Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  After about twenty minutes of praising and deploring the English newspapers (“they have the best and worst”), it was time to be firm with Debbie and with Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Debbie had been joined by a dachshund, and they were both removed, and he beamed again in utter benevolence. Not quite utter, perhaps, for his thick circular lenses give him the slightest look of Dr. Mabuse.

  After Le Touquet (“the house was completely smashed in the war”) he lived in Paris for a while and in 1947 came back to America. In 1952 he and his wife were staying with his oldest friend and collaborator, Guy Bolton, “down here, and my wife came in from this awful jungle and she’d bought a house. It was a shack, but you see we fixed it up and built on to it, and reclaimed twelve acres from this scrub, and I don’t think I shall ever leave Remsenburg.” He is eighty on Sunday, and I smiled a salute at the gallantry of the word “ever.”

  I supposed that he had a host, at least a clutch, of close friends around. “No, no,” he fluted, as if he was lucky to be so free of claims, “only Guy Bolton. You don’t really need more than one, do you?” It was evidently enough for him. “Of course, I wave to the neighbors. They are very friendly and all that. But no friends, we never go to parties or travel anymore.” He sounded like a TV announcer describing the halcyon life for a Florida insurance company.

  When had he last been in England?

  “I went over in nineteen-thirty-nine to see a cricket match. It was between Dulwich and St. Paul’s. It was very dull. T. Bailey played a dreadful innings. They tell me England has changed in many ways, but nobody can agree on what ways.”

  We were headed for another pleasant detour so I brought him back on the main road with perhaps a brutal bang.

  “I think I’d better bring this up,” I said, “because a lot of people do wonder about it. You saw the last piece by Evelyn Waugh about you and the Germans and those broadcasts during the war?”

  He came over to a closer chair and bent down, his pink face suddenly quite intent and grave.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Does it make you feel relieved or embarrassed to have this thing thrashed over again?”

  His pipe wheezed again, and wrinkled his features, if it’s possible to wrinkle features as ripe and smooth as an apple.

  “I don’t know,” he said, honestly baffled. “I wonder if it was necessary. Evelyn Waugh is such a fine friend. I’ve really been in two minds about it. What do you think?”

  I told him as gently as possible that I thought it had done him a service, because scurrilous legends don’t wither, “they simply get coarse and smelly, and someone comes along who knows no more about you than the obvious thing about Captain Boycott. They’d say Oh that Wodehouse, wasn’t he mixed up somehow with the Nazis?’“

  He was suddenly like a bishop who has heard an artless truth from the lips of a babe or suckling. ‘Yes,” he said eagerly. “I think you’re right. Yes, I see.” He thought through a smoky pause. ‘Yes,” he said, as if it was the last word. “I am grateful.”

  We started up again almost as if lunch or some other domestic entrant had intervened. I wanted to ask him about his daily routine, and the writing he was doing, but there was the awkward possibility that he might be doing very little and be too proud to say so, and I might clumsily invite him to admit that his day was done and his market gone with the wind, the Second War and the Welfare State. So I mentioned the “new book” The Ice in the Bedroom and the literary study of him (Wodehouse at Work) just coming out by a certain learned Usborne.

  “Oh,” he said, “the novel came out here last year. But the other book is a rather frightening thing, you know. I mean, I’m sure it’s very conscientious and impressive to have someone go into one’s stuff like that, but it’s rather unsettling. I mean, you turn the stuff out and then public orators begin to declaim and critics analyze it… well, it’s rather uncomfortable.” He writhed with unaffected conviction.

  “Do you find”—this was the sneaky foot in the door— “that people still want the stuff turned out? I understand you’re translated all over.”

  “Well,” he said, waving his pipe and stressing every other adjective, “it’s the most remarkable thing. I don’t believe there is a single language—wait now, I am not sure about the Russians—that hasn’t translated it. I get books in Burmese and Korean and Japanese, and I can’t think what they are. You have to trace them like hieroglyphs and read them backwards. And all the time, you wrote them. It’s most amazing. I can’t think what they think they’re reading!”

