Roger Angell's Elegiac Impulse - Part 2

Photo by Sylvia Plachy, from Roger Angell's "Here Below"

Roger Angell had an exquisite sense of life’s transience. I’ve written about this before in relation to his baseball writings (see here). But on the occasion of his recent death, I want to note it again, this time in connection with his two wonderful “cemetery” pieces – “Here Below” (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006; included in his 2006 collection Let Me Finish) and “Over the Wall” (The New Yorker, November 19, 2012; included in his 2015 collection This Old Man).

In “Here Below,” Angell and his wife, Carol, visit three cemeteries: the Palisades, New York, Cemetery; the Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Cemetery; and the Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery. He says of the Palisades Cemetery,

It was a quiet, foggy morning, and once there I felt as if we’d walked into a green and gray room furnished with leaning stones. Many had surfaces thickened with lichen and decay, where inscriptions had become indistinct, with some words missing. It was like a half-heard conversation…. Now, near the western fringe of bushes in the cemetery, Carol found one of the markers we were looking for: a tipping-forward silvery granite oblong, with letters fading into invisibility…. Another eloquent marker nearby was a tall and faded pinkish-brown slab – perhaps it’s brownstone – with a scalloped top and the pleasing old willow-tree-and-stone-urn drawing, barely visible here, that you find in this part of the country.

“Indistinct,” “half-heard,” “fading into invisibility,” “barely visible” – these are descriptions of time’s erasure. Angell repeats the motif in his depiction of the Brooklin Cemetery, where his mother, Katherine Angell, and his stepfather, E. B. White, are buried:

The gravestones are mid-sized with a classic curve along the top and elegant shoulders, but the years have demonstrated that slate – or this slate, at least – ages poorly. A corrective metal sheath or splint now covers the top of both slabs, to check the fine-cracks that have appeared along the sides and front. The fading slate, now silvered to a happier tone, has almost smoothed away the names and dates. Soon the Whites’ wish for privacy, well known to everyone in town, will be complete.

Describing the Brooklin Cemetery, Angell casually mentions that fifteen years ago he and Carol purchased burial plots there for themselves. He says,

Fifteen years ago, Carol and I met here with the friendly cemetery representative (a sign on his pickup truck advertised his other line of work, taxidermy) and for two hundred and twenty dollars signed on for a nice double, close to an oak tree in the northeast corner.

Note that “nice double”; Angell seems comfortable with death.

In “Over the Wall,” written six years later, Angell is back in the Brooklin Cemetery. This time he’s visiting not only the graves of his mother and stepfather, but Carol’s as well. He tells us she died last April. He writes,

My visits to Carol didn’t last long. I’d perk up the flowers in the vase we had there, and pick deadheads off a pot of yellow daisies; if there had been rain overnight, I’d pick up any pieces of the sea glass that had fallen and replace them on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone.

He mentions that he and Carol both have gravestones: 

My decision to have my gravestone put in at the same time as Carol’s, in early August – it only lacks the final numbers – wasn’t easy, but has turned out to be comforting, not creepy. Broklin is much too far away just now – I live in New York – but the notion that before long my familiar June trip back there will be for good is only keeping a promise.

The piece concludes with Angell walking in the oldest part of Brooklin Cemetery. He says of the graves there,

These are marble or granite headstones, for the most part, but all are worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility.

Worn to an almost identical whiteness … washed almost to invisibility. Angell seemed at home in cemeteries. They confirmed his acute sense of life’s ephemerality.