The New Yorker Radio Hour - Remembering Roger Angell, and Fishing with Karen Chee

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Roger Angell, who died last week, at the age of 101, was inducted in 2014 into the Baseball Hall of Fame in recognition of his extraordinary accomplishment as a baseball writer. But in a career at The New Yorker that goes back to the Second World War, he wrote on practically every subject under the sun; he also served as fiction editor, taking the post once held by his mother, Katharine White.  Angell “did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine’s nearly century-long history,” David Remnick wrote in a remembrance last week. “His prose and his editorial judgment left an imprint that’s hard to overstate.”  In 2015, Remnick sat down for a long interview with Angell about his career, and particularly his masterful late essays—collected in “This Old Man: All in Pieces”—on aging, loss, and finding new love. Plus, we join the comedian—a writer for “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “Pachinko,” and a New Yorker contributor—on her favorite kind of outing: a fishing trip that doesn’t yield any fish. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Last week, Roger Angel, the longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker, and a friend to generations of staffers at the magazine, died at home at the age of 101. As a writer, Roger took up the subject of baseball in the early 60s, just as the Mets were being born. and he was soon recognized as the greatest chronicler in the history of the game. One of the best memories I have at this magazine was sitting in the left field stands with Roger at Shea Stadium as the Yankees beat the Mets in the deciding game of the World Series in 2000, and then entering the Yankees locker room with Roger under huge plumes of champagne.

Joe Torrey, the Yankees manager who had known Roger since his playing days, greeted Roger like a brother. We're going to revisit now an interview I did with Roger in 2015, just a year after he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. One of the things that always amaze me about your baseball riding is that you have a tone of a happy man, of someone who's going at this at his leisure, and that all the difficulty of writing, which we know to be the case, is somehow way out of the first. frame, that there is this voice of someone just in love with what he's watching. That's hard to achieve. Well, it developed over the years. I mean, I didn't really plan it in advance. It was just, it was some kind of me. What was the kind of sports writing that you couldn't stand? What were you trying to avoid? Actually, when I started, Sean said, William Shaw on the editor of the magazine for decades. My editor said, why don't you get on the spring training and take a look. And he said, we don't want to be

sentimental and we don't want to be a tough guys. You know, there are two things to avoid. Did Sean know anything about baseball? Nothing. Nothing. My first piece, he came into my office, carrying the galley. It's my first piece from that spring training. And he pointed to a place

on the page, and he said, what's this? And I looked and I said, that's a double play, Bill. And he said, what's a double play? And I explained it to him and his cheeks glowed with excitement. There was something new. Did you find it harder to talk with players as time went by, as you got a little older?

Did you gravitate more toward coaches and managers than players? Once they call you, sir, you're in big trouble. I gravitated toward good talkers, as I've said before. But did they thin out, was what I mean. Did the good talkers become less and less numerous? Yes, I think so. When I got over 80, it was impossible for me to talk to players, really, because they would say, sir. And also, as you've said, the habit of talking openly as a person,

not as a very well-paid celebrity, semi-celebrity ballplayer, is pretty well gone. Because it's a big difference when the ballplayers are making about as much as a solid orthodontist and now they're making as much as an oligarch. Sure, sure. But you did pay attention as I did. I would carry notes and write endlessly like long notes and keep my ears open and listen for something. I remember being outside the office of Jim Fry, the Kansas City manager, after his great star, George Brett, had another extraordinary day at the plate.

And I'm waiting to go in to see the manager, and there are two old coaches at their locker is just outside the door in their underwear and clogs talking, a couple of country guys. And one of them says to the other, everything that George hits goes through the infield like a stream of milk. and this country image and I wrote it down. I've wrote it down.

Wow, thank you. You wait days for things like that in the nonfiction game. Roger, you practiced nonfiction as it were by night and fiction by day. For years and years, you were a fiction editor

of the New Yorker to this day. You read short stories for us and in the fiction department. Was this bread in the bone with you? I think some of our listeners will know that your mother was really had singular responsibility for introducing serious fiction to the New Yorker.

Catherine White was the person who brought real fiction to the New Yorker. And you must have grown up hearing about this process and knowing this process. My stepfather was E.B. White, who was E.B. White and writing for the magazine every week.

