Sullivan's Angel!

For 42 yules New Yorker Writer Frank Sullivan saluted friends and celebrities in a full-page poem, nutmegged with his gentle wit and redolent rhymes. The poem failed to appear last year; the sage of Saratoga Springs was too ill to write it. Then, last winter, Sullivan died at the age of 83. But this week's New Yorker does not leave the "season all unbarded and countless friends un-Christmas-carded." The humorist's former editor, noted Parodist Roger Angell, 56, has raised a toast in the master's distinctive style.

Determined that Sullivan's name-dropping needlepoint should go on, Angell combed the year's headlines for worthy toastees, borrowed (like Sullivan) a few names from friends and wove them into Sullivanian tetrameter. Angell--a short-story writer, bestselling baseball author (The Summer Game) and stepson of E.B. White--aims good cheer at "Helmut Schmidt, Kenneth Tynan/ And the Rev. Rep. (D., Mass.) Robert Drinan, " and offers "A puppy each for Stacy Reach/ And Marvellous Nadia Comaneci." He exhorts: "Come, Willie Morris! Come, Maury Wills/ Make with the tonsils for Beverly Sills, "and wishes that "the new year lay good Karma/ On our White House-tenant farmer."

Angell eschews, with unjustifiable modesty, comparison with the metier's creator, whom he salutes in a touching envoi: "Farewell, upstate harp of Tamil Vale, Frank, sweet bird of Saratoga . . ." New Yorker Editor William Shawn, however, is pleased. "If Frank Sullivan knew about it, he would be pleased too," says Shawn. Or as Angell concludes, and Sullivan would have: "Peace on each land beneath the sun/ Good friends, God bless us, every one. "

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