This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  March, 2009

  THE FADEAWAY

  Colleagues for more than half a century, writer-editor partners for more than half that time, John Updike and I were close at a fixed distance—he at home north of Boston, I in my New Yorker office near Bryant Park—but spoke voluminously by telephone, by manuscripts and galley proofs, and also via his typed, cheerful two-and-a-half-by-five-and-a-half white postcards that bore his pale-blue name and address hand-stamped in the northwest corner. Now and then he would turn up at the office, startling me once again with his height and his tweeds, that major nose, and his bright eyes and up-bent smile; he spoke in a light half-whisper and, near the end of each visit, somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away. The fadeaway, as I came to think of it, may have had to do with his exile from his own writing that day, while travelling; the spacious writing part of him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its engrossing daily stint back home. Informally august, he stayed young after his hair turned white, but the additions of fame and a vast work now made him seem Colonial, ready for the portrait on a postage stamp.

  (Credit 42.1)

  A similar sense of shift and distracting clarity often overtook a reader in one of Updike’s stories when an ordinary enough event or small-town American scene—a slight earthquake, a 5.4 on the Richter scale, awakening a man at home in bed in the early morning; a mother on her way to work in the nineteen-thirties running for a streetcar in Pennsylvania; a man in his late fifties outside his living room in the winter finding the moons of Jupiter with his new home telescope—slides to another breadth and meaning in the space of a sentence or two. This is what Updike has had in mind for us all along. He invites us into his story and walks us easily along; all is recognizable and reassuringly alive, but then—we’ve had no warning—we’re seized with a flooding fresh knowledge, in the same fashion that sadness or some ancient night remembrance can sometimes take us in its teeth. Updike was in his twenties and thirties when most of his seventeen stories about the Maples were being written, but his expert and unpatronizing account of a suburban marriage—husband and wife, neighbors and kids, meals and affairs and politics and anxiety—also carried this double view. There’s something terrifying about it all, because these young people, parents and children alike, are such beginners, not ready for so much life.

  Updike’s writing is light and springy, the tone unforced; often happiness is almost in view, despite age or disappointments. He is not mawkish or insistently gloomy. Death is frequently mentioned but for the time being is postponed. Time itself is bendable in these stories; the characters are aware of themselves at many stages. This is Updike country: intelligent and Eastern, mostly Protestant, more or less moneyed. We understand and read on, and then—and then a middle-aged married man named Fanshawe remembers how he had “ceased to fear death—or, so to say, to grasp it”—at the moment when he first slept with a woman named Lorna Kramer. Or the young father, Richard Maple, at the end of a day when he and his wife, Joan, have been explaining to their young children that they are going to separate and try living apart for the summer, ending their marriage at least for now, is telling the news to his teen-age son, in bed and just home from a rock concert, and the teary boy stops him with a word: “Why?” He has forgotten why. Or that young woman from the past—Updike’s mother without a doubt, but seen this time as the mother of a man named Joey in a long 1990 story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse”—“running to catch the trolley, the world of the thirties shabby and solid around her, the porches, the blue midsummer hydrangeas, this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind.”

  Updike’s sentences are fresh-painted. In all his writing, critical or fictional or reportorial, he is a fabulous noticer and expander; he’s invented HD. So armed, he felt free from the start to take up and engage with all that lay within the range of his attention and put it down on paper. As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: “Which one sounds better, do you think?” Sighing, he would take us back over the same few words again and again, then propose or listen to a switch of some sort, and try again. All writers do this, but not many with such a lavishly extended consideration. He wanted to see each galley, each tiny change, right down to the late-closing page proofs, which he often managed to return by overnight mail an hour or so before closing, with new sentences or passages, handwritten in the margins in a soft pencil, that were fresher and more inventive and revealing than what had been there before. You watched him write.

