Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  Time and again, the members demonstrated a truth that Hanley had mentioned in the early days as universal: that any group of people, confronted with a word they have known all their lives, and then offered a certain pronunciation, will divide into those who say they’ve never heard it and those who say they’ve never heard anything else. This often happened at the committee hearings and when it did, Shaw, rebelling against all his instincts, resorted to the democratic procedure of a vote. When it went against his own preference, he would sigh or incline his head, implying that the winners would rue the day.

  The first time I was called on to offer an American alternative was when a clear variation was well-known. In the guide, which the BBC would publish later, the reader would find: “lieutenant—lefftenant (Am. loo-tenant).” The committee seemed to accept my function agreeably enough, though Logan Pearsall Smith, as an expatriate Anglophile, hinted from time to time that it would be better if American English did not exist, or at least were never mentioned.

  There is a street in London called Conduit Street. The non-Londoners on the committee bowed to the true educated vernacular Cun-dit, and the ruling was about to be recorded when Lloyd James, in a spasm of mischief, wondered if Mr. Cooke might like to suggest an alternative American pronunciation. It would not be an exotic word to New Englanders, I said, but plainly an Indian word, cousin to Cotuit, Mass. If so, it would be pronounced Cun-do-it. General chuckle and on to business. Only the chairman thought that an American variant should be printed, on the understanding that when the next Irish variation came up, it should get the same treatment. We moved on.

  The most memorable little battle happened at a meeting where the simple word “canine” came up for adjudication. Shaw asked each member to pronounce his preference. To a man, they came through: can-ine. In spite of the overwhelming preference, Shaw took a vote and, announcing the result, added: “Somebody voted twice.” Gentlemanly uproar. I pleaded guilty. “Because, sir,” I said, “the American is unquestionably different: it’s ‘cane-ine.’“ To the disgust of the company, Shaw said firmly: “Quite right!” But, the committee protested, we are unanimous for can-ine. Shaw thereupon made a speech, the gist of which was: “I believe strongly in following the pronunciation of men who use the word every day in their profession, and my dentist says, ‘cane-ine.’“

  “Then, sir,” nipped in the witty Logan Pearsall Smith, “your dentist must be an American.”

  “Of course!” roared Shaw, “how d’you suppose I came to have all my teeth at my age?”

  This retort, I recall, was greeted with a not wholly comprehending chuckle by the assembled Britons, who seemed vaguely unaware of the dim reputation of British dentistry. Shaw beamed on them with a well-satisfied grin, willingly registered the general preference (can-ine) but wagged a finger to remind them that he was insisting on “Mr. Cooke’s adding in brackets: (Am. cane-ine).”

  Once the last word had been questioned, argued over and ruled on, the chairman rose to attention, as he had been sitting at attention, and gave an offhand nod, the social equivalent of a thank you and good-bye, stepped down from the rostrum and was out the door. I never remember his mixing with the members or attempting any small talk or socializing in any degree. This was true of the three or four meetings that were held in my time. After a while I could well understand what one or other of the group told me, that Shaw was a man with no friends. In his early, Fabian-campaigning days, he developed at most what you might call enthusiastic acquaintanceships with the other Socialist crusaders, but I can find little evidence, even from his biographer, Hesketh Pearson, that he kept or ever achieved any close friendships at all. Indeed, the notion of Shaw as “a man’s man,” a normal male with several cronies, is as bizarre as imagining his taking up golf or draw poker.

