Bertie Russell, on a lecture tour of the US in 1950, summoned Alistair Cooke to a New York apartment. When Cooke waited upon him, Bertrand Arthur William, third Earl Russell - mathematician-philosopher, about to head for Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature - wasted no time on genteel preliminaries, but said: "I asked you here, Cooke, because I wanted to tell you that whenever I read your pieces in the Guardian, I say to myself: That is probably the way it happened."
Mr Cooke was 93 on Tuesday. This weekend - if he gets the health - he will broadcast his Letter from America, telling it "the way it happened", as he did last weekend and as he has been doing for the past 55 years.
Ideological truth
Sometimes, when he reports the story of the week, or reflects upon a story three-quarters of a century old, it is possible to feel that he is leaning a little too far right of centre, as perhaps, these days, with Bush Junior. That is the time to take out and dust off an observation he once made about H.L. Mencken: "He taught me, what I confirmed many times on the road, that there is no such thing as ideological truth and that, to the extent that a reporter is a Liberal reporter or a Communist reporter or a Republican reporter, he is no reporter at all."
When something of considerable - or even great - moment happens on our little planet, all the wire services and all the terrestrial and satellite broadcasters have their whack out of it, making whatever sense of it they may. And then, at the weekend, along comes Cooke - in the tenth decade of his beautiful life - with 15 minutes' airtime (13 1/2, effectively) in which to put shape on it for his listeners on Radio 4 and the World Service. Sometimes, when he is 10 minutes into the broadcast, you look at your watch and think: this time, he is not going to make it. But he always does: he always closes the circle, frequently throwing beams of light into corners that have been dark all week.
Sometimes, when a reporter has been on the road for decades and his legs have gone and his liver is dodgy, he is given a desk job and called - with deepest irony - "distinguished". The word may be used of Mr Cooke, however, with the straightest of straight faces. He has reported American affairs for three British newspapers. His BBC Letter is a thing of unmatched competence and grace. He has won four Emmy Awards for his television work, which includes the series Alistair Cooke's America - an elegant work for which one must seek an equal in Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.
Charlie Chaplin
Alistair Cooke, a Manchester man, born in 1908, was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. A Commonwealth Fund scholarship took him to Yale and Harvard, where he studied drama, in which he intended to make a career. Chance took him to Hollywood, where he became an assistant to Charlie Chaplin, who wanted to keep him, saying, "I'll make you the best light comedian since Seymour Hicks." Cooke was rather miffed at this. "I was thinking just then of becoming Eugene O'Neill," he confesses.
At Harvard, he took a course in the history of the English language in America. He was advised to contact H.L. Mencken, the great Baltimore Sun journalist, an expert on such things as Anglo-American equivalents and the vagaries, in the US, of the phoneme. He visited Mencken and they became close friends. On his last visit, when Mencken was old, they talked about the poet, Edgar Lee Masters, and Mencken wondered when he had died. About 1948, Cooke suggested. "Yeah," said Mencken with no guile at all, "that's right. I believe he died the year I did."
In 1935, back in England, Cooke was asked by NBC, the American network, to broadcast a weekly London Letter to the US. On the abdication of Edward VIII, in 1938, he broadcast reports of that event - which was probably the conditioning factor in his returning permanently to the US, of which he has long been a citizen, and to whose language he makes some concessions while retaining his own English phonemes.
Special pleasure
I first heard Alistair Cooke on an old battery-driven Cosser radio. It seems to me that I have been listening to him since I could first hear. Trying to recall broadcasts of his which gave special pleasure is not easy, because all his work is so rewarding, so stylish, so acute. A broadcast of which I have the clearest memory, however, is one of three he made when he took a dander around Europe. This was a Letter from Dublin.
When he arrived at Shannon, he caught an Aer Lingus plane for Dublin. He noticed that, yes, the country was as green as he had heard it was; that the plane was green; that the hostesses' uniforms were green; that the pilot's name was Greene; that the co-pilot's name was Greene.
In the body of that talk, he displayed a close knowledge of Irish literature, especially drama, his old subject. At the end of the talk, he reflected upon Irish wit, which he found to be of the biting sort. And as the plane took off and began to level out, he heard a voice in his imagination - a voice he recognized as that of Joxer Daly.
"I hear," said the voice, "ya ran into Alisther Cuke when he was here. A darlin' man. Oh, a darlin' man intoirely. By the way, d'jya notice the way he picked hees noase?"