And my mother and stepfather's house was full of galleys and pencils and eraser rubbings. and conversation about the magazine and about Harold Ross and about the writers of the day. And sure, I paid close attention, but I wasn't planning to be a New Yorker editor or to be a New Yorker writer. What were you planning on? I was hoping to be maybe a boy naturalist, a herpetologist with my first day. But I did pay attention, and they were doing the same thing.

And my mother was editing Vladimir Nabokov and people like that. How did Nabokov take it? How did Nabokov take editing? I was with the usual haughty way, and the famous Nabokov editing was by the great New Yorker founding editor Harold Russ, who loved clarity above all and was not classically or much educated, but loved clearness. And in the middle of some terrific Nabokov member, I think part of his speak memory pieces, his wonderful memories about his family, there's a line at the dinner table and somebody says, past the nutcracker.

And one of Harold Ross's endless queries, he always had about 20 or 30 queries, about every piece of copy. He said, from the evidence we've been given so far, I would have assumed that the book host were a more than one nutcracker family. Roald Dahl. I was looking through some letters

that came to Harold Ross and Roll Dahl, who wrote all those great children's books, but also a number of things for the New Yorker and memoir pieces for the New Yorker, wrote a scathing letter to Ross complaining about the editing and the number of commas that had been injected into things.

And he says, it's as if you would take a great comma shaker and sprinkled commas throughout my copy. Well, that was our style, yeah. It's lightened up a little bit. Now, tell me about this new book. You've put together an enormous range of things. You've got in here some obituaries that were published in the New Yorker online.

You've got a couple of long sustained essays that we'll talk about. Some baseball writing. Letters. The book is called This Old Man by Roger Angel, All in Pieces. This old man, Roger Angel, all in pieces. Well, I'm a little tired of the joke in the title already. But tell me about the book. Well, I wrote the piece, this old man. I started the piece in 2013, I think, late in the year, and I think handed it to you long about February, something like that.

It came as a complete surprise to me. You just plopped it on my desk done. I wrote it in different pieces, because I didn't quite know what I was doing. And it was about physical debility. And it starts up with the description of my arthritic hands. Which you say the tips of your fingers look like they've been the subject of torture by the KGB. Yeah, if I point my forefinger at you like a pistol and fire at a finger nose, I'd hit you in the knee. But I described some of the everyday debilities of age. And I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I knew that loss was at the middle of this. I'd lost my wife. We've been married for 48 years. and I'd lost a daughter and a beloved dog of Carol's and mine

went out the fifth floor window in the middle of a in panic, jumped out the window the fifth floor and was killed. Loss is for people my age are common. Ed Hirsch, the wonderful poet, lost his son and wrote a great book about it last year and he says that anybody over the age of 65 has a 100-pound bag of cement of loss

on his shoulders. And he writes about writing about the loss of his son and he says, you can't make a story out of it. You can't do that with the life. So I didn't know how to touch on these subjects.

I didn't know if I wanted to even. And I did so actually through the loss of the dog. I'd written a piece about losing my wife, losing Carol, called Over the Wall, which sort of began this process and I waited six months.

Just after the first Obama election, she died in April, and I said she didn't know this news, and she didn't know about the hurricane that fall, and nothing she didn't know. And I said the dead don't know what's happening, and the dead leave quickly, and I quoted to Kenneth Koch, poem, say, Le Maud Vint, but they go quickly. And there's a line in that which says, no more scenes in the bedroom, no more waiting in the whole. Paul waiting to say hello with mixed feelings. Perfect line. I described the death of Harry, this dog, and then threw in that Carol and I wept,

we couldn't get over weeping for him, and he lay in our bathroom between us on the floor, and we threw Kleenex back and forth, and I said we were also weeping for my daughter Callie, who'd committed a suicide a couple years earlier, and events that knew we couldn't just get their minds around in any way. but it was for both. But I don't want to dwell on this. I didn't want to make much of this because everybody's experienced loss.

And there are many changes of moods through this piece. I patched the thing together and some of the sadder or little moments, paragraphs that are hard to take are often followed by a joke or a lighter moment.

