Postscript: Luis Tiant 1940 - 2024

Luis Tiant (Photo by Rich Pilling)

I see in the Times that the great Cuban baseball pitcher Luis Tiant died: see “Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83.” Tiant figures centrally in Roger Angell’s brilliant “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November 17, 1975), an account of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Angell wrote,

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.

That is one of the most inspired baseball descriptions ever written. It makes me smile every time I read it. Tiant is gone now, but he lives on in Angell’s classic piece. 

On the Horizon: Top Ten "New Yorker & Me"

Photo by John MacDougall

The New Yorker & Me has been around nearly fourteen years. Hard to believe. During that time, I've posted 1,433 notes – over a million words. Blogging is an ephemeral business. Roger Angell compared it to launching paper airplanes from an upstairs window. But thanks to blogspot.com’s archive, all my posts still exist. How long they’ll last is anyone’s guess. Some are better than others. Some were easy to write; others more difficult. I hope it doesn’t seem too self-indulgent if I look back and pick ten favorites. A new series then – “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” – one per month, for the next ten months, starting January 15, 2024. 

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.

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. 

September 28, 2020 Issue

Dan Chiasson makes an interesting observation in his “Critical Distances,” in this week’s issue. He says, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” Is this true? I recall Ian Frazier saying something similar a few years ago. In his “Carving Your Name on the Rock” [included in The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991), edited by William Zinsser], he writes, “What the travel writer is doing, in essence, is carving his name on the rock. He is saying, ‘I passed this way, too.’ ” Is that what I’m doing when I write this blog – asserting my existence? Blogito, ergo sum. I blog, therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. Blogging is too ephemeral and insubstantial for that.

Roger Angell, in his “This Old Man” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2014), writes, “I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.” That’s a perfect metaphor for blogging, conveying both its freedom and its ephemerality.

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my motive for blogging. Last week, I was close to winding things up. Then along came the September 7th New Yorker containing Jay Ruttenberg’s wonderful “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette, and I felt rejuvenated. I listened to LaVette’s raw, croaky rendition of “Blackbird,” and I loved it, and wanted to say why. Right there, I think, is at least one reason I blog – to figure out why I’m drawn to a particular writing or artwork.

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.

Joseph Mitchell - The New Yorker's Long-Line Champ

There’s a line in Joseph Mitchell’s "A Place of Pasts" (The New Yorker, February 16, 2015) that is a startling 1,183 words long. I believe this is a New Yorker record. The sentence is as follows (take a deep breath):

And I should also say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts: my own past; my father’s past; my mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters; the past of a small farming town geographically misnamed Fairmont down in the cypress swamps and black gum bottoms and wild magnolia bays of southeastern North Carolina, a town in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all heart-wrenchingly homesick; the pasts of several furnished-room houses and side-street hotels in New York City in which I lived during the early years of the Depression, when I was first discovering the city, and that disappeared one by one without a trace a long time ago but that evidently made a deep impression on me, for every once in a while the parlor or the lobby of one of them or my old room in one of them turns up eerily recognizable in a dream; the pasts of a number of speakeasies, diners, greasy spoons, and drugstore lunch counters scattered all over the city that I knew very well in the same period and that also have disappeared and that also turn up in dreams; the pasts of a score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being uniquely strange, only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world strange, but whom, since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now think of, without taking a thing away from them, as being strange all right, no doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or archetypically strange or even ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right, three good examples of whom are (1) a bearded lady who was billed as Lady Olga and who spent summers out on the road in circus sideshows and winters in a basement sideshow on Forty-second Street called Hubert’s Museum, and who used to be introduced to audiences by sideshow professors as having been born in a castle in Potsdam, Germany, and being the half sister of a French duke but who I learned to my astonishment when I first talked with her actually came from a farm in a county in North Carolina six counties west of the county I come from and who loved this farm and started longing to go back to it almost from the moment she left it at the age of twenty-one to work in a circus but who made her relatives uncomfortable when she went back for a visit (“ ‘How long are you going to stay’ was always the first question they asked me,” she once said) and who finally quit going back and from then on thought of herself as an exile and spoke of herself as an exile (“Some people are exiled by the government,” she would say, “and some are exiled by the po-lice or the F.B.I. or the head of some old labor union or the Mafia or the Black Hand or the K.K.K., but I was exiled by my own flesh and blood”), and who became a legend in the sideshow world because of her imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes imaginatively brutal remarks about people in sideshow audiences delivered deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow-freaks grouped around her on the platform, and (2) a street preacher named James Jefferson Davis Hall, who also came up here from the South and who lived in what he called sackcloth-and-ashes poverty in a tenement off Ninth Avenue in the Forties and who believed that God had given him the ability to read between the lines in the Bible and who also believed that while doing so he had discovered that the end of the world was soon to take place and who also believed that he had been guided by God to make this discovery and who furthermore believed that God had chosen him to go forth and let the people of the world know what he had discovered or else supposing he kept this dreadful knowledge to himself God would turn his back on him and in time to come he would be judged as having committed the unforgivable sin and would burn in Hell forever and who consequently trudged up and down the principal streets and avenues of the city for a generation desperately crying out his message until he wore himself out and who is dead and gone now and long dead and gone but whose message remembered in the middle of the night (“It’s coming! Oh, it’s coming!” he would cry out. “The end of the world is coming! Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now! Any hour now! Any minute now! Any second now!”) doesn’t seem as improbable as it used to, and (3) an old Serbian gypsy woman named Mary Miller—she called herself Madame Miller—whom I got to know with the help of an old-enemy-become-old-friend of hers, a retired detective in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, and whom I visited a number of times over a period of ten years in a succession of her ofisas, or fortune-telling parlors, and who was fascinating to me because she was always smiling and gentle and serene, an unusually sweet-natured old woman, a good mother, a good grandmother, a good great-grandmother, but who nevertheless had a reputation among detectives in con-game squads in police departments in big cities all over the country for the uncanny perceptiveness with which she could pick out women of a narrowly specific kind—middle-aged, depressed, unstable, and suggestible, and with access to a bank account, almost always a good-sized savings bank account—from the general run of those who came to her to have their fortunes told and for the mercilessness with which she could gradually get hold of their money by performing a cruel old gypsy swindle on them, the hokkano baro, or the big trick; and, finally, not to mention a good many other pasts, the past of New York City insofar as it is connected directly or indirectly with my own past, and particularly the past of the part of New York City that is known as lower Manhattan, the part that runs from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge and that encompasses the Fulton Fish Market and its environs, and which is part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home.

