Talk About America

OVER TWENTY YEARS have passed since Alistair Cooke, now The Guardian's chief American correspondent, began beaming his Sunday night broadcasts to BBC listeners over the globe. Unless you have a good short wave radio, it's impossible to listen to them in the U.S. Which is a pity for, as this collection of 42 such "Letters from America" convincingly demonstrates, Cooke has a keen eye for America and the variety of her people.

Not that he attempts any solemn pronouncements on "The American Character"--Cooke is too wary and talented a journalist to tackle a subject as tangled and usually as dull as that. Rather, he gives an idea of what might be termed American styles--of how various Americans operate, of why class distinctions break down at baseball games or, of all places, at the Kentucky Derby.

A group of New England farmers at a town meeting wants to tear down the town's last covered bridge to avoid paying the $3000 needed to keep it in good repair. The town selectmen, however, have different ideas, and manage to swing the meeting over to their side, by reminding them of other possible costs. Cooke writes, $3.000, it was suddenly discovered, looked like a bargain. So they voted it, in theory to preserve the "old wooden covered bridge," in fact as an insurance premium against damage suits and as a bait to hook the nibbling "historical element." In a way, the passage describes not the preservation of a covered bridge, but rather the preservation of a far rarer ristorical specimen: a center of Yankee parsimony.

In the letters, Cooke uses an artfully constructed rambling style, both to preserve the informality of a personal letter and also to cram a maximum of information, anecdotes, and observations into a five-minute broadcast. One piece begins with a breezy description of the development of Palm Beach Florida--a quiet retreat which, Cooke sadly notes, was created by and for "the fastidiousness of the very rich" not by the act of the legislature, as would befit the U.S.'s democratic pretensions. This is only a prelude to the core of the talk, where Cooke sketches, in only two pages, the strange combination of pomp and efficiency surrounding any United States President, but particularly John F. Kennedy--"the grandson of the Irish saloonkeeper and ward heeler"--who now has an aura far surpassing that of "ordinary" residents of Palm Beach.

THUS DOES Cooke approach his topics: with sketches, vivid description, and not a little humor below the surface. It is somehow appropriate that a chat about a Californian living in the midst of swimming pools, sprinkler systems, and ultra-modern cigarette lighters should conclude with a picture of this "professional Californian"--perhaps the precursor of a new civilization--sitting in his living room with a .22 rifle ready to blast into eternity the next squirrel that tries to munch from his laboriously-fostered grass lawn.

Seldom does Cooke slip into his genre's pitfall: bad amateur anthropology. Their wit not withstanding, his comments on the effect of air conditioning on New York family life do fall into this class, as they become contrived expositions of trivia. He is safer--and much more entertaining--when he sticks to the looser descriptive style of which he is a master.

And when he is not sure of an answer, he is generally honest enough to admit it. His article on Watts brings to mind a Rogers Albritton lecture: a somewhat confused talking out of a problem, changing direction several times in a few pages. Though Cooke finally tags television as a cause of the riots, he seems unsure of himself, and ends by halfheartedly suggesting a plethora of liberal answers to riot-prevention: birth control, blacks, blacks on the police force, public works projects, and the like.

But one should hardly fault a man who says he wants only to bring some glimpses of how people in one country behave to other nations for failing where those with more impressive credentials and a lifetime of experience don't have a record to be proud of. Talk About America doesn't try to give the answers to our various dilemmas, but it's a worthwhile book nonetheless--the sort of thing to pick up on a gloomy night when you're tired of reading riot commission reports, memoirs of draft resisters, and radical solutions for the ghettoes.

And after you've finished reading it, you may even begin looking at catalogs to find a good short wave radio set.