There's some actual jokes in there and is okay because I like to take jokes. I count on jokes myself. I'm known to tell jokes. And there's also the opposite of loss. There's new love. Yes, and this was happening. I was finding someone new in my life, my present wife, Peggy, and this was going on.

And I wanted to say that. And time was going by, and I was still engaged in life. And I said that old people are like everyone else. We need connection. We need love. We need intimate love. And a hand on the shoulder. I mean, there's sex.

I mean, the piece ends with, in a sense, life against all other things. Against all odds, against all odds, yes. But I wanted to say what was happening with me, which happens with other old people. Old people fall in love. All people have love life, have intimate connections, have sex lives, and people don't like to admit this.

Mostly their children. Because they're somehow revolted by it. But I think people are getting over this because it's now known. I mean, it's not something to be repelled by. It's something to be grateful for. This brings up something else, which I've noticed with writers that I've dealt with. Writers that go on and on often go back, as update did, go back to the same subjects again and I get him, back to his mother, to the sandstone field of farmhouse, to his father, to his teenage courting gears,

and did the same story really again and again, but much better each time with increased feeling. some of the very best stories he wrote for us were at the very end. And the same thing happened with another writer of mine that I edited over a period of 40 years, V.S. Pritchett, the great British writer. In his middle 80s, suddenly got this amazing hot street writing some of the greatest stories of his life. And I think that all of us do this at any age because we basically go over the same material in our minds again and again. the stories that really mean a lot to us. And it's not we're trying to get them right, but we're not trying to change the outcome,

but we're trying to keep them or to say, was this the way it was? And psychologists and experts on the subject say that this is what memory is. It isn't just a defensive thing to protect us from falling out of a tree when the tiger's passing by, but it is a trying out of a scenario,

again and again, because it may be of use. That's what memory is. And this is why the same scenes recur. After I wrote scenes, a lot of this personal stuff, I used to have dreams about or think about over. And once I put them down and got them published, I don't think about them anymore. It's very strange.

It goes away. When you go back and read your earlier stuff, do you recognize it? Does it feel like you? Not the very early stuff. No, it feels like Hemingway. And can you relate it all to a decision like Philip Roth's to stop writing? Well, I haven't got there yet.

I'm thinking of not blogging anymore because I don't think my blogs are quite up to what they were. I'll be the judge of that. I keep going. Please keep going. I don't want to stop. I like to have it still going on a little bit. And this way, once again, I think I'm extremely lucky. I'm 95 and still writing my goodness.

I mean, I'm startled. I'm very happy. I'm happy to be here with you, always, Roger. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you, David. Roger Angel, who died last week at 101. Our love and condolences to Roger's wife, Peggy Mormon,

and to all of his family and friends. We'll be back in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's about 9 a.m. Light drizzle. We're on the banks of the Hudson River, on a little park.

And the striped bass are running, so we're going to try to hook some fish. Breda Green is one of our producers. And on a Monday morning recently, she was in the town of Beacon, New York. Now, I happen to do what little fishing I do on vacation, but not on company time. And in fairness, Brita wasn't just having fun. She was there to meet Karen Chee. She is a comedy writer, and she works for late night with Seth Myers. She's a contributor to the New Yorker's humor column, too,

and she's also a recent but enthusiastic convert to the great sport of fishing. Before, maybe even a couple years ago, if somebody had been like, do you want to go fish for two hours? I'd be like, what a waste of time. Like, I have stuff to do. But now it just makes the rest of my day so much better, and I'm always in a much better mood after I've spaced out

and zoned out for a while. So we could sort of climb down on the rocks over there, but it's a little shallow. Okay. I will say of all the times I've gone fishing, I think I've only caught a fish once. Really? Yeah. And I'm sort of afraid of catching a fish, but I love the anticipation of it could happen.

I got this worm. I cut it in half and I'm sort of hooking it on to the hook. I'm putting it on a few times so that it won't fall off immediately in the water. And then I'm going to walk the veil. And yeah, we'll see how it goes. Chi grew up in California in the Bay Area, and she took up fishing during the pandemic on an extended visit to South Korea.

Before the pandemic hit, I was writing for late night and doing stand-up pretty much every night. And that was kind of the routine I had settled into. So then when the pandemic hit, it was remote work and no live shows. And Zoom made me really anxious, so I just sort of stopped doing stand-up altogether for a while. Wow. And you were in New York? I was in New York. I was in a little apartment with two other people and a cat.