  His bewilderment seemed completely genuine, and through all our talk there was the novel feeling that here was a hermit, a recluse, a sort of musical comedy Schweitzer, who had honestly no idea that he’d ever been heard of, or read outside the dormitories of English public schools when the lights were out. The calls from American magazines and agents (it was coming out now) of course were understandable. “They go on and on. I just had a call from an agent who wants me to make a musical comedy out of Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. And then they’re well along with a series of television shows about Jeeves. But I don’t understand the other countries. The Communists, for instance. There was a ban on me in Hungary for a while, which is just as mysterious as their reading me at all. But they do. The Czechs and the Poles and the rest. Perhaps they think of me as a satirist.”

  He chuckled over this and added in a confessional tone. “Of course, I’ve always gone rather on the assumption that country houses and butlers have never passed away.”

  I thought of Margaret Fuller accepting the universe and said mildly, ‘You’d better. After all, it’s your staple.” “Of course it is,” he cried, grateful for the mot juste.

  “It’s my staple. I don’t pretend these things exist. They probably never have existed. They’re really historical novels. I suppose there are no Bertie Woosters, at least, anymore. If there are, I imagine they’re on the make. You see, I do feel we have lost something, even in the crooks and bounders. The Woosters were really innocent people. That’s what we’ve lost—innocence.”

  This led by an obvious but gloomy association to the modern comedians and humorists. In the only downright sentence he ever spoke, he said he disliked the “sick” comedian. He writhed a little and found a better word.

  “Geniality,” he said, “I think that’s what I miss in the new comics and the humorists.”

  I wondered who the new humorists were, and he wondered too. “Really, when you come to think of it, I can’t think of any young ones coming along except Jean Kerr. When I first came to this country, everybody was funny, the writers, the vaudeville comics, the iceman, the neighbors. …”

  Couldn’t this have been the delight of a first exposure to the oblique turn of American minds?

  “Maybe, maybe,” he said, making another tremendous discovery. “But there are no more Benchleys and Thurbers, and George Ades or S. J. Perelmans, or in England any more W. W. Jacobs and Barry Paines. And Nunnally Johnson, now there was a fine humorist.” He remembered a story of Johnson’s about a man who used to come home every day and find that his wife had moved the furniture around. One day he came home and flung himself on the bed, but the bed wasn’t there. So there was a court case and she was sued. He told his story “and every man in the court had gone through the same thing. The case was dismissed. Now there, you see, no magazine would possibly take that today.”

  We were on the dangerous ground where a younger man suggests that maybe humor dates more than most forms of literature. Also, Debbie or the dachshund was snuffling and scratching at the door. So I came finally to the mystery of this exile and this hermitage.

  “Tell me,” I said, “don’t you find it difficult to mine your stuff at three thousand miles from its source?”

  “Ah,” he said (the Geiger counter was swiveling like mad now), “I’ve had misgivings about that from time to time. But you see, even when I lived in England, I only went to country houses till I got the feel of what it was all about.” He r
ested the hand with the pipe on one knee. ‘You know, I’ve always been a recluse. I’ve never seen any sort of life—I got it all from the newspapers!”

  So, the rich and deathless population of Wodehouse County is all a fantasy It struck me that to the extent his picture of country house life is imagined, it probably crystallizes, better than any enlargement of reality, the preconceptions of the foreigner, especially of the Communists, who must at this moment be learning the dreadful truth about the West by commuting between Leave It to Psmith and Little Dorrit in order to strike the proper balance between the life of the oppressors in their castles and the oppressed in their factories. He thought it very likely.

