This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  In 1982, Sheppard took a short vacation trip to New England while the Yankees were away on a road swing, and while in Boston paid a visit to Fenway Park, where his local counterpart, the Red Sox’s announcer Sherm Feller, persuaded him to take the microphone for a courtesy inning. By wonderful coincidence, his first batter was Reggie Jackson, now playing for the California Angels after his five notable years in the Bronx.

  “Now batt-ing,” Sheppard intoned, “numb-er for-ty-fourr, Regg-ie Jack-sson, for-ty-four.”

  Reggie, standing in, dropped his bat and looked straight up to heaven.

  Post, July, 2010

  EDITH OLIVER

  Edith Oliver was the almost perpetual Books editor of The New Yorker as well as its Off Broadway drama critic.

  I’m sad but also eager to say a few words about our colleague Edith, who was such a pal to us all. Almost every day at our old offices on the uptown side of Forty-third Street I’d find an excuse to drop in on her, in her niche next to the stairs—to pass on a joke (I can still hear that smoky laugh), or talk about a book or a movie, or invite her into a shared groan over some bottomless paragraph or pious Comment piece that had somehow found its way into the comic weekly.

  “Yes!” she would cry hoarsely, stabbing out her cigarette. “Godawful. The worst ever. Bill Shawn has a lot to answer for this week, baby. I give up.”

  The pattern was always the same: enthusiasm or outrage flung out in introductory one- or two-word chunks, then a three- or four-word development, and then the swift concluding flurry of annoyance, agreement, shared glee.

  She was a born enthusiast, even in her discontents, and she was delightfully complicit. Whatever you and she were ripping up or raving over, she made you feel that the two of you were in on it together, like kids in a tree-house—pals for life or at least for these two minutes. I always went back upstairs to my office feeling better, and often with some outrageous compliment still burning my ears. Often when a piece or a story or a book or even a play had come up with us, she would say, “You should have written it. It would have been better.” This is the kind of stuff we have wanted to hear from our parents, of course, but Edith saw no reason to hold it back, and then she would laugh with you at such blather. “You’re the best ever,” she would tack on. “You know it.”

  She was sharp and quick and passionate in her judgments, but also profoundly loyal, which allowed her to say deadly things about people she knew without seeming to betray them. “The worst liar in the history of the world!” was her sentence one day on a man we deeply admired and respected, but she had taught me by then not to be shocked by candor. Edith knew how complicated and godawful we all are, and didn’t mind a little savaging when it was called for. This freed her from small talk, and made you treasure her as a friend, even in absentia. Whenever you let her down with something dumb or careless you’d said or done or written, you knew she would soon be groaning or shuddering about it with somebody else, another friend—but that she still cared about you as much as before. I don’t know any greater compliment.

  Theatre friends of Edith’s at this gathering will be talking about her as a critic, and I would only offer that here, too, she was a true pal. She never allowed the weight of her expertise or the privilege of her post or the passing insult to her intelligence to creep into her reviews. She never allowed herself to sound like a critic, that is. She was somebody you knew who cared about the theatre, and here was what she had seen and liked this week—or, too bad, didn’t much like this time, except for the professional lighting and extremely useful set design. She always sounded like herself. She was loyal to the theatre but not in awe of it or pissed off by it: what more could one ask?

  She was more loyal than the Boy Scouts and Lassie and Nathan Hale rolled into one. She was loyal to E. M. Forster and Cole Porter and Bob and Ray and Victor Pritchett and Lanford Wilson and Bill Shawn and her family and Fred and Ginger and to everybody here, her pals.

  If it would bring her back, I’d take up smoking again, in a minute.

