The American fondness for Alistair Cooke, whose death at 95 was reported yesterday by the BBC, seems to have no
bounds. Appreciations praising his journalism — to say nothing of his charm, wit, intelligence and
erudition — have appeared everywhere today, filling many column inches.
Like just about everybody else, I too have a sweet recollection of him: “Short of
burning his golf clubs, the surest way to lose Alistair Cooke’s affection is to describe him as a
television personality.” That was my lead for an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, written nearly
22 years ago, which sticks in memory as if it happened yesterday.
The embarrassing irony, not lost on Cooke, was that Knopf had just brought out a book he’d
written with a high-sounding title — “Masterpieces” — tied to the television series “Masterpiece
Theater,” which he had hosted for 10 years. But at least the book’s essays on authors and subjects
dramatized in the series were steeper than his cozy comments at the top of each program. At
2,000 words each, they offered his views of Dickens, Austen, Balzac, Hardy, Dostoevsky,
Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola and James, and his critical ruminations about such programs as “Upstairs,
Downstairs,” “I, Claudius,” “Lillie,” “The Duchess of Duke Street” and “Edward and Mrs.
Simpson.”
Americans who occasionally got to read syndicated versions of Cooke’s newspaper articles in
the Manchester Guardian, before he retired in 1972 as chief correspondent, know how well he
wrote. But they rarely got to hear his 15-minute BBC radio broadcasts, “Letters From America.”
To miss those was to miss the fact that his limpid prose — whether on television or on the printed
page — was a function of radio, which he called “literature for blind men.”
Cooke much preferred radio to television “because the pictures were better,” he often said,
quoting the remark of a 7-year-old boy that he’d heard of. “You are in charge of the
picture,” Cooke elaborated. “If you stand up against the Empire State Building on
television and tell its history, which is ghoulish and funny, viewers are saying, ‘He looks a little
tired,’ or, ‘He’s not as thin as he used to be.’ Whereas if you tell the story on radio, your words
create the picture, and that’s what I love. The voice does the whole thing.”
More with less — it was a theme that ran through Cooke’s conversation. In literature he
always admired such writers as Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan for the simplicity of their prose,
“and some of the early Hemingway because he planed down the language like nobody since
Dryden.” His appreciation of Dickens, a volcano of creativity with no time to polish, was the main
exception.
Because Americans of my generation knew him best from “Masterpiece Theater,” I asked him
whether he thought the series had any lasting value, especially since it had become the butt of
jokes as a stilted trend-setter for middlebrow taste. Cook took the point. But his comeback was a
fascinating, if typically name-dropping anecdote about the historian George Kennan’s evaluation
of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the long-running soap opera that Cooke said was “‘Masterpiece
Theater’ at its best.”
“We were at a kind of farewell party at the British Embassy when Lord Ramsbotham was
leaving his post as the ambassador to the United States,” Cooke said. “I asked Kennan, whom I’d
known for 30-odd years, what he was doing and everyone was naturally attentive, because he is a
most distnguished statesman and so on.
“He said he was doing this history of British diplomacy from 1897 on, and he had just seen
some astonishing documents that had become available. But then he got off this remark that he
had found something better than any of it. And we all said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘I’ve come on one
thing showing, step by step and more clearly and more ruthlessly than any diplomatic file, that it
was the upper classes, not the lower, that cracked. And that is the television series, ‘Upstairs,
Downstairs.'”
Apparently the three U.S. senators in the group didn’t know what Kennan was talking about,
Cooke recalled, “since members of the Congress never watched television.” Their wives, who did,
were a little ashamed to admit they were familiar with the series, he added, not forgetting to point
out that if George Kennan found “Upstairs, Downstairs” more useful than documents from which
history books are made, then “Masterpiece Theater” surely had lasting value.
So much praise of Cooke requires balance from a skeptic. So here it is, by Jess Bravin, who
once wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Nothing soothes America’s cultural inferiority complex
like having an Englishman tell us we’re great. Unfortunately, all too few Englishmen seem willing
to do that; even the colonies of British rock stars in New York always seem to act like they’re
slumming. Face it: There’s no way an Englishman can say ‘Big Mac, please’ and not sound like he’s
making fun of us. As a result, that rare Englishman we do manage to turn can ride the waves of
New World gratitude to stardom. How else to explain Richard Dawson? Or, indeed, Alistair
Cooke?”