  The dogs bounded in again and converged on my French poodle, which had broken out of the car. There was an ugly snarl and yelp or two, and the talk was plainly at an end. “Debbie, Debbie,” he said, almost weeping with affection over this slobbering monster of a boxer. “Gently, gently.” He picked her up and saw me across the lawn and down the driveway. With the free hand he waved, as to a neighbor, and padded out of the burning sun and back into the shade of the house and the real world of Psmith and Jeeves and Lord Emsworth and Mr. Mulliner and Bertie Wooster, who don’t exist any more except in the puzzled but fascinated imaginations of about eighty or ninety nations.

  5

  FDR

  (1999)

  My first memory of President Roosevelt in the flesh was at the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, a weeklong celebration in September 1936. Roosevelt was to be the main speaker in the closing ceremony. But the whole affair was such a dazzling circus of exhibitions (manuscripts, antiquities), symphony concerts, torchlight parades, fireworks—all staged for the first and surely last convention of world scholarship—that it was enough to obliterate in retrospect the sharp memory of all the participants—all except one. It was my first reporting assignment for a newspaper, for anybody, and it was a daunting initiation.

  Over seven hundred eminent scholars from forty-two foreign universities had been invited on terms that can be said to be uniquely demanding if not outrageously rude: that they should turn in to the president of Harvard the results of original—and hitherto unpublished—research carried out during the previous two years. Most of these papers were so specialized, so beyond the intellectual range of the reporters present, that we simply had to note and take on trust the vital importance of Professor Millikan’s cosmic ray researches, the excursions of Sir Arthur Eddington into the interior of the stars, Dr. Howard Northrop’s meditations on the formation of enzymes. The uncomprehending majority of reporters present were left to grab a one-day sensation out of the discovery of Dr. Friedrich Bergius of Heidelberg of how to convert wood into carbohydrates. It offered a startling piece on the grim prospect of a besieged nation at war being adequately fed on sawdust.

  When the final day came, the delegates discovered that President Conant was about to confront them with something not at all entertaining and far more challenging than anything they had seen all week (perhaps, for some of them, all their lifetime). It was to hear four famous men, two from democracies, two from totalitarian regimes, express themselves on an idea: the idea of Freedom.

  The most eminent living anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, was the first to speak for our side: “Our present civilization is passing through a very severe, perhaps a crucial, stage of maladjustment. The abuse of legal and administrative power; the inability to create lasting conditions of peace; the recrudescence of aggressive militarism” (no mention of passive militarism!); “the torpor of true religion and the assumption of religious garb by doctrines of racial or national superiority or the gospel of Marx … it is our duty to insist on the necessity for freedom.” This was all impressively high-toned but once the echoes of its eloquence had faded, much of it was seen to be begging the question. “The inability to create lasting conditions of peace” is not a twentieth-century failing: it was demonstrated so long ago as 1307 by the brave Pierre Dubois, legal adviser to the king of France, and the organizer of the first league of nations. And to whom shall we present our “insistence” on “the necessity of freedom”? Adolf Hitler? Neville Chamberlain?

  In response came two scholars of world renown, from Rome and Tokyo. Dr. Corrado Gini, professor of sociology at the University of Rome, didn’t even begin to dispute “the necessity for freedom”; plainly, to him, it was a naive delusion of people who had no historical perspective. To every nation, he granted, “there must be an appropriate” alternation of “tension and relaxation of authority.” While admitting the “wisdom” of some liberal eras, he yet believed that “Italy today requires a Fascism.” So there!

  There was even less hope of a workable formula for compromise between tense and relaxed authority from the great Masaharu Anesaki, professor of religion in the University of Tokyo. The very notion of freedom, he casually implied, is irrelevant to the spiritual well-being of a nation. He simply saw “the modern civilization of the West as a power working for its own destruction … a power civilization impotent to overcome, and unfit to be totally absorbed in, the” presumably superior “spiritual heritage of the East.”

