Alistair Cooke - Letters from America, 1946–1951

ALISTAIR COOKE

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Letters From America

19461951

Alistair Cooke

CONTENTS

TO THE BRITISH READER

Some months after the war was over the B.B.C. asked me to go to London and discuss the sort of broadcasting I might do in what was then called the peace. I had been talking about America to Britain since 1934 and from America to Britain since three years after that. My one-man band met the same fate as everybody elses in the autumn of 1939. And through the war years I doubled in brass and learned to play the solemn trombone of a political commentator. Politics will undoubtedly bedevil us all till the day we die, but when General MacArthur stood on the deck of the Missouri and said in his resounding baritone, These proceedings are closed, I took him at his word and, like most other people, yearned to get back to the important things in life. Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered, anyway. And it would be a crime against Nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it puts off enjoying those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place, and which the gravest statesman and the hoarsest politicians hope to make available to all men in the end: I mean the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under trees, to read, to hit a ball and bounce the baby.

The suspicion that these things are what most men and women everywhere want led me to suggest, in London in 1946, that Britons might be more honestly enticed into an interest in America and Americans by hearing about their way of life and their tastes in these fundamental things than by suffering instruction in the procedures of the American Senate and the subtleties of the corn-hog ratio. Mr Lindsay Wellington, then director of the Home Service, responded so promptly to this that he suggested I forget politics altogether and accept an assignment to talk about anything and everything in America that interested me. To do this for a large and very mixed audience, ranging from shrewd bishops to honest carpenters, was a challenge to explain in the simplest and most vivid terms the passions, the manners, the flavour of another nations way of life. It was a formidable assignment, for though a man might make sense of his travels in his own way for his own friends, broadcasting demands of him, if he respects the medium at all, that, as the old Greek had it, he think like a wise man and talk in the language of the people. I dont know whether this has ever been done, except at various times by minstrels, the greatest religious teachers and comedians of genius.

But out of this bold ambition grew a series of weekly talks to Britain which I called Letters from America. They were commissioned in March 1946 for a tentative run of thirteen weeks; and by the grace of the B.B.C., the receptiveness of the British listener, and the stubborn endurance of the pound sterling, they still at this writing go on. After a year or two the number of listeners asking for copies of scripts began to strain the mimeographing resources of the B.B.C.s New York office. Some people took so kindly to them that they urged me to put them out as a book. This has the same effect on a broadcaster as a nomination for the Presidency of the United States on a first-class cement manufacturer. The thing is patently absurd except to his cronies, but the idea first flatters, then haunts him, and he ends by feeling be must accept a sacred duty to save the Republic.

Publishers began to massage me and lonely widows to cajole me until it seemed churlish to resist. There was, however, a more honest flattery that gave me pause. A good many of the letters I have had from listeners to this series were from people who can hardly put pen to paper. Their taste seemed to coincide with my own: they had got pleasure from talks which I felt had managed to convey some human experience in a language most people can understand. These successes averaged about one in five, but they are not necessarily the ones that look best in print. But by the time the series had run to two hundred there appeared to be a good handful that would survive the translation into black and white. Accordingly, the pieces that follow were selected by this test. They were chosen on no other principle, though I have tried to include pieces about the things that first puzzle the visiting European, so that the book can be taken as a painless introduction to living in the United States. I have naturally succumbed to the pieces that produced the heaviest fan mail. And though I can find no justification for including a piece of reporting that is no practical help to anybody but a kidnapper, the mail was enormous after the talk I have here called A Baby is Missing.

I have given some sort of grammatical shape to sentences that ended nowhere, as sentences do in life. And where I failed to say something tricky in a simple way, I have made so bold as to use words I would never use before a microphone, but which should not stump the small sophisticated race known as book-readers. Otherwise, except for a little trimming and polishing, these pieces appear here as they were broadcast. In their original form, a few of them were printed in the