This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  —

  WEEKS AND STORIES GO by, and one of the records that are being run up, one realizes, is a life’s work. V. S. Pritchett is as old as the century, and, while there is little about him that feels monumental, he is England’s grand master of the short story and our language’s presiding man of letters. Sir Victor has always insisted that he is more craftsman than artist, and claims that plots are almost beyond him, but he is too modest. The three interconnected Noisy Brackett stories, which begin with “The Key to My Heart,” are made up of car chases, crooked business dealings, drunkenness, gossip, class snobbery, and comic invention: the ingredients of a Feydeau farce, one might say, except that they are also stuffed with heartbreak and sexual suffering. Rereading them, you relish the craftsmanship, but then your eye is caught, once again, by something else. Birds, for instance. I had remembered “…and the rooks came out of the elms like bits of black paper,” in “The Key to My Heart,” but not “A soft owl flew over the lane.” The short adjective, instead of the expected adverb, is art itself, and makes a place and a mood and a time of day, an entire scene, out of seven words. Call back the interviewer. This is what we’re looking for in the fiction line: we want that owl.

  Onward and Upward with the Arts, June, 1994

  POSTLUDE

  This trade talk is more than twenty years old, and there have been a few changes. I am no longer reading and editing and rejecting fiction, and about time, but the process at The New Yorker remains about the same. That list of regular fiction contributors has turned over, as well, with my old varsity gradually being replaced by George Saunders, Richard Ford, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, Roberto Bolaño, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tom McGuane, Lorrie Moore, Chimamanda Adichie, Junot Díaz, Donald Antrim, Colson Whitehead, and many others. The incumbent editors, Cressida Leyshon, Willing Davidson, and fiction editor Deborah Treisman, carry on the same intimate day-to-daying with writers—well, perhaps not quite as intimate, since it all happens online now—but editing, I think, remains a mystery to the world. Sometimes it even mystified me. Back in 1991, when we were closing Edith Templeton’s “Nymph & Faun,” cited above, it was suddenly learned that most of the characters in it still had the same names they’d borne in life: names she’d carried in memory while changing past events into high-style fiction. For legal reasons, we had to fictionalize them, give them pseudonyms. I reached her by telephone at her home in Bordighera, Italy, and explained the little crisis, asking her to call back the next day with fresh names; I would do the same, and we’d write in our fresh cast on the page proofs. The next day, we found that three of the names I’d thought up and attached to different characters were exactly the same as hers. Later, in a citation at the end of her collection, “The Darts of Cupid,” she called our mutual understanding “telepathic.”

  Now and then there are public rewards, as well. When Alice Munro was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, we New Yorker fiction types yelled and hugged each other in the hallway outside our offices. Munro was a short-story writer, nothing else, and now the world’s best. She’d never stopped, and she was ours. Deborah Treisman had been her editor for a decade or more, and they counted on each other for everything.

  July, 2015

  LA FORZA DEL ALPO

  An opera in four acts, conceived prior to successive evenings at the Westminster Kennel Club Show and the Metropolitan Opera.

  CAST

  GUGLIELMO—A dashing fox terrier (tenor)

  MIMI (Ch. Anthracite Sweet-Stuff of Armonk)—A poodle (soprano)

  DON CANINO (her father)—Another poodle (baritone)

  BRUTTO—Companion poodle to Don Canino and suitor for the hand of Mimi (basso)

  FIDOLETTA—A Lhasa Apso. Nurse to Mimi but secretly enamored of Guglielmo. A real bitch (mezzo)

  SPIQUE—A comical bulldog (basso hundo)

  DR. FAUSTUS—A veterinary (tenor)

  CHORUS: Non-sporting, herding, and terrier contestants; judges, handlers, reporters

  (There will be three walks around the block)