What an extraordinary construction! Mitchell has written other long lines. For example, there’s a 435-word beauty in his "Street Life" (The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013). But none of them come close to the length of his “A Place of Pasts” creation. Is it the longest sentence ever to appear in The New Yorker? I can’t think of any that are longer. There’s one in Ian Frazier’s great "Authentic Accounts of Massacres" (The New Yorker, March 19, 1979; included in his 1997 collection Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody). But when I counted up the words, it came to 354 – not even in the ballpark. Another candidate that came to mind is the remarkably long sentence in Roger Angell’s "Here Below" (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006), in which he observes his mother at the dinner table and imagines her “immediate deep concerns.” I just finished checking it; it contains 458 words. Therefore, to the best of my knowledge, information, and belief, Mitchell’s amazing 1,183-word assemblage is the longest sentence in New Yorker history. I hereby declare Joseph Mitchell to be the magazine’s long-line champ.

Credit: The above photo of Joseph Mitchell is by Therese Mitchell; it appears in the February 16, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Joseph Mitchell’s “A Place of Pasts.”

February 17 & 24, 2014 Issue

William Strunk’s advice to “Make the paragraph the unit of composition” (Elements of Style, 1972) is undoubtedly right. But, for me, reading’s deepest pleasure is sourced in the colors, contours and textures of artfully crafted sentences. This week’s issue contains two gems. The first is from Amelia Lester’s “Tables For Two” piece on the Empire Diner:

Young families, their tabletops littered with sippy cups and mezcal cocktails, tend to finish their meal by attacking the Platonic ideal of the banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream.

What a mélange of delightful, surprising ingredients! I particularly like the incongruous juxtaposition of “sippy cups” and “mezcal cocktails.” And the combination of abstraction (“Platonic ideal”) with specificity (“banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream”) is ravishing. The whole thing is like a gorgeous Rauschenberg – Washington’s Golden Egg, say, or Monogram. I’m glad to have read it.

The other line that caught my eye is in Roger Angell’s wonderful “This Old Man”:

I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.

The analogy between blogging and making (and launching) a paper airplane is brilliant. It exactly expresses the “ease and freedom of the form” that I feel when I post an item here. Praise of blogging by a master writer like Angell is inspiring.

