Alistair Cooke: A Letter from Bath | As published in 1961

When Alistair Cooke visited Bath in 1961, many of the city’s most celebrated buildings had only recently begun to emerge from decades of grime and wartime damage. His observations offer a fascinating snapshot of Bath at the start of the restoration era that would shape the city we know today. Image above courtesy of Visit Bath. Nick Smith photography

Foreword by Colin Webb

When I arrived in Bath from London age 22 in 1969 to join a small book publisher, the city was still undergoing renovation and a general clean-up of the black soot that was ingrained on many fine facades. I could not then have predicted that in many years to follow I would publish the legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke (1908-2004), become his literary executor, and also return to Bath finally for good in 2001.
Having edited his Letter from America 1946-2004 (Penguin Modern Classics) I found this piece first published in The Listener when he visited Bath in 1961. In this he admirably defends the city from Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique that in architecture there is nothing from the past worth preserving. His observations still resonate.

A Letter from Bath. 6 July 1961

HAVING ARRIVED IN BATH I cannot get out of my mind the late Frank Lloyd Wright, the great, or at least the grandiose, American architect – who even by his belittlers was credited with revolutionary discoveries in the art of building, with the first cantilevered house, the first air-conditioned building; he was the master of the tensile strength of steel, the pioneer – as long ago as the eighteen-nineties – of the modern house, which for the moment we will define simply as a free-flowing combination of indoors and outdoors, with picture windows and room dividers and the rest of it.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an enormously impressive man who looked like Merlin impersonating Whistler’s Mother; and he had a beautiful, gentle, smooth-flowing voice that lulled you into believing that he was showering you with pearls of wisdom even when he was drowning you in nonsense. On one occasion, a year or two before his death (he then confessed to his ninetieth year, though I sometimes thought that he shaved it a little and might very well have built the pyramids), we had a long conversation about his methods of teaching his disciples, or – as he preferred to call them – his apprentices. He was right to insist on that word because he made it clear very early on that it was a breathtaking privilege to work for him, and his assistants were consequently paid nothing. They lived in or around one of his two houses – in the Arizona house they slept on open terraces and shivered through the cold nights before the hot days began. It would have made no difference if they had lived in the inner recesses of the porches that were called bedrooms – there were no windows anywhere in the house. They got up. and they had a monkish meal and then they sat at the feet of the Master.

Fake classicism – lifeless imitations: look at Washington DC, a collection of Greek wedding cakes” Frank Lloyd Wright

And then what? I asked him. Did they study periods of architecture and the characteristic materials of each age? He was shocked at the suggestion. ‘They discover for themselves’, he said, ‘the living properties of the material they work with and learn to adapt it to needs of time and place’. That was a reply. It has a swing to it but it does not get you very far. But surely, I said, an architectural student must, somewhere along the way learn something about the classical orders, the Corinthian, the Ionic, the Doric. He cut me off with a howl of pain. ‘Sheer antiquarianism’, he roared. But, I said, feeling that I was ninety and he was nineteen, isn’t it necessary to have some training in the architecture of the past before you launch out on your own? ‘Not in the least’, he said, quite serene now, ‘ What does it lead to? Fake classicism – lifeless imitations: look at Washington D C, a collection of Greek wedding cakes…’ But I said, doesn’t the Jefferson Memorial prove something? ‘It proves’, he said, ‘that if you have enough money and a moronic Congress, you can build a lavatory in the shape of a Roman temple’. Well, is there nothing good or worth preserving in genuine originals that were truly modern in their time? ‘Nothing’, he said, ‘nothing at all. There has been no true building since the Aztecs. The Acropolis should be dynamited. And look at Versailles. A monstrosity. And look’, he said, clearly intending not to look at all, ‘at Bath’.

Bath’s best future is as a tourist town; and unlike some other tourist traps that are bedecked and bedizened for the visitor, Bath has no need to
add anything.” Alistair Cooke

I knew there was some link between my guilty feeling on entering Bath and this plaguey memory of Frank Lloyd Wright. I looked at Bath, as I had done three or four years ago, and in defiance of the old master I dare to say it is a beautiful town to look on and soon will be lovelier still. This is because the City of Bath, like so many other places in Britain, had to suffer the scare and destruction of a bombing or two to appreciate the noble things it had for so long allowed to run down.

Alistair Cooke (1908-2004) broadcasting on the BBC. Image courtesy of Cooke Americas LLP

The first time I was in Bath after the war, the Roman baths, the great Abbey, the crescents built by John Wood and his son were black with grime and pitted with rot. In the last year or two Bath has wakened up with a bang to what is unique about its heritage: an eighteenth-century town built in a single style out of the local stone that abounds in the nearby quarries. As they have done in so many other old towns of England, in Cambridge most wonderfully of all, they have blasted away the centuries of dirt that had added more grime than bloom, and today you can see the two great crescents and the Circus as they were in the seventeen-sixties and seventies. Great lyrical arcs of a light biscuit colour, gay and graceful as they were meant to be. Some attempt has been made, though not enough, to paint the doors of the houses in a uniform colour. There are still garish hints that a Brighton landlady has been putting chocolate brown on a door or two and ultramarine blue round the window frames. The Abbey no longer sits here like a lumpish Gothic tomb. It shimmers in the late afternoon light, and on the west front one can now see teams of angels having a rollicking time rushing up and down (I don’t know why down) a ladder from Heaven.