  After the disastrous failure of his misbegotten early “Arfeo” at La Scala in the winter of 1843, few expected that Verdi would soon return to the themes of canine anticlericalism and the proliferation of Labradors (labbrazazione), but his discovery of the traditional Sicilian grooming cavatina—as recapitulated in the touching barkarole “Dov’è il mio guinzaglio?” (“I have lost my leash”) that closes Act III—appears to have sent him back to work. Verdi’s implacable opposition to the Venetian muzzling ordinance of 1850 is to be heard in the rousing “Again a full moon” chorus that resonates so insistently during Brutto’s musings before and after the cabaletta:

  (Credit 28.1)

  At the opening curtain, Guglielmo and Mimi, in adjoining benching stalls, plan their elopement, despite the opposition of Don Canino, who has arranged her forthcoming marriage to Brutto despite rumors about the larger male’s parentage. After the lovers’ tender duet “A cuccia, a cuccia, amore mio” (“Sit! Sit, my love!”), recalling their first meeting at an obedience class, they part reluctantly, with Guglielmo distressed at her anxiety over the nuptials: “Che gelida manina” (“Your icy paw”). Don Canino, enlisting the support of the perfidious Fidoletta, plots to dispatch Guglielmo into the K-9 Corps, and, joined by Brutto, the trio, in “Sotto il nostro albero” (“Under the family tree”), jovially celebrates the value of pedigree.

  As the judging begins, Guglielmo, alerted to Don Canino’s plot by the faithful Spique, disguises himself as a miniature apricot poodle, but the lovers fail to detect the lurking presence of Don Canino, who has hidden himself among a large entry of Rottweilers in Ring 6. A pitched battle between hostile bands of Lakeland and Bedlington terriers requires the attention of Spique, and in his absence Fidoletta entraps the innocent Guglielmo, who discloses his identity to her. She breaks off their amusing impromptu duet “Non so chi sei” (“I don’t know who you are, but I sure like your gait”) to fetch the police, but Guglielmo makes good his escape through the loges during the taping of a Kal Kan commercial—an octet severely criticized in its day, but to which Mascagni makes dear obeisance in his later sestina “Mangia, Pucci.”

  (Credit 28.2)

  Guglielmo, not realizing in the darkness that he has found his way back to his natal kennel in Chappaqua, delivers the dirgelike “Osso Bucco” while digging in the yard, but is elated by news from Spique that he has uncovered certain documents in the back-door garbage compactor. Fidoletta, puzzled, trails the valiant pair as they hasten back to the Garden.

  In our turbulent final act, the wedding of Mimi and Brutto is interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Faustus, bearing the purloined A.K.C. documents unearthed by Spique. The good vet declares that the nuptials must halt, because Brutto is in fact not only Mimi’s father but (through a separate whelping) her uncle as well. Don Canino, horrified at his own depravity, vows to enter holy orders, and, in a confession, reveals that Brutto is no purebred—“Mira l’occhio azzurro” (“Ol’ Blue Eyes”)—thanks to a Pomeranian on his dam’s side. Dr. Faustus removes Brutto to his laboratory for neutering. Guglielmo, still in disguise, unexpectedly wins a Best of Opposite Sex award in his breed as the lovers are at last united. Guglielmo serenades his Mimi with the “Sono maschio” (“I am a young intact male”) as the happy couple, renouncing show biz, envision their future as a breeding pair with a cut-rate puppy mill in the Garden State Mall. Spique, exhausted by so much unlikelihood, falls asleep on the emptied stage, where his sonorous snores (“Zzzzz”) are joined by those of the audience.

  Shouts & Murmurs, February, 1994

  THE DARIEN CONNECTICUT DEF POETRY JAM

  2 HAIKU

  Kick him in the groin

  And get that yellow, baby:

  Mom’s late for yoga.

  Bo’s header in net

  Beats Mamaroneck 1–zip.

  Early admission?

  —Sokkamom

  (Credit 29.1)

  SITTER

&nb
sp; Changin yo Huggies

  Baby honkee muhfuh

  So don do me no trix

  Got a Calculus I test

  Tomorrow second period

  And if I turn Tupac way low

  You go’n sleep

  Sweetie babe?