  At one time, in late middle age—say well into his sixties—he socialized, always alone, to the extent of lunching with almost any celebrity who invited him. If they expected a cordial private exchange with a famous public character, they were uniformly disillusioned. The impressions of him from single encounters are strikingly similar. The benevolent P. G. Wodehouse, who liked everybody, was offended by Shaw’s coming as a guest to lunch, imagining his host’s lavish way of life and deploring it. At another luncheon party, Shaw dismayed the company by teasing H. G. Wells with a joke about his (Wells’s) wife’s newly diagnosed cancer. At a luncheon in honor of Bergson, Shaw told the guest, simmering with bottled rage, that his philosophy was not what he thought it was. Arriving as a guest of Thomas Masaryk, the founding president of Czechoslovakia, Shaw described the foreign policy of the new country as a disaster and marched from the room. Winston Churchill was unusually laconic: “He was one of my earliest antipathies. “ James Agate, in the 1930s and 1940s England’s most eminent dramatic critic, although he had made it plain in print that “Shaw’s plays are the price we have to pay for his prefaces,” yet thought Shaw to be the greatest living polemical writer and “a very great man.” Agate was delirious when Shaw invited him to lunch with Mrs. Shaw and was prepared to sit and worship: “He sat upright in a chair which was frail, spindly and altogether beautiful like himself.” Not only did Shaw talk continuously throughout the meal but Agate noticed “an odd habit” (which is surely disturbing to most listeners) “of not looking at you but gazing fixedly at a point somewhere over your shoulder.”

  When Shaw was the host, however, there is ample record that he could be droll and charming, once it was understood that the available food was to be the vegetarian platter prepared by Mrs. Shaw and that the guests had been invited to be present at a monologue. “Although,” Bertrand Russell recalled, “like many witty men he considered wit an adequate substitute for wisdom, he could defend any idea, however silly, so cleverly as to make those who did not accept it look like fools.”

  The meetings of this committee provided my only contact with the great man. It was transitory but vivid and, I now realize, disappointing to a young man who, as an even younger man, had been something of an idolater. At Cambridge I once wrote to him out of the blue and asked him for a photograph and specified, in cocky sophomoric fashion, for “something unusual, not the regular studio portrait.” He sent me a sepia photograph of himself lying down on a divan and tossing a bemused smile at the photographer. Underneath, in his beautiful spidery script, he said that this photo was unusual enough to be unique and he hoped it would satisfy me. If it didn’t, please to let him know. The tone of the postcard was that of an uncle to a favorite nephew. I was enchanted by it and by the evident cordial good nature of the man himself.

  But to most people on the outside who never met him and inferred his private character from his writing, he was a riddle. A young Scottish professor, being invited to lecture on Shaw, replied that she would have to confine her remarks to the plays, for which she had “a great curiosity and respect. As for the man’s character, I give up: he is an enigma.” What baffled everybody was the inexplicable contradiction between the human being you could meet and see and hear and the public character who was at once a shrewd capitalist, a dedicated Communist, and a defiant admirer of both Hitler and Stalin. This gentle, seemingly reasonable man would certainly hesitate to bruise a gnat but he professed to accept the necessity of liquidating (i.e. murdering) whole regions of peasants for the sake of a long-term political program. Yet the same man could feel excessive guilt for offending a nonentity: a young aspiring writer in the suburbs sent Shaw, evidently for comment, the manuscript of a children’s book and its accompanying illustrations. Shaw lost the lot. He subsequently wrote a flock of apologetic letters to the forlorn young man, gave him a part in The Doctor’s Dilemma and sent him a pair of new boots, a cardigan, an autographed copy of Man and Superman, a book on Karl Marx and, for no explained reason, the sum of fifteen pounds, ten shillings.

  To the complaint of a London critic that a “wrinkled” Eleanora Duse was appearing in London in a role much too young for her, Shaw retorted: “Her wrinkles are the credentials of her
humanity.” After unloosing this lance of chivalry and good sense, he was then ready to release a fatuous manifesto proclaiming that vaccination killed more children than it protected.

  But the central, and most bewildering, contradiction of his private and public character was that between his personal generosity, courtliness even to the humblest people (his optician remarked to a neighbor—”Oh, that Mr. Shaw! A nice old gentleman, never any trouble at all”), and his lifelong oscillation between maintaining that Stalin’s twilight signatures on orders to massacre, torture, exile or “liquidate” were a Tory invention or that they were measures necessary to prevent the Soviet Utopia from sinking into the “debauchery” of democracy.

