Let Me Finish, by Roger Angell

The image I have of Roger Angell, I realized yesterday, is thirty-five years old -- the one that appears above, taken from the dust jacket of The Summer Game.

I think The Summer Game was every other book that I read in 1972 and the next few years, devouring it cover to cover every time we visited the grandparents who had it on the shelf. Summers passed, Grandpa died, Grandma moved to an assisted-living apartment, and one of the few compensations for all this sadness was being bequeathed the treasured volume. I still reread it every year or so. Although I can no longer detect the aroma of Grandpa and Grandma's living room, it remains a treat to open. It is on a very short list of the best books about baseball ever written. Several other contenders on anybody's Top 10 list are also by Angell.

I had not read any of his non-baseball work before finding his latest, Let Me Finish, on the "New Nonfiction" shelf a couple of days ago at the library.

Angell says that Let Me Finish is not the result of planning to write a memoir, nor was he ever one for keeping a diary, but that he found himself with a collection of memories that he'd written down over the past three years.

Protestations of modesty or intent aside, there is the feel of a theme running through the essays. Maybe it's just a tone of voice. Whatever the case, it's consistent and it's wonderful. Angell's prose continues to flow as smoothly as a big cabernet sauvignon, especially if you have some chocolate to go with it.

There is nothing mawkish or maudlin about this book. Angell has a rare ability to make reasonable an unapologetic view of the innocence and optimism of decades past. These are not the mutterings of a codger, wishing you'd stay the hell off his lawn. He makes clear that some things have gotten better, does not pretend that everything about the past was perfect, and even, sort of, acknowledges that today's more ironic point of view is occasionally not without merit. I wish that no one had previously used the phrase "grow old gracefully," because I can think of nothing more appropriate to characterize Angell in Let Me Finish.

Something I didn't know is that Angell is the stepson of E.B. White. He grew up in two households, living with his father during the week, and his mother and White on the weekends. One of the essays is about White, and another about his father, Ernest, and my feeling after reading both is that Angell gained far more than he lost from being raised this way.

There is one baseball essay in the book, and his favorite sport appears throughout, like a radio on in the background, getting turned up when a rally starts. Baseball is probably the one area that he covers where I am old enough to share his sense of before and after. Though I'm little more than half Angell's age, and don't remember baseball not being on television, we're of one mind about a sense of loss and a distaste for the current state of affairs. I know how much it irritates me to contemplate Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's home run record; Angell, who saw Babe Ruth play, must be doubly queasy. Neither of us care for the current assault on the senses at the ballpark, and both of us shudder at the game's devolution into sports-industrial complex, not to mention the gossip column coverage of the players. But here again, he does not harp. I was left feeling that he has, like I try to, merely demoted paying attention to baseball on his list of priorities, occasionally indulging only in a wistful twinge.

Here's the way he looks on the dust jacket of Let Me Finish:

Highly recommended.

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Photo credits:
From The Summer Game: Judy Tomkins
From Let Me Finish: John Henry Angell