  This process sounds old-fashioned, but Updike was probably the very first New Yorker writer to shift over to a computer, back in the early eighties. “I don’t know how this will change my writing,” he wrote to me in advance, “but it will.” He was right, of course: the flavor was mysteriously different, the same wine but of another year.

  By the end, there were a hundred and forty-six John Updike stories that ran in the magazine, starting with “Friends from Philadelphia,” in the issue of October 30, 1954, and finishing with “The Full Glass,” in the May 26, 2008, issue. Another several dozen casuals or works of humor ran up to “A Desert Encounter,” on October 20, 2008. All this, of course, was in addition to his five hundred–odd reviews and poems and critical essays in The New Yorker, and to one side of or on top of the twenty-three novels, the art criticism for The New York Review of Books, and the steady rush of pieces and stories published elsewhere. He often insisted that he was about to run dry. When I became his fiction editor, early in 1976, succeeding William Maxwell, I was alarmed to hear from him that his best fiction-writing days were probably behind him. This was nonsense; his output then was a steady three or four first-class stories per year, but to hear him tell it the end was near. “Fiction is a young man’s game,” he said querulously. I had not yet understood how much he loved sounding old. Rabbit Angstrom, we might notice, dies of old age, in effect, in “Rabbit at Rest,” the fourth and final book of the celebrated work, at the age of fifty-six. By the time his production level did in fact slow a bit, twenty years down the line, I’d found a little trick that he and I enjoyed. Some mornings when we were talking idly on the telephone, perhaps still again about the Sox’ pitching, I would tell him that there was a sharp new story coming up in the next issue—something different, by a young man or woman we’d been following for some time now. “Rea-lly!” he would cry, his voice rising. He was still a close reader of every issue, and over the years as a reviewer for the magazine he had been amazingly generous to beginning talents. But this was beside the point, as we understood. A couple of weeks would go by and then—not every time, but sometimes—my little pile of morning mail would include a tan manuscript envelope with his name stamped in blue up in the corner: a new story by John Updike.

  Talk, February, 2009

  MIDDLE INNINGS

  MO TOWN

  Late on yesterday’s dazzling, post-summer afternoon in the Bronx, each batter and infielder moved and ran with his own autumnal sharp-shadow cutout barely attached at the foot. The brilliant, reminding light was relentless; it never let us up, enamelling the grass at the outset, then producing late-inning gateways of alternate shadow and sun between the mound and home plate that made each pitch flicker in its flight. No, no, you wanted to say: Not so fast. Not yet. (“ONE MO TIME,” said a fan’s held-up plea.) It got late early up there, as Yogi once said, and the outcome we didn’t want arrived just the same, in spite of plaques and speeches. Mariano Rivera’s pregame “Exit Sandman” final-Sunday ceremonies at the Stadium—he’s retiring after nineteen seasons—had been awkwardly merged with Andy Pettitte’s recently announced decision to depart for good, too, afte
r eighteen (all but three with the Yanks), but, because Andy would be starting against the visiting San Francisco Giants and was preoccupied with that, it remained Mo’s day mostly, and sweetly reassuring. Waterford crystal, the comical rocking chair, parents, family, current teammates and old ones. Paulie, Jorge, Bernie, Derek, Tino, manager Joe, Rachel Robinson (Mo, of course, the last player to sport Jackie Robinson’s universally retired uniform number, 42). Michael Kay. Speeches, smiles—Rivera won this category, hands down—and an actual surprise: Metallica, live and in person, there to play his entrance song.

  © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Credit 43.1)

  All this was happily cheered and clapped for and phone-flashed by the attending forty-nine thousand one hundred and ninety-seven fans (as it had been previously and similarly done in the honoring ballparks where Mo appeared this summer), but, once the game began, these same thousands found themselves for the last time painfully checking off and folding and tucking away their own shared but also private memories of the two, beginning with Pettitte’s prayerful, early-Renaissance gaze in at his catcher’s signals, with his cap pulled low, his hands up, and his lips touching the top of his upheld black mitt.

