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The New Yorker Radio Hour
War and Peace and Pandemic, and Roger Angell on Baseball Seasons Past
00:31:36
The contributor Yiyun Li is a fiction writer who also teaches creative writing at Princeton University. “The campus is empty,” she tells Joshua Rothman. “The city is quiet. It has a different feeling. And it’s a good time to read ‘War and Peace.’ ” When the coronavirus outbreak began, Li reached for Tolstoy’s epic of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars; there is no better book, she feels, for a time of fear and uncertainty. So as many of us were retreating to our homes in March, Yiyun Li launched a project called Tolstoy Together, an online book club in which thousands of people, on every continent except Antarctica, are participating. In the morning, Li posts thoughts about the day’s reading (twelve to fifteen pages), and participants reply, on Twitter and Instagram, with their own comments. “War and Peace,” Li believes, is capacious enough to be endlessly relevant. “The novel started with Annette having a cough. And she said she was sick, she couldn't go out to parties, so she inv...
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- [00:03]
Narrator/Producer
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Ian Lee's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker for more than 15 years. Lee is also a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
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Josh Rothman
Well, are you in Princeton now, is that right?
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Ian Lee
I am, I am, yeah.
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Josh Rothman
And the campus is empty. Everyone's gone home.
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Ian Lee
The campus is empty. The city is quiet. It's different. It has a different feeling. And it's a good time to read War and Peace.
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David Remnick
A good time to read War and Peace, Tolstoy's 1200 page epic about Russia during the Napoleonic wars when the coronavirus outbreak began. That was the book.
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Ian Lee
The novel started with Annette having a cough and she said she was sick, she couldn't go out to party. So she invited people to her house for a party and everybody came. I mean, I have read a novel so many times, this is the only time I thought, oh, you know, a cough really means something. And these people really should be careful about life.
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David Remnick
Around the time that we were all retreating into our homes. Last month, Ian Lee launched a project called Tolstoy Together. It's kind of an online book club. The New Yorker's Josh Rothman is a Tolstoy fanatic and he recently talked with Ian Lee about the new project.
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Josh Rothman
What was it about War and Peace that made you think, this is the book that I want to be reading now?
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Ian Lee
One is, it's a long book and I thought, I do think there are people who always have always meant to read it, but who have not picked it up. And so this is a good time. And the other thing I really like about Tolstoy is he's such a solid writer. And War and Peace has this reliable structure. Peace and War and Peace and War. I feel like I can just put my trust into to toastways words. You know, in other moments of my life when I was really agitated, I would hand copy War and Peace, you know, passage that I love just to keep like the hand moving or keep the mind moving. It has that, that kind of support for a mind. So I thought I would go back to War and Peace and I thought I could invite 5, 10 people to read with me like a book club. And a lot of people responded and people really loved it. So it became a bigger thing than I originally imagined.
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Josh Rothman
So how many people are reading it with you now?
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Ian Lee
You know, our estimate is on and off maybe about 3,000 people. And from we counted probably 20 countries all the continents except Antarctica.
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Josh Rothman
That's so cool. And so how does it work?
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Ian Lee
I calculated, I thought we probably will be stuck for two or three months just looking at the data from other countries. If we read 12 to 15 pages a day, which takes about 30 minutes, that will take us about 12 weeks to finish the book. Then we'll be in the summer. And my hope is by then we will all be free to walk around and enjoy life. That's how I propose. We're just going to read 12 to 15 pages pages a day. And at the beginning of the day, I would post three thoughts from me. This happened on Twitter and Instagram. And then for the rest of the day, people would chime in, people would question, put their questions or observations. So it's quite like a big party. Like at the beginning of War and Peace, everybody's talking.
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Josh Rothman
It just sounds great.
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Roger Angell
Yiyu.
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Josh Rothman
And I know this is a crazy question because War and Peace is like the world's biggest book, but. But I mean, could you try to just give us a summary of what it's about for people who haven't read it?
