I've worried off and on about Roger Angell lately. He's the longtime New Yorker writer and editor whom I wrote about too briefly here. I don't think anyone has ever written better about baseball, and he was also for many year's the magazine's fiction editor, in which role he took up the placement of commas in John Updike's "copy" and perhaps gently suggested a different word here and that one be elided there--a little like suggesting to Ted Williams that he might consider modifying his stance in the batter's box. Angell is well into his 90s now, and the elapsed time between appearances of his byline at the magazine's website has been stretching alarmingly. Then this year baseball's Opening Day came and went, an event that would stir him if anything could: nothing, and I figured he's sick, moribund, mentally addled, on the injured reserve list permanently. But another thing about which he's passionate is his military experience in World War II, a formative event he shared with many of his generation. And today, the 75th anniversary of D Day--well, here you go. The whole thing is worth reading but here is his opening:
On June 6, 1944, D Day, I was an Air Force sergeant in the Pacific, half a world away, but, like almost everyone around the globe, I followed the extraordinary event with acute interest. Some future New Yorker colleagues of mine had a closer look. Gardner Botsford, a top-level editor at the magazine for almost forty years, was a young infantry officer aboard a landing craft at Omaha Beach, and he can be seen clearly in one of the most famous photographs of the day, on the starboard side of the picture, in left profile, standing tensely behind the soon-to-be-dropped gate. As he revealed in a memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly, he had a double task that day, since he was also on an intelligence mission to make contact, within two days, with members of the French underground, at a farmhouse a mile or two inland. He did indeed perform this mission, along with much more, including extended combat, which he talked about only late in life, and with extreme reluctance. The price of this could be seen sometimes during the course of a passing thunderstorm, when he would fall silent and grip his chair.
Forget about the author's age: how's that for a paragraph of English prose? I'd say it was merely "distinctive" until that last sentence, which, in retrospect, everything before was building toward. The photograph he describes is at the top of this post.
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