That Old Feeling: Cooke's Tour

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A few years later, Cooke would return to his old hero Fairbanks as the subject of a Museum of Modern Art monograph. The essay had a dry and tentative tone, and I can't help wondering if Cooke, on reseeing the films, had spotted warts on his idol and, not wanting to offend his early enthusiasm, retreated into sociological analysis and critical disinterest. Or perhaps by 1940, with war in Europe and America still in Depression, he realized that his future lay in reviewing stories on the bigger screen — one that stretched from Bangor to Baja California — for a different medium.



ALISTAIR'S AMERICA

He had presented programs before on the BBC. After the film critique, he filed occasional pieces through the late 30s, then a weekly report on the American war effort, and the emceeing of "Answering You," with Americans asking questions of their British allies. Now Cooke's boss at the Beeb had a bigger idea: he should explain America to the world. As Cooke recalled in 1997: "The head man said, 'Why don't you talk about the things you talk to me about? American children, the chemistry of the New England fall, out west, anything." The deal was for 13 weeks with a possible renewal, but, he was told, "at the end of 26 weeks — no more." This was in 1946.

In his first "American Letter" (did the BBC have a weekly report from Paris called "French Letter"?), he recounted his U.S.-bound Queen Mary voyage with 2,000 war brides leaving their homeland for new lives abroad: "Along the entire main deck of the ship the handkerchiefs fluttered in an unbroken line, like washing day in Manchester and Leeds." He spoke of a ride in a broken-down New York taxi whose lack of a reverse gear meant the driver had to circle a block twice to land at the proper address ("This is a useful money-making device which I offer without patent"). In a Manhattan studio he recorded his chat on a 16-in. disc and mailed it off to London. The BBC aired it March 31.

In 1950, the weekly program would be renamed "Letter from America." Advancing technology would allow Cooke to broadcast from wherever his other duties took him. As the years passed, he delivered his letter from the office — or, toward the end, the bed — of his apartment overlooking Central Park. But nothing altered the format or tone: a talk of 13 or 14 mins. on American politics, art, sport and folk customs, enunciated in the silken intimacy of Cooke's lightly adenoidal voice, which made him sound, to the BBC's tens of millions of listeners, like Western Civilization's wisest, blithest, least shockable uncle.

He had a voice made for radio (as he would later have a face made for public television). "A radio engineer once told me that I had a pair of lungs of the lowest decibel volume he had ever monitored." That whisper lent an intimacy to affairs great and small, for Cooke used the microphone to speak the way Bing Crosby used it to sing: with a tone both confident and confidential. He knew that "Radio is literature for, so to speak, the blind." (Note the care with which the ostensibly conversational modifier "so to speak" is introduced into an aphorism about oral communication.) "I suddenly realised there was a new profession ahead. Which is writing for talking. Putting it on the page in the syntactical break-up and normal confusion that is normal talk."

The trick was to keep the talks informal without letting them get sloppy. This Cooke accomplished by trusting his instincts that, when the time came, he'd know what to say. "The talks were, and are, never prepared," he wrote in an introduction to "The Americans: Fifty talks on our life and times," published in 1979. "They offer the relief and the exhilaration of sitting down once a week and writing what comes to mind about the American scene usually no more than a couple of hours before they are taped and flown to London to be broadcast. More often than not, I have little idea, as I sit down at the typewriter, what I am going to talk about. This, I believe, is the proper psychological condition for composing a talk: we do not go out to dinner with a little agenda in our pockets of what the evening's conversation is to be about."

It is said that more than half of all speakers of English use it as a second or third language. That is surely true of the BBC World Service audience. Cooke always had a performer's sense of his audience. The vocabulary of the "Letters" was simple, and he resisted sounding preachy or professorial. "In all these talks," he wrote, "I have gone along on the original theory that people are permanently curious about how other people live, and that all the politicians and propagandists in the world working three shifts a day cannot forever hope to impose their line on two people sitting alone in a room." Understand: that's Cooke talking, the listener attending.

