Alistair Cooke - The Americans: Letters from America 1969–1979

ALISTAIR COOKE

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The Americans

Letters from America 19691979

Alistair Cooke

Contents

A Note to the Reader

The word reader ought to be in strong italics. For these are talks meant to be listened to. And the job of writing and then performing a radio talk has been for me, down forty-odd years, by far the most challenging and satisfying craft of any I have attempted in a lifetime of journalism.

The challenge is not to write for your friends, or the intelligentsia, or your newspaper editor, but for an audience that spans the human gamut in very many countries. For these weekly thirteen-and-a-half-minute talks were broadcast first in the Home Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation and then aired, through the overseas services of the BBC, on every continent (they can be heard in the United States only on the short wave). It is a great privilege to have the ear, at least the opportunity to entice the ear, of ordinary people and extraordinary people in countries as far apart as Scotland and Malaysia. I stress the unique satisfactions of the medium because nothing could be more rewarding than the sort of letter which acknowledges that a German grocer has been touched by an obituary piece on Dean Acheson or a Lord Chief Justice moved by the story of an illiterate black girl who swiped a baby from the incubator of a New York hospital.

Radio is literature for, so to speak, the blind. For one friend sitting in a room, not for any large collective audience that might be assembled in Madison Square Garden. And because the one friend in a room may be of any colour, any station in life, any sort of education, the radio talker must try to write in an idiom acceptable to almost everybody who normally speaks the language. There are vocabularies, such as you would write for your newspaper or for a serious periodical, which are taboo as talk. Ideally, one ought to be Daniel Defoe, or John Bunyan, or Pepys, or Mark Twain, or the Jacobean translators of the Book of Genesis. This is, of course, an almost impossible challenge, and it is rarely met and conquered. Consequently, in going over these talks for publication I have made the most of the privilege of print to straighten out the syntax (which one doesnt do in conversation) and to introduce occasionally literary words that are more exact and that will not throw the much smaller race of book-readers.

During the Second World War, I did a weekly broadcast from America that concentrated, understandably, on the progress of the war effort and on its human exasperations. Once the war was over, I was invited by the BBC to forget our preoccupation with Armageddon and talk about anything and everything that occurred to me about life in America. The series, called Letter From America, started in March 1946, for a preliminary try-out of thirteen weeks. I hope it will not sound vain if I say that nothing I have done in journalism, or in the past few years in television, has given me more pride than the fact that the series still goes on and is now in its thirty-fourth year.

The talks were done once a week when I was busy with other things. For twenty-five years I was writing a daily report for the (Manchester) Guardian as its chief correspondent in the United States. For more than two years, between 1969 and 1972, I was trekking across and around the United States writing and filming the television series, America. The talks were, and are, never prepared. 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 to 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 evenings conversation is to be about.

Like the talks in two previous collections (Letters from America and Talk About America) these appear in chronological order, with three exceptions. The first talk (which combines two talks) seemed to be a proper introduction to the whole book. The second Letter From Long Island assumed you knew things elaborated on in the first. And it seemed sensible to put the so-called Epilogue to Watergate immediately after the last talk on the whole episode rather than in its historical place, three years later.

Otherwise, there is only one other thing to say, which I cant say better than I did in the preface to a previous collection: Most Americans, in spite of the evangelism of bloodshot politicians, live their lives without any feeling of national destiny and without seeing their country as the big brutal world power of the nasty cartoons. My aim is still what it was when these talks began: to run up and down the human scale that unites a Lancashireman to a Texan and a German to a Siamese.

A.C.

Nassau Point, Long Island.

Summer, 1979

Telling One Country About Another