  —LASOUL

  ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S SECOND DRAWER

  I hear you Vanessa and Aly:

  French cuffs are so

  McOut.

  —M. Moi

  RPM

  ogetoffmyassgetoffmyassgetoffmyassmisterbigfatlexus

  high on latte here on the dewy do we merritt

  i’m askin’—you wanna play games?

  you wanna play bumperpool?

  (Credit 29.2)

  You wanna play the lil game i taught

  my poodle name of renoir: rollover and play dead?

  looks like it….

  rumrum rummedyrum.

  Uhohwasthatyouflashingyourhighbeamatmejustnow?

  —Walter Putnam Stebbins

  (Credit 29.3)

  A GOOD MAN

  Right beyond the Whiskas and stuff

  2nd left after Dependency Needs

  Straight along past the Goldfishes

  Balsamics Baking Supplies Batteries Bottled Waters

  Now left again before Party & Poolside

  + look w. care thru Other Herbs (Rt. Side) and if not

  ASK!

  But what the hell is

  —can’t make out your writing—

  “Filé Powder”?

  —Yupster

  INTIMATION AT WEE SPINNEY

  My Title—

  1st from a boggy

  Lie sailed O sunlit

  Orb slightly trapward

  Ere my deft in

  Sideout 6-iron

  Draw

  Plunked it just on the second

  Cut at 17 from

  Where it rolled

  Sweet slight bend

  Yow exclam cried Herb

  To within 2' 8" but

  What’s left for me

  Now eye ask?

  —Biff III

  (Credit 29.4)

  12:31 A.M.

  You ’wake?

  Listen what came between the Accord hatchback

  And the yellow Volvo DL wagon? Sort of

  Gray with a little ding

  Low on the door on your side?

  Funny to ask when I’m looking at my dad’s

  Malibu here plain as day.

  —Ambien

  GREEN AS GREEN

  We are crabgrass. Up up up up up up up

  Grow grow grow grow grow—

  HOLD IT! QUIET GUYS!

  mnmnmnmnmnmnmnn

  Yep, it’s Rider-man. Heads down, everybody:

  …mnmnmMNMNMNMNmnmm mn m n…

  There he goes—did you catch that hat?

  Well, back to the old salt mines, I guess.

  Grow grow grow grow up up up up up

  Their Shih Tzu died

  —S. Ward

  Verse, June, 2003

  (Credit 29.5)

  PAST MASTERS: WILLIAM STEIG

  THE MINSTREL STEIG

  The rule about age is never to think about it, so let us instead pack “two suitcases, the first with food, the second mostly with food,” and be on our way. The travel tip comes from Zeke, a gifted young pig who leaves home in the middle of the night, upset because his harmonica-playing invariably puts his family to sleep—“out like a light, no matter how merry the music.” The story is continued in “Zeke Pippin,” a book for children published on November 14th, the day its author and illustrator, William Steig, turned eighty-seven. It was his twenty-fifth children’s book since he first took up the work, a quarter century ago; almost all of them remain exuberantly in print, with several still popping up here and there in new editions and surprising languages—Hawaiian, say, or Xhosa—and with sales, foreign and domestic, that now total close to two million. Steig, of course, is this magazine’s own William Steig, who sold his first drawing to The New Yorker in 1930 and his most recent one last month, which makes him our longest-running active contributor. The magazine has published sixteen hundred and fifty drawings of his and a hundred and seventeen covers, and there are more of each in the bank. He is probably still best known here for his extensive series “Small Fry,” which concerned the rowdy doings and pleasures of inventive and pugnacious young boys and girls: street kids, for the most part, who all bore strong resemblance to one another—stubby and snub-nosed, with bright eyes and tough, tipped-up chins—and thus, inescapably, to Steig himself. His most celebrated cover, I imagine, is the one for May 9, 1953—a portrait of a five- or six-year-old boy artist, brush in hand, leaning against the runny, color-bursting tree he has just painted, under a yellow-ray sun that would make van Gogh squint: Kid Steig forever.