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Ian Lee
Well, it's about a war between France and Russia during the Napoleon time. And the peace part is about Russian families living through actually the war, and the war part is really about the war between the two countries. So that's a very bad summary of the novel.
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Josh Rothman
Do you have a favorite character?
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Ian Lee
I love Pierre. I have such a soft spot for him. And the first time when he was introduced, there was a sentence said he did not, as they say, know how to enter a salon, and still less did he know how to leave one. So he has that awkwardness and reminds me of Winnie the Pooh, when Winnie the Pooh went to rabbit's house, ate too much and got stuck in the rabbit hole. And he has that endearing quality. A little bit awkward, but he also had deeper spiritual quality. So I think he's one of the characters. You know, he always offers comfort to me.
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Josh Rothman
The thing that I remember finding most surprising about War and Peace when I started it was to me, War and Peace had always been sort of a joke of a book. Like. Like when I, if you had to choose out of the Air, the name of a really heavy book, you would choose War and Peace. That's like. That was kind of like what it was before, you know, when I was a young person, before I actually read Tolstoy. And then as soon as you start reading the book, it's just almost immediately obvious that it's going to be incredibly Suspenseful and entertaining. And that also very obviously, about things that are important and meaningful to you.
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Ian Lee
The book has a bad reputation. I mean, I love a lot of books, but I never get bored reading War and Peace. Every page there's something new. There's something that engages my curiosity or something makes me laugh. Yeah, I would just read the page I'm on today. This is when the Russian army went to war with France for the first time. So do you mind if I read.
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Josh Rothman
A lot to you?
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Ian Lee
Yeah. So at the bend of the Danube, one could see boats and an island and a castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the ants falling into the Danube. One could see the left bank of the Danube, rocky and covered with pine forest, with a mysterious distance of green treetops and bluish gorges. One could see the towers of a convent looming up from the pine forest with its wild and untouched look. And far away on a hilltop on the other side of the inns, one could see the mounted patrols of the enemy. That's just, you know, it has this beautiful long shot of the scenery, almost like the untouched, mysterious thing. And then all of a sudden we actually saw the French patrols just inside. You know, I think he. I mean, Tolstoy certainly is the best seer, and he sees everything.
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Josh Rothman
I mean, I was thinking there's times when things happen in the world, like 9, 11 comes to mind, I guess. But there's many other times when it just seems hard to think about other things or hard to make room for certain types of emotions or certain types of thoughts. It's like the world gets compressed down to this kind of narrow stream of concerns. And one of the things that I always liken in Tolstoy, and I think this is especially true in War and Peace, is that that never happens. So that even though the war is happening, people still are falling in love. They're singing songs, they're living in nature. I'll never forget. There's this scene where Andrey is. He's visiting the Rostov family.
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Ian Lee
Oh, yes.
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Josh Rothman
And there's an oak tree, this gnarly old looking tree. I think he stays the night in the house he'll remember better than me.
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Ian Lee
He stayed in the Rostov's house? Yes.
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Josh Rothman
Yeah. And he hears Natasha singing from the room below, I think, and it's just beautiful. And it's not about war and it's just a beautiful song. And then on the way out, he goes by the same tree and he sees it's flowering, but it's about, you know, the world continues there's still youth and beauty and nature and everything.
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Ian Lee
You know, that is such a good example. You know, when he was listening to Natasha, there was a moment his window was shuttered, so he opened the shutter and the moonlight rushed in. That moment I just thought was, yes, people are still living their lives during that war.
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Josh Rothman
I mean, for me and maybe for other people, this is a it really feels like we're living during history and we're alive during this time. That is the type of thing that people will read about later.
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Ian Lee
Yes, I think you're right. There are a lot of resonance between the novel and what we have been through. The panic, the anxiety and the uncertainty. Of course, we have to live through this pandemic. We have to live through this history, just as we have to live through that war, we have to read through that war part of the book.