A Cooke's Tour could be circuitous: his mind wandered during his chats, made detours into engagingly irrelevant reminiscence, twisted the topic to include the mandatory reference to golf, his lifelong obsession. But what trips he took his listeners on.



LOVING AMERICA, AND LEAVING IT

From the beginning (the mid-30s), Cooke had his wrangles with the BBC. The bosses did not easily grant the freedom he took as his due. In early days he flooded Bush House with program ideas; later he annoyed the brass and the censors by delivering his copy at the last minute. There were rancorous battles over pronunciation. The word "canine" cued one such skirmish at a 1935 advisory panel meeting chaired by none other than George Bernard Shaw. As Cooke recounts it, Shaw argued: "I believe strongly in following the pronunciation of men who use the word every day in their profession, and my dentist says, 'cane-ine.'" "Then, sir," nipped in the witty Logan Pearsall Smith, "your dentist must be an American." "Of course!" roared Shaw, "how d'you suppose I came to have all my teeth at my age?"

The abiding complaint about Cooke was that he had fallen in love with his beat: was too pro-America. Some members of the BBC thought that Cooke's decision to take American citizenship in 1941, when Britain was waging a lonely war against Hitler, tiptoed toward treason. Over the decades, Cook did defend many of America's more wayward adventures, including last year's Iraq invasion. But this apologist never apologized; his "Letters" were, forthrightly, love letters.

Politically, Cooke was a traditional liberal, close to the policy of The Guardian, which was the official voice of Britain's Liberal Party. He thought F.D.R. a great President for his time, and Lyndon Johnson, whom Cooke admired more than he did John Kennedy, a great and tragic man for his. If "liberal" means open to all ambiguities of human behavior and misbehavior, it applies to Cooke even more clearly. Who else could sit through a two-year trial, and write a book about it, without ever concluding to his own satisfaction whether the man in the dock was guilty or innocent. This was the Alger Hiss case, which Cooke covered like a down blanket for two years in The Guardian and used as the basis for his book "A Generation on Trial."

It's said that liberal is less a state of mind than a time of life: youth and idealistic early middle-age. The age of free love and four-letter words was not congenial to this son of a Methodist lay-preacher. In 1977 he revved himself up for a rare fulmination: "Maybe after years of stumbling in the dark, through the writhing bodies and genitals of filmed and photographed orgies...we shall try again to make a fair and practical definition of freedom of speech that will manage to rid us of the clutter of filth that floats along with the First Amendment and is marketed for lucre in the name of liberty."

He delivered what turned out to be his last letter on February 20th. Here are its last, stark words: "George Bush must be driven from the White House and I'm the man to do it." He was quoting, or paraphrasing, John Kerry, who had in the weeks previous scooted to the head of the Democratic pack; but Cooke stopped short of endorsing the challenge. He had defended the Iraq attack, before, during and after it. He did this in large measure, I think, because of Tony Blair's seemingly enthusiastic and certainly dogged support of the invasion — for reasons all but the top men in both governments know (and the top men may always have known) to be baseless. Cooke argued from the perspective of an old Iraq hand, one appalled by the carnivorous rule of Saddam Hussein. He saw the Iraq invasion as the overthrow of a bad man by men trying to do good.

The first words of that February 20th letter contain its only hint of infirmity — "Propped up there against my usual three pillows ... I was feeling chipper enough to glance across at two bedside piles [of books] and hope for a perfect lullaby before drifting into sleep." — but not enough even to hint that this broadcast would contain his last publicly spoken words.

In many of his last shows, one heard intimations of mortality. Cooke's voice was less robust, the breaths more audible between phrases. But this only added to the intimacy: the old uncle was whispering truths that seemed more precious because they sapped him to speak them. Finally, he may have run out of strength, out of words. Perhaps it took a little bit of heroism to make talking on the radio seem as comfortable as an audio easy chair. If his grieving audience believes, with him, that there are great and good men, then Alfred Alistair Cooke was a good man who built great words, sentences, books — the cogent measure of a turbulent time — out of little "Letters."

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