This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  He did us proud, but at a cost beyond the paying.

  Post, April, 2013

  SIX LETTERS

  TO DANIEL MENAKER

  After a twenty-five-year career as a New Yorker fiction editor, Daniel Menaker shifted to book publishing in 1996 and became executive editor in chief at Random House. He is the author of five books.

  Dear Dan:

  My plan was to tell you tomorrow how much I like your book—but second thoughts tell me that I’ll forget something or, more likely, that talk at your table about “A Good Talk” might feel too self-conscious to make for good talk. Anyway, all I want to say is that the book is a very quick read, because of its pleasures and surprises, and also a slow one because you want to stop and go back and think about some of the things going on there. One of the surprises is the Fred and Ginger conversation, which I strongly resisted at first because I wondered how either one of them could talk without extreme caution or embarrassing over-performance since they knew they were being taped. But they do gabble away quite easily and the talk immediately carries the day and gets the reader eager to know what they’ll say next, thus instantly proving the book’s value and excitement. This is true even during your interruptions or digressions, which are compelling but also make one eager to get on with the talk.

  Carol read the book too, and I noticed that she kept laughing as she read along, proving how much she liked it even before she said that she did.

  Speaking of which. After we’d read the book I asked C if she ever thought about those moments when someone at dinner is about to stop talking and everyone else there starts gunning their mighty engines a little, like drivers at a red light, hoping to win the breakaway jump into the next conversation a fraction of a second before the last one is quite over. And she said no, because I always hope I won’t be the one who has to talk next.

  So now we can talk about that.

  Actually I’m going to try not to say a word at your house tomorrow night because of the things people will be thinking about me now, thanks to your book. And now I have to stop and look for typos. Thanks for that task, pal.

  Yrs. of course,

  TO RON FIMRITE

  April 21, 2010

  Dear Ron:

  I’ve heard your miserable news and I couldn’t be sorrier. David tells me you want no wailing at the bar and I will forbear, although this will be the first bar date with you I’ve ever passed up. You have been a true friend, and even though we’ve met rarely in recent years I’ve always thought you were in the next room and available at a moment’s notice for lunch and light discussions. Whenever we talk on the phone, we’re simply resuming our conversation, even if the previous one was back last year. Thanks for that and a whole lot more.

  I can’t remember exactly when we became lifetime pals, but I suspect it was some time in the mid-seventies when I made my first spring training trip to Arizona. On your invitation, I joined you at the—duh: some desert name—on (I think) Van Buren Street, and learned how to play Pong and how to leave ballgames never later than the seventh inning, in favor of more civilized doings at poolside. I think that was the year that Jack Mann left his shoes outside his door at night to be polished (in a motel?) and went around barefoot for the next day or two. Days and nights and eventually years went by in this delightful fashion, with Chub and Steph and Rig and David and Linda and Carol and Lesly and others joining the company for jokes and talks and sweet times. All your doing, really.

  I have the same feeling about my stays in San Francisco, where you were always the host, the Grover Whelan, of each visit, making me feel as if I was simply taking my place in a large and friendly family of mine that wanted me around for every meal. How else could I have felt when you and Linda took me in right after the earthquake in 1989, and I came to breakfast crying, “Something really serious has happened: I’ve lost my notebook.”

  You know all this by heart, Ron, as do I, and many pages more of it will go unsaid for the time being. My plan is to call you tomorrow—I understand you’re coming home from the hospital today—for a brief chat. I’m told that you don’t have a walk-around phone (is yours the party-line wall model, with a crank?)—and if you don’t feel like coming down the hall please don’t bother.

  Carol sends her love and some major hugs. John Henry sends his love, and says he holds very clear memories of good times in your company. (He lives in Portland, Oregon, now, which is too far away, but he’ll be around here for a few days later this week, along with his wife Alice and their eight-month-old daughter Clara, who is making her East Coast début.)

  Hang in there, Ron. This whole thing is a hell of a note, because you’ve been pencilled in for years to speak at my memorial. Who’s going to take your place—Bobby Valentine? See what I mean?

  Yrs, ever, dear Ron, believe you me,

  TO TRACY DAUGHERTY

  December 9, 2006

  Hi Tracy,

  Thanks for your message. I enjoyed our meeting and felt that we both enjoyed talking about Donald Barthelme at such length. I think your book “Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme” is off to a great start. I was glad to see you making a note about my little observation that the only thing a biographer should beware of and eschew in writing about Don B. is that hovering, omnipresent sense of awe and reverence that seems to surround him still.

  I don’t think that the swift offer of a first agreement came from any sense of mine that we were on some special wavelength or would always understand each other. Rather, it was because he could write funny stuff, as we had seen from those early casuals. Reliable writers of humor were always at a very high premium for us, because of their rarity. I had little or no idea what sort of writer Donald would turn into, and doubt that he did, either.

