, like everybody else, but an impulse took me into the quiet back corners of this magazine’s Checking Department Library, where, on a back shelf, I found, holy smoke, this magazine’s own Eleventh Edition, or what’s left of it. The spines were gone and some of the boards came off in my hands when I began to pull out the first volumes, and the lap debris now included fragments of gold title-lettering. The thin, high-grade paper still felt strong in my fingers, though, and the gray twin rivers of text flowed steadily and thrillingly downward, as before.
“Ship,” when I got there, was even better than remembered. It blew me away: sixty-three pages (pp. 860 to 922) of text, diagrams (“The Arrangement and Armour of the Austrian Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand”), tables, cross-sections, cf.s, footnotes, and, by my quick count, fifteen thousand words of maritime text, plus ninety-five photographs. Here was the Victory, yes, and here was the five-masted schooner Helen W. Martin; the bows on the heavily gunned H.M.S. Inflexible and H.M.S. Agamemnon and the rest now bore a Monty Pythonish resemblance to the Morgan Guaranty Trust Building on Fifth Avenue, but almost retained their menace. I moved along to the sleek Chilean Chacabuco; to the Nile gunboat Sultan; to the Cunard liner Mauretania, with an attached nosing tug, as I had sometimes seen her. I had actually been aboard “The American River Steamer Hendrick Hudson” once, on a day excursion up the Hudson, but never, worse luck, on the smoke-belching French Jules Michelet. There were a dozen or more submarines, but none so stylish, surely, as the French Vendémiaire, whose crew, in those pom-pommed hats, stood at smiling attention along her narrow deck.
I was spending too much time with the photographs, just as I did when I was a kid, and not nearly enough with the thick and daunting text. “On one point it is necessary to insist,” I read at random, “because upon it depends the right understanding of the problem. The ancients did not employ more than one man to an oar.” Got it, I thought. Farther on, I read about a memorable 1866 race between British barques in the tea service, in which the Ariel, the Taiping, and the Sirica left Foo Chow, China, together, and then “separated and lost one another till they reached the English Channel, when the Ariel and Taiping got abreast and raced to the Downs, the former arriving some ten minutes before the latter…. These three occupied 99 days on the voyage.” Ninety-nine days? Ten minutes! I closed the book, promising myself I’d have to get back to all this very soon, perhaps via the quicker and much neater online Britannica.
Only I won’t. What’s gone, and what I miss most, isn’t the Eleventh Edition in type, or a grand document of the last days of maritime empire, but my careless, spongy twelve-year-old mind, which saw time stretching away endlessly ahead and plenty of room in it every day for something absolutely astounding.
Post, March, 2012
PAST MASTERS: WILLIAM MAXWELL
Tribute at the Century Association
Bill Maxwell greeted me with kindness and amazing trust when I first arrived as an editor with The New Yorker’s Fiction Department in the autumn of 1956. Along with an assemblage of other remarkable editors, we worked together every day for twenty years, in the utmost happiness. We disagreed on occasion, sometimes passionately, but with never a harsh word and—what’s more startling—never a staff meeting. Bill and I were different but it didn’t bother us. He once wrote that there are editors who are natural “yes” sayers and others who are natural “no” sayers, and he and I would agree, I think, about where we each belong in that lineup. I also recall a day when I came back from lunch carrying a parcel from the Music Masters store, down in the lobby, and when Bill asked I said it was a record for my younger daughter, who was then about five years old. His daughters, Brookie and Kate, were a few years older than my two, and I knew that they had been raised from the cradle on Brahms and Heifetz and Chopin, so I was embarrassed when I took out my purchase, a Little Golden Record that featured Tom Glazer singing “The Little Red Hen.” Bill looked at this object with wonder—he’d never seen such a thing—and he said, “Oh, Roger, you’re so worldly.”
