Essayist
Benny Green
The Americans Alistair Cooke (Bodley Head £5.95) The composition of a radio script to be read by the writer has little to do with literature. In the pragmatic sense, literary style is that device by which the writer obliges his reader to punctuate the text with the appropriate rhythms and inflexions. Understandably, therefore, the writer's physical performance in radio abrogates the function of style, which explains, incidentally, why so many publishers make a mistake when they offer to buy for publication some series of radio programmes which has happened to catch their ear. I must in my time have written and performed at least 1500 radio scripts, but I doubt if any literary editor of this: publication would ever have been inclined to publish more than half a dozen of them — which raises the problem of Alistair Cooke.
His latest book consists of 50 of his 'Letters from America', those deceptively relaxed broadcasting masterpieces which he has been delivering weekly for the last 33 years. In a prefatory note to the reader, in which he defines radio as 'literature for, so to speak, the blind', Cooke explains that 'there are vocabularies, such as you would write for your newspaper or for a serious periodical, which are taboo as talk', and that he has therefore prepared The Americans for the presses by making the most of the , chance `to straighten out the syntax, which one doesn't do in conversation, and to introduce occasionally literary words that are more exact and that will not throw the much smaller race of book-readers'. But thousands of other professional broadcasters have on occasion attempted this adjustment of the spoken into the written word, without the slightest success, a fact which suggests that Cooke is as unique as the hippogriff. He is, in fact, one of the most gifted and urbane essayists of the century, a suprenl. e master of that form of literary work which seeks to simulate the effect of physical per." sonality hovering just behind the reader's shoulder. And while Henry James and George Meredith would probably be scandalised by such a code of literary conductj no doubt Dickens and Wells would a 1 pp_aud it and Sterne grumble that it was not garrulous enough. If the criterion for inclusion is siMPIY what has interested the writer, then it follows that there will be a stimulating disparity between the entries. One of the best, pieces in the collection is the obituary or Duke Ellington, not at first glance a theme of cosmic importance when seen in the light of the Watergate essays which punctuate The Americans. However, as Duke Ellington was a more talented and more admirable American than Richard Nixon, it is Cooke who has his priorities straight and the rest of the bunch will be seen by posterity's disinterested judges as philistines.
Cooke has included ten of his reports on Watergate, beginning with the first tremors in September 1972, and ending with his epilogue in May 1977. What is striking about these entries is their steady graduation from scepticism to acceptance, a fact which I think does Cooke great credit. There have been too many journalistic pied pipers through the 1970s who played a Nixon melody so out of tune that eventually, when the score was published, they preferred to forget all about it. Not Cooke,, Who moves from the position of September 1972 — 'The Democrats are scratching around hoping to come on the time-bomb of a big scandal. They think they have found one, though it, is no bigger than a Molotov Cockiair — to the considered judgment of May 1977 — Nixon as 'a character of Shakespearean complexity and pathos — pitiable, sympathetic, gone for good'.
In the period covered by this book, Cooke delivered about 500 'Letters' giving him a healthy margin of selection for an anthology containing only 50. However, in nominating the book as the most readable, informative and engaging collection of essays on literate subjects., to be published this year, I have a sneaking feeling that those 450 rejected 'letters' would have served just as well. In following Cooke's career I can discern no lapses from his own standards, and I am delighted to see that With his essay called 'Pacific Overtures', he Persists in being almost the only gifted essayist in America or indeed anywhere, to regard the musical, comedy form as being Worthy of intelligent discussion.
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