I can see him now, sitting in that easy chair in the book-lined room, facing the camera with that wise and all-encompassing intimacy with literature, culture and journalism that had been his hallmark for so many decades. He was always my model of what it must be like to age with grace and dignity. Urbane, witty and intelligent, a master narrator and storyteller.
I can hear the background music starting now. The familiar and comforting notes of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s Rondeau. It’s 9 pm on a Sunday night. The year is 1973, and Alistair Cooke is introducing another episode of Mobil Masterpiece Theater on PBS. It’s a dramatization of a novel by Dickens, or Trollope, or perhaps Henry James. Whatever it was that week, it was television with refinement, what TV ought to always been capable of doing, but which, in the vast media intellectual wasteland of the 70s and 80s was instead full of pre-fabricated sitcoms and violence that catered to the lowest common denominator. That seemed to be television’s sole purpose — crude and unintelligent entertainment. It’s a mass medium, after all. That was back then. Now we have the infinite selections of great stuff available to us on multiple streaming platforms, including my favorite, YouTube. Times have certainly changed.
I didn’t watch Masterpiece Theater for too many years. I actually stopped watching it in the ’70s, even though it went on for another 15 years introduced by Cooke. The magic years for me were the early 70s. But every now and then I’d tune in and see that familiar and warm face and voice, the same man who did the weekly Letter From America radio program for the BBC for broadcast in Great Britain.
He never seemed to age or change. The measured words. The masterful articulation of sentences that were finely crafted beforehand and delivered so effectively.
He was also famous for “Alistair Cooke’s America,” an acclaimed 13-part documentary series on PBS, as well as a book of the same title.
It was Cooke’s collection of essays by H.L. Mencken titled “The Vintage Mencken” that first introduced me to the savage wit and biting social criticism of the famous Baltimore newspaper columnist, author, linguist and iconoclast..
Despite all the chaos and change in my life, wandering around the country, landing in one place after another, there was always that little bit of continuing and unchanging order, that civilized countenance, that could be found each Sunday night speaking to you as if you were seated opposite him in the same room, a crackling fire going in the fireplace on a cold winter evening.
Russell Baker took over the job from Cooke, and he was very good, too, but of course Alistair Cooke was irreplaceable.
When I got older, I hoped I would be rather like him. Mental faculties fully in place. Wisdom recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth would say. A man who was widely read and cultured, and who had a great and abiding appreciation for the glories of the written word.
In the case of Cooke, he was a journalist and historian who obviously had a great love of novels. I will always feel like I am a writer and journalist, and, although I don’t read novels, I did at one time, and they were some of the classics of literature, and I’ve never forgotten them.
I had an English professor at the University of New Orleans around this same time in the early 1970s whom I admired a great deal, and who was my academic advisor since I was an English major. His name was Edward M. Socola. I took three courses under him, including two surveys of American literature. I remember him quite well these many years later. I’m not saying I knew him well at the time. Professors were generally rather distant from their students. I only conferred a few times with him about my course progression, but I did gain many insights about him through the way he taught his courses, his obvious love of American literature, and the way he personified a kind of old-world elevation of thought and intellect that is so missing in most of popular culture today.
We’ve always had a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country. I sensed it as a youth in high school and before that. I didn’t have to read tomes on the subject to know that scholarly pursuits were secondary to other kinds of achievement in school, that the smart and studious kids were considered, if not outcasts, then certainly different and set apart from the majority of students.
I remember once being rather taken aback and offended by a comment one of my high school classmates wrote in my senior yearbook. It wasn’t anything bad she wrote, it was just indicative of the whole mentality of “do as little as you can get away with” that was so pervasive among the “average” student. I was surprised it came from her. She complimented me saying she had “never met a guy with such a sense of humor and terrific wit as yours.” That part was very true and nice, if I don’s say so myself, but then she wrote, “Never forget English with Mrs. B. — You and I never read those stupid books…”
Now what bothered me about it was the sheer audacity. I couldn’t believe she would think I hadn’t carefully read each and every one of those novels, which I most certainly had. Although the only one I really remember is Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Oxbow Incident, and not much about it either, the fact is I took learning very seriously in the late 1960s when I was in high school. I did all the assignments by the time they were due. I enjoyed literature, although not the tests and quizzes that came with the assignments. But for her to presume that I thought it was some kind of waste of time, as she obviously did, was just egregious to me.
Now, all that literature I read in my high school must have had some impact. My teachers weren’t too inspiring, to say the least, but I think the sheer eloquence of the prose and poetry had the desired effect: instilling of respect for, and curiosity about, literature and its possibilities, and the beauty and majesty of the English language when exemplified by great literature, although school itself tended to dampen one’s enthusiasm for all this. I determined to be an English major in college the following year, and never looked back or regretted the decision.
And, it was people like Alistair Cooke and my American literature professor who cultivated a love of reading in me. I had a love of books and reading that existed since my early youth, but it was not something that stirred great intellectual excitement in me. That came only in college. I really liked the selection of short stories my professor chose for us to read, and I recall how I wanted through the years to preserve my copy of the anthology in which they were reprinted.
Years later, our paths were to cross again. It was 1992, and I was back in New Orleans for a short time when my father was gravely ill with cancer. I and my brother and mother were sitting in the ICU waiting room at Baptist Hospital. I looked up and stared in disbelief at the familiar face of the man sitting a short distance away reading a book. He hardly seemed any different at all 20 years later. I went up to him, and he said he also had recognized me, although not distinctly. It was so good to see him. I told him that he had done a good job teaching us, and that “your students remember you all these years later.” I think he really appreciated my telling him that. I rattled off some of the titles of the books we had read for an elective course in the literature of Americans abroad: Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, Twain’s Innocents Abroad, both of which I remember well to this day. I could sense he was pleased I remembered the works we had studied. I just thought it was remarkable I would see him in that place, at that time.
As for Cooke, I see him as a man of letters, a champion of literature and the power of words to elevate and inspire. Maybe one of the reasons I fancy myself a writer today is partly because of the influence of those two men, and also what they represented: refinement and attentiveness to the best our culture has to offer, something many people today would prefer to shout down and mock in their headlong rush to be amused, enraged and entertained by social media. The decline of reading today is already evident. This is very sad.
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