November 19, 2012 Issue

These days it seems that Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s great baseball writer, spends as much time thinking about double burial plots as he does contemplating double plays. This may strike some people as morbid, but not me. I enjoy nosing around old cemeteries. I enjoy reading about them, too. Angell’s “Here Below” (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006) is a wonderful cemetery piece, ranking with Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956; Up in the Old Hotel, 1992) and John Updike’s superb “Cemeteries” (Picked-Up Pieces, 1976). “Here Below” describes visits that Angell and his wife, Carol, made to Palisades Cemetery, Stockbridge cemetery, and (most memorably) Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery, where a number of his family, including his mother (Katherine S. White) and step-father (E. B. White), are buried. I like Angell’s descriptions of grave markers (e.g., “An other 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”). Interestingly, “Here Below” contains one of the longest sentences I’ve ever seen in The New Yorker, an amazing construction that innocuously begins, “Mother smiles and sighs and picks at her roast potato,” and then takes off, running sixty-eight lines, ending with a question mark.

Angell’s “Over the Wall,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, is a touching sequel to “Here Below.” In this new piece, Angell again visits Brooklin Cemetery. This time he describes two additional grave markers – his wife’s, who died early last April – and his own (“it only lacks the final numbers”). And he mentions another grave, as well, “that of my daughter Callie, who died two years ago.” Angell doesn’t linger over his wife’s grave. He says, “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.” That “on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone” is inspired. In the oldest part of the cemetery, Angell sees headstones “worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility.” This echoes one of “Here Below”’s best lines: “Carol found one of the markers we were looking for: a silvery granite oblong, with the letters fading into invisibility.” Fading into invisibility – time’s inevitable effect. Angell’s two marvelous cemetery pieces make the vanishing process almost palpable. 

Pritchett's Precision

In preparation for a post I’m planning called “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011,” I’ve been rereading some of V. S. Pritchett’s work. Between 1949 and 1988, he wrote seventy New Yorker book reviews. They are among the glories of the art of book reviewing. I don’t think it’s correct to say, as Roger Angell said, that Pritchett “was not a stylist” (“Marching Life,” The New Yorker, December 22, 1997). I think he was a great stylist. Maybe what Angell meant is that he didn’t write fancily. And that’s true, he didn’t. His style was plain, but it was clear and sharp – “sharp as horseradish,” as he himself said about Chekhov’s humor (in his brilliant essay “A Doctor,” included in his 1979 collection The Myth Makers) – sharp in terms of both precision and pungency. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

On Camus: “His senses responded to the harsh mountain landscape, the stony plateau, and the desert that was another sea; to the clear sunlight, the brassy heat, and the seductive silence of the evenings. The deep sense of “indifference” in him responded to the indifference of nature, but not in a Northern, Wordsworthian way; there was nothing “deeply interfused” here. Each stone or tree was an object: his visual sense of the “things” of landscape is intense in all his writing. Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock.” (“Albert Camus,” The New Yorker, December 20, 1982)

On Tolstoy: “He is the absolute patriarch. He toils as an artist, as a teacher, as a farmer, and in bed. His family toils for him. His wife obeys – and also learns from him the deadly habit of diarizing and counter-diarizing. His intellect growls away, and he exacts as much from himself as he exacts from others.” (“Two Bears in a Den,” The New Yorker, August 21, 1978)

On Byron: “Byron is a good letter writer because whether he is scoffing, arguing, or even conducting his business affairs, he has a half-laughing eye on his correspondent; although he can turn icily formal, he has mainly a talking style of worldly elegance and is spontaneously the half self of the moment, for not only he but everyone else knew the duality of his nature. The whole person can be deduced from what he dashingly offers. His character is a springboard from which he takes a dive into what he has to say about himself for the moment, bringing other people to half life in the splash.” (“Byron,” The New Yorker, June 2, 1980)

On Henry James: “The spell of the letters really lies in their idiosyncrasy. They are communings with himself as much as with friends. They are also talking letters. They are written in his dictating period, and he writes as one listening to his own voice as it leads him on, watching his words float on the air, and delighting in the studied mischief of his hesitations and parentheses. He always evokes the friend to whom he is writing. His enormous privacy flowers. His lonely room fills up with voices; he carries his friends down the happily rambling stream of consciousness.” (“The Last Letters of Henry James,” The New Yorker, August 20, 1984)

Lean, simple sentences composed of concrete, precise words that evoke vivid images and sensations – “stony plateau,” “brassy heat,” “his intellect growls away,” “his enormous privacy flowers,” “icily formal,” etc. - govern the style of the above-quoted passages, and are among the hallmarks of Pritchett’s brilliant way of writing. The sentence “Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock,” in the Camus passage above, is exemplary of that clear, sharp quality I mentioned earlier.

Credit: The above photo of V. S. Pritchett is by Cecil Beaton; it appears in The New Yorker (December 22, 1997) as an illustration for Roger Angell’s “Marching Life."