  Andy was almost great, giving up two hits in seven innings—the first a home run in the sixth by the rookie San Francisco shortstop Ehire Adrianza, and the other a double in the eighth by Pablo Sandoval, which shortly became the winning run—Andy had gone, with a final hat wave—in the Yanks’ excruciating 2–1 defeat. Mariano came on with one out in the eighth, and surrendered a single but no runs, and along the way gave us still again his eloquent entering run from deep center field; the leaning stare-in with upcocked mitt over his heart; the reposeful pre-pitch pause, with his hands at waist level; and then the burning, bending, famed-in-song-and-story cutter. All these, seen once again, have been as familiar to us as our dad’s light cough from the next room, or the dimples on the back of our once-three-year-old daughter’s hands, but, like those, must now only be recalled.

  The game ran down, then ran out, with the Yanks somehow failing to score anybody after putting runners on second and third base with no outs in the bottom of the eighth. The TV camera, sweeping the dugout rail one more time, caught a gallery of derelicts. The last batter, a twenty-two-year-old rookie catcher named J. R. Murphy, went down swinging. Shattered by injuries and with their bullpen worn to a frazzle, the Yankees have lost six of their last nine games. Sagging in the tatterdemalion struggle for that second American League Wild Card in the last week of the season, they will be caught by the heels in the next day or two and gobbled up by the statistical werewolf. Baseball, as Bart Giamatti told us, breaks your heart, but he was thinking of the back-then Red Sox.

  Post, September, 2013

  SOX TOP SLOPPY CARDS

  Game 1, 2013 World Series

  Red Sox 8: Cardinals 1

  World Series opening games can feel like a sunny day at Camp 6, a deserved picnic where we enjoy the fabulous views we’ve attained and contemplate the last push to the summit, but all images of the sort flew away quickly last night, when the inept Cardinals gave up five runs in the first two innings at Fenway Park, in the course of an 8–1 pasting by the Red Sox. Jon Lester, the lefty Boston starter, struck out eight Cards over seven and two-thirds innings, and David Ortiz knocked a home run and a single and a sac, driving in three runs: thrilling star material on a better night, but only satisfactory here. The Cards, the best defensive team in the National League, were stinko, with three infield errors, two of them by shortstop Pete Kozma. The pattern of the game became clear when the veteran Cardinal starter Adam Wainwright could only smile wanly after allowing a feeble pop by Stephen Drew to drop like a thrombosed dove at his feet, to begin the Sox’ second. No replays, please.

  Big Papi’s most telling blow may prove to have been his fly ball out to the rim of the Sox’ bullpen later in the second—a near replica of that grand slam in the A.L.C.S. sixth game that pinwheeled the Tiger right fielder Torii Hunter. This ball, not quite a line drive, came down a yard or two north of that one, and was plucked back niftily from beyond the barrier by the Cards’ Carlos Beltran, who slammed heavily into the four-foot wall there but held on. (Tim McCarver, the sterling Fox commentator, pointed out that that low bullpen wall is safe enough for outfielders when their backs are turned but deadly whenever they raise their arms.) Beltran’s contused rib forced him to leave the game, and his absence tonight and perhaps later on, removing his powerful bat from the order, would be worse for the Cards than losing a trifling opener.

  The Never Before moment arrived early, when Ortiz, the fourth Boston batter of the evening, hit a soft grounder to the right, where second baseman Matt Carpenter flipped to Kozma to begin a potential double play. When the ball came loose out there, second-base umpire Dana DeMuth signalled that Kozma had held it long enough for the force, even though everyone in the northern hemisphere, including my watching fox terrier and I, could plainly see that Kozma had barely touched the toss with the tip of his glove. The out stood up, stare decisis—or would have in an earlier era of umpiric reasoning. Here, though, and to my amazement, five neighboring umps came circling in, like crows or undertakers, and, after consultation, DeMuthed the call—safe on an error, the out cancelled. Justice and common sense had prevailed (along with a snub to the possibility of instant electronic replay to decide such calls next year), but a part of me felt a twinge of loss. Umps should always be right, even when they aren’t. In their hearts, as Bill Klem said, they never missed a call.

