This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  Post, November 30, 2011

  ANDY’S HAIKUS

  Hey, why the long face,

  Mr. Smooth Fox Terrier?

  Dog jokes never die.

  Stay down, crazy pooch!

  Stop jumping all over me.

  Enough love—O.K.?

  Petal ears on top,

  Triangles of attention,

  Pick us up also.

  Aloft and agog,

  My old dads, depanniered,

  Cancelled fox’s plan.

  Unacceptable,

  4 A.M. nose in my ear.

  Oh, well—c’mon under.

  Prewash your plates

  Is what I do around here:

  Lift that door and die!

  Circling your cushion,

  Settled on your spot to nap:

  Curvature ensues.

  Black patches on white

  Form an archipelago:

  Terrierana.

  June, 2014

  (Credit 39.1)

  MORE HAIKUS

  MARATHON

  Six more miles? Oh, God,

  Let me die like what’s-his-name—

  Like Pheidippides.

  OSPREY

  Still taking on airs,

  Making a splash at dinner,

  Local star keeps up.

  HEY!

  It surprises me

  That what pigeons keep saying

  Is “Hai-kuu”…“Hai-kuu.”

  PILEATED

  A pair of redheads

  Jackhammering a spruce stump

  Got my attention.

  SIX LETTERS AND A MEMO

  TO ANONYMOUS

  December 4, 2009

  Dear ———:

  Thank you for your letter pointing out that Cliff Lee’s 2008 record for the Indians was 22–3, not the 22–2 that we printed. Actually this “error” was intentional, and was inserted into my Sporting Scene article thanks to The New Yorker’s collaboration with a joint Brandeis/Harvard Sociology Departments’ readership reaction survey: a well-devised format which searches out really objectionable readers and will eventually document more than 32,000 irritating or self-regarding responses to journalistic carelessness in the United States and Canada; a similar study is just getting under way in Great Britain.

  Professor Greta Shunway, of Brandeis, is also excited by your closing “Tant pis,” pointing out that this qualifies you as a rare double entrant in the study, and guarantees that you may expect a personal visit within the next ninety days from professionals on the survey’s board.

  Sincerely,

  TO TRACY DAUGHERTY

  November 26, 2008

  Dear Tracy:

  Thanks for getting back to me—and many more thanks for your compliments. Please don’t agonize over any of this. You’ve written a tremendous book, “Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme,” and the thing for you to do now is to enjoy it. I really mean that. The brief experience of publication—the delivery of the m.s., the calls and letters back and forth with the editor, the fixings and rethinkings, the first proofs, the corrected proofs, the talks about the cover and the pub date, the jacket copy arrangements and the blurbs, the book itself in your hands (!!!), the signing and the mailing of copies to friends, the actual pub date and its swift departure, the reviews, the sight of the books in a bookstore, the letters and phone calls, the weeks rushing by and the book suddenly not on the shelves anymore—goes by at warp speed, and my advice is to relish every moment. What Tolstoy thought, five or six days after the publication of “War and Peace,” was Yes, but what have I done lately?

  I hope you’re about to have a really great Thanksgiving.

  Yrs. & best,

  TO BOBBIE ANN MASON

  Monday, February 8, 2010

  Thanks, Bobbie. I think writing is different for different people and I know it was always hard for you. It’s never easy, let’s agree. But I don’t think Salinger’s great skills or genius meant that he wouldn’t stop writing, as you speculate. I have two theories about him and perhaps both are wrong. I think he was badly damaged by the war, when he had some hard experiences. Certainly he became more bitter as a hermit, and chose to interpret his own fame and reputation and preference for privacy as a test of something or other. But every writer encounters this to some degree and has to decide how to handle flattery, ego, agents, money, and the demands of publicists and rival writers and yearning readers. For some reason this was beyond him, and since he could find no recourse in irony or humor or semi-detachment he fell into that deep suspicion of everyone out there—see Lillian Ross on that “smell” he began to detect everywhere—turned into deep eccentricity and paranoia. The other strain that occurs to me can be found in the Glass stories, which begin to fall apart in the last one we’ve seen—the Hepworth mess. He’s been promising some semi-religious higher truth in the series, but now can’t deliver. Seymour has been dead a long time and where can this all go? He’s painted himself into a spiritual corner.

  I don’t trust writers who end up just writing for themselves. Writing is a two-way process and the hard part isn’t just getting in touch with oneself but keeping in touch with that reader out there, whoever he or she is, on whom all this thought and art and maybe genius will devolve. Without the reader you can do anything, put down anything or nothing—it doesn’t matter much.

  But one’s own way of writing, which almost requires leaving the world altogether, demands too much of oneself, and I can see why you’d seriously think of stopping. I just don’t think anything of the kind happened to Salinger.

  Maybe we’ll be given a great trove of brilliant untouched Salinger prose now. I hope so but somehow I doubt it.