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Josh Rothman
So, I mean, I have to say, like, what we're doing now, just talking about this book, it's incredibly enjoyable and it makes me think about what role talking about art has at a time like this. You've convened this group of people who now have a time of their day set aside to communicate with one another about art and literature.
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Ian Lee
I, you know, in a way, I realized there's so much comfort like people around the world. They were all, they could all feel stuck. And if they can read slowly, 1215 pages and they all talk about these 1215 pages, it just offers something for people to talk about other than what's happening outside. And I think whether it's a distraction or, you know, it's just a mitigation of the anxiety, it's really bringing people together. And there are people who would say, you know, I so looking forward to tomorrow's pages.
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Josh Rothman
So we thank you so much. Even this was incredibly enjoyable.
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Ian Lee
I enjoyed it so much. I hope we can meet some.
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David Remnick
The writer Ian Lee talking with New Yorker's Josh Rothman about Tolstoy's War and Peace. If you want to participate in Lee's project Tolstoy together and maybe you can catch up with them, you can find the information on our website, newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Around this time of year would have been a joyful one. The start of baseball season. Not the worst casualty of this pandemic by far. But for a fan, the loss of baseball is a bitter pill, the deprivation of a really beautiful distraction. And there's talk that maybe the season will open in June. But that's really impossible to know. Until then. I wanted to revisit a conversation I had with the great baseball writer Roger Angell, who is now 99. A few years ago, I brought Roger to the studio to talk about his long and remarkable career at the magazine. In more than seven decades, he's contributed fiction, movie reviews, comic poems, essays about aging and loss. There really isn't a genre that he hasn't touched. But on the subject of baseball, there's no greater writer than Roger no one. And for this, he was inducted into the Baseball hall of fame in 2014.
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Roger Angell
So this is a thrill for me as well as an honor. The roster of SPINC honorees is stuffed with old heroes of mine like Red Smith and Tom Meaney, and with baseball writer friends who have also been models and heroes, folks like Jerome Holtzman and Peter Gammons and Bill Madden, who were so quick to put me at my ease in the clubhouse and to fill me in whenever I turned up. Again, my gratitude, it always goes back to baseball itself, which turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and exacting, so easy looking and so heartbreakingly difficult that it filled up my notebooks in Seasons in a Rush. A pastime indeed.
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David Remnick
That was an amazing day, Roger. I just wonder, you know, a year and a half later, looking back at it, what it meant to you. You've been writing about baseball for a long time, since the early 60s.
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Roger Angell
I was extremely anxious beforehand, and I was anxious about so many friends of mine who were coming up this enormous distance. I thought I was not going to be very good, and I actually was using little mahlocks near the end, and I lost some weight, but the minute I got there, it was just terrific.
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David Remnick
But you had to invent a voice for this. You had to figure out a way of covering baseball. God knows that baseball, especially when you began, was the focus for sports writers. In fact, in the 50s, the most.
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Roger Angell
The prestige sports guys were in baseball. Yeah. In baseball. Yeah. I approached it with sheer terror. I didn't know what I was doing. I was a baseball fan. I'd been a writer, but I'd not written about baseball, only a little bit. And I was very self conscious, talking to the players, really quite scared.
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David Remnick
Why is that?
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Roger Angell
Well, I felt that they would know more than I did. They wouldn't. What's this guy doing here? I was shy and a little bit nervous. So what I did was to sit in the stands at first, and because I had felt I didn't realize that nobody was writing about the fans. And I was a fan. And I could sit in the stands and be a fan and also be a writer.
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David Remnick
Is the press box a bad place to cover things from?
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Roger Angell
No, I don't think so, but once you get used to it. But I wasn't at ease in the press box yet.
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David Remnick
One of the things that always amazed me about your baseball writing 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 voice of someone just in love with what he's watching. That's hard to achieve.
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Roger Angell
Well, it developed over the years. I didn't really plan it in advance. It was just. It was some kind of me.