  At last, or next to the last, came the man whom this theme had obsessed for the past two years. The president of Harvard himself: James B. Conant. Not physically a heroic figure, a small, thin, bespectacled clerky type, not unlike a comic strip stereotype of a “professor.” But he was the man who had stood up against the Massachusetts legislature and its urge to enforce a loyalty oath on teachers throughout the state, and on this last day, he was the most impressive figure. Now his lean voice pierced through the rising wind and the restless audience: “In the name of Harvard,” he proclaimed, “one essential condition for the continuance of a national culture: absolute freedom of discussion, absolutely unmolested inquiry.”

  Even so general a plea was about to receive a practical test from fifteen thousand Harvard men who had passed around the Yard. The coming main speaker would soon stand there and require tolerance and silence from an audience to possibly fifty percent of whom his views were monstrous and heretical.

  That left, however, fifty percent who never went to Harvard, townspeople who had spent weeks scrambling for a ticket to the Yard and this famous occasion. They were beginning to thrash their arms against the cold and crane their heads to catch the first glimpse of the star turn, when the gray sky blackened and a sudden billow of wind from the east brought on a torrent of rain and drove everybody indoors. Not quite everybody. Probably less than a third of the expectant crowd could jam into the Sanders Theatre, and it took time till they were packed to the windowsills. The thousands who couldn’t make it stayed huddled outdoors, their drenched ears cocked for the hero. Inside, at last, the old ex-president Lowell fairly bellowed into the microphone: “Gentlemen, the president of the United States!” There were many old Harvard men quite prepared to boo or hiss. They were sufficiently well-bred, however, to sit on their hands. But no dissenting gesture short of a gunshot could have arrested the roar that for five clocked minutes rocked the theater and thundered out of the loudspeakers of a continent.

  Through this sustained din, he came on slowly as the platform guests parted for him: leaning on an arm, the other hand clutching a cane, walking very slowly and straight-legged. “Seems,” remarked one young student without guile or second thought, “to have trouble walking.”

  It was an artless remark but it was a taproot for me into the one visual memory of that day that remains indelible. For I have to confess that all the foregoing reportage and Roosevelt’s lilting but unremarkable speech hoping “Harvard and America” would “stand for the freedom of the human mind” spring not from my memory but from a rescued photostat of my dispatch (September 20, 1936) to the London Observer.

  Well before the final ceremony I had gone to the Yard expecting to flash my press credentials and be led down to the press rows by some marshal or usherette. But the main entrance was jammed with a dense, jostling crowd.
I knew the Yard well (I had been at Harvard, after all, for a whole year) and I remembered a side entrance round a long curving wall. It was there all right, an open iron gate leading into a small yard not much larger than a capacious alley. Opposite the entrance gate was a door, which led through to the Yard. But I had barely walked into the alley when there was the sudden swishing of a large automobile, a squawk of brakes and a rapid patter of footsteps running toward me. They belonged to a young bareheaded man in a suit who had one hand stuck in his right coat pocket. He was what I was to come to know well: a Secret Service man. He stopped me, pushed me, gently I must say, against a side wall and wondered what I was doing there. I showed him my credentials and was plainly so scared and innocent of all foul designs that I said I surely would stay un-moving against the wall until “the president has gone up to the Yard and we’re out of here.” The president! I had hardly time to pronounce the tremendous word than my man darted across the alley, opened the car door, and from the other side appeared two other men (during the Second War, it would always be one Secret Service man, one marine, and Elliott, Roosevelt’s eldest son). They together made several swift and inexplicable passes, like jugglers, toward someone inside the car, and on a count (of three, I suppose) one cried “Now” and they lifted and held aloft a massive human figure crumpled into a squatting position, since one man had his arm crooked under the figure’s knees, and the other under his upper back. It was Franklin Roosevelt, as inert as a sack of potatoes. His head could move and did so as he acknowledged the motions of the third man, who had dived into the car and emerged with a cane and a hat. Roosevelt was then deposited on the ground, his back straightened, the cane was put into his right hand, the hat stuck on his head. With a tug or two from his helpers, he braced himself, linked arms with one man and limped stiff-legged toward the side entrance door and onto—I learned later—one of the ramps that were built in any public place with steps he was due to visit.