by PERRY ANDERSON
Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn (1941-1912) SOURCE/Press TV
Over time, an American legend grew up that Alexander had hit local journalism like a bolt of lightning by introducing an English fashion of polemical writing, unknown in the us, but familiar in Britain. I lost count of the number of Stateside obituaries that repeated this notion. Nothing could be further from the truth. In point of style, Alexander himself did not write like this in London: his pieces in the tls were often quite stilted, in keeping with the conventions of the paper and the period. Of his father Alexander observed: ‘He wrote fast, with a beautifully easy style’, but Claud was himself the first to say this was not always so, remarking that in his mid-twenties, ‘I wrote slowly and my style was erratic.’ [20] The incomparable zing of ‘Press Clips’ was not imported from the uk; it was invented in the us. Still less had its object anything to do with British example. In Ukania, criticism of the press in the press has long been taboo, governed by the Fleet Street maxim that dog does not eat dog—a rule breached only where crime rather than ideology or politics is at issue. [21] Murdoch can offer a good conscience to all, but even in the most independent of venues—say, the London Review of Books—treating belles âmes of the Guardian or Independent along Cockburn lines would be unthinkable.
In New York, the Voice of the time was generally regarded as the most radical weekly in the country. But Alexander’s columns were well to the left of its centre of gravity, and in due course the distance between them led to his departure over the most predictable of local flash-points, Israel. In early 1984, the editor of the Voice—a former stalwart of the New York Times—suspended him for having two years earlier received a grant to write a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon from an Institute of Arab Studies, by then extinct for want of funds. Overwhelmingly, readers of the paper expressed incredulity and anger at the decision. But the upshot was never in doubt: Zionism was not to be trifled with. Prompted by Andy Kopkind and seeing an opportunity, Victor Navasky hired Alexander for the Nation on the spot. [22] The move was a boon to both paper and author. The column that Alexander negotiated with Navasky, named ‘Beat the Devil’ after Claud’s most successful novel, gave him two facing pages each fortnight, a space in which he could vary his palette and amplify his register beyond the staccato of ‘Press Clips’. For his discovery of America had been not only of a political landscape vaster and more energizing than Britain, but of a literary landscape wilder and more liberating. Of himself he said, much later, that the prose stylists who had attracted ‘an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility’ were always ‘American rough-housers’; and once across the Atlantic, though he never tried to imitate them, ‘they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go’, [23] releasing him for writing of the kind he perfected in these years.
He was much in demand. By the turn of the eighties, he had a political column in the Wall Street Journal, covered restaurants for House and Garden, could be read in Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and American Film Institute, and—at his most accomplished—in Grand Street. But his main impact was on the Nation itself, whose circulation doubled from a lowly 24,000 the year after he moved to it, and nearly doubled again the following year. Navasky attributed the increase to his direct-mail campaigns, but few doubted a Cockburn effect. ‘Beat the Devil’ changed the face of the Nation, not least in the brim-full Letters Pages it elicited, where Alexander delighted in riposting con brio: no one in the history of the Nation ever received or replied to so many challenges from readers. He had found his best audience.
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