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David Remnick
What was the kind of sports writing that you couldn't stand? What were you trying to avoid?
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Roger Angell
Actually, when I started, Sean said, William Shawn, the editor. William Shawn, the editor, my editor said, why don't you get onto spring training and take a look? And he said, we don't want to be sentimental and we don't want to be tough guys. You know, those two things to avoid.
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David Remnick
Did Sean know anything about baseball?
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Roger Angell
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 page place on the. 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 a double play? And I explained it to him and his cheeks glowed with excitement. It was something new.
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David Remnick
Did you find it harder to talk with play players as time went by, as you got a little older, did you gravitate more toward coaches and managers than players?
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Roger Angell
Once they call you Siri, you're in big trouble. I gravitated toward good talkers, as I've said before.
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David Remnick
But did they thin out, is what I mean. Did the good talkers become less and less numerous?
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Roger Angell
Yes, I think so. It's very. I mean, when I got over 80, it was impossible for me to talk to players, really, because they would say sir and. And also, as you've said, the habit of talking openly as a person, not as a very well paid celebrity, semi celebrity ball player, is pretty well gone.
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David Remnick
It's because it's a big difference when the ball players are making about as much as a solid orthodontist, and now they're making as much as an oligarch.
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Roger Angell
Sure, but you did pay attention, as I did. I would carry Notes and write endlessly like long notes and. And keep my ears open and listen for something. I remember being outside the office of Jim Fry, the Kansas City manager, after his great star, George Brett, had another extraordinary day at the plate. And I'm waiting to go in to see the manager. And there are two old coaches at their lockers just outside the door in their underwear and clogs talking. A couple of country guys, and one of them says the other, everything that George hits goes through the infield like a stream of milk. And this country image. And I wrote it down. I wrote it down. Wow. Thank you.
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David Remnick
You wait days for things like that in the nonfiction game, Roger. You practice nonfiction, as it were, by night and fiction by day. For years and years, you were the fiction editor of the New Yorker. To this day, you read short stories for us. And in the fiction department, was this bread in the bone with you? I think some of our listeners will know that your mother really had singular responsibility for introducing serious fiction to the New Yorker. Katherine White was the person who brought real fiction to the New Yorker. And you must have grown up hearing about this process and knowing this process.
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Roger Angell
My stepfather was E.B. white, who was. And writing for the magazine every week. And my mother and stepfather's house was full of galleys and pencils and racer rubbings and conversation about the magazine and about Harold Ross and about the writers of the day. And sure, I paid close attention, but I wasn't planning to be a New Yorker editor or to be a New Yorker writer.
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David Remnick
What were you planning on?
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Roger Angell
I was hoping to be maybe a boy naturalist, a herpetologist with my first. First aim. But I did pay attention. And my mother was editing Vladimir Nabokov and people like that. How did Nabokov take editing with his usual haughty way. And the famous Nabokov editing was by the great New Yorker founding editor, Harold Ross, who loved clarity above all and was not classically or much educated, but loved clearness. And in the middle of some terrific Nabokov mem. I think part of his Speak memory pieces, his wonderful memories about his family. There's a line at the dinner table and somebody says, pass the nutcracker. And one of Harold Ross's endless queries. He always had about 20 or 30 queries about every piece of copy. He said, from the evidence we've been given so far, I would have assumed that the Nabokos were a more than one nutcracker family. So, Roald Dahl.
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David Remnick
I was looking through some letters that came to Harold Ross and Roald Dahl. Who wrote all those great children's books, but also a number of things for the New Yorker and memoir pieces for the New Yorker wrote a scathing letter to Ross complaining about the editing and the number of commas that had been injected into things. And he says, it's as if you would take a great comma shaker and sprinkled commas throughout my.
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Roger Angell
Well, that was our style. Yeah, it's lightened up a little bit.
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David Remnick
Roger, what does age do for your writing? How does it affect things? How does it either deepen your work or make it more difficult? What's the effect of time on a writer's life?
