Cool, calm and now collected
John Grimond
LETTER FROM AMERICA, 1946-2004 by Alistair Cooke Allen Lane, £25, pp. 503, ISBN 0713998342 re, £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 How did he do it? To listen to Alistair Cooke's weekly letters from America, it must have been a 'cinch' or, as he once helpfully translated to a generation unfamiliar with the word, 'no problem'. He must have sat
down at his trusty Remington typewriter rather too close to his deadline for comfort, in the manner of green-eyeshade journalists of the old school — and simply knocked it out. The weekly conversation that Cooke conducted with his listeners for over half a century was so natural, so unpompous. that it must have been spontaneous, effortless and unprepared.
It may have struck listeners that way, but readers of this volume are unlikely to agree. The striking feature of these letters is how well they are written. When Cooke says of someone (an immigrant taxi-driver, as it happens) that he was 'incapable of a cliché', you know you are in the hands of a writer who minds about language. Sure enough, Cooke uses plain, everyday words and once in a while drops in the kind of phrase that makes you wish you'd thought of it first: eyes 'as blue as gas jets' (H.L. Mencken's) or 'turned to cinders' (Ethel Kennedy's, as she cradled the body of her murdered husband, Robert); 'you would have had to scan the army lists with binoculars to see what happened to [General George] Marshall'; 'a pipe . .. always an impressive accompaniment to a stalling mind' (James 'Scotty' Reston's); the Pacific ocean 'sliding in as solid as a freight train'; and so on.
Perhaps all this came effortlessly to Cooke. it seems unlikely. There are the occasional giveaway remarks, such as 'nobody is a born journalist', and his reference to the 20 years it had taken Hemingway to 'fashion such a sentence [an opening line] to his own satisfaction'. Then come the known facts: his curiosity about etymology (passing the buck' is explained, though Cooke is too coy to go into the origins of 'vanilla), his study of linguistics at Harvard, and his letters to colleagues advising when the adverb 'soft' should be used rather than the adverb 'softly'.
Even more revealing, perhaps, arc the anecdotes. One, in particular, seems pertinent. It concerns the jazz cornettist, Muggsy Spanier, 'coming from the bone-white sunlight' of a San Francisco morning into 'the sour air' of 'a dreadful nightclub' and `squinnying through the dark' to see the incomparable Earl `Fatha' Hines:
sitting there, as he did for two or three hours every morning, practising not the blues or 'Rosetta' or `Honeysuckle Rose' hut the piano concertos of Mozart and Beethoven ... Hines looked up and said, 'Just keeping the fingers
'To be the best,' added Cooke, 'you have to run, fight, golf, write, play the piano every day.'
These letters have been chosen largely because, as the editor says, they were the ones that 'work best in print', so maybe the writing was not always so good. No matter. Writing was not all that Cooke brought to his Letter, A sense of humour was another ingredient, and also a sense of history: over and over again, America, that country that the British think they know so well, was explained in all its foreignness through its history. This, like all Cooke's learning, was worn lightly. Facts were introduced easily, almost as asides. Statistics were rarities. Nothing in the amiable weekly conversation gave the impression that it had involved vulgar research.
Above all, the United States was explained through its people, not so much people in groups — Latinos or GreekAmericans — but as individuals. So a death or an anniversary was an opportunity to talk not just about the man (seldom the woman), whether he was Joe Louis, Robert Frost or Jack Kennedy, but also about the country he had helped to shape. Cooke was not blind to events, least of all to political events: it was his daily duty as a correspondent for the Illanchester Guardian to report them. The Letter, though, was his way of putting events in their setting, and thus of explaining his country to his ex-countrymen.
His country was, indubitably, America. To some Americans, he may have seemed like an Englishman. The letters make it clear that, from his college years on, his heart was in America, even if he had something of the outsider's ability to penetrate its mysteries (he became a citizen in 1941, but after Cambridge in the 1920s he had gone to both Yale and Harvard). The advantage of this sense of identification, coupled with his long life in the country, was that he understood the United States and could bring both context and perspective to the interpretation of events. The disadvantage was that he was not as curious as a true, de Tocquevillian outsider might have been about some aspects of his adopted homeland.
The reader will not find America's uglier side much discussed in this volume. Cooke discovers Baltimore's `darktown' in 1937, discusses 'the negro problem' in 1954 and returns to the topic of race from time to time. He is worried by drugs and vigilantes and jogging. But he does not — in this collection, anyway — have much to say about poverty, crime, punishment, or even abortion, McCarthyism or corporate greed, some of the issues that have animated American politics in recent decades. Of violence, he says, if indeed it is 'a special sickness of our age, it is universal'.
Selective blindness may have been part of Cooke's wise attempt to avoid moralising. Yet he was too knowing to believe that his letters carried no judgments, and it seems more likely to reflect his own aversion to, or lack of interest in, the less attractive aspects of American society. An allied criticism could be made of the places he chose to write about. New York, Washington, Long Island and San Francisco are well represented here. Vermont, Baltimore, Chicago, Kentucky and even Alabama get the occasional visit. He steels himself for Los Angeles. But Nashville, Detroit, San Diego, Omaha? Both the sunbelt and the vast heartland of America go largely unremarked.
Even so, Cooke's Letter was a brilliant creation. The 2,869 broadcasts were in themselves a phenomenon, but their success lay not so much in their longevity as in their ability to explain a mystifying society to a foreign audience in an utterly engaging manner. The listener was drawn in, often obliquely through some intriguing anecdote, and slowly introduced to the main topic without quite realising what was going on. Rambling, at first usually pointless, often unrelated to the news and always devoid of gossip and scandal, they seemed to break all the rules of journalism, and even of storytelling. Yet they worked. And surely Cooke had to work to make them work.
John Grimond is writer-at-large for the Economist
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