The New Yorker & Me: Roger Angell's Elegiac Impulse

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Roger Angell's Elegiac Impulse

Roger Angell (Illustration by David Levine)

Time pours through Roger Angell’s baseball writing. He’s acutely conscious of transience. In his superb “The Flowering and Subsequent Deflowering of New England” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1967), he pauses near the end of his account of Boston’s pennant-clinching victory against the Twins and says of Carl Yastrzemski,

There was something sad here – perhaps the thought that for Yastrzemski, more than for anyone else, this summer could not come again.

In his wonderful “Days and Nights with the Unbored” (The New Yorker, November 1, 1969), his report on the Mets’ stunning 1969 World Series win, he writes:

Nothing was lost on this team, not even an awareness of the accompanying sadness of the victory – the knowledge that adulation and money and the winter disbanding of this true club would mean that the young Mets were now gone forever. In the clubhouse (Moët et Chandon this time), Ron Swoboda said it precisely for the TV cameras: “This is the first time. Nothing can ever be as sweet again."

In the opening paragraph of his masterpiece, “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November, 1975), a thrilling account of the 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, he says,

Tarry, delight, so seldom met…. The games have ended, the heroes are dispersed, and another summer has died late in Boston, but still one yearns for them and wishes them back, so great was their pleasure.

Of his writings’ many brilliancies, the one I love most is the tinge of elegy.