(HOST) Tomorrow is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alistair Cooke. VPR commentator and Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director Peter Gilbert tells us about a new collection of Alistair Cooke’s writings to commemorate the occasion.
(GILBERT) The book is called Alistair Cooke Reporting America, The Life of the Nation 1946-2004. It comes out in this country tomorrow, in honor of his birthday exactly a century ago. It was published in the country of his birth, England, last month. And it contains, along with wonderful photographs, 88 of his Letters from America, almost all of them previously uncollected.
Many Americans know Alistair Cooke as the longtime host of Masterpiece Theater. The British and others know him principally through his weekly BBC radio broadcasts, Letter from America. They lasted 58 years, easily the longest-running radio series in history. That’s 2,869 broadcasts before his retirement in February 2004, just a month before he died at the age of ninety-five. His reporting made him, an English-born American citizen, the preeminent interpreter of America to Britain and the world.
The book is a double treat because it also includes an eloquent introduction and decade-by-decade commentaries by his daughter, Vermont resident Susan Cooke Kittredge, which provide personal insights into her father’s life and character. Susan is about to step down as the senior minister of the Old Meeting House, a community church in East Montpelier. Her personal take complements his global perspective, sketching the man who gave voice to such incisive observations.
Susan’s commentaries are insightful, poignant, and sometimes funny. She writes about going fishing with her father in the pre-dawn hours when she was a little girl, his later obsession with golf, his infatuation with, of all people, Vanna White, her father’s reaction to her decision to become a minister, and his underlying faith. She tells about overhearing her mother, who was "frugal by nature and upbringing," speaking on the phone shortly after Alistair Cooke died, [Her mother said,] ‘They gave him three months and he only used one.’
Eighteen months after her father’s death, Susan learned that his body had been stolen the night he died and his bones illegally sold for illicit bone marrow transplantation. After that travesty, she found working on the book and the opportunity it provided to recollect and reflect enormously restorative – "to remember that he could whistle and hum two parts of a tune simultaneously," to recall just "how engaged he was with the major events in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century," and to read his work again, the witnessing "of a great writer with a keen eye, extraordinary memory, seasoned perspective, and tender heart."
"Perhaps he was so good at what he did," his daughter concludes, "because, as he interpreted America for Great Britain and the rest of the world, he endeavored to reconcile and balance his own character and life, a life steeped in centuries of tradition and history, and then dramatically injected with the vitality, youth, and exuberance of a new nation. His love of both countries was the secret of his wisdom and the inspiration for his work."