  Love,

  TO TOM BELLER

  Tom Beller was writing “J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist” (2014).

  May 1, 2014

  Dear Tom Beller again:

  Sorry to be late with this.

  I’m pretty sure that Jerry Salinger would have walked toward Madison, not Lex, in search of that pack of cigarettes. He could have tried at the little Schmidt’s Drugstore, two doors north of 91st Street on the NE corner of Park, but probably that was still a pure drugstore. It had one of the pharmacist’s vases of mauve water hanging in the window.

  You’re right: Madison then was nothing like Madison now. The gentrification began in the 1980s, I believe. It was a businesslike avenue before that, and in Jerry’s time, with two-way trolley tracks in the middle. All traffic was two-way. It had newsstands, a Gristede’s (on the NE corner of 92nd); a liquor store or two; a plumber’s store, with a bathtub in the window (mid 91st–92nd, on the east side of the avenue); a florist’s (J. D. Flessas, on the SW corner of 91st); numerous drugstores (including Cantor’s on NE or SE corner of Mad and 93rd, depending on which year we’re talking about, and, maybe a bit earlier, a nearby Liggett’s); plus shoeshine and shoe repair shops, hardware stores (probably Feldman’s, even then), etc., etc. The Hotel Wales was already there, east side of the avenue between 92nd and 93rd, but much seedier then.

  Lexington was much the same, also with trolleys—the trolley cars on the two lines were not identical in appearance—and with the same stores, maybe more groceries or butcher shops, but all of them cheaper and with a slightly less affluent clientele. More laundries; more of those basement ice, coal & wood places. Maybe some deli’s but they weren’t called deli’s then.

  Lexington and I think 93rd had a Lucky Lindy coffee shop. But neither of the two avenues felt affluent; they were useful. Almost all the buildings along them were four-story brownstones. Madison, as you noted, was on the same geographical level as Park; Lex was downhill from Park. There was some construction going on in these blocks all through this time, depression or no depression. The Walter Chrysler and H. Goadby Loew mansions, on 93rd between Park and Madison, both went up in the 1930s or a bit before; the large Brick Presbyterian Church (NW corner of 91st and Park) went up around 1939.

  Salinger and the younger me probably
passed each other more than once on the street back then, all unknowing. We each knew that the wind was from the east on gray mornings when we woke up with the smell of hops in the air, blown from the huge Ruppert’s Brewery, which lay east of Third and north from 90th Street.

  I think you’re making a mistake to scorn or downgrade Gus Lobrano. He was a major figure in the fiction department, and a top man at the magazine at the time when the Shawn succession was being determined. He died much too young. He handled many significant writers, including Ogden Nash, Frank O’Connor, James Thurber, Ogden Nash (verse), Edward Newhouse, Peter Taylor, and more, including the younger me. A gentle, determined, and brilliant editor and a sweet guy. He had been a classmate of E. B. White’s at Cornell.

  I think I’m about Salingered out, but do let me know if you have something specific that you can’t quite find. It’s good news that the book is almost ready.

  Best,

  TO PHILIP LEVINE

  November 16, 2010

  Dear Philip:

  Terrific poem this week—thank you. “Turkey” really snuck up on me, maybe because of those short lines. No, it’s your shifts: Jean-Claude, then “Indochine,” then the Admiral radio. But you know all this. Your stuff never fails me.

  It’s been a while since my last to you. I turned ninety in September—a huge surprise, though I thought I’d gotten ready for it. I’m still working at the magazine, but suspect that’s only because I’m too old to fire. I’ve been trying to make up for sparse production with my old Christmas jingle, but couldn’t deliver this time, thanks to some tough family events. I’m still reading fiction, or some of it, but we in the department have noticed a sudden drying up of submissions since this election. It reminds me of when Nixon got elected for the first time: a horrible event that suddenly produced a flood of funny casuals (not about him), of all things. But I don’t think that will happen this time around.

  Maybe you noticed that Sparky Anderson died. The obits made me think of a moment in the eighties when I was in his office in Lakeland, where there was a huge photo of Ty Cobb up on the wall. I was doing a piece on old-time ballplayers vs. the modern guys, so asked him if Cobb would make his team. He took the pipe out of his mouth and lowered his voice when he said, “I know he’s not starting for me. I hope he makes the twenty-five-man squad.”

  All best, Philip, and thanks again,

  P.S. I just reminded a young guy next door about your all-time title: “The Poem Circling Hamtramck, Michigan, All Night in Search of You.”