  Post, October, 2013

  CHINNY-CHIN-CHIN

  Game 4, 2013 World Series

  Red Sox 4: Cardinals 2

  Series Tied

  Last night’s game, like Saturday’s, ended with a losing-team player disconsolate in the dirt, but this time without an attached ruling to talk about. Kolten Wong, a ninth-inning Cardinals pinch base runner, was cleanly picked off first base by the Boston closer Koji Uehara, for the last out of the game. No excuse: Sox win, 4–2, knotting the series at two games apiece. The play was a fillip, not a filibuster, with the evening’s main event remaining Jonny Gomes’s three-run homer in the top of the sixth, which broke a 1–1 tie, and held up, guaranteeing that the teams, no matter who wins tonight, will return to Boston on Wednesday, for a sixth and then possibly a seventh and determining contest. Serious stuff by then, with every pitch tense and fraught, and winter now just down the street. No more fun, I mean, so let’s pause here and for one last time talk about beards.

  In resuming the topic, I don’t expect to match or approach the charming and scholarly essay recently posted by my friend and colleague Richard Brody, who said that “one of the beauties of the beard is that its lushness is polysemic, lending itself to an interpretive exuberance to match its flow.” Yow, Richard, and excuse me, but might I demur?

  Beards are kudzu.

  Jonny Gomes’s beard—a brown frigate bird’s nest—is among the uglier sported by the hairy Sox this year, and when numbers of his teammates began grabbing it and ritually tugging on it upon his return to the dugout after his blast I was among a minority in the land who were hoping they’d pull it off. Gomes, a nice guy from Petaluma, California, has broad sloping shoulders and a pleasant, or O.K.-ish, everyday expression, but he’s shaved his head now, too, which doesn’t help, unless you’re eager to join the crowding recent hordes of the undead. C’mon, Jonny.

  Gomes’s isn’t the worst Sox beard—the title goes to backup catcher David Ross, whose unkempt cabbage includes a clashing streak of white that cascades over his chin—perhaps a relic of a childhood moment when he ran into his grandfather in the narrow back hall outside the bathroom. The other catcher, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, has a raggedy garden-border growth, in keeping with the encircling back-yard shrubbery of his hair. Mike Napoli’s beard is thickest; Dustin Pedroia’s the weirdest, since it comes with his desert-saint stare and that repeated on-deck or between-pitch mannerism of opening and stretching
his mouth into a silent O: a screech owl with laryngitis.

  I’m a gentle fellow, and intend no lasting hurts here. I admire Big Papi’s plunging mid-cheek parenthesis, which has been there for many seasons, of course, and now feels as familiar and locally reassuring as a statue by Daniel Chester French. I also offer praise for the angle-iron jawline wool sported by tonight’s Boston starter, Jon Lester: an aesthetic so clearly modelled on Gunnar Björnstrand’s trimmed-down growth while he portrayed Fredrik Egerman in Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.”

  Can I ask a question? Where are the Red Sox wives or sweetie pies in all this? Have none of them spoken up—privately or in the Globe or in a thousand tweets—to protest this office fad? How does it feel to wake up, night after night, in immediate proximity to a crazed Pomeranian or a Malamute or an Old English sheepdog stubbornly adhering to the once caressable jaw of the guy on the nearest pillow? Doesn’t it scratch? Doesn’t it itch? Doesn’t it smell, however faintly, of tonight’s boeuf en daube or yesterday’s last pinch of Red Man? And what about the kids—how long can you keep putting them off with another recital of “The Three Little Pigs” or Edward Lear? Who does your husband/significant other think he is, anyway—Dostoyevsky? Brigham Young? Darwin? An Allman brother? Alexander Cartwright?