A Radio Broadcaster Who Lived by ‘Show, Don’t Tell’

The husk in his voice was a bit like Ronald Reagan’s, and so, too, was the easygoing “Well ... “, interjected as if to take stock of where he had brought his listener and consider where he might head next. The art of conversation is like any other. Its practitioners far outnumber those who are real masters. No one should be able to make extemporaneous talk so effortless as Alistair Cooke did.

But if you are a writer, there was something even closer to the core of the man, and it was the way he used words on paper. He was, after all, a foreign correspondent long before radio, and then television, found him, and to the end he considered himself a reporter and a writer. Good writers try to live by the injunction “show, don’t tell.” Ask half a dozen writers what that means, and you’ll get half a dozen answers, and yet every writer knows intuitively. It means something like this:

“What I saw was a small man so short in the thighs that when he stood up he seemed smaller than when he was sitting down. He had a plum pudding of a body and a square head stuck on it with no intervening neck. His brown hair was parted exactly in the middle, and the two cowlicks touched his eyebrows. He had very light blue eyes small enough to show the whites above the irises, which gave him the earnestness of a gas jet when he talked, an air of resigned incredulity when he listened, and a merry acceptance of the human race and all its foibles when he grinned.”

This was Cooke writing about H.L. Mencken, unread today but in his time the most lacerating newspaper columnist in the land.

When Cooke broke into journalism in the 1930s, the newspaper feature story scarcely existed and the “profile” -- a story focused on a single person -- was not yet daily fare. Today the profile is a staple of newspapers and magazines alike, and the reasons are not far to seek. Television has brought us the chimera of “personality,” and with it the illusion that we can peel away the public persona and know what this or that celebrity or politician is “really like.”

Cooke was one of the first masters of the form, and yet he abhorred its pretensions. “Anyone who has been subjected to press interviews or, worse, to profiles ‘in depth’ (usually composed on the basis of a two-hour conversation),” he once wrote, “knows that only very rarely does the printed piece approximate to a plausible account of the subject’s views, let alone to a recognizable sketch of a character that is not a stereotype.”

But one of the most basic human impulses is to know someone else. We casually ask of someone, “What’s he like?” and our ears are alert for those markers -- good or bad, telling or wildly mistaken -- that define an individual to our satisfaction.

Cooke understood this. His early love had been the theater. He had come to the States in 1932, in fact, on a drama fellowship, but became infatuated with the crazy variety and rude energy of a country he could see both intimately and yet from a critical distance. He loved politics and he loved Hollywood, and had a dramatist’s gift for limning actors on the public stage.

Of Humphrey Bogart he wrote:

“Many first acquaintances were dropped at once when, out of shyness probably, they tried to adopt some of the Bogart bluster in the hope of showing right away that they were his sort. One of his sort was enough for him.”

The words are from an elegiac remembrance titled “Epitaph for a Tough Guy.” Nothing better about Bogey has ever been written. It not only is a profile of the man, but also the kind of film criticism one never reads -- understated in its wit, shrewd in its psychological insight.

As Philip Marlowe in film adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s private-eye novels, Bogart was heir to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. But he was at the same time peculiarly American, and audiences understood this:

“Holmes possessed an uncanny sense of the whereabouts of distressed gentlewomen and had memorized the Paddington train timetables against the day of their rescue. Bogart knows all about hotels from Yokohama to New York: the tactical geography of suites, connecting doors, and fire escapes, how to confuse the room clerk and evade the house dick, determine the clientele by a glance around the lobby, know who is up to no good and where she is likely to be.”

But these are the movies, “mere” entertainment. We are satisfied if they are even that, and have no reason to expect much more from movie criticism.

What Cooke brought to reportage -- whether his subject was an actor or a politician -- was a piercing vision of what T.S. Eliot called “the skull beneath the skin.” Of Adlai Stevenson, twice a failed candidate for the presidency, he wrote:

“Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the humility of a saint but not the serenity. He was acutely sensitive to poverty, sickness, disability and grief. But when he was among his poorer worshipers, he could not improvise the politician’s spread-eagle stance and the manic grin. He ambled nervously among them, spoke gently, hoping to convey by a look that he was grateful they did not hold their plight against him.”

For 70 years, Cooke took an unquenchable interest in the world about him, and chiseled what he saw and heard and thought into words cut like diamonds. In 1968, he happened to be in Los Angeles when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and he wrote of the chaotic scene and of a life cut short:

“There was a head on the floor, streaming blood and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an iced cake.”

Life, in all its variety, was his subject all along, and his words were suffused with its color and vitality. As recently as February, 95 years old, he wrote his last “Letter from America” from his study overlooking Central Park, a rumination on Democrats’ chances of beating George W. Bush in November. There could hardly be a more admirable example of writing well to the end than Alistair Cooke.