HOW I MISS ALISTAIR COOKE

In 1942, to get a sense of America, Alistair Cooke took to the road. He started in New York, went south to Florida, then west through the Deep South, taking in New Orleans and Texas. After that he headed straight west to California, then up the coast from San Diego through Los Angeles and San Francisco, into the piney lands of the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle he drove east again, down through the heart of the country, through Denver and Kansas City, into the farm belt, before he followed the train tracks to the industrial North, to Minneapolis and Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. After the Great Lakes, he passed through home (which New York had become) into a New England Fall, and up the coast more or less to Canada. Today there are a number of ways to give a shape and purpose to such a journey: there is the National Parks tour, the Native American tour, the Soul tour, the Jazz tour, the Barbecue tour, the Civil War tour – and, of course, though Cooke came too early for it, the Civil Rights tour. Cooke, though, wanted to see how the country was preparing for war.
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His travelogue opens with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; it closes with the death of Roosevelt and the bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is odd about it, as a war chronicle, is that he spent his time so far away from the war. It is the varying strength of the quake, at such a distance from the epicentre, that Cooke tried to measure – although he was suitably sceptical of his mission: “You smell around the town for the always elusive odor of ‘morale’”. Some of the flickers he registered were so faint as to be almost imperceptible. A soda jerk in Charleston had run out of Coca-Cola. “I walked sadly back to the hotel, convinced that the war was beginning to – if not at last push us around with a velvet glove – administer a gentle nudge to the American way of life.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, no one in the aftermath of the war had much interest in such an account: the sick have a greater appetite than the convalescent for the details of what ails them. This leaves the book in a strange position: it is written in the casual journalistic vein of a magazine report, but its best, most curious readership was always going to be posterity.
Cooke has found that posterity. The manuscript, long laid aside, was discovered in a cupboard a few weeks before his death in 2004. Its value, as a historical record, has only increased with time, particularly as one of the great objects of his curiosity – what it means to be an American – has not lost its relevance. And roadtripping is still a national pastime. “The automobile has never been”, Cooke wrote, “as it still is to Europeans, a symbol of luxury or even of comfort. It is as necessary to the well-being of Americans as love or a place to keep things cold. And by 1942 it was probably the most irksome American loss.” Fuel wasn’t the only thing in short supply; the rubber of good tyres was more important than the quality of the car attached to them, and Cooke was lucky to have a supply of both. Trains, he decided early on, would never take him to the America he wanted to see: it is a country that can only be reached by road.
Cooke had a fine eye for natural variation; and much of the book is taken up by an account of the fluidly changing landscapes and the different kinds of people who make use of them. Whether climate, in the largest sense, produces character is one of the questions he sets out to answer. The rainy seasons of the Willamette Valley, it seems to him, have taught Oregonians an English stoicism: they’re grumblers not howlers. But racial questions always muddy the waters: the locals, in any case, are mostly Anglo-Saxons. “This is the kind of landscape”, he remarks of Tennessee, “God planned for a civilization that had emerged out of war. It is by a disturbing coincidence the same kind of landscape that He gave so richly to Germany. Perhaps that is why the Germans, who can fight so ruthlessly, weep and give in when their own border is threatened.” One of the ways his book shows the passage of time is the confidence with which he deals in ethnic generalizations.
It’s the sin of his trade, he remarks: “We are a tribe of artful men who have learned over the years to stifle our doubts about our own capacity to observe”. Sometimes, of course, he would have been better off listening to his doubts. In particular, he writes about race relations, about Negroes in capitals, and whites in the lower case, in a way no one would dream of writing now: with a casual descriptive interest that probably seemed to him at the time the light touch of objectivity. Cooke is equally unembarrassed in characterizing his countrymen. Pilots from the Royal Flying Corps, stationed in Georgia, strike him “as the first rough hew of a new generation of English democrats . . . . These boys were not recruited out of a theory of social democracy. They were Britons, seventeen years of age, who were available, deceptively apt, and in a galumphing way responsible and personally courageous”. Yet his sympathies, as well as his curiosities, are mostly in the right place. “We’re all right to shoot at”, a black soldier complained to him, about the train station showers, which were reserved for whites, “but not so good to keep clean.”
Oddly enough, it is his willingness to deal in types, to present them openly, to question them, to draw tentative conclusions about them, that makes the book. He is acutely conscious, driving across the country, of travelling through an economy as much as through a geography. The great effect of the war, on the American home front, was to shift around the populations of its workers: class and ethnic tensions were the inevitable result. “Stoop labour” was the term used for Americans (mostly black and Hispanic) who did the jobs that whites refused to. Suddenly, they were in short supply for. Any farmer whose crop had been deemed inessential. Labour travelled to where the war work was – a country of immigrants had taken to the road again. Chicago became “a frenzied microcosm of the American city at war”:
“Booming retail trade, desperate housing shortages everywhere, a soaring standard of living with undrafted boys in their early twenties making 100 dollars a week and buying a bond or two on the side, and newly married war-workers plumping down ready cash for homes and furniture, lavish juvenile delinquency; rising venereal disease; a Negro population impatient against the ban on color in war factories but moving up into the trucking, janitoring, clerking jobs the whites have left for “defense” and high money . . . . ”
Not everything was done well, but the book makes clear just how much was done. America in the Second World War, Harold Evans notes in a foreword, “stepped up its war output by a staggering twenty-five times” – this is the large story behind the small stories in Cooke’s “Life on the home front”.
The type that most interests him, in all its variety, is the American. In the years that followed, Cooke grew only more comfortable with the transatlanticism of his role. He “was the special relationship”, a bit of blurb from the Daily Mail declares on the back of his collected Letter from America. I knew him first, as a child growing up in Texas, as the quintessentially English host of Masterpiece Theatre, the programme that brought British drama, such as Brideshead Revisited, to American television. We saw him sitting, surrounded by leather books, by opera glasses, snuff boxes and hip flasks, etc, in the comfort of what seemed to be an English country house. He played, on both sides of the Atlantic, the part of eccentric uncle, introducing shy cousins to each other, in terms that made them only more shy of each other. One of the feelings his American Journey leaves behind is a kind of nostalgia for what those terms used to be.
“Grandiosity . . . is to other nations the most unpleasant of all American traits – the unbridled promise, the wild freedom of untested assertion, the invitation to share the cornucopia that is stuffed with the peculiar American riches: such unique things, the native honestly believes, as devilish ingenuity wedded to unequaled material and spiritual resources. What exacerbates the foreigner’s annoyance is his secret awareness that there is an uncomfortable measure of truth in the boast.”
Stereotypes evolve subtly, but it isn’t only the measure of truth that has changed.