It's spring, 1949--a fragile peace hangs over Europe , its great cities still bruised. Roger Angell, a young American journalist and newlywed, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with two men, dressed in tuxedoes, among the statues and hedges of a garden in the English countryside. Aided by the light of the moon, they take a piss.

Let Me Finish , a warm and winning collection of essays and remembrances from a writer who has spent fifty years behind the fiction desk at The New Yorker , spans the breadth of Angell's life from his schoolboy days spent in the cocoon of Manhattan's Upper East Side to recent ones spent visiting cemeteries. It flashes with extravagant people and events, as with these three men drunkenly, lavishly relieving themselves. One of those people--a colleague, as it turns out--also published a memoir during his ninth decade, calling it, A Life of Privilege, Mostly , a title that one imagines Angell would have used had it not already been taken.

Angell insists that the title of the book is not about completing a 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." The stories are intimate, and reading them is like sharing a table with an older gentleman who has a few stories to tell and is a few drinks in (Angell gives meticulous instruction on how to prepare his "old predilection," a dry martini). That said, in the book's final chapters the author does meditate upon how to finish a life and how to be remembered.

The title may also relate to the manner in which Angell constructs these stories and the vagaries of memory, another of his predilections. In one description of sailing--Angel grew up spending summers in coastal Maine and now splits his time between there and New York--the author calls up the spirit of Edward Hopper, known for his watercolor landscapes: "Mr. Hopper," Angell intones, "paint me a seascape." Unlike Hopper's paintings, Angell's portraits are sketches: incomplete, rough, showing erasures and cross-outs; his medium is pencil, not paint. His writing is marked with shifting names, places, and memories. "Memory is fiction," Angell writes, and, indeed, so are the facts of his life impermanent and at times sketchy. The bartender on a ship that brings Angell and his wife back from that jaunt through the old continent is named Charles or Jules or Gérard; he is not sure. Surprisingly, uncertainties like these make the memories more real.

Born--and born well--in 1920, Angell spends his youth at the "faintly cuckoo" Lincoln School in Morningside Heights, prowling the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium (Angell has since become the leading chronicler-sage of America's game), hiding in the "popcorned dark" of movie theaters, and taking road trips with a Columbia undergrad improbably named Tex Goldschmidt. From the vantage of the Angells' brownstone on East 93 rd Street , the poverty and soup lines of the Depression are something to behold but not to experience, jotted into notebooks during a school trip to Chicago .

He is in awe of his older sister, a student at Concord Academy and Bryn Mawr. Angell preps for Harvard at a Connecticut boarding school. Where it takes Tobias Wolff a novel to capture the buttoned-down ethos of a similarly leafy institution, it takes Angell a few pages. Graduating from college in 1942, Angell entered the Air Force but saw no action, his battles fought over rec-room ping-pong tables and in classrooms against distracted draftees, not in planes over Berlin against the Luftwaffe. "I'd not been in the war, exactly," Angell writes, "but like others back then I'd got the idea of it."

His father was an attorney with a progressive streak and his mother an editor at The New Yorker, where she had worked since its inception. It is in part here, at The New Yorker , that this blue-blooded picaresque begins to unwind.

As Angell recalls--he notes that other family members disagree--his father returned from war in France with a decidedly modern sense of love and marriage. In turn, Angell's mother's attention turned to a friend at The New Yorker , Andy White--E.B. to us readers of Charlotte's Web and The Elements of Style . How wonderful it is to see White, that exquisite craftsman of American letters, forever grey-headed in this reader's mind, called a "young lover!"

After the divorce, White and Angell mère moved to East Eighth Street , beginning Angell's bifocal existence. His description of a Christmas day spent shuttling back and forth with his sister between the downtown home of the Whites and their father's uptown place is pure Cheever--certainly appropriate for one who spent years editing that champion of mid-century familial dysfunction.

A self-described "movie kid," Angell writes that he is fonder of secondary actors than stars. Perhaps this fondness for the William H. Macys and Steve Buschemis of yesteryear is due to the quality of actors supporting Angell. There's Aunt Elsie, who was sent by The New Republic to cover the war in 1918 and was maimed during a murky incident involving another journalist and a German potato-masher grenade. (She forever looks down on her sister's affiliation with the New Yorker --"that vulgar magazine.") We also find Uncle John, a Midwestern concrete scion, who resettles in Beacon Hill and surprises all, producing a work on the Sanskrit Antakaranha.

Beside this colorful yet mostly anonymous cast, those who make the cameos tend to be stars themselves. Walter Lippman appears in Angell's father's living room--one of many who sampled the family's Prohibition-era house wine, Château Quatre-Vingts Treize; Groucho Marx pops up at a table at the Algonquin; V.S. Pritchett occupies the apartment upstairs with his wife, pacing loudly and nakedly to keep cool; Tennessee Williams enjoys some Armagnac at a café in Paris; Somerset Maugham plays host to the young Angells at his villa in Cap Ferrat; George Plimpton elbows in with yet more advice on martinis.

Angell developed as a writer in what seems to have been a perfect, inky storm: surrounded by literary luminaries, watching his mother and White work at their home in Maine , and editing the likes of John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro for publication in The New Yorker . He has a penchant for uncommon yet pleasing phrasing--the "pigeoned distance" of the Polo Grounds, an "islanded bay," a "trenchcoated" reporter--and a gift for musical words, both the charmingly anachronistic and the exotic--"macadam," "hackmatack," "jacaranda," "macaque," "flibbertigibbet."

As to be expected from a man who can use the exclamation "Zowie!" without a trace of irony, there's much huffing and puffing here about the state of today's youth. Angell seems to think that our plugged-in, Adderalled-up adolescence lacks the romance of his own: "young sophisticates today...are given little time for yearnings before being knocked flat by the rush and crash of experience."

One needs only to turn to an essay published recently by Angell's own magazine, written by a writer forty-four years his junior, to quash these concerns. In "13, 1977, 21," written by the novelist Jonathan Lethem and reprinted in last year's rich collection, The Disappointment Artist , Lethem details the summer, on the cusp of puberty, that he spent watching the original Star Wars 21 times. Here is another young, yearning cineaste who slips into a Manhattan movie theater--his Times Square 's Astor Plaza to Angell's East Eighties Orpheum--looking to escape for an afternoon and, like Angell, to forget about his parent's divorce. If the thirteen-year-old of the late seventies looks so much like the thirteen-year-old of the early thirties, how different is the thirteen-year-old of today likely to be?

Four years ago, a then seventy-five-year-old Gabriel García Márquez--a youngster compared to the octogenarian Angell--published the first volume of his own memoir, Living to Tell the Tale , in which he reminds readers of the importance of memory and the memoir . In the epigraph, he writes, "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." If, indeed, the measure of a life can be taken in how one tells its tale, Roger Angell has lived remarkably well.

 

Samuel Jacobs '09 wonders whether Harvard will take up more pages in his future memoir.