  I want to emphasize again the influence and importance of editor William Shawn through all the New Yorker’s dealings with Barthelme. I enthusiastically admired what he was and what he became, and we two did work together happily and productively, but none of that would have meant much and little of it would have happened were it not for Shawn’s daring and intuitive understanding of what sort of an artist had turned up when Don began submitting his amazing early pieces. As I said the other day, many people on the magazine did not share this deep admiration, either, and there were always complaints and puzzled murmurings as we began to publish him pretty steadily and to find space for his oddly illustrated semi-abstract casuals, and to run the longer stuff like “Snow White” at full length. Some New Yorker writers and staffers did cotton to him from the outset, of course, and loved what he brought to the magazine and to all of us in that place and time.

  There was little mention of this in the small flood of books about Shawn that appeared after he died; it was as if Shawn’s genius as a fiction editor was held to be secondary to his other gifts and not an integral part of his influence over the writing and thinking of that time. I’ve pointed this out over and over in the past few months, while talking about my own little book, but not many people seem interested. Fiction and art don’t belong, for some reason. This misapprehension predates Barthelme, to be sure. The early books about Harold Ross, including Brendan Gill’s popular but patronizing view of him, “Here at The New Yorker,” treat New Yorker fiction (Cheever and Salinger aside) in a somewhat offhand way, even though for many years we used to run three or at the very least two stories or casuals in each issue, with the leadoff or “A” story always appearing in the primo slot, right after the Talk of the Town.

  It also seems to me that people forget now how significant—how much admired and imitated and talked about—Donald’s stuff was for a stretch there. Did you by chance come upon the long analytic and admiring piece about him by Richard Schickel in the NY Times Magazine for August 1, 1970, which is written in a Donald-like Q.-and-A. format?

  Sorry to go on so.

  Best,

  TO CHARLES MCGRATH

  Charles (Chip) McGrath was a long-term fiction editor at The New Yorker, and was nam
ed managing editor in 1988. He became the editor of the New York Times Book Review in 1995, and has subsequently served as a Times writer at large.

  February 28, 2008

  Dear Chip,

  Our gloomy lunch talk made me realize steroids are finally getting to me—not so much the practice but the sordid denials and evasions. I still can’t get over Clemens before that Congressional Committee the other day. Deeply weird drama—the bulging Spaceman phiz and whoever lives behind it lying and lying, and the skulky drug provider telling nothing but the truth. I’ll never forget it.

  Your line to me that if there was a little something you could take that would turn you into John Updike you’d do it in a nanosecond has brought back that three-day visiting-writer-gig I had at the U. of Penn a few years ago, where I was in the hands of a lively English prof named Al Filreis, who taught writing. I did a reading, went to some comp classes, met his bright and talented students…well, a few were talented. The last morning there was sort of an open house where I took questions and read a little more. A mixed audience, undergrads and grad students, with some faculty and Penn staff people drifting in and out. Forty or fifty people there at a time. About half the questions were about steroids, and I finally said, “Let’s say you’re a lawyer or an architect or a veterinarian, and there’s this little something you can take that will make you not just a better lawyer, architect, or veterinarian, but the best one in the world. It’s illegal but if you take it nobody will know. How many of you would take it—put up your hands.”

  About half the bunch put up their hands—almost all of them faculty or staff types, folks in their thirties or forties. When I asked the other question—who would never, never take the elixir, all the kids stuck up their hands vehemently. This poll depressed me at first, but thinking about it later I decided that what we’d seen wasn’t about idealism and its loss as much as innocence: young people with no idea yet about how tough and grungy the world was going to turn out to be for them.

  I think fans still don’t have any notion of how hard big-league baseball really is—how the season gets to you. Other sports beat you up—this one happens every day and it grinds you down. It’s by far the hardest sport to play at a high level. .230 hitters get desperate just trying to keep up to their own level, then get ready again for another game tonight. A lot of them, I think more than half, used to take greenies, amphetamines, to keep that edge. Joe DiMaggio, not exactly a struggler, drank fourteen or fifteen cups of coffee every day. There’s also lingering pain, and daunting or disabling injury awaiting you, especially for the pitchers. A lot of them used to soldier on while in horrific pain. I wrote about this in an old piece, “The Arms Talks.”

  I think I told you about the time in spring training a little while ago when I found myself sitting on a back bench at ———, a couple of yards away from ——— and ———. No one else there. Two famous closers, one the fabulous veteran home stopper and the other his opposite number, there with the visiting ———s for that afternoon’s game. They were shop-talking pitching and pharmacology, what they took every day to get ready. (They gave me a glance, but ——— knew me and probably said I was O.K.) What I picked up from the murmured converse was their strong interest in the proper order of self-medication—“Man, you take that in the fifth inning? I always wait till the seventh, middle seventh, then the Blurto top of the eighth.” Etc. It was all nicknames and prescription shorthand, no Ben-Gay or Bayer in it anywhere.