  At the end, I see him leaving Broadcasting House on a late spring morning, a fedora shading his crinkled eyes and white beard, his hands deep in a top coat, marching with his wide tread down Upper Regent Street, occasionally looking over his shoulder for his bus, then deciding the day was balmy enough for walking all the way home. He might pause in one of the leafy London squares to sit on a bench and eat his delicious mid-morning lifesaver of a parsley sandwich. Then on down the Strand to the river and up to his apartment in the Adelphi and reunion with his only friend, wife, companion: the ever-virginal (by mutual agreement in the marriage contract) Charlotte Payne-Townshend. And there, after much meditation, and a lifetime of feeling “the joy in being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one,” he would sit down and write his will and leave his entire fortune to the mighty purpose of—Simplified Spelling.

  2

  John Nance Garner:

  The Frontiersman

  (1967)

  On a warm April night in southern Florida, in 1951, two United States senators and a man from Missouri were asleep as holiday guests in the house of a wealthy American statesman, in Hobe Sound, an exclusive strip of land on the ocean, fenced in from the plebs by towering Australian pines and highly cultivated bits of real estate with an asking price of about a hundred thousand dollars* a lot.

  Just as the dawn was coming up over the sea and the blue herons that stand motionless in the neighboring lagoons, a telephone startled this silent house and it was answered by the man from Missouri. He was struck dumb by what he heard and he pattered off in his pajamas to the next room and tapped on the door.

  The man from Missouri simply said, “I just had it on the phone from Washington—Harry Truman’s fired MacArthur.” The senator from Texas came upright, as on a hoist, and sat on the side of the bed and pondered the appalling news: that MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific war, the most Roman of all American generals, had been—as the order said—”stripped of all his commands.”

  The visible eyeball of the senator from Georgia rolled over the bedsheet and a high southern voice came out from under. “Hitch up yo’ pants, Lyndon Johnson,” it said, “and let’s get the hell back to Washington and get that investigation started or they’ll have a posse out for us before noon.”

  It was a sound instinct. Before the recriminations got started, the three men were back in the capital; and the senator from Georgia began the famous hearings that took many months and, I believe, three million words to affirm the judgment of the president of the United States and to confirm the original prejudices, one way or the other, of its people.

  This anecdote is very typical of southern politicians, of their wariness, their healthy respect for the shifts and terrors of public sentiment, their relaxed assumption that pending Judgment Day something practical can be done about almost any catastrophe, from the loss of an election to an earthquake.

  It came back to me the other evening when we learned that down on the Mexican border, in Uvalde, Texas, a former vice president of the United States had died. He was John Nance Garner, called “Cactus Jack” after the burning and barren landscape that weaned him. Of all public men today he was the last link between the America of the Civil War and the America of the nuclear age. He would never himself have claimed the title of statesman, and, for that matter, he never earned it. “An elder statesman,” he once told Harry Truman, “is a retired politician.” He would not have claimed to understand or sympathize with the trouble in the cities, the missions to the moon, or the turn of American life much after 1934. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the end of the road for him. And when, at the end of Roosevelt’s second term, he stepped down from the vice presidency, he went home to Texas and swore he would never again cross the Potomac River. And he never did. He was cashiered, you might say, by his origins and his prejudices. The Depression overwhelmed him and many more of his breed who had been raised to believe that there was nothing an American couldn’t face and overcome if he rolled his sleeves and gritted his teeth and sweated it out.

  Today this bluster may sound quite fatuous. But it was a central conviction of the men who tamed the frontier, from the Cumberland Gap to the American River. And John Nance Garner was a fascinating faint echo of it. He was remarkable not for any great gifts of mind or character but for his intense typicality of one aspect of the frontier character: its fatalism, physical hardiness, cynicism, tooth-sucking humor, its humdrum pragmatism in the face of death, disloyalty, and disaster. A Texas judge like Garner demonstrated to perfection the quality once ascribed to W. C. Fields: “He had the greatest reverence for his colleagues, with the usual reservations and suspicions.” It is easy to imagine him, a little quiet stoat of a man, hearing the shocked cries of the onlookers at the severed head of an Indian and glancing down and snapping out, “A flesh wound.”

