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April 9 - May 30, 2021
It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars. —MARIE COLVIN, 2001
Fair Weather This level reach of blue is not my sea; Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun, Whose quiet ripples meet obediently A marked and measured line, one after one. This is no sea of mine, that humbly laves Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm. I have a need of wilder, crueler waves; They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm. So let a love beat over me again, Loosing its million desperate breakers wide; Sudden and terrible to rise and wane; Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide That casts upon the heart, as it recedes, Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. —SEAMUS HEANEY
Of course, I had seen her before, and knew her by reputation, but that moment was when we became friends: the time we couldn’t stop laughing, thinking we might plunge to our deaths from the skies above the Red Sea.
I forgave her, of course, because everyone forgave Marie—she had a charisma that made you excited to think she considered you a friend.
As grief subsided, I thought of her no less often. She was always there, her ghost challenging me to discover all that I had missed when she was alive.
But sometimes she couldn’t fathom her own feelings. She knew she was cleverer than the boys, yet she longed for their attention. She relished the feeling of vanquishing her father when she outran him in races around the house in the wet grass—yet as much as she wanted to defy him, she also craved his approval. If a boy misbehaved in school, his punishment was to go stand with the girls—as if that were the ultimate degradation. It was hard to make sense of it all.
“She liked the adventurous side of life,” Thom recalls. “She had a strong backbone and a great thing about the downtrodden.”
When the clouds darkened and the waves grew rough, others headed back to shore, but she would sail into the storm, relishing the rocking of the boat, the fight with the spinnaker, and the possibility of capsizing, using her skill to right the craft as the waves crashed around her. Danger, she found, was thrilling.
workers, and kept asking how much they got paid, how many hours they worked,” Jerelyn recalls. “She couldn’t probe him enough. She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe they only get twenty-five cents an hour. I just can’t believe it.’” Jerelyn thinks that some kind of alarm went off in Marie’s head that day. “I had never seen her ask questions like that before. I think it was the moment she became a journalist.”
An eye for detail, the ability to conjure a scene, and scant regard for her own safety were to become trademarks of her journalism.
Where Katrina was well organized, Marie was often chaotic, but she had a way of dealing with practical details that irked or bored her: she simply ignored them. She rarely paid her library fines and was always behind on the administration of her student loans. Debts were an irritant in the back of her mind, not a real concern.
have lived a good life. I made people happy. And I did what I thought was right.” The last one—it is the essence of my father. I feel so weak-spirited when I think of him. Why should all the pettiness matter to me? But I did learn—LIFE IS TOO SHORT.
He talked about truth rather than balance and was more interested in character and narrative than in the gathering of facts taught in basic journalism courses.
Marie would always say that Hersey’s Hiroshima was the best book on war she had ever read. Short and understated, and based on the reporting he did the year after the atomic bomb was dropped, it traces the lives of five Japanese civilians and a German missionary who survived and whose lives intersected. In an interview for The Paris Review in 1986, Hersey said it had been inspired by Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which traces the interlocking stories of five people who are killed when a rope bridge gives way in Peru.
“In fiction, the writer’s voice matters; in reporting the writer’s authority matters,” he wrote in “The Legend on the License,” a 1980 essay for The Yale Review. “It is very simple … All we need to do is insist on two rules: the writer of fiction must invent. The journalist must not invent.”
He told her that the physical act of writing was the only way to learn—there was no theory, only practice. Events, what people did, were of the essence, and the reporter was less an artist than a carpenter, hewing a story from a tree, chipping away, sanding, and polishing until it was perfect.
At the end, he wrote, “I like the tough, honest realism, but no individual human beings emerge. Places, however, are evoked well.” Her later work, with its emphasis on individual stories in war, shows how much Marie took these lessons to heart.
The realization that what mattered was being able to write, that I was scared to attempt it because of fear of failure; everything has always come so easy for me. To fail at anything else would not really be to fail; to fail at writing would be real failure. And to succeed the only success I would value.
She got by until December, when a friend of her father’s told her that Local 237, the New York City municipal employees’ branch of the Teamsters union, was looking for someone to edit their member newsletter.