  Talk to you next week,

  TO CHARLES SIMMONS

  March 31, 2010

  Dear Charles:

  Please forgive my delay in responding to your “Once More About Anatole Broyard,” which was caused by its predictable popularity among my colleagues. This did not produce a decision to publish the piece, I’m sorry to say, so this letter is an apology. We’re letting it go, I’m told, because it would be so odd for us to run two separate Broyard memoirs. I understand this verdict even if I don’t agree with it, and this impels me to ask whether you have any other Times memoirs in mind or in the works. If so, I’d love to see them, and would expect though can’t promise a better outcome.

  The Broyard piece has changed my view of the Times, which I now see as a steamy souk or hothouse of sex. I thought of this place in the same way, years ago, but we were just preppy fooler-arounders compared to you folks off to the west. I put all this in the past tense only because of my age; for all I know there may be more action than ever on these floors, though I think it more likely that harassment issues and Facebook and the cell and the tweet have combined to produce a new Puritanism among journalists—a terrific loss to life & letters.

  It was good to hear from you, Charles. Please write back anytime.

  Yrs, and best,

  TO ROBERT CREAMER

  March 10, 2009

  Dear Bob:

  I love the tale of the blackberry brandy, or pre-Imodium. I myself recall a couple of storied evenings on Frank’s porch [Frank Sullivan], when those five or six rocking chairs of his were refilled two or three times over in the course of the conversations. My eternal repayment for his kindness was one of the few really good ideas I’ve ever had in my life. I called up Jock Whitney* at the Trib (and somehow got through to him right away) and after identifying myself suggested that he arrange to name a race at the current Saratoga meeting as “The Frank Sullivan,” in honor of the great man. I also explained that I’d been told already that the NYRA never, never named a race after a living person.

  “It will be done!” Whitney cried, in imitation of the Pope, and it was. When “The Frank Sullivan” made its début as a modest, mid-card Saratoga event the following August, Frank was delighted. He went with a passel of friends and made a bet on every horse in the race, so he’d be sure to have the winner. I think he died later that same year.

  Best again,

  * * *

  * Philanthropist John Hay ( Jock) Whitney was the last editor and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. As co-owner (with his sister Joan Payson Whitney) of the Greentree Stable, he was also a major figure in American turf circles.

  HERE COMES THE SUN

  With Opening Day gone by, a visitor to the recent spring-training camps can expect to keep no more than a handful of memories of the short season, such as a low line-drive homer in Tampa by the Yankees’ new import, Hideki Matsui, intensely annotated by a horde of visiting Japanese media; or a Mo Vaughn sailer at Port St. Lucie, over the right-field fence and into a sandpit, where it was excavated by an exclaiming pack of boy archeologists; or Renee Conley’s birthday party in Lower Box 105, Row D, at Scottsdale Stadium, in Arizona. Renee and four slender, well-tanned friends of hers—Laura McDermott, Angie Ray, Angie Cronk, and Ann Chaillie—were dressed in jeans, tank tops, and a scattering of forward-facing baseball caps, and their occupation of this sector, close behind the backstop screen, a bit over toward the visiting-team dugout, brightened the afternoon almost as much as the sun, which had been hiding behind chilly rain clouds for the past couple of days. The women put out the news that this was Renee’s twenty-first birthday, and Renee, bowing and blushing a little—she had cropped dark hair and a nice strong nose—accepted the good wishes of the old fans and kid fans around her but then said, well, no, she was thirty-one today. This seemed to put her about in the middle, agewise, in her bunch, who turned out to be servers from the nearby Bandera restaurant. “The best margaritas in town,” said Laura, who is a bartender there. “Only don’t go today, because all the staff will be rookies.”

  The game began—the Giants were hosting a split squad of Seattle Mariners—but the young women were distracted by party-favor comical cardboard eyeglasses, with a jagged “Happy Birthday” in exuberant colors above the frames. Putting these on could be done only by reversing the caps, and once this was done, to cascades of laughter, it was time for a round of Bud Lights and the first of a dozen or so group shots, with the girls hugging up in a tight bunch and showing their perfect teeth to each helpful, “
cheese”-urging neighbor fan wielding a borrowed camera. Fan parties can turn into a royal pain if you’re there for the game, but, c’mon, this was spring training, and it was a kick to see how rarely this part of Row D ever actually looked at the field.

  By the time the women had slipped on pacifier-sized candy rings (more snaps), you began to pick up some of the conversations and sort out the principals. Angie Ray had serious crimson lipstick and wore a cap with “Alien Workshop” over the peak, while Laura’s cap said “Lucky Brand” in script astern. Angie Cronk was the one with a cluster of small silver rings in her right ear and a lavender silk scarf fashionably twisted around her short, white-blond hair. She looked a bit like Jean Seberg. One of her friends said, “Angie, your ring matches everything—God, you always look so great!”

  “Ooo, look, the bases are loaded,” somebody said—we were in the fifth by now—but Rich Aurilia’s grand slam over the left-field fence was more or less missed because the friends were so busy with the birthday cake: two Hostess cupcakes, side by side, with a candle “3” stuck in one of them and a candle “1” in the other. Renee instantly blew them out, to a screaming that became part of the wild game noise as Barry Bonds, the next man up, delivered a monster blow over the berm in right. Nobody ate the cupcakes.