The New Yorker's Angell takes a graceful, witty, elegiac look back
To us poor strivers in the hinterlands -- of Brooklyn, for example -- the old New Yorker wasn't just a magazine. It was a window onto a mesmerizing foreign land, a world of people whose clothes fit, whose names were easy to pronounce, and who were maddeningly at home with sailboats and cocktails and just about everything else.
The denizens of this blessed nation seemed to fall effortlessly into whatever success they had, and in the pages of The New Yorker even their sufferings were marked by grace, good humor, and the cadences of King James. With their casual sense of proprietorship they were like some unconscious royalty, coexisting with the rest of us tacky commoners in space and time but never in spirit.
No writer could be more thoroughly a product of The New Yorker -- or its world -- than Roger Angell, whose mother was the editor Katharine White (Angell eventually inherited her office at the magazine) and whose stepfather was no less than E. B. White. Angell has been associated with The New Yorker for decades, and his memoir, ``Let Me Finish," is as much a creature of it as he is, most of the material having appeared there first.
The book has the virtues and flaws you might expect given its exalted lineage, which is to say that for the most part it is enthralling: witty, worldly, deeply elegiac, and in places heartbreaking. The famous and not-so-famous -- S. J. Perelman , Somerset Maugham, and countless colorful relations -- flit through its pages just long enough to leap magically to life.
As with many other New Yorker scribes of his generation, Angell's strengths are those of the feuilletonist , and in these brief, essayistic forays into his own past he not only recaptures the pleasures and pains of childhood but re-creates the New York of the 1920s and '30s with remarkable economy and vividness. There are the subways with their wicker seats, the unpredictable old-time automobiles, the sound of letter writing with a Waterman pen, and the intimacy of a small, impoverished New York during the Depression, when everybody seemed to know everybody and see plenty of them.
Boston and coastal Maine are important settings as well. A Harvard man and Red Sox fan, Angell recalls skating with White at the Public Garden in December 1929. When his stepfather's shoes are stolen, White tries ascending Pinckney Street in his skates but finally just tramps through the snow in his socks.
There are also sobering glimpses of adulthood, stolen when it wasn't looking, as when the youthful author spies on his shaving father and discovers that the older man is talking to himself about his troubles -- including Roger. The seminal event of this particular childhood was divorce. Katharine's decision to leave Roger's father resulted in a kind of legal spite fence erected between mother and children. Roger and his sister saw their mother on weekends and holidays, living the rest of the time in the gloom of their father's townhouse. ``Nobody in our family was much of a hugger," the author acknowledges, adding, ``Mother least of all."
Ernest Angell tried hard with his kids, but he never got over the divorce and neither did his son, whose life would be marked by it forever after. ``Let Me Finish" is inevitably about the ways the past is different from the present, and this is one of them: Divorce is everywhere now. There are other changes too, of course, and the author sounds none too happy about most of them. In Angell's day Americans were more optimistic about civil liberties, had a purer relationship to baseball (the author's central subject as a writer), and appreciated the infrequent adventures offered by the automobile. Travel was nicer too, with great big ships that let you sit next to ambassadors and movie stars at dinner, and destinations uncluttered by the unwashed masses.
Yet most of the changes lamented in this charming book are nothing more than the price of democratization. Tourist destinations are more crowded because technology and spreading affluence have made it possible for more of us to travel. Is that really so bad? The banality and congestion of driving nowadays are similarly byproducts of universality and improvement. And will anyone really contend -- particularly in a state that allows gay marriage -- that civil rights have somehow diminished since the 1920s?
There are other shortcomings here. Angell is so good -- but so brief -- on his own life and times, for example, that we resent the filler on martinis and such New Yorker colleagues as Gardner Botsford . And too many of the people encountered and admired in these crowded pages are praised for their ``easy" laughter or ``effortless" round of golf. In writing, ``ease seemed to be the whole trick," and elsewhere Angell wonders if he would ``ever be as easy and joyful" as someone else. This love of effortlessness smells a little aristocratic, as if only the talents of birth are to be admired, and from the sweaty perspective of the strivers it's all a little hard to take.
If Angell is a bit short of self-awareness on this front, he is amply endowed with consciousness on the subject of memory itself, which is after all at the heart of this affecting work. Again and again he remarks sadly on the conversations and voices lost to memory, in contrast to the persistence of odd, Rosebud-like details. ``Like it or not," he writes with characteristic modesty, ``we geezers are not the curators of this unstable repository of trifling or tragic days but only the screenwriters and directors of the latest revival."
Maybe so, but it's a performance we can all be thankful for.
Let Me Finish, By Roger Angell, Harcourt, 320 pp., $25
