At the beginning of 2017 I went on a White family bender. First I re-read E.B. White’s collected essays, which are among my very favorite written things. Then I read the Letters of E.B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth. What a task that must have been, assembling seven decades’ worth of letters to and from. Strung together they make a compelling biography. I stayed up late reading it, despite the small person who woke me several times each night. I was somewhat unsettled by how much I enjoyed diving deep into a real person’s life, consuming (that’s the word that kept coming back to me) decades of it at a time.

It led me to read about Katharine Sergeant Angell White, his wife, a legendary New Yorker editor, paragon of good taste, gardener, confidant of Nabokov and Updike (it’s unpleasant, describing women by their relation to men; let’s add “like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Austen,” from the linked New Yorker article, for counterbalance). By all accounts she was interested and interesting, a formidable, aristocratic New Englander; I imagine her speaking like Katharine Hepburn, sharing that early midcentury transatlantic accent along with the distinctive name spelling. The descriptions remind me a bit of my grandmother, also a paragon of good taste; a reader of Updike, the New Yorker and good fiction generally, though I don’t know about Nabokov; and an occasionally formidable figure who was by way of being from New England, though also West Virginia. There was always something aristocratic about her to me, even just her regally upright posture.

I checked out Katharine White’s one published work, Onward and Upward in the Garden, a collection of gardening essays that appeared first in the New Yorker. They initially took seed catalogs as the subject of more or less straight book reviews, without preamble or explanation. I appreciated the novelty and the brisk tone, but gardening has not yet captured my interest, and I returned the book unfinished.

Then I turned to the next generation: Roger Angell, noted baseball writer, retired fiction editor at the New Yorker, and Katharine White’s son from her first marriage. Let Me Finish is his memoir of his 1920s boyhood in New York City — a charmed time in the city’s life, in his telling (the Depression remaining on the periphery of his world), and what he calls a more or less classic, charmed American boyhood — except for his parent’s divorce and his mother’s departure, which he describes with remarkable generosity. He recounts without bitterness the certainly bitter proceedings that ended with his father having full custody, and him and his sister riding the subway down to Greenwich Village to spend weekends with his mother and Andy White. Is Angell fair-minded by nature (he notes that his sister found the divorce much harder to forgive), or is it the perspective that ninety years confers?

The boy Roger comes across as lucky and lighthearted, a talkative enthusiast interested in baseball, of course, but also snakes and a hundred other things. His tale of riding the subway to the Bronx Zoo with a snake in a box, accompanied by “my snakiest friend, Kim,” to present the animal to the surprised, but willing, keepers of the reptile house for an unscheduled check-up feels characteristic.

This Old Man was a more uneven read, collecting as it does letters, two-page reminiscences about Angell’s well-known departed acquaintances (William Shawn, Harold Ross), essays and New Yorker pieces spanning sixty years. It was worth reading for the title piece alone, though, which deals not with the rarefied literary world of his youth and career, but a bit of privilege that landed on him at random. (The essay appears in slightly different form here.) He describes what it’s like to reach 93, to outlive not only two spouses but some of your own children and most of your friends. The sentences I underlined note his surprise that the wish for physical touch, intimacy, never goes away and hardly dims. “Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love,” is the line in the online version.

Even better, though, was his 2012 essay “Over the Wall,” which begins with a list of things his recently deceased wife will never know about about: Obama’s re-election, the Giants’ World Series win. At the end he visits her in the Brooklin, Maine, cemetery: “All [the graves] are worn to an almost identical whiteness … some washed almost to invisibility. … What I noticed most, though — the same idea came over me every time — was that time had utterly taken away the histories and attachments and emotions that had once closely wrapped around these dead, leaving nothing but their families and names and dates.

It was almost as if they were waiting to be born.”