Remembering Roger Angell, and Fishing with Karen Chee

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2022

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.5	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.
0:23.6	As a writer, Roger took up the subject of baseball in the early 60s,
0:27.1	just as the Mets were being born,
0:29.2	and he was soon recognized as the greatest chronicler in the history of the game.
0:34.3	One of the best memories I have at this magazine
0:36.4	was sitting in the left field stands with Roger
0:38.4	at Shea Stadium as the Yankees beat the Mets in the deciding game of the World Series in 2000,
0:45.2	and then entering the Yankees locker room with Roger under huge plumes of champagne.
0:51.0	Joe Torrey, the Yankees manager, who had known Roger since his playing days, greeted Roger
0:56.1	like a brother. We're going to revisit now an interview I did with Roger in 2015, just a year after
1:02.7	he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
1:08.1	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 frame, that there is this
1:29.7	voice of someone just in love with what he's watching.
1:33.4	That's hard to achieve.
1:35.2	Well, it developed over the years.
1:37.7	I mean, I didn't really plan it in advance.
1:40.2	It was just, it was some kind of me.
1:43.1	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, the two things to avoid. Did Sean know anything about baseball? Nothing, nothing. My first piece, he came into my office, carrying the galleys, 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 the double play?
2:19.0	And I explained it to him, and his cheeks glowed with excitement.
2:22.8	There was something new.
2:25.5	Did you find it harder to talk with players as time went by, as you got a little older?
	...

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