"Let Me Finish": Angell's collection of essays is a bittersweet look at youth

"Let Me Finish"
by Roger Angell
Harcourt, 320 pp., $25

When Roger Angell's personal essays and reminiscences began appearing beside his baseball pieces in The New Yorker a few years back, I assumed he was warming up for a full-scale memoir.

Never much of a sports fan, I had always given Angell a wide berth, despite what everyone said about how he wasn't "just" a sports writer. But then I read "Movie Kid," about his clandestine youthful forays into the "popcorned dark" of New York movie theaters, and I was hooked.

Whenever a new piece appeared about his father; his near-legendary mother and stepfather, Katherine and E. B. White; his trips by car and steamer and wooden sailboat, I devoured it. That's going to be some memoir, I kept thinking.

It came as a bit of a letdown to discover that "Let Me Finish" isn't a memoir after all, but those same New Yorker essays — "true stories," Angell calls them — collected and arranged in a bright, nicely paced and balanced volume.

These remembrances of things past — old friends, old marriages, parents, holidays, cherished journeys, drinks and pastimes — are, for the most part, just as good the second time around. But the whole did not quite equal the sum of its parts.

In the strongest and most deeply felt piece, a memoir of his beguiling lawyer father, Ernest Angell, the author writes of how "family memoirists" get "caught somewhere between feelings of disloyalty and the chic contemporary mode that demands that we tell all and affix damages."

Angell himself comes down squarely at the reticent end of the spectrum, constrained not just by fear of disloyalty but by a kind of innate, self-deprecating elegance.

It's typical of him to swank just a little over his blackjack savoir faire at Monte Carlo with S. J. Perelman ("already a Mount Rushmore eminence on the landscape of American humor"). After winning big, Angell tosses "a casual stack of counters" toward the croupiers to murmurs of "La maison vous remercie."

Then comes the inevitable blushing admission: "Not till the next day did I give [Perelman] a break and confess that my expertise and gambling manners had all come out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

This is just the right note for a nostalgia-drenched piece about being young and free and mildly adventurous in Europe just after the war, but elegance serves him less well when he touches on family woe.

When he was 9, Angell's brilliant, difficult mother left his father and married her New Yorker colleague E. B. White (Andy to family and friends) — and gusts from this devastating squall blow through all of the family pieces in the book. "The divorce was off limits for all of us," writes Angell, in the essay about his father. "[M]y mother could never bring herself to say that she had left us kids behind, along with the marriage, in order to join Andy White. Her tale stopped at that point, for all her life." And his pretty much does, too.

Angell is at his best here as an elegist — an old man savoring the glamour, the easy laughter, the inexplicable sadness of distant youth. "Hard Lines," about his college friend Walker Field ("the most stylish gent I knew" ) who died at 38 of a brain tumor, is a heartbreaking masterpiece of restraint. "I've had a life sheltered by privilege and engrossing work," Angell writes at the essay's end, sighing over losses, "and shot through with good luck, but I don't believe that this accompanying trickle of rotten news is exactly rare."

But I was surprised the second time through by some of the guarded scorn and nervous evasiveness beneath the fond portraits — E. B. White is a "world-class" hypochondriac; New Yorker editor and writer William Maxwell has a "wide-eyed, sometimes infuriating purity of gaze"; New Yorker editor William Shawn is "the quickest reader and most perceptive editor I've known, but also, in his later years, the most contradictory and self-destructive."

Angell alludes more than once to time spent on psychiatrists' couches, but unresolved issues still fester.

With his gaff-rigged sloop, Maine coast cottage, nightly dry martinis and deep WASP pedigree, Angell is the quintessential literary patrician. He is also an eternal boy, at least on the page: fresh, clean, sparkling, naturally at ease. Or so he would have one think.

"Writing almost killed you," he says of his stepfather, "and the hard part was making it look easy."

I'd guess that that's the way it is for Angell, too. At 86, he may well be the last in the line of writers who cared so much and succeeded so well in making it look easy. In "Let Me Finish," Angell offers a glimpse, just a tantalizing glimpse, of the hard part. Perhaps it's churlish to wish for more.

David Laskin is the author of "The Children's Blizzard," winner of the 2005 Washington State Book Award.