Letter for an American

To:
BILL BRYSON
Hanover, New Hampshire
U.S.A.

Dear Bill,

A few years ago I read and enjoyed your book, Notes from a Small Island, so much that I just had to write to you. It is a charming and humorous account of your last-ditch reconnaissance tour of Britain before you repaired to the U.S. Not only does it contain descriptive passages of great beauty (whether of rural or urban landscapes, or purely anecdotal ones) but to readers like me it brought to life both you and Britain. The book provides a contemporary balance to the classic, Afoot in England (1945) by that great, nature-loving writer, W.H. Hudson. I then moved on to Neither Here Nor There, a thoroughly engaging account of your travels in Europe and Asia Minor. An even funnier book, I suppose, because you could afford to be both funny and caustic in a way you couldn’t be about Britain, which you once considered your home for twenty odd years. You could take digs, potshots, and make jokes at your hosts’ expense with great liberty and aplomb, but without being rude or feeling guilty.

Through your books (including that feisty piece "Fat Girls in Des Moines" in a special issue of Granta on travel) and articles I found in you a kindred spirit. This isn't really surprising, considering that I spent more than twenty years in Canada during my childhood, adolescence and youth, and then returned to India. Though not similar, your experience in a sense parallels mine because you spent two decades in England before returning to America, your native land. I wish I could write a book like yours about Canada—titled, perhaps, Notes from a BIG Continent?—a land that triggers nostalgia, and one I look upon fondly even after twenty years away from it, except for three lengthy visits. Leaving any country you’ve lived in for a long time is a Catch-22 situation: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Perhaps you feel the same way.

Which brings me to my own contacts with England, both direct and indirect, over a period of thirty-five years (1962-97). I fell in love with my first impressions.

But my brushes with England, the motherland of Canada and America, have been only glancing blows. I’ve never really had the chance to stay for long periods to soak in the atmosphere and absorb the ethos of a country which gave us the best-known tongue in the world. It has now become the father tongue to billions around the globe. A host of mother tongues, meanwhile, languish in oblivion. Mere wafer-thin slices in the world's language pie.

The first brush came in late July, 1962, when my mother, brother, sister and I flew from Bombay to London, England, to connect with BOAC there and continue on to Toronto, Canada. I had just emigrated from India, and it was the first time I'd set foot on Western soil. And there hangs a tale….

….The plane developed some trouble as it winged over the Atlantic, and had to turn back to London—the passengers must've panicked, though I believe there was a reasonable safety margin. I still remember us rushing around nervously on the tarmac at Heathrow, my mother clutching my two-year-old brother in her arms, trying to comfort him. We were all stressed out; my mother was anxious to meet my father after almost a year of absence, but her eagerness was foiled. England was of course nothing new for her. She had spent a year there with my father in 1957. However, this was the first time we children had set eyes on the Western world; everything in London(U.K.) had that sheen and newness, as did Toronto….

My feelings were mixed: on the one hand I was sad about leaving my boyhood friends in India; on the other I was excited about settling down in a totally different culture. How things change. Who, including me, would've dreamed at that time that I would one day make that journey in reverse?

Your reverse journey came a decade ago when you left England for America. But you settled in New Hampshire, which after all is a part of the U.S. that has long been known as New England. How appropriate! You couldn’t bear being cut off totally from England, could you? Pictures I’ve seen of this state show that it is on a small scale in America’s grand scheme of things, its continental landscapes. And it is the one American state that most closely resembles the cozy, intimate ambience of Britain. So you found a part of England in America’s northeast.

And yet, I know that Des Moines, Iowa, in the American midwest, is also another world where your heart resides, which you visit again and again—it is your ancestral home. I feel some affinities here too. For more than twenty years I grew up in S.W. Ontario, an inland peninsula of Canada that dangles south of the 49^th parallel, is hemmed in by the Great Lakes, and nudges the American midwest—nay, thrusts into America’s belly. And in its small-town landscape this peninsula is not all that different from midwestern states like Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri before their landscapes merge into the great Central Plains of Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. One comes across similar scenes in southern Ontario: grain elevators, silos, flour mills, corn and tobacco fields, barns, combines, large farmhouses. Even the climate is similar, except of course for tornadoes—or twisters.

I now come to Alistair Cooke and his Letter from America on BBC Radio. As you know, Cooke became well known for his Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, and was the author of the acclaimed TV series "America" broadcast in the early 70s, in which he recounted his personal history of America, his adopted homeland. But these projects came much later. Cooke had been composing his weekly Letter with a single-minded devotion since 1946, chronicling America for the rest of the world in his own engaging style. I've been a regular listener since 1991, during the first Gulf War, having discovered it forty-five years after the fact. Now that Cooke has passed on, it begs the question: after Alistair Cooke, who? Well, I won’t prolong the suspense. I can think of no better candidate to succeed him than yourself, Bill, an ex-American expatriate in Britain, now back in his native land to assume his identity as an American. Would you take up the challenge if it were handed to you? Surely the BBC must be scouting around for a worthy successor!

The BBC staff would often refer to Cooke as their favorite American—though English by birth—so I don't see why you, an ex-American expat who lived in Britain for some twenty years and came back to his native land, couldn't be accorded the same honor, should the BBC take you on board. You would be ideal for the job: not only do you know the pulse of America, you also know the British and the larger world well enough to know how to put across your views, comments and observations. Not to mention that you lived for many years in Yorkshire, where Cooke hailed from.

Some British commentators lambasted Cooke for his old-fashioned, patrician, and at times even grandfatherly, style of presentation, saying it's totally out of tune with what America is all about. You'd think they wanted the sort of hip material found in, say, the magazine Rolling Stone. But remember that another Britisher (from Wales), the travel writer, Jan Morris was invited by Rolling Stone in the late 70s to write a series of essays on the great cities of the world (later collected in a book titled Destinations). By her own admission, she was a writer "of romantic instinct and distinctly traditionalist prose". Cooke admired her work, calling her 'the Flaubert of the jet age'. Despite the criticism it has to be said that Cooke had a warm, storytelling, informal narrative manner, exploring hidden connections and items of human interest, that is fast disappearing. He documented America in a way no one would have done. However wanting his approach may have been, we should at least be grateful for what he did give us. I believe his legacy will be a lasting one.

And that brings me, finally, to you, Bill. Your style might be pegged somewhere between Cooke's chatty but informed manner in his Letter—written for a voice broadcast—and Morris' probing, literary style. That's what makes you such a strong candidate to succeed Cooke in these changing times. You also have the advantage of being neither too young, nor too old. Just the right age to project a changed America. The only adjustment you'd have to make is that you'd have to write for a radio broadcast rather than the print medium you're used to. But I feel sure you could emulate Cooke's fireside chat manner with your own personal twist, passionately cultivated in your writings about language, places, and very recently about ‘everything’ in an ambitious book titled A Short History of Nearly Everything.

It's a great opportunity. I have no idea of course whether the BBC wants to continue the tradition of the Letter, or who it might be looking for to succeed the inimitable Alistair Cooke. Would you consider the challenge if it came your way? I wish I could drum up a petition, with thousands of admirers who would gladly sign in your favor. I can think of no better person in whom I would place my trust for this worthy job. Think it over.

Sincerely yours,

Jayant Deshpande

Pune, India