  Tribute, Summer, 1998

  MICHAEL MULDAVIN

  Mike’s arrival at Pomfret School in the fall of 1936, where he joined our junior class—there were about twenty of us—seems mysterious, almost magical, even now. Pomfret was a small place, and insular. There were about a hundred and twenty boys, in all, scattered over five terms—I mean years. In class, we were narrower: Long Island Republican and Episcopalian, with a scattering of Catholics and Democrats, and headed mostly for Yale. There was one Jewish kid; no African Americans, no girls. I was a New York City boy who’d grown up in an intellectual, divorced household, where my father—soon to become the National Chairman of the A.C.L.U.—let me speak my mind at all times. When Mike arrived I was already used to being a semi-outcast at Pomfret, but then suddenly here was Michael Semyon Muldavin, a suave, multilingual leftist with immense charm, spikey tan hair, a great laugh, an exotic faraway address, and a charming, gentle manner that ingratiated him with everyone—the old boys, the faculty, the faculty wives, even the football players. He saved my bacon. He knew a million times more than I did about the T.V.A., the Scottsboro Boys, the Comintern, Rexford Guy Tugwell, the Brownshirts, the Soong Sisters, Leon Blum, Sergei Eisenstein, Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, La Pasionaria, and the American Fruit Company, but he could talk about them—in history class or while watching an Achaeans vs. Ionians league hockey game, or late at night in a dorm—in a quiet way that held everyone’s attention. Soon he and I were outcasts together, but that estate had become more respectable, almost desirable, and other smart kids began to edge our way. In our senior year, where Mike became one of the great assets of the Class of 1938, he sang in the glee club, appeared in the French Dramatic Club plays, and helped found a new debating society, the ProCon, where he was named best debater and also—it wasn’t a known category—kindest debater. I remember him concluding an incisive and complex little talk he gave to the entire school one morning on some subject—it’s long since gone—because he concluded it with a smile and slight bow, and said, “Thank you.” Thank you for what? No one had said this before—not even one of our teachers. Why, thank you for listening, of course. Thank you for thinking about this with me. A bit of civilization, a touch of class, had descended on us.

  The next year Mike and I were happy as freshman roommates at Harvard, in a top-floor double of Straus Hall. We had a bicycle built for two and scooted around Boston and Cambridge, under the trees. We biked downtown for movies or dinner, then biked home. I think he sat in front but maybe we switched around. We were both in the Student Union—he full-bore, I more idly. He was part of the Communist Left, then contesting for control of the Union—and a difficult position because of the onrushing war in Europe and the coming Stalinist entente with Hitler. Often when I’d come back to our room late from Widener there would be four or five serious S.U. guys there talking. They’d drop their voices when I came in and look at me in baleful fashion. Sometimes I put my arm across my face like a cloak, which deepened their mistrust, but it cracked Mike up.

  We talked endlessly, in our room and at classes and meals. I wasn’t bad in political debate but he was better. Once, at breakfast, I remember crying, “You just shifted your grounds!” And Mike said, “You noticed!” And we laughed again.

  That spring we got involved in a union strike against a local Cambridge taxi company, and some ugly-looking guys—members of the union’s “Education Committee”—used our phone to send scab drivers to distant addresses, where they got beaten up or had their tires slashed. Or so I was told. Soon, in any case, the strike was won but we had no phone. Mike had been the one supposedly in charge of handling our joint phone bill but late in the year our service was terminated for lack of payment. I protested and Mike said, “Don’t worry. I know how to handle this sort of thing.” He came back that day with a stamped, signed slip of paper from the Bell Telephone Company showing that our accumulated four-month bill of about seventy bucks had been settled in full for fifty-five
.

  “Wow!” I said.

  “Never give in to the cartels,” Mike said gravely.

  “And the phone’s been turned back on?” I said.

  “Well, you can’t have everything,” he said, spreading his hands. “This is a victory.”

  He left college after our sophomore year, and dropped out of sight. I heard from him next at Hickam Field, in Honolulu, in 1944, where he called me up at the G.I. magazine where I was an editor, and proposed dinner. “I’ll come by and pick you up,” he said. “And by the way, what are you—what rank?”

  “I’m a sergeant,” I said. “And you?”

  “I’m a captain.”

  “In what?” I said.

  “I’m in Intelligence,” he said. “Intelligence, of course.” He couldn’t resist this.