I’m going to read a brief passage from “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” which was publishe
d in 1980. It’s a long story or a short novel, of surpassing power and sadness. Like so much of his fiction, its setting is Lincoln, Illinois, his childhood home. One of the protagonists is the narrator, William Maxwell, whose voice you will recognize:
My father was all but undone by my mother’s death. In the evening after supper he walked the floor and I walked with him, with my arm around his waist. I was ten years old. He would walk from the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather’s clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. Or he would walk from the library into the dining room and into the living room by another doorway, and back to the front hall. Because he didn’t say anything, I didn’t either. I only tried to sense, as he was about to turn, which room he was going to next so we wouldn’t bump into each other. His eyes were focused on things not in those rooms, and his face was the color of ashes. From conversations that had taken place in front of me I knew he was tormented by the belief that he was responsible for what had happened. If he had only taken this or that precaution…. It wasn’t true, any of it. At a time when the epidemic was raging and people were told to avoid crowds, he and my mother got on a crowded train in order to go to Bloomington, thirty miles away, where the hospital facilities were better than in Lincoln. But even if she had had the baby at home, she still would have caught the flu. My older brother or my father or I would have given it to her. We all came down with it.
It sometimes surprises me that I remember the settings and events of Bill Maxwell’s childhood almost better than my own: the house on Ninth Street, Grandfather Blinn, Hattie Dyer, Aunt Annette. The fabled short-fiction writer Alice Munro once told me that she had been in the habit of visiting the towns and cities that were closely connected to the works of great American writers—Oxford, Mississippi, for Faulkner, for instance. Lincoln, Illinois, she said, meant the most to her. Every street corner seemed intimately familiar and close at hand. It was like coming home. We feel the same way, incidentally, about John Updike’s boyhood town of Shillington, and its people and places—Grandfather Hoyer, Pep Conrad’s store, the sandstone farmhouse. But we shouldn’t be much distracted by this appropriation, nor attribute it only to the skills and obsessive attention of these wonderful writers, who have circled back over these same trails again and again in their work. I believe, rather, that their stories are the same stories that we tell ourselves, each of us, over and over, every day and every night, returning to our own distant or recent past, possibly in search of happiness but much more often in the hope of finding an unexpected window or bend in the path there. We want our stories to come out differently, but they never do. Except in the detail, what we find so often in the writings of William Maxwell is our lives relived—with the same questions asked, and with answers or the chance for amends still elusive—but now illuminated with the courage and persistence of a great companion. This is perhaps the very first purpose of fiction and, most assuredly, one of the rewards of art.
Thank you, Bill.
October, 1998
SIX LETTERS
TO ANN BEATTIE
October 29, 1985
Dear Ann,
I’m sorry—extremely sorry—to say that we’re sending back “Another Day.” No one here could recognize these people; they don’t seem to have any connection with real life. The story is written with wonderful clarity and intensity, but the gigantic egos and destructive behavior of your characters are presented so bluntly and coldly that they blot out everything else; no one is left alive, except the victims, and they are almost grotesques, too, because of what has been done to them. It seems to me that fiction of this sort flattens one’s interests in the events and discoveries of a story, because one knows that what comes next will be equally deadly and bitter. Two people here who read the story said that they expected that someone would shoot the dog next.
This sounds as if we’re looking for pleasant fiction or a particular view of life, but I don’t think we are. It may be that you know people who are as horrific and destructive as this and that I don’t, but I still would expect them to be recognizable to me in some intuitive fashion. Many of your stories have been about people who were living a very different life than my own, and thinking and saying things that I didn’t expect or know in advance, but there was an instant and unabashed recognition; they seemed alive and important, and no matter what they said or did, I cared about them. It seems to me that I could even care about Harry and Jo-Beth and Oren and the rest, if I felt that you cared about them too, but that doesn’t come across here.
I don’t know how it has happened that we are so far apart just now in our view of fiction, but I know it will correct itself somehow. I hate to write a letter like this, but it’s probably best if we try to be clear. Whatever you think (and please do think about all this, even if you don’t agree), please keep writing stories and sending them to me. I count on you always, you know.