I do not know, or much care, whether the impulse to do all this renovating and sandblasting was aesthetic or commercial. Bath’s best future is as a tourist town; and unlike some other tourist traps that are bedecked and bedizened for the visitor, Bath has no need to add anything. All it has to do to become a beautiful but animated museum is to clean and restore and expose the lovely shell of a town which attracted everybody there in the eighteenth century, from Clive of India to Gainsborough, from Lady Hamilton (and Nelson, naturally) to Sheridan and General Wolfe, Beau Nash and even John Wesley.

The city has done a fine job on the Roman Baths; it has restored the general ground plan of the system, it explains the whole thing with the recorded voice of an Oxford scholar commenting on each section of the baths as each is illuminated in turn. Alongside this restoration is a new museum of artifacts that have been dug up at various times and that tell us a great deal about the kind of life the Romans had in Britain when they were busy civilizing our forefathers. Not all the reminders of Bath’s old glory are in the arts of building or renovating ruins. One of the best ways of spending a morning is to go into the Abbey and read the hundreds of epitaphs that appear on plaques and tablets on the walls. Anyone only casually interested in military history can begin to sense the vast extent of the British Empire in its heyday and the cheerful commuting that soldiers and sailors indulged in, between the Hudson River and India and on to the Peninsular War, before they all settled in Bath and shared reminiscences in the Pump Room of the hazards of the Indian climate, and the charms of the girls from upstate New York.

Most of these epitaphs were written and inscribed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during that long span when – as somebody said – it was almost impossible for an Englishman to write badly. Soon after the Nineteenth century sets in, life becomes real and life becomes earnest, and the prose becomes grim and dim. But happily – if I may put it that way – most of these generals and admirals and gallants and their ladies died at a time when their epitaphs alone give them a kind immortality. Consider this one about ‘ Anne, only daughter of George Finch Esq of Valentines in Essex’: ‘It pleased God to visit her with a tedious and severe illness, which she bore with great evenness and constancy… Her life was the more desirable in that the first real occasion of Grief that she gave her sorrowful Mother was her Death’. Another begs the onlooker to consider how sad the widow must feel in actually having to see the epitaph chiselled: ‘Reflect, O Reader, on the distress of Conjugal Affection, and pity the fond endeavour which, in seeking to alleviate perpetuates its sorrows, by inscribing marble’.

A minister plenipotentiary to the court of Prussia, – one Joseph Ewart – could become a sympathetic figure and a warning to all schoolboys who fear the effects of too much homework on the brain. For do you know what Mr. Ewart died of? He was, it says here, ‘a premature victim of the exertions of an ardent and superior mind’. He was dead at thirty-two. The one epitaph that I should like to think set the tone of Bath in its best days – the mischief and gaiety possible to retired sailors who had done their duty well – is this one, to a Rear Admiral of the Red, who died in 1774:
‘Let the Brave revere him for the pattern which they gain,
Let the gay regret him for the pleasure which they lose.’

Now why should I, at the beginning, have thought of Bath and Frank Lloyd Wright in the same breath? Because I think a lot of intelligent people feel a certain guilt in visiting historical places that provide a haven from the things we have to face today – and by things I mean not only political anxieties but the effort to find a true style of society, of work and leisure, of architecture and traffic engineering and holiday resort, that will fit the social revolution we have gone through in the last thirty years or so. In other words, Frank Lloyd Wright was a very persuasive critic of what he took to be a sin: the sin of inviting people to wallow against the backdrop of a life and style of city that is dead and done with. This was his big argument against living in any time that was not your own. He would have made the point that Gainsborough, Sheridan, and the rest, even the retired soldiers and sailors, did not do with Bath what we are doing with it. They lived their lives in a modern town, a creation of their own artists and entertainers. They moved among the latest furniture in the very latest style of house. They did not retreat into Elizabethan manor houses or sigh for William and Mary furniture: they were healthy; people who want to dally with the eighteenth century instead of the twentieth are not.

Having come lately from Berlin, which is crackling away like a time-bomb ready to explode at the ticking of Mr. Khrushchev’s stop-watch, I am acutely aware of the dangers of escapism. Destroy all your old towns, Wright used to say, and build a democratic architecture that follows the shape of the land it is placed in and that has meaning for people living in a democracy – not palaces and plaza gardens and vast museums. but… But what? I asked him. ‘Build’, he said with a firm gentle emphasis, ‘ for whatever the people do in their daily lives’. I can only think this means better, more dashing greyhound tracks, flashier movie houses, grander nuclear reactor plants, football stadiums as big as the Colosseum, and bookmakers’ offices as elegant as the crescents of Bath.

I had, and I keep, great affection for Frank Lloyd Wright. But it seems to me a very plausible argument based on a preposterous premiss. The premiss is that we all come into the world with a completely original set of muscles and organs and nerves, and that our character and ideas will be formed only from the moment we begin to take in sights and sounds and the advice of our parents. But a man in his forties today surely is not only a user of snack bars, a veteran of Dunkirk, a man for or against the Common Market. Whether he knows it or not, he was-through his forbears – tamed by the Romans, toughened by the Crusades, excited and deepened by the age of Shakespeare, and civilized by the eighteenth century. Bath is only one delectable reminder that a man is all the forces that have made him – and so is a nation.

A Letter from Bath by Alistair Cooke. First published 6 June 1961 in The Listener, a BBC magazine.
Reproduced with the ­­­­kind permission of © Cooke Americas, LLC

Alistair Cooke’s A Letter from America 1946-2004 (Penguin Modern Classics) is available in Bath at Topping & Company and Mr B’s and many other good book sellers.