  “God damn, Mike!” I cried. He’d won again.

  —

  I HARDLY SAW HIM at all, down the years. Once in a while he’d call again, out of the blue, and we’d have a talk or a meal together—a year ago it was at the Century Club, in New York, with his son, Joshua, a Sarah Lawrence professor, in whom he took such great pleasure and pride. He seemed exactly the same to me. He’d always just arrived from someplace and was headed off tomorrow for some other coast or country or province. He talked as if I knew what he’d been doing in all these faraway places around the world, among people in desperate need. He always said “We” or “Us”—and then he’d add, “You know.” I didn’t know, and no wonder. In addition to acquiring a Harvard law degree, he’d become a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, a medical economist, and a pioneer investment trader in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. What I felt, then and now, was that all these concerns, all this rushing about, had assuredly been for us, for us all, and that he represented me as he did from the day he first arrived at Pomfret, with class and civilized hope. He did us honor.

  Tribute, February, 2006

  ANNA HAMBURGER

  Anna Hamburger was the place your gaze stopped when you’d just come into a crowded East Side living room, dropped in at a friend’s Village gallery opening, arrived at a neighbor’s walkup for Christmas cheer, or looked past the surrounding strangers at the theatre and discovered her, there across the narrow theatre lobby, at intermission. Good, you thought, everything’s all right now. You looked again, as you moved toward her, waiting for her to spot you as you got closer, and for that breathtaking welcoming smile—her huge, heavy-lidded eyes opening wide—and for her to say your name in greeting (“Raw-juh!” in a woodwind contralto) and put up her face toward yours. Anna, who died last week, at the age of ninety, was the wife of my long-term friend and colleague Philip Hamburger, and wherever she went, he came, too. She’d had a long, happy marriage (and two children) with her first husband, the writer Norman Matson, and then this second brilliant go-round. She had ten grandchildren and fourteen great-grands.

  Phil and Anna were a couple in the gin-and-tonic, Héloïse-and-Abélard sense. You rarely thought of them as anything but two—he in his dark suit, with his curved little smile; she close at hand, with pale lipstick and extraordinary hair. They belonged to an aristocracy of energetic attendance and intense critical response. “Have you read…? Did you hear…? Wasn’t that…?” And if you’d read the book, by chance, or been at the concert, or happened upon this particular op-ed disaster—or even if you’d somehow missed it—you were swept aboard, listening and laughing with this avid couple at this suddenly significant moment.

  Anna grew up in Greenwich in the nineteen-twenties. Her father, the Socialist labor reformer William English Walling, was a contributor to the original Masses, and she never lost the conviction that the good guys would triumph in the end. After voters had given Richard Nixon another term, or Fritz Mondale or Mario Cuomo had come to grief, she and Phil would be on the phone the next morning or have you over to dinner the next week. “How could they?” she exclaimed, spreading her hands wide. “It’s unbe-leevable!” Optimistic but never naïve, she was tough and comforting at the same time. “She knew exactly what people were like and didn’t let it bother her,” one friend said of Anna the other day. “She took care of you,” said another. In a community of the gifted, she practiced intimacy as if it were an art form, and became another New York genius.

  Talk, December, 2002

  PAST MASTERS: V. S. PRITCHETT

  MARCHING LIFE

  Always alert to oddity and happenstance, V. S. Pritchett, who died last March, at the age of ninety-six, often mentioned the linked, double ticking of his own life and the clock of the century, but he must have sensed also that this shared distance of time had become a distraction, almost a disservice, to him near the end. The same proviso applies to the massive accumulation of his writings—fifteen collections of stories, nine works of criticism, three biographies, five novels, seven travel books, and two classic works of autobiography—which led to the near-universal bestowal of the title First Man of Letters upon him, once he had reached his mid-seventies. The honorific never quite fitted. Pritchett was aged at the end, to be sure, but not ancient. He was non-monumental. He was not literary—not in many senses of the word, at least. He was not a stylist, for instance, and he liked to point out that he had been a hack long before he became a critic. Even his knightly robes kept slipping askew. The moment that he and his wife, Dorothy, got back to their house from Buckingham Palace, in 1975, where the Queen had dubbed him Sir Victor, they called up their friends to tell them what tune the Guards regimental band had played as he approached the kneeling bench: Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” They were shouting with laughter.