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Roger Angell
I'm not sure. I mean, I'm aware of my waning powers, I really am, but I can't. I'm not writing long pieces. I'm not going out there and write another 10 or 12,000 word baseball piece. I'm not sure.
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David Remnick
And that's a matter of what? Getting up and down stadium steps and.
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Roger Angell
Doing the interviewing and doing the traveling and taking the time. A lot of hard work. And it's hard for me to get around. It's hard for me to see, it's hard for me to hear a little bit. And I'm doing much. I'm very happy to fall back and do posts and blogs.
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David Remnick
This is the amazing thing. You are in your mid-90s, I hope you don't mind me saying. I think you're perfectly aware of it. And yet, sentence by sentence, you're as funny and as touching and as good a writer as you ever were. And you've taken to the Internet in a way a lot of people resisted. You took right to it.
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Roger Angell
Well, I like the brevity of the blog. You can make it quite short. You can just go on as long as you want to go and then just stop. It's sort of like making a paper airplane. No, it's about. I used to love to make paper airplanes. I made great paper airplanes. And you throw it out the window and it goes a little ways or a turn, it occurs beautifully and then goes out of sight and is forgotten forever. And that's like a blog.
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David Remnick
Do you like the immediacy of the Internet? You're putting up a post and at 6 o' clock it's there and bang, you're getting a.
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Roger Angell
Well, it's taking me till the middle of the afternoon sometimes. Fair enough, but no. I can sort of see the end when I'm starting, which is not bad.
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David Remnick
Now, tell me about this new book you've put together. An enormous Range of things you've got in here, some obituaries that were published in the New Yorker or online. You've got a couple of long sustained essays that we'll talk about, some baseball writing letters. The book is called this Old man by Roger Angell. All in pieces.
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Roger Angell
This old man, Roger angel, all in Pieces. Well, I'm a little tired of the joke in the title already.
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David Remnick
But tell me about the book itself.
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Roger Angell
Well, I wrote the piece this Old Man. I started the piece in 2013, I think late in the year, and I think handed it to you along about February, something like that came as a.
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David Remnick
Complete surprise to me. You just plopped it on my desk.
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Roger Angell
I wrote it in different pieces. I didn't quite what I was doing. And it was about physical debility. And it starts off with a description of my arthritic hands, which you say.
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David Remnick
The tips of your fingers look like they've been the subject of torture by the kgv.
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Roger Angell
Yeah. If I point my forefinger at you like a pistol and fire it for your nose, I'll hit you in the knee. But I describe some of the everyday debilities of age and I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I knew that loss was at the middle of this. I had lost my wife, we were married for 48 years and I'd lost a daughter and a beloved dog of Carol's and mine went out the fifth floor window in the middle of a threw in panic, jumped out the window on the fifth floor and was killed. Losses for people my age are common. Ed Hirsch, the wonderful poet, lost his son and wrote a great book about it last year. And he says that anybody over the age of 65 has a 100 pound bag of cement of loss on his shoulders. And he writes about writing about the loss of his son. And he says you can't make a story out of it, you can't do that with a life. So I didn't know how to touch on these subjects and I didn't know if I wanted to even. And I did so actually through the loss of the dog. I'd written a piece about losing my wife, losing Carol, called Over the Wall, which sort of began this process. And I waited six months and just after the first Obama election she died in April. And I said she didn't know this news and she didn't know about the hurricane that fall and a lot of things she didn't know. And I said the dead don't know what's happening and the dead leave quickly. And I quoted a Kenneth Koch poem. Say les mort ven vite. Go quickly. And there's a line in that which says, no more scenes in the bedroom. No more waiting in the hall, waiting to say hello. With mixed feelings. Perfect line. I described the death of Harry, this dog, and then threw in that. Carol and I wept, but we couldn't get over weeping for him. And he lay in our bathroom between us on the floor. And we threw Kleenex back and forth. And I said we were also weeping for my daughter Callie, who had committed suicide a couple of years earlier. And events that knew we couldn't just get our minds around in any way. But it was for both. But I don't want to dwell on this. I don't want to make much of this, because everybody's experienced. And there are many changes of mood through this piece. I patch the thing together. And some of the sadder or paragraphs that are hard to take are often followed by a joke or a lighter moment. There are some actual jokes in there, and it's okay, because I like to take jokes. I count on jokes myself. I'm known to tell jokes.
