Toward My Own Theory of Description: The Slipper-Kick

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Who is the all-time New Yorker description champ? What’s being asked here? (1) Who is the best describer in the history of the magazine? Or (2), who is the all-time best describer of the magazine? Answer to 1: Roger Angell. You heard me. Not Nabokov. Not Updike. Not McPhee. Not Frazier. Nope. My pick is baseball writer Roger Angell. Sample:

Conjecture thickened through most of the opening game, which was absolutely close for most of the distance, and then suddenly not close at all. Don Gullett, a powerful left-hander, kept the Red Sox in check for six innings, but was slightly out pitched and vastly outacted over the same distance by Tiant. The venerable stopper (he is listed as being thirty-four and rumored as being a little or a great deal older) did not have much of a fastball on this particular afternoon, so we were treated to the splendid full range of Tiantic mime. His repertoire begins with an exaggerated mid-windup pivot, during which he turns his back on the batter and seems to examine the infield directly behind the mound for signs of crabgrass. With men on bases, his stretch consists of a succession of minute downward waggles and pauses of the glove, and a menacing sidewise, slit-eyed, Valentino-like gaze over his shoulder at the base runner. The full flower of his art, however, comes during the actual delivery, which is executed with a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations. I had begun to take notes during my recent observations of the Cuban Garrick, and now, as he set down the Reds with only minimal interruptions (including one balk call, in the fourth), I arrived at some tentative codifications. The basic Tiant repertoire seems to include:

(1) Call the Osteopath: In mid-pitch, the man suffers an agonizing seizure in the central cervical region, which he attempts to fight off with a sharp backward twist of the head.

(2) Out of the Woodshed: Just before releasing the ball, he steps over a raised sill and simultaneously ducks his head to avoid conking it on the low door frame.

(3) The Runaway Taxi: Before the pivot, he sees a vehicle bearing down on him at top speed, and pulls back his entire upper body just in time to avoid a nasty accident.

(4) Falling Off the Fence: An attack of vertigo nearly causes him to topple over backward on the mound. Strongly suggests a careless dude on the top rung of the corral.

(5) The Slipper-Kick: In mid-pitch, he surprisingly decides to get rid of his left shoe.

(6) The Low-Flying Plane (a subtle development and amalgam of 1, 3, and 4, above): While he is pivoting, an F-105 buzzes the ballpark, passing over the infield from the third-base to the first-base side at a height of eighty feet. He follows it all the way with his eyes.

This passage makes me smile every time I read it. It’s from Angell’s brilliant “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November 17, 1975; included in his 1978 collection Five Seasons), an epic account of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Is it description? Of course it is. It’s one of the most lyrical descriptions of action I’ve ever read – where lyrical means elegant, vivid, poetic, stylish, inspired, and evocative. It also contains an ingredient I haven’t mentioned to this point – analysis. Zhang doesn’t mention it in her book. Descriptive analysis is a major form of representation, particularly in descriptions of art. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

Oh, and my answer to question #2 above: Anthony Lane. See his wonderful “The New Yorker at 75” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000; included in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect). Sample:

As it happens, The New Yorker has made matters of fact its business; sticklers for exactitude will agree that, when an employee is packed off to a movie theatre, bearing a copy of the week’s film review, in order to check that the second shirt from the left in the casino scene is woven from purple plaid and not magenta velour, there is not much to stickle about.