What Roger Angell Knew About How to Live

FFifty years ago this month, I joined the staff of The New Yorker just months before its fiftieth anniversary. Despite my limited knowledge of the magazine’s institutional history, I knew that former fiction editor Katharine Sergeant Angell White and her husband, EB (Andy) White, the progenitor of the magazine’s editorial voice, were a fundamental source of its DNA. The Whites had long since moved to a farm on the Maine coast, but Katharine’s son (and Andy’s stepson), Roger Angell, was becoming an institution in his own right. Roger seemed omnipresent—as a fiction editor who occupied his mother’s old office, as a writer of short stories and humor articles, as an occasional film critic, and in his outstanding reporting and essays on baseball, work that would eventually earn him a place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame (and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a unique double award). When I successfully submitted humor articles to him (my first articles!), Roger seemed as pleased as I was. Whenever he rejected one of the other 90 percent, he remained encouraging.

In a short time, we went from friendly colleagues to friends and, in time, real buddies. We watched our first baseball game together in 1977, during spring training in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, while Roger was on his annual preseason reporting trip along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. (I was visiting my parents, who were wintering nearby.) Roger was born the same year as my father, in 1920, but I never thought of him as a father figure; he always made me feel like we were equals.

When my children were young, I took a few summer trips with them to Maine, and along the way we visited Roger and his second wife, Carol, at their home in Brooklin, where Roger began spending his summers in 1933. Yet I never imagined the intimacy our friendship would acquire in his 80s and 90s. Carol, nearly 18 years younger than Roger, died in the spring of 2012 of breast cancer, compounding the loss two years earlier of his eldest daughter, Callie, to suicide—a blow whose “oceanic force and mystery” he was still trying to understand.

“A lot of people will tell you to let them know if you need anything,” I wrote to Roger. “I’m the one to call.” Twice a month, I would pick him up on Sunday mornings at his apartment on Madison Avenue and we would walk through Central Park, on to a farmers’ market on the Upper West Side and a supermarket in West Harlem. Along the way, we would talk about everything and nothing: the magazine, the Mets, his dreams and anxieties, what his shrink had said, our worries about our children, and memories of our marriages that still make us cringe.

One of Roger’s most memorable baseball essays is “Agincourt and After,” his recap of the 1975 playoffs and World Series. Game 6 of that series, of course, featured Carlton Fisk’s indelible 12th-inning home run against the Cincinnati Reds, the ball having slid off the screen inside the left-field foul pole at Fenway Park and landed in the grass (“a fair ball, fair all the way”). Describing the torrent of emotion it unleashed throughout New England, Roger celebrated the “joy that causes a grown man or woman to dance and shout for joy in the dead of night because of the random trajectory of a distant ball.”

The ball was not a metaphor, nor was the game, nor the ardor it unleashed, which Roger identified as “the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring.” That visceral phrase came to him at age 55, with four and a half decades of life still to go. Caring deeply provided him with a compass that guided him through the ups and downs that lay ahead. One of the highest compliments he paid a writer or visual artist was to call them “a great observer,” that is, an alchemist of the extraordinary and the hidden in plain sight—an ability he observed in the genius of Saul Steinberg, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. You had to be an observer to notice something.

What he loved most about baseball, I think, was his knowledge that no matter how much attention you pay to the game, you soon notice something you’ve never seen before. Reading Roger over the years and watching baseball with him, I learned to see the game in its infinite possibilities. No other writer I know could have allowed a fan to visualize frame by frame, away from the stadium or a television screen, the mechanics of a given pitcher or hitter, which Roger anatomized in terms that evoked Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering 19th-century studies of horses in motion.

Shortly before Carol died, she gave Roger issued a stern warning: “If you haven’t found someone new within a year of my departure, I’m coming back to haunt you.” He heeded that injunction in the summer of 2014, when he married his third wife, Peggy Moorman. Earlier that year, he had published in The New Yorker what would become his most widely read essay, “This Old Man,” a 93-year-old’s candid, intimate account of what one discovers, savors, endures, regrets, and forgives in the final moments of a very long life:

“Growing old is the second biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by far, is our incessant need for deep attachment and intimate love. . . . No confession or personal revelation is in sight here, but these feelings in old people are usually treated as a steamy secret. The invisibility factor—you’ve had your turn—is back. But I believe everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the soft warmth of a hip or a foot or a stretch of bare shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, no matter how old we are, never lose that desire: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize it greedily, stunned and transformed anew.”

As macular degeneration gradually eroded his vision, he managed to keep writing—blog posts, stories for Talk of the Town, short essays. He also nurtured his habit of memorizing and reciting aloud his favorite poems, cognitive gymnastics exercises that were primarily tributes to his favorites—Joseph Brodsky, WH Auden, John Betjeman, John Donne, Philip Larkin, among others—as well as his own haikus, many inspired by his smooth-coated fox terrier Andy.

Unacceptable,

4am, nose in ear.

Oh, well, come on, below.

In addition to sports and the nightly news, he regularly consumed Turner classics, but he needed to get closer and closer to television. During Game 5 of the 2016 World Series, with the Chicago Cubs about to be eliminated by the Cleveland Indians, he announced that it would be the last game he would immortalize on a notepad. But he got back to work when the Cubs won Game 7 in the 10th inning. When he wrote about it the next day, I was his secretary. If I hadn’t convinced him, he would have neglected to mention that the combined age of the Cubs’ four infielders was equal to his own.

The following spring, my youngest son, Paul, and I visited Roger and Peggy at their winter home in Sarasota, the home of the Baltimore Orioles for spring training. One afternoon, while attending a Baltimore-Pittsburgh preseason game, we caught a glimpse of a Pirates infielder named Gift Ngoepe, the first African-born player to reach (briefly) the major leagues. Roger insisted that he visit the press box between innings to learn more. With canes in hand and Paul at his side, they were stopped by a security guard who asked for his papers. “I’m the oldest person in the stadium and I’m in the Hall of Fame,” Roger told him. They went up.

Mark Singer, 73, is a staff writer at The New Yorker.