Love,
TO NANCY FRANKLIN
November 18, 1999
Dear Nancy,
I suppose you know that your great piece about my mother is in the forthcoming Profiles collection, and I suppose further that you’ve already seen the book. I was looking at a copy the other day, and read your KSW Profile all over again, front to back, and was struck again by its great reporting, its thoroughness, its elegant concision, its daring perceptiveness, its fairness, and—well, its love. I think I wrote you a note when it first came out, but I want to say again how much it means to me that you wrote it in the first place, and how happy I am that it’s in a book now, for keeps.
The piece is also a big fat relief for me, because I’ll never have to write one of my own about my mother—or at least not a major, all-points effort like yours. I feel no need to correct or to amplify what you’ve done, because you’ve got so much of KSW into yours, in a way that feels both level and intimate. I’m also pleased in a wise, satisfied way because of your “As an editor, she was maternal, and as a mother she was editorial.” If I’d heard this in 1965, let’s say, I would have saved about $20,000 in psychiatrists’ bills—no, make that $25,000. I would have invested that sum in Xerox, then Microsoft, and I’d be telling you all this right now, this minute, while driving us to the Villa Angellino in Cap Ferrat in my mauve Jaguar XV-I6 two-seater. Pity.
Love again,
TO JOHN HENRY ANGELL
July 16, 2000
Dear John Henry:
Here’s a late, well, I hope not too late, but heartfelt happy birthday to you, my dear—with wishes for a happy, sunny day, happy summer, happy whole year, and many more. I won’t say decade because thinking in those big blocks is sort of gloomy, I’ve found. One always tries to weigh the meaning of those ten-year chunks, and the only answer is mortality, which we knew about before we started. But I think you’re a million miles ahead of where you were ten years ago—I remember you then, of course, and also with joy—and more at home in the world…. There, see what I mean: heavy thinking: I’m sorry.
I wish we could be with you to watch your thirties come up the bay with the tide, but we’ll catch up with you soon. Hope you can find your way back again in August, since there always seems to be a little more time there for us all. Meantime, I’m enclosing a check, as usual, with my love—as usual only more so. Buy a new paddle or something.
I imagine you can pick up a general tone of frazzlement between the lines here. It all comes from [David] Cone—the book, the man, the decline, the money, the late hours, the terrible pitching, the unknown future, the unorderly notes, the passing and often lost ideas, the need to get along with it and the need to get it right, and more. I think he may actually retire at almost any point—or least disappear to another team after some sort of buy-out from the Yankees. It’s killing him that all this is happening in full view, here in the big city. I think it’s his worst dream come true. He seems to pitch a little less well each time, while trying harder, and I think he’s run out of ideas. But his behavior in the face of a
ll this is nothing less than extraordinary, and that alone makes me glad I got into this big, weird mess.
I’m sorry, by the way, to stick this into your birthday letter, but it’s sort of natural, since talking with you is natural to me, and gives me confidence. You have no idea, I think, of the place you have in my thoughts all the time now, and how often I find myself wanting to tell you things, and waiting to hear what you think. It’s one of the great rewards of me being my age and you being yours.
Happy birthday, my dear, and welcome to whatever is coming along for you next. It’s great to have you around.
All my love,
TO WYLIE DAUGHTY *
February 7, 2008
Dear Wylie (if I may):
How very kind of you to think of me! I read your father’s unpublished pages with far more attention to the author, of course, than to The new yorker stuff. I’m always interested in O’Hara, which puts me into an exclusive club of about a hundred thousand. I felt the old and undeserved proprietary affection, and got a kick when I saw that he’d made his hero a Harvard man this time. But Stephen learns and remembers more than anyone at Harvard would have bothered to do—and actually more than anyone except John O’Hara would have. Everyone is here—Andy and Thurber and Lobrano and Sullivan and Ross—along with some made-up lesser figures, but the real presence is the author, burning up the pages once again and pouring the dialogue around like gasoline.