Roger Angell Dies at 101
David Remnick wrote a wonderful remembrance of the great Roger Angell, who died last week at 101:
“Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the
first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and
intimate love,” he wrote in This Old Man. “I believe that
everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight,
together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or
a bare expanse of shoulder within reach.”Roger died on Friday. He was a hundred and one. But longevity was
actually quite low on his list of accomplishments. He did as much
to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine’s nearly
century-long history. His prose and his editorial judgment left an
imprint that’s hard to overstate. Like Ruth and Ohtani, he was a
freakishly talented double threat, a superb writer and an
invaluable counsel to countless masters of the short story. He won
a place in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in
the Baseball Hall of Fame — a unique distinction. The crowd of
friends from the magazine who drove four hours north to watch him
receive the J. G. Taylor Spink Award at Doubleday Field, in
Cooperstown, wore custom jerseys declaring themselves Roger’s
“Angells.”
Angell, more than any other writer, understood intuitively why baseball is a special game. It was because Angell was such an astute writer about life, in general, that he was so good writing about baseball, particularly. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
My dad taught me to love baseball, but Roger Angell taught me
how to love it: unreservedly, with a writer’s nosiness, a
historian’s stance, an ear for comedy, and a skeptical but not a
jaundiced eye. And above all: patiently. You cannot enjoy a
baseball game without first settling into it, getting its feel,
and then giving it time.
