By the Book

Alistair Cooke’s ‘Memories of the Great and Good’

A guest review by HAROLD M. GREEN

Alistair Cooke is probably best known to Americans as the urbane host of the peripatetic series “Omnibus,” which made the rounds of all three major networks from 1952 to 1959 and was the jewel in the crown of the “golden age of television.” In the traditions of De Tocqueville and Lord Bryce, Cooke has written on almost every facet of American life and culture since he arrived in New York in 1937 after studies at Cambridge, Yale and Harvard.

An avid student of the art of biography, Cooke deplores the trend toward “psychobiography” and exploiting the sexual peccadilloes of national icons. Accordingly, one will be hardpressed to find in “Memories of the Great and Good” material of a salacious nature. Cooke’s study is largely a goodnatured pilgrimage to the past, a labor of love gleaned from more than 60 years as a journalist, foreign correspondent and goodwill ambassador. It includes scintillating and often inspirational sketches of people as different as Winston Churchill and P.G, Wodehouse, Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara McClintock, Gary Cooper and Robert Frost—a true harmony of contrasts. The reader will also meet many legendary statesmen, scholars and literary luminaries mentioned by Cooke only in passing—Thomas G. Masaryk, I.A. Richards and H.G. Wells, to mention a few. A more detailed discussion of these three, alone, would go a long way toward giving added historical dimension to an already impressive memoir.

With the exception of the essays on Shaw, FDR and James Reston, which were published especially for this volume, the other pieces are mostly retreads from the BBC series “Letter to America” and from Manchester Guardian articles. Therefore they are new to most American readers who now will have the opportunity to revisit some of the most memorable personalities in recent history.

Cooke’s perspective in these sketches resembles in certain particulars that of a now forgotten 1927 work by Emil Ludwig, “Genius wad Character” (especially in his more contemporary sketches of Wilson, Lenin, Walter Rathenau and Cecil Rhodes). While “Genius and Character” was written in a more philosophical vein, Alistair Cooke would still probably concur with Ludwig’s 1927 observations on the basic function of biography: “...to show all readers, and especially youth, that great men are not gods, that they have been gripped by alltoohuman encumbrances as afflict every other mortal and that they have fought through, regardless, to their goals.”