Down with dreaminess

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday [9/19] of writer and editor Roger Angell.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Angell]

Born in New York (1920), he was mostly raised by his father, but his mother was Katharine Sergeant White, an editor at The New Yorker, and his stepfather was the writer E.B. White. Young Roger liked to read detective stories and books about cowboys and reptiles, and go to the movies.

He went to Harvard, then into the Air Force, and then worked for magazines. He wasn't really planning to be a writer, and after watching E.B. White slave over short columns for The New Yorker, write them over and over and still feel like they weren't good enough, he wasn't sure if it was the job for him. But after about 10 years at various jobs, and occasional submissions to The New Yorker, he found himself drawn back to the magazine. He joined the staff as a contributing writer and the fiction editor. He was the editor for writers including John Updike, William Trevor, and Woody Allen, and he is still a staff writer and senior editor.

In 1962, he was talking to William Shawn about baseball. He said, "I told him about spring training; he didn't know there was such a thing." So Shawn sent him to Florida to write about spring training, and he's been writing about baseball ever since. He said: "It never occurred to me that I was going to spend my life writing about baseball. I had no such plan. No such plan. And at no point did I say to myself, What I am is somebody getting together a body of baseball writings. I think of this as one piece at a time and hope that I'm still enthusiastic about the game, that if something happens I'll want to write about it."

And he said: "The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the Field of Dreams thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie. It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In Fields of Dreams there's a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they're talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that."