  Pritchett will be remembered by everyone who knew him for his curiosity—a tourist’s eagerness that had left its stamp upon his expressive face and was never far removed from his writing. His eyes, always alert, and his mouth, which often showed a skewed half smile, seemed ready on the instant to flower into delight but could change just as quickly to a thoughtful, deeply inward look of consideration, with his domed head and large jaw somehow forming an apparatus for either procedure. A short, strong-looking man, with thick shoulders and an uptilted gaze, he appeared at times to be standing behind an invisible pub counter, or perhaps about to oversee the unloading of a shipment of crocuses or greyhounds. There was a strain of workaday London practicality about him, and the surprise was that this avidity should be directed toward books and stories and ideas, instead of the tradesman’s ledger. His cheerfulness—friends and relatives and other writers (writers in particular) could be seen standing near him whenever the chance came along, as if they were warming themselves at an old-fashioned coke-burning fireplace—no doubt derived from a resiliency developed during an unpeaceful childhood, but later on it bore an unmistakable air of relief: the look of a writer who has found a way to keep at it, to write all the time, and thus not to miss any part of himself in the end. He had freed himself of the occupational self-pity that makes so many writers so much less fun to meet than one expects.

  I was an editor of his for almost fifty years, starting at Holiday, for which he wrote vigorous, impeccable travel essays, and continuing, over a longer period, with his stories for The New Yorker, and we wrote each other ceaselessly back and forth, and talked about everything—well, maybe not his neckties. In time, I came to understand that the amiable attention he gave to even the smallest suggested cut or rephrasing in his text was not a sign of politeness or modesty but came from the intense, almost sensual pleasure he took in every part of the writing business. He is the only writer I have known who would thank you for a rejection; he would be disappointed when it happened, to be sure, but eager to learn what had seemed to go wrong, and then you could hear in his murmuring, diminishing tones over the telephone the processes of revision already at work in his mind. “The Fig Tree,” one of his most celebrated and satisfying longer stories (it runs well over ten thousand words), was sent back twice in its early form. In the first revision, Pritchett had followed some suggestion of mine about a differen
t direction for the ending—a notion that clearly made matters worse. He thanked me once again and went back to work. The third version, which came in almost a year after the first, was a major restructuring, front to back, and required nothing from this end except gratitude: he had got it right, and there was almost more pleasure in that than there would have been in a perfect first manuscript—of which he was also capable, of course. Writing is hard work, and Pritchett was a practitioner who didn’t resent its ditch-digging days. “I am really just a daily journalist,” he said once. “I sit down every day to do it, because I have to do it, and now I know how to do it. [I] actually do enjoy the act of writing, and it is that which means the most to me.”

  Pritchett’s fame, whatever its eventual dimensions, will probably rest upon his two-volume autobiography, “A Cab at the Door” and “Midnight Oil” (published in 1968 and 1971, respectively), and upon the “Complete Collected Stories” (1990), a handsome, corner-of-the-bookcase volume of eighty-two stories, which, taken together, present a mixture of weight and shimmering human complication, and a unifying Chekhovian continuity. Readers may also avail themselves of “The Pritchett Century,” a new anthology, selected by his son Oliver, who is a Sunday Telegraph columnist, which combines excerpts from the autobiography; thirteen stories; parts of the novels “Dead Man Leading” and “Mr. Beluncle”; selections from Pritchett’s biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov; eight samples of travel writing; twenty-one critical essays; and a posthumous appreciation, by John Bayley, that was first published in the London Review of Books. Any presumed anticlimax here is inappropriate, for the absorbing, well-written, and joyful obituaries that followed Sir Victor’s death would make a lively little anthology all on their own.