- [26:36]
David Remnick
And there's also the opposite of loss. There's new love.
- [26:40]
Roger Angell
Yes. And this was happening. I was finding someone new in my life, my present wife, Peggy. And this was going on. I wanted to say that. And time was going by and I was still engaged in life. And I said that old people are like everyone else. We need connection. We need love.
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David Remnick
We need intimate love and a hand on the shoulder. I mean, there's sex. I mean, the piece ends with, in a sense, life against all other things.
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Roger Angell
Against all odds. Against all odds. Yes. But I wanted to say what was happening with me which happens with other old people. Old people fall in love. Old people have a love life, have intimate connections, have sex lives. And people don't like to admit this.
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David Remnick
Mostly their children, because they're somehow revolted by it.
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Roger Angell
But I think people are getting over this because it's now known. I mean, it's not something to be repelled by. It's something to be grateful for. This brings up something else which I've noticed with writers that I've dealt with now and then. If a writer lives long enough. This didn't just happen much with American writers. The famous thing about American writers was there are no second acts in American lives for writers. But writers that go on and on often go back. Updike did go back to the same subjects again and again. He went back to his mother, to the sandstone field farmhouse, to his father to his teenage courting years and did the same story, really again and again, but much better each time with increased feeling. Some of the very best stories he wrote for us were at the very end. And the same thing happened with another writer of mine that I edited over a period of 40 years. VS Pritchett, the great British writer in his middle 80s, suddenly got on this amazing hot streak, writing some of the greatest stories of his life. Full of life, full of sex, full of amour and adventures and comedy and childhood things all rushing out of him. And I think that all of us do this at any age because we basically go over the same material in our minds again and again, the stories that really mean a lot to us. And it's not we're trying to get them right, but we're trying to. We're not trying to change the outcome, but we're trying to keep them or to say, was this the way it was? And psychologists and experts on the subject say that this is what memory is. It isn't just a defensive thing to protect us from falling out of a tree when a tiger's passing by, but it is a trying out of a scenario again and again because it may be of use. That's what memory is. And this is why the same scenes recur after I wrote scenes. A lot of this personal stuff I used to have dreams about or think about over. And once I put them down and get them published, I don't think about them anymore. It's very strange. It goes away.
- [29:41]
David Remnick
When you go back and read your earlier stuff, do you recognize it? Does it feel like you.
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Roger Angell
Not the very early stuff, no. It feels like Hemingway.
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David Remnick
And can you relate at all to a decision like Philip Roth's to stop writing?
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Roger Angell
Well, I haven't got there yet. I'm thinking of not blogging anymore because I don't think my blogs are quite up to what they were.
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David Remnick
But I'll be the judge of that.
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Roger Angell
Keep going, please. No, I don't want to stop. I like to have it still going on a little bit. And then this way, once again, I think I'm extremely lucky. I'm 95 and still writing. My goodness. I mean, I'm startled and very happy.
- [30:21]
David Remnick
I'm happy to be here with you always. Roger, thank you very much.
- [30:24]
Roger Angell
Thanks. Thank you. David.
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David Remnick
The great Roger Angel. He's the author of many books on baseball and the essay collection this Old man all in Pieces. Our interview was from 2015. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for this week. I want to thank you for joining us wherever you are. I hope you're healthy and I hope you stay that way. See you next time.
- [30:55]
Narrator/Producer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Calla Leah, David Krasnow, Gofen M. Putubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turin Endowment Fund.