The Anglo-American. - Review - book review

National Review, Dec 18, 2000 by Tracy Lee Simmons

Alistair Cooke: A Biography, by Nick Clarke (Arcade, 546 pp., $29.95)

Latter-day mavens of PBS know Alistair Cooke as the courtly, avuncular host who presented the best of British television drama throughout the '70s and '80s on Masterpiece Theatre. Few realize that this venerable journalist and polymath has chronicled most of 20th-century American history in the making, notebook in hand. His first transatlantic voyage in 1932 brought him to the shores of a nation led by Herbert Hoover, and he has survived to report on the bizarre standoff between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Both as a newspaper correspondent and, since 1946, as the proprietary voice of Letter from America, his BBC radio chats on American life for English audiences, Cooke has reported on the rise

and fall of kings and presidents, recorded in vivid words the splendor of New England autumns, and mused on the crack of baseball bats on summer afternoons.

Born in Manchester in 1908, Cooke spent his youth in Blackpool, where as a child in 1917 he first laid eyes on American soldiers over to help fight the Great War. By the 1920s the bright and precocious Cooke had gained admission to Cambridge, no mean feat for a boy of modest origins. There he fell under the tutelage of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the eccentric slayer of cant and jargon in English prose, and Cooke's own mature prose style betrays a decisive debt to "Q," as he was known, as well as to H. L. Mencken, Cooke's American mentor. Cooke's fate was sealed when, on the eve of earning a First in English, his supervisor, the redoubtable E. M. W. Tillyard, judged him with niggardly prescience: "Satisfactory, but a journalist's mind." Yet perhaps only a man with the pliant, far-ranging mind of a journalist could stand as genial interpreter of the United States and her institutions for Britons-and later play the reverse role for Americans: the veritable embodiment throughout much of the 20th century of the "special" Anglo-American bond.

As a young man, Cooke traipsed through Europe as far as curiosity and cash would take him. One day he found himself standing on a street corner in Germany hearing Hitler mesmerizing a small crowd, a moment that provided him his "first political lesson in the fragility of freedom." Then came a scholarship award from the Commonwealth Fund for travel to America. Starting off at Yale, he ended up at Harvard, where he studied the peregrinations of the English language in the United States.

Within a year of his arrival, Cooke was shooting back dispatches on Hollywood for the London Observer, one of which occasioned a lasting friendship with Charlie Chaplin. Later he freelanced for the London Times. But these jobs weren't sustaining; the Times, he later said, merely "kept you in cigarettes." Cooke needed a real job, and one virtue of this new biography lies in the spadework of Nick Clarke-himself a host and commentator for the BBC's Radio Four-in documenting Cooke's struggle to gain a footing in his chosen profession; success, as it often does, dripped from a slow faucet.

Then, quite without design, Cooke landed in radio. After marathon days of broadcasting for NBC from New York on the constitutional crisis attending Edward VIII's abdication in 1936, Cooke had found his metier. His easy conversational manner served well such an intimate medium. By 1946, the war over, BBC Radio approved a short weekly program of commentary to be written and presented by Cooke, who was by now an American citizen, and the Letter from America was born. (Winston Churchill never missed it.) This job, coupled with a foreign-correspondent's post for the Manchester Guardian, defined his professional life for the next half century. He would be at ease before both the typewriter and the microphone.

But the Alistair Cooke that Americans know today is a product of the 1950s, when he mastered one more medium. In the spring of 1952, a television producer, Robert Saudek, heard Cooke's remarks on receiving a Peabody Award, and immediately asked him to host an American television program, which was to be a kind of variety show for the mind. He agreed, and Omnibus premiered the following fall. During its nine-year run, the program featured Leonard Bernstein-in his first television appearance-explaining the intricacies of Beethoven's genius with orchestra players standing astride a giant score; Gene Kelly employing famous athletes to illustrate dance moves; and actors like James Dean and Hume Cronyn performing original plays.

When not speaking to the wider world, Cooke compiled several books. Some-One Man's America; Talk About America, 1951-1968; and America Observed-are drawn directly from his radio talks and newspaper pieces, while others-The Americans and The Patient Has the Floor-present eclectic mixes of broadcasts and speeches (including one before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974). Six Men, one of the remarkable books of our time, provides character sketches of six legends Cooke got to know well: Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson, Humphrey Bogart, and Bertrand Russell.