  Most of Steig’s art, though, has been for and about adults, and it has not always been lighthearted. In some of the cartoons, men and women yell and quarrel, snap at their kids, glare inkily at each other from old armchairs. In one drawing, a sour-looking widow standing in front of a gravestone, her mouth open and her finger in the air, is continuing the argument. Other Steig people, alone and captionless, stare out at the reader from faces that are masks or Rorschach blobs or blotter lines; the style is hard to describe, because it keeps changing, sometimes almost from week to week. Courtship and love (and plenty of lust) turn up, mostly in classical guise: broad-hipped nymphs, tattered knights, satyrs, men as roosters, lions as kings. Everyone seems to have dressed up, in the child’s sense of the word, perhaps in hope of more fun. Animals and flowers and masks abound, but almost sadly. The titles of some of Steig’s collections sound like warnings: “The Lonely Ones,” “Ruminations,” “Strutters and Fretters,” “Our Miserable Life.” It’s amazing how different, how direct and open Steig is when he turns to the difficulties and adventures of children.

  Not children exactly. In most of the books, one notices, the dramatis personae are boys and girls in disguise—junior pigs, mice, dogs, geese, donkeys, and frogs—with parents (in coats and pants, hats and dresses) of the same breed; and before long the switch, which looks only charming at first, takes on a more useful purpose. “I realized that I could get crazier with animals and have them do stranger things,” Steig said not long ago. “And I put them in clothes, as other writers have done.”

  Launched by Steig’s flowing pen, Pearl, of “The Amazing Bone,” happily sets sail (above and on following pages), on dire and colorful adventures. (Credit 30.1)

  Steig’s heroes and heroines, young and innocent as they appear, keep running into appalling obstacles and troubles. Roland (of “Roland the Minstrel Pig”) is almost garrotted, narrowly misses being crushed by a boulder, and then is strung up from a tree limb. Sylvester, a donkey, is turned into a rock. Amos (the mouse in “Amos and Boris”) falls overboard in mid-ocean, and Boris (a whale, ibid.) is stranded on a beach by a hurricane. Abel, the mouse hero of “Abel’s Island,” is marooned for a year, and Pearl, a very young pig in “The Amazing Bone,” is nearly cooked and served (with a nice green salad) by a fox. So it goes, but these small critters remain valorous, and they come through in the end. Survival, we begin to understand, is the main event. These animals aren’t just sweet; they’re tough and active and optimistic. They love to get going. They’re battlers. Dominic, the eponymous dog hero of Steig’s picaresque novel, carries a spear and routs the rascally Doomsday Gang again and again. When he’s buried in a deep hole, with the foxy and ferrety gang members licking their chops up above, he starts to dig his way out at once. “Working away, he was happy he had gone out into the world to seek his fortune. So many interesting things to do! With four sets of claws and the spear, and a bountiful supply of energy, he burrowed a long tunnel away from the hole and under the crowded roots of a large tree. Then he worked his way upward to the surface.”

  —

  I AM A FATHER of children who are widely separated in age, thanks to a s
econd marriage, and when, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, my wife and I first took turns reading aloud “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble” and “Amos and Boris” and “Caleb & Kate” and “Farmer Palmer’s Wagon Ride” to our young son, I sometimes felt a brief pang for my daughters, who were by then well into their twenties, because they’d come along too early to get that firsthand, child’s-eye view of such treasures. Is there a word for this phenomenon—“postchronism,” or some such? It’s like being sorry for Sophocles’s audiences because they missed out on “The Tempest,” or pitying the monks who first stared up at the freshly painted Giotto frescoes in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi because they never got to think about Cézanne. It is my own view that we dismiss children’s literature too readily, perhaps because young readers are always poised to move along to the next stage, but also because we suspect that anything that appeals so strongly and pleasurably to us, as parents, is too easy to be taken seriously. How many of us do not still believe in our secret hearts that with a little luck we could have played major-league baseball or written a first-class children’s book. Dream on.