Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Two of my favorite books on baseball, Roger Angell's The Summer Game and Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, were published in the spring of 1972.
The similar titles led some readers to confuse the two Rogers, which, to me, is like confusing Jason Varitek (of the Red Sox) with Jason Giambi (of the Yankees). Writers, like ballplayers, have their own strengths and weaknesses.
This season, Angell, 85, and Kahn 78, have written books about themselves. Sort of a bittersweet Old Timers' Day at the bookstore, although neither has retired from writing.
*In Let Me Finish, Angell explains that his title "isn't about wrapping up a life or a time of life but should only evoke a garrulous gent at the end of the table holding up one hand while he tries to remember the great last line of his monologue."
Make that graceful and garrulous. If ever someone was raised to write and edit, it was Angell, the son of Katharine White, a founding editor of The New Yorker, and stepson of E.B. White, the incomparable essayist and children's author.
Angell is best known as The New Yorker's baseball writer, but his day job at the magazine, "the family store," as he calls it, was as fiction editor. He dined with Tennessee Williams and traveled with S.J. Perelman, "a Mount Rushmore eminence on the landscape of American humor."
Angell's essays, several of which were published in The New Yorker, are not so much a memoir as a collection of scenes and thoughts about the power and fallibility of memory. "Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction," he writes, "and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way."
He's discreet, never confessional. He reveals more about his parents' divorce than his own. Readers wondering how Angell finds thoughtful and articulate baseball players in locker rooms full of cliches will be disappointed. He writes more about editing than writing.
He grew up amid literary gentility and led a life "sheltered by privilege and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck," but he wears all that lightly.
About his stepfather, who wrote Charlotte's Web and co-wrote The Elements of Style, Angell writes, "Writing almost killed you, and the hard part was making it look easy."
Angell makes it look easy.
*Kahn's Into My Own is filled with edgier memories, the kind of stories reporters tell one another after work in bars, or at least used to, when reporters drank more.
It's loosely organized around what Kahn calls "the remarkable people and events that shaped a life" in a half-century writing about sports and more.
It pays tribute to sports editor Stanley Woodward, "the man Ernest Hemingway wanted to be," and to poet Robert Frost, who told Kahn, "Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose -- unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction." Kahn's mother, "an early female Ivy Leaguer, Jewish to boot, and on top of that, a Socialist," wanted him to become a classical scholar. Instead, Kahn, a college dropout, reported on the Brooklyn Dodgers, using references to John Milton, the English poet (Paradise Lost).
Much of the book, if not the details, will be familiar to those who've read Kahn before: stories about baseball's racism and Jackie Robinson and his friendship with teammate Pee Wee Reese, a white Southerner.
Kahn also settles old scores, savages an ex-wife and deals in painful detail with the suicide of a son at age 23.
As a writer, he's ferociously competitive, his phrase for Robinson. Kahn can be a tenacious reporter and a lyrical writer, but modesty and understatement are not in his repertoire.
His best chapter reconstructs a leisurely interview in 1960 with Frost for The Saturday Evening Post, whose editor warned Kahn, "Not too much poetry, please."
Later, Frost thanked Kahn, but told him, "I didn't read all of your article. I get tired of myself." Kahn, for better or worse, never tires of himself.
Let Me Finish
By Roger Angell
Harcourt, 302 pp., $25
Into My Own
By Roger Kahn
Thomas Dunne, 290 pp., $24.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
