More on Cooke

I don't particularly want to turn this into the Official Alistair Cooke Website, but his passing is of a genuine interest to me. For one thing, he is a breath of another era. He worked on a screenplay with Charlie Chaplin; he befriended H.L. Mencken; he reported from London for NBC on Edward VIII's abdication; and all of this was just in the 1930's. And he was a great writer.

Anne Applebaum, who I admire very much as a thinker and a writer, is partly correct in her column in today's Washington Post about the strange double-image of Cooke, English to the Americans, a psuedo-Brit to the British. And she is quite good on how the aura of Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theater still influences the way that educated Americans view Britain, no matter what the actual place is like. She writes:

"Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke, and this is 'Masterpiece Theater.' "

It was a Sunday evening in the mid-1970s. In Britain there were miners' strikes, blackouts, and weeks without garbage collection. Sterling had collapsed, or was about to. Punk rock was in its early adolescence. The nation was gripped by post-imperial depression, and obsessed with its own decline. But within the little square box that Alistair Cooke inhabited while he introduced the latest BBC costume drama -- "Upstairs, Downstairs" or the "Forsyte Saga" or, later, the beloved "Brideshead Revisited" -- Britain appeared unchanged since its Edwardian heyday. Cooke always sat on the same sort of high-backed armchair, and always wore the same sort of neat gray suit. He spoke slowly -- what was the rush? -- and kept his hands neatly folded in his lap. He was, in other words, just what we wanted an Englishman to be, and I have no doubt that he knew it.

But I think she goes a bit far when she says that he did "a peculiar disservice" by showing a old-style England to Americans, and a genial and quaint America to the English. He wasn't really that simplistic, at least not as I heard him in the last four years of his life. And by all the accounts and scripts I've read, he was never that simplistic in the first fifty-four years of his career, either.

Applebaum also doesn't mention, or doesn't appreciate, what an exquisite literary stylist Cooke was. Fortunately the New York Times and Daily Telegraph writers do, and in their obituaries make clear just what a consumate craftsman the old pro could be at his best. Speaking of style, the Telegraph obituary is one of the classics of the genre; I really wish that the Washington Post would start copying them, for goodness knows that every day someone dies in the Washington, DC area or in the United States who is more than worthy of the Telegraph treatment. The Times has not so much an obituary, with rolling, sonorous, lingering prose rythyms and melodies, as a profile of the deceased. But it's great.

A tidbit from the Telegraph:

"Here [in the United States]," [Cooke] said, "they think I'm an old English gent, and in England they think I'm a sort of enlightened American."

The key to this dual identity was Cooke's voice, instantly identifiable, easy on the ear, betraying nothing, acceptable to all. And the voice originated, like his infatuation with America, as a brilliant young man's escape from what, in a rare unguarded moment, he once described as "the snobbery and seediness of English life".

And, with the last word, here is Cooke quoted in the Times on the hard work of writing:

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Mr. Cooke reminisced about his long career, especially "Letter From America," and the discipline he imposed on it.

"I would pick my topic on Monday and spend the day researching it," he said. "On Tuesday I'd type two or two and a half pages, all my arthritis would allow me. I'd type the rest, another three pages, on Wednesday, 1,700 words total ? 13 minutes 30 seconds air time.

"Then I'd beat the hell out of it, getting rid of all the adverbs, all the adjectives, all the hackneyed words. Do you know what Mark Twain said about the perfect word? The difference between a perfect word and a near-perfect word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Go forth and do likewise.