I never got to meet Donald Barthelme; I know him only through his extraordinary short stories, many of them published in The New Yorker, and one of his novels. Neither did I meet Roger Angell, a New Yorker giant who wrote of sports, particularly baseball, and served for many years as the magazine's chief fiction editor. He and his second wife Carol were, in 1976, the fortunate recipients of an inscribed copy of Barthelme's new collection Amateurs, which has recently come onto the market from Angell's estate. It is a book which I have not read, although some of the short stories nevertheless may be familiar. After all, fifteen of the twenty-one stories had originally appeared in The New Yorker, where I may very well have seen them. Angell must have read (and perhaps even rejected) the others as well, so it isn't surprising that, according to the bookseller offering it, "The book itself has no sign of previous use."
I may not have met Angell, but at least I had the opportunity to meet him. I attended exactly one function where he was present, a 2015 opening reception at the Luise Ross Gallery for New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren, Angell's friend. In 2014, Koren had designed the baseball jerseys for Angell's J. G. Taylor Spink Award ceremony at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Columbia University's comics librarian Karen Green pointed Angell out to me, the only one present who was wearing a baseball cap.
Still, I did not feel comfortable introducing myself. I had not read any of his works—I was far more familiar with the writing of his stepfather E. B. White—and I certainly couldn't talk baseball on his level. Besides, he was busy with other people. At least Karen got a photograph of him—with Koren—from the event. Today a cropped version of that photograph has pride of place on Angell's Wikipedia page, mocking me.
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| Donald Barthelme AbeBooks listing accessed November 10, 2022 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31351038616&searchurl=kn%3DThe%2BNew%2BYorker%26sgnd%3Don%26sortby%3D0&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title19 |
Note: Roger Angell's Wikipedia page is here, complete with the photograph taken at the Luise Ross Gallery.
Better still, see Karen Green's uncropped photograph of Angell and Edward Koren together as it appeared on Ink Spill here.
And you might as well take a look at Ed Koren's baseball jersey designed for Roger Angell's big day in Cooperstown here.
Cartoonist Michael Maslin did get to meet Donald Barthelme (talk about your coincidences!) and to write about it years later on his Ink Spill blog here.
Richard Locke reviewed Amateurs for the Times in 1976 (not all that favorably) here.
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