  TO SAM FIELD

  November 18, 2011

  Dear Sam:

  Thanks so much for your letter. I loved your story about the lost and magically retrieved copy of “Let Me Finish”—a tale that would thrill any writer, including Dickens or Tolstoy. I also enjoyed going to Sebastopol via that link and getting a glimpse of the beautiful houses and setting in your home town. I’m glad you’re playing golf now and then, though I stopped some time ago—being ninety-one I don’t play anything anymore—but I don’t mind passing along the golf shot of my life. This came while I was still at Harvard, and was playing with another hacker pal of mine one weekend at a suburban course in Wayland, Mass. There was a party of three just ahead of us on the course, and I waited for them to get a decent distance ahead on some hole before I stepped up and somehow hit the longest drive of my life, which began to fade ominously in their direction. I started to yell “Fore!” but stopped because I didn’t want them to stop walking. The ball hit a couple of yards behind them and then I saw one of them begin to writhe and jump about oddly. He didn’t go down, but when I’d gotten to within his cursing distance we discovered that the ball had come down inside his collar and had ended up down his back somewhere. I apologized endlessly but couldn’t quite suppress my grin: Wow—greater than a hole in one, any day!

  I see Tad Tomkins a lot but almost no one else from the old Snedens days. Jack Macrae is still with us, though reduced by MS. He gets around on a little go-cart but still goes to work at his publishing house. I’m also able to get to my office almost every day, but my writing now is mostly via New Yorker blogs. I do enjoy the form.

  I had an inquiry by e-mail not long ago from a man who’d been trying to find the old Snedens waterfall swimming pool and pergola. He said that people who lived there told him they’d heard of it but that it had disappeared. He walked around the area and found the waterfall but no pool or anything else. It turns out that it was all destroyed by vandals some years ago—they came in by boat off the Hudson, and hammered it all down in less than an hour: the pool and the white pergola and the paired steps and that lovely small reflecting pool with the Roman white marble lion’s-head spouts. A tragic loss, to me.

  So good to hear from you.

  Best, as ever,

  TO DAVID REMNICK

  Inter-Office Memo

  June, 2009

  Dear David,

  I’m a lifelong R. Crumb devotee, and while I do admire our scheduled Genesis chapter from his forthcoming version of the Good Book, I fear that seven spreads is going to put us way over our pubic hair allowance for 2009. Wouldn’t a six-page selection do the trick and pay him full homage?

  Roger

  No need to answer…

  PAST MASTERS: JOHN UPDIKE

  JOHN AND THE KID

  Tribute at the New York Public Library

  Here’s a passage that John Updike wrote forty-nine years ago, after watching Ted Williams hit a home run at Fenway Park, in the final at-bat of his career. The date is Wednesday, September 28, 1960, and the lines are from John’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which ran in The New Yorker three weeks later. Most of you know them already.

  Fisher threw [a] third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. [Center fielder Jackie] Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and vanished.

  Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

  Let’s fill in a bit. The game, against the second-place Orioles, was won by the seventh-place Sox, 5–4, an outcome that made absolutely no difference to either team. Attendance at Fenway Park that day was 10,454 and would have been 10,453 if a lady that John Updike had hoped to meet at her apartment on Beacon Hill that morning had not stood him up. He went to the Fens, instead, bought a ticket, and wrote what turned out to be the most celebrated piece of baseball writing ever. In the words of Fats Waller, one never knows, do one? The 1960 regular season continued for three more days, but this was Ted Williams’s last game ever. The home run was his twenty-ninth of the season, and his five hundred and twenty-first, lifetime. Here comes a fresh statistic, one you’ve not heard before. From the beginning of the modern baseball era, in 1901, to the end of that 1960 season, there were 66,112 other home runs struck in the major leagues, all noted and described briefly or at length by a writer or writers in attendance, not one of whom mentioned the Tappan Zee Bridge or feathers caught in a vortex, or conveyed the event with such economical joy.

  I think John got a little tired of the attention p
aid to this piece, down the years. He never wrote about baseball again—golf was his game, as it turned out—and I imagine he had many dozens of other pages or paragraphs that he liked more—parts of “Rabbit Run,” for instance, which he’d finished a year before Ted’s last blast. When he and I talked about the article, as we did a few times, we each admitted—I with gratitude, he with customary modesty and class—that “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” might have set the tone for my own baseball stuff, which I had not yet begun or thought of, and perhaps also encouraged The New Yorker to publish a few more sports pieces than it had so far. Thank you, John.

  In the preface to a special edition of “Hub Fans,” John wrote that he liked to think that the piece was “suffused with love,” because of his boyhood attachment to Ted Williams and his more adult feelings for the woman who’d not kept their date, but I’ll settle once again for joy—for the lift and lightness and intelligence that he himself and almost all of his writing conveyed, right to the end. You can go back and read him almost anywhere—this is the consolation he has left us—and see this and find him there once again. And if you think about that feather one more time it may come to you with another gleam of pleasure that the image carries the float and even the mildly lifting and falling shoulders of the contented everyday home-run hitter, suspended in time as he circles the bases and makes it safely back home again.