  Garner was the son of a Confederate cavalry trooper, and he was born in a muddy cabin, one room wide— what they called in the Red River Valley a shotgun house. Almost all the neighbors lived on farms. The black soil produced cotton and the red clay soil produced corn, and there were little sawmills in the clearings of the shortleaf pine. This was 1868, only three years after the war was over, but not before the Apache raids were over in his part of the country. His horizon was alive with flying squirrels and timber wolves, and his life was bounded by what the farmers called “work-a-crop” parties, by planting and plowing, box-and-pie suppers and fiddlers’ contests on Saturday night; and on Sundays by camp meetings, and the whole neighborhood chanting:

  I felt the old shoes on my feet, the glory in my soul,

  The old-time fire upon my lips; the billows ceased to roll.

  He was a small chunky man with slant eyes and he was neither pious nor studious. In his Who’s Who entry, which he kept down to five lines, he put down “limited school advantages,” and it was an understatement. But he learned poker from mustered-out soldiers and it stood him in good stead in Washington, where he often in one year won more from his fellow legislators than the ten thousand dollars of his congressional salary. He looked like a cross between a fox and a mole and had many of the more engaging habits of each. He somehow picked up a college education of sorts and at nights he started to read law. This was as practical a calling as any on a frontier which was riddled with army deserters, cattle thieves, claim jumpers, and strangers who came in and settled down to a farm on the general presumption of their neighbors that they had shot an uncle or sired an untimely baby someplace in Tennessee or the Carolinas. I well remember (the week, by the way, that Truman fired MacArthur) sitting at the bedside of a very aged lady in Alpine, Texas. She would have been about ten or fifteen years Garner’s senior, but she talked with that intense concreteness of the very old when they are recalling their childhood and youth. She talked about the feuding families and the silent types who settled in the Davis Mountains; and she spoke with contempt of an expansive jolly man who came through in the 1870s, was full of praise for the bare landscape and said he meant to settle there for the reason that he liked the people and thought it was great farming country. Evidently, he had not shot or ravished anybody. “From then on,” said the old crone, “he was a suspicious character.”

  There was a lot of preaching on the frontier, but it was reserved for Sunday meeting and left to one man, a
professional. By weekday, you dealt with your fellow man, agile fly-by-nights, and rustlers and crooked lawyers and people who poisoned crops and dynamited wells. And from time to time there was an Indian raid. One of the first cases tried by the twenty-five-year-old Garner, when he was a countyjudge, was a gang of men who had been systematically cutting down pasture fences. Barbed wire was a comparative novelty, an omen of the coming of law and order; it fenced off the open range and said, This land is mine. Marauders who liked to make the most of the chaos of the range burned pastures, cut the wire, and left warnings to anyone who replaced it. Garner, in this case, bypassed the finer points of the law. He simply turned the Texas Rangers on them.

  In his early twenties, by 1890, Garner had moved four hundred and fifty miles southwest, but still in Texas, to Uvalde, which grows pecan nuts and harvests a fine crop of mohair from land that only a goat can thrive on. This was where John Nance Garner hung out his shingle as a lawyer. Pretty soon he was in the Texas legislature and in 1902 he went to Congress, a small farmer’s, railroad-hating Populist who burrowed his way into power through the channels he knew best: the back room, the small office, the poker game, the little chat with worried men. All his life he distrusted orators, “crooners” as he used to call them. Politics was doing the best you could for the people you knew best; and that meant wheedling bills through a reluctant Congress. He was a tireless wheedler, and he once said that “a snort of bourbon is a better persuader than the Twelve Apostles.” Whenever a sad man came to him complaining he was getting nowhere with a local bill he’d sworn to sponsor, Garner would shuffle him off to his small office. “Come,” he’d say, “let’s go and strike a blow for liberty.”