I was prepared to enjoy Alistair Cooke’s The American Home Front, 1941-1942,
based on watching him for years as the host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. He
struck me then as amiable and educated, so I figured this would be a
perceptive and eminently readable exploration of Americans transitioning from
isolationism to full-fledged commitment to global war.
Instead I found tortuous sentence construction and paragraphs that form impenetrable walls across upwards of a page and a half.
Yes—a single unbroken graf covering 60 lines of type. Many of them, as a
matter of fact. Way, way too many.
Want an example?
“Like most Southern cities, Atlanta has better than
its share of determined liberals, in a region where being a liberal is as hard
on individual endurance as being a conscientious objector in a city at war. The
ambition of these people in Georgia had been to have the state Constitution
revised, no revolutionary itch in this, a revision every ten years is promised
in the Constitution itself, but as the years go by it gets harder and harder
to loosen a vested interest way from its foundations, if only to give it more
breathing space elsewhere. In Atlanta, the cry is for ‘redistricting’ and sweet
release from the county unit system, whereby the electoral system is figured on
antique population figures, which consequently allow two representatives in the
state legislature to the smallest county—with a population of a few hundred—and
only six representatives to Atlanta, which has a population of nearly half a
million.”
That quote is in one of the medium-sized grafs,
which is to say: it only goes on for about 80% of the page. But I was pretty
well hors de combat before I got to the third sentence.
Moreover, it’s shallow; Cooke isn’t giving us a big
scoop so much as a fast skim. As he crosses the country he never stays more
than one night in a place. He talks with a few people he finds on the streets
or at a diner counter and then heads out of town.
(Well, might have stayed longer in the second half
of the book; but I quit reading after he left California and he still had the
northern journey back to the east coast to go.)
It’s not often that I don’t finish reading a book;
but I decided that my life isn’t going to last long enough to plough through
those paragraphs. Sometimes a girl’s just gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
2 comments:
Hmmm. I don't think I was aware of this book, and I'm curious about it: Was it published during the war, and was it intended for US or British audiences, or both? (That kind of run-on sentence was common in popular British writing of the day, I think.) It wasn't easy to get a book published during the war because of paper shortages, and I remember seeing books by reputable publishers in which the pages were pied.
I'm not excusing Cooke or faulting you for giving up on the book, just curious.
I read most of a later Cookebook about America the nation that I thought was pretty good, but I now forget what period it covered.
It was actually published after Cooke's death a few years ago. His assistant apparently found the MS in a closet of his she was clearing out just before he died.
I'm sure he used the material in his weekly Letter from America BBC broadcasts, or whatever else he did; but this was the first time it was published in toto.
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