In the absence of a book of non-fiction that I keep close by when I want a rest from a novel, I found this second hand copy of Alistair Cooke's Letters from America 1946-1951 bought from a charity shop a few years ago. It had been languishing at the back of my book case ever since. It was bought because I knew that my mother was an avid listener to his radio programme after the war. Everything stopped for those fifteen minutes, she never missed an episode. My copy was published in 1951 and reprinted in 1984, so is thirty eight years old. The pages are falling out. So here I am, trying to elicit the dulcet tones of his trans-Atlantic dialect. These are some notes from my favourite pieces:
GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL
At the end of summer, they are packing up the cottage at the end of Long Island. It's Labor Day and bringing in the "rusty barbeque grill we haven't used in years".
MY FIRST INDIAN
Here he travels to Santa Fe in the footsteps of D H Laurence who wrote books about the Indian view of life. "I took the Santa Fe train from Los Angeles and discovered, as everybody does, that it doesn't stop at Santa Fe". Going on the Albuquerque and taking the bus.
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA
"An American senator, speaking from those cavernous lungs which the Almighty saved for American senators" Speaking at a conference, the author's piece was on "the comparative significance of cricket and baseball". On the latter, the crowd expects a frequent show of indignation .... it's a good show while it lasts and is included in the price of admission". Compared to "the Englishman's strict fidelity to the umpire's little finger".
LONG ISLAND DUCK
All about Long Island, not just the duck. "The geography of Long Island is very easy to describe. It is a flat fish lying north-east of New York City, parallel with the Connecticut shore. It's nose burrows into Manhattan and it's tail is a hundred miles out to sea. , divided into two forks, or flukes".
"Near Riverhead is a big duck farm.....a small snowscape that turns into several thousand ducks".
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
When J B Priestly visits New York, his subsequent controversial review was picked up by he New York times and created a stir. Cooke had resided in the USA for 15 years when he wrote this piece which is about travellers writing their first observations on a new location.
WINTER AND FLORIDA
Writing about New England and "our regular blight - a winter keen and cold that blasts the land and withers it ....... winter is a thing to be endured ....... come November and again in February and March, the wish that we were somewhere else". That is the escape to Florida. Later we are told about "a jook party or tonk", words I had never heard before.
SPRING - THE NINTH OF APRIL
A sensitive piece about the American civil war, and particularly a glowing portrait of the defeated Robert E Lee. A stunning biography in only three pages. Unbelievably, this head of the Confederate army was first offered by Lincoln the leadership of the Northern Union army. "One of the great ironies of military history".
AMERICAN SUMMER
"Of the four American seasons none is more dramatic or more humbling than the summer. It is a time when heat-waves roam around the continent, moody as bandits, and close in on unsuspecting places, on southern swamps and midland prairies and northern valleys, with thunder out of the Apocalypse and a one night respite of cool after rain". Maybe except for Maine, the Pacific coast and Western Oregon and "the price they pay is the English one. cloudy skies and gentle showers. . but everywhere else summer is a blinding ordeal".
(Later: "you might think that everybody who speaks a form of English knows what a nettle is? ......No!" The author also goes on to explain about a corn dance. But what is corn?
"At this time of year about twenty-odd million Americans are living in some other place than home: in summer camps, by lakes etc etc".
THE FALL OF NEW ENGLAND
Here Alistair Cooke is "marvelling" at "the English spring and New England in the fall". He explains about the phenomime that is the weather with, for example, Arkansas with its "blazing hawthorns" whereas ours "the leaves stay green until the first frost kills them". The evocation of the American countryside is conjured up with sentences like "I drove up and over the hills across New York State into Connecticut..... and the maple with it's bursting sugar which blazes into scarlet". And then on, into Vermont.
MOVING A HOME
The author talks about his old apartment in New York in a community bound by 72nd Street and 68th Street on Lexington Avenue. Here his run down and seedy apartment has a long corridor with the dining room at the far end, "so far away that we used to say let's go to 70th Street and eat". They are moving to another village bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenue. Going up in the world. He talks about the typical open plan American apartment: the door allergy and steam heating. Talking about New York: "This great, plunging, dramatic, ferocious, swift and terrible big city is the most folksy and provincial place I have ever lived in".
MARGARET AND MISSOURI
This is about Margaret Truman, the President's daughter, a mid-western girl hitting Washington society! With the observation "Snobbery is a whole time job over here, and is therefore more conspicuous and more pathetic than it is with the same people in Britain".
NO SYMPATHY FOR APATHY
More about the New York summer, the same latitude as Madrid: "the summer comes in with a crash of thunder , and thereafter the heat broods over the city until it has turned rancid".
"Perhaps New York and other American cities are no place for sensitive souls" ..... "steam pipes under motor parkways so the snow melts as it falls".
IT'S A DEMOCRACY, ISNT IT?
About other people's noise and music. "In Britain, one of the minor duties of good citizenship is not to disturb the private life of other citizens. In this country, it's the other way round"........."the ability not to hear what you don't want to hear, or selective deafness"......."one aspect of the American character, the ability to withstand a great deal of outside interference".
LETTER TO AN INTENDING IMMIGRANT
"Today you can cross the three thousand miles of the American continent and never want for a private bathroom, a cement highway, a night baseball game, an airplane connection, a pair of nylon stockings or a gallon of ice cream in six different flavours".
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