And we were indoors for like two full months. Yeah. It was wild. And then what happens that made you decide to move to Korea? So I initially, so I went because my grandma got really sick quite suddenly. And I went thinking I would be there for a month or two. So I brought like five T-shirts. And that was like all I had brought. I brought like a small suitcase of summer clothes.

Can I ask what your grandma, what happened? Yeah, she's actually doing much better now, but she had heart failure, and also she's 92, so it was just so many other things weren't going well, you know? Scary. Yeah, yeah. And then what made you stay? Well, she didn't get better for a really long time, and because it was remote work, I was like, I'll stay there.

It's no problem. And maybe it's also because of the pandemic and how much, you know, life-threatening and scary that was for people, even if it was just in the abstract. And, yeah, when my grandma got ticket, it felt like the equivalent of people, you know, when they have babies and they're like, suddenly all my priorities is, you know, lined up. And that's how I felt. Wow. And because you would work nights because you were working, like, U.S. hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was crazy. I would be writing jokes at, like, two in the morning about the Trump administration. At nighttime, the silver lining of that schedule was that the first few months, we needed to have somebody awake throughout the night to check on my grandma periodically to make sure she was.

breathing okay and also to help her go to the bathroom. I was like, oh, I'll do night duty because I'm up working anyway. And so that coincided really nicely. Oh, wait, hold on. I'm getting a pull. I wonder if it got stuck though. Let's see. I'm holding it at a 45 degree angle. Do you think it's just like hooked under there? I would love to pull this out and there's just like a whale. And we're like, oh, yeah, like it's like a trash bin. It's actually the pull is gone, so I wonder... Let's just reel it back. Interesting.

Oops. There's the worm! Okay, we can try it again. I mean, it's going to become very clear that I just fish to go through the motions of fishing rather than survival. I started fishing because... Well, a mix of all of the stress things I mentioned, but I read, this is going to sound nerdy,

but I read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Adele. And I was like, I've got to find a hobby where I'm not thinking about anything and I'm not thinking about work. In Korean, there's like a word called like, I'm just going to say it in Korean. It's mong deringba, which is spacing out. And so you can like mong tereo in any place,

but you can also do, people really like doing this thing called like mongbul or bulmong, which is you space out while looking at a fire, that sort of a thing. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to do this while I'm fishing. And so there's like sort of an overpass by the Han River, which is the river that like sort of cleaves through Seoul. So it splits the city in two.

And yeah, I saw, it's like a lot of old men fishing silently next to each other. And I kind of just joined them. So it was very nice. We didn't talk at all. But one of them was actually very helpful with like helping me figure out how to get the line right and how to cast and everything. but was very gruff the entire time, which I thought was so charming. Wow, so you just like cast in and then you just stand there and you just try to clear your mind?

Yeah, I truly just zone out. It's like a meditation. I guess so. I've tried meditating before and I always fall asleep. So this is a nice way to be a little bit alert. There's like a little bit of anticipation with the fish and then I can completely chill out, which is nice. Oh no, it's tangled. There we go.

Okay. I definitely thought the pandemic would be more temporary than it is, and I thought there would be a clear end date and that my life would resume. But I actually think the way I sort of think about my life has completely changed since then. I just want to make sure I always have enough time to spend with my family and friends, and that that is more important to me than work. Yeah, so I think fishing is probably going to stick around for a bit. My dream is to have a fishing buddy who also, we can just sit in silence. for a couple hours and be like, yeah, let's go home. We go home. That's Karen Chee out on the Hudson River with Rita Green of the radio.

Can't catch anything. That's okay. Do you feel relieved? I do. It's very much a journey, not the destination type of activity. She is a contributor to the New Yorker's shouts and murmurs column, and she writes for Late Night with Seth Myers. She's working on Season 2 of Pichinko for Apple TV.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. And if you're out fishing this weekend, I hope you have better luck than I did last week. I'm David Rendon. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Peter Bresnan, Avae Carrillo, Breita Green, Calilea, David Crowell. Léznau, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putteboile, with help from Alison McAdam, David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Meng Fei-Chen. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.