Her colleagues called her “little girl” and ostentatiously stopped telling dirty jokes when she entered the room, but according to Joe, Marie soon earned their respect by transforming Local 237’s newsletter. She understood immediately that members didn’t want dry pronouncements from union leaders; they wanted to see their own pictures and stories in print.
January 12, 1982. Felt the pieces of my life beginning to fall into place. But also the need to stop waiting for the unknown but expected event, and to take charge.
Tons of bombs, tens of thousands of soldiers rushing through waves to shore being machine-gunned and dropping in the surf. In the battle plan, all the mass moves make sense—but to one person? I wonder if you can ever give up the individual desire to live, in the mass movement?
The role and feelings of the individual in the collective violence of war would become a major theme of her journalism.
naked self-expression is the seed of creativity;
the artist’s consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses; and art eludes conventional morality.
He had suffered long bouts of depression and alcoholism; self-control was essential for his survival.
Lou was never a reporter. His peculiar talent was to read thousands of words someone else had written and get the essence of the story in a flash. He could listen to a reporter’s pitch and know instantly whether it was a story, and how to tell it and sell it. His journalistic mantra was “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em horny,” encapsulating the imperative to make the news exciting, not just informative. His oft-repeated criticism of young journalists’ copy was “Why don’t you put the second par first?”
He found redemption in being a mentor.
“God put me on earth to be a catalyst,” he told her.
His voice would go really rough, like broken glass and cigarettes.”
Martha Gellhorn, who had reported the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and Oriana Fallaci, who had been in the Resistance against Mussolini before embarking on a career covering war and revolution.
Lou was able to help her examine her thoughts, cutting through what she characterized as “the slick veneer” she gave them, “the gloss that allows me to glide along, handle this crisis, that.”
Her mother, who came along to the party, remarked to anyone listening, “She’s hard on shoes,” while making coffee for those left at the very end.
August 4, 1985. First day in Paris! I’m the Paris bureau chief. I’ve done it. Exultant.
The New York Times columnist Flora Lewis,
Then there was Aline Mosby, aged sixty-three and still reporting for UPI, who had been the first American woman posted as a correspondent to Moscow.
After one argument, she stormed off to the beach. He followed her with a writing pad. “You can hide from me but not from this,” he said. “There’s an acorn of genius in you. I know and I’m never wrong. You have to stop being Marie the party girl. You have to be a journalist for a while, but you can’t stop there or you’ll end up with a handful of ashes. I’ll make a novelist of you.”
Why do you think I always drive so hard through life leaving bodies? I can’t feel, I stop feeling. I am not afraid, I don’t feel for more than a moment …
Marie had tried to explain that she had always felt different from other girls, who she thought went at things in a roundabout way while she liked to tackle problems head-on. Maybe that was why men thought there was something wrong with her, she mused. Maybe they were right.
There was no new man to distract her; a new story was what she needed.
Elias Canetti’s The Voices of Marrakesh.
David had a shambolic demeanor that belied the sharpest of minds—he ferreted out details that others missed and had the ability to make interviewees say far more than they intended.
Theirs was less like a meeting and more like a looking into a mirror and seeing the other’s reflection.
It was Marie’s first trip in a helicopter. An Austrian reporter lent her his Walkman so, as they swooped over the sands of the Sahara, she could drown out the roar of the rotors with Dire Straits and Bruce Springsteen, while watching the crescent-shaped dunes and cloud shadows below.
At the airport, the journalists were served tea under a banner proclaiming “We Are the Natural and Historical Contradiction to America as an Imperial Power.” A poster showed President Reagan’s face against a desert background and a skeleton, with the caption “The Barbarian Reagan Is a Necrophiliac Because His Approach Suffocates Humans.”
Marie had never worked so hard in her life, filing three or four stories a day in a chaotic atmosphere where the Libyan armed forces randomly fired antiaircraft batteries in case there was another raid, and journalists never knew from one hour to the next if they were going to be fêted, detained, or expelled.
Martha Gellhorn’s friend Virginia Cowles had been the Sunday Times correspondent during the Second World War. The paper’s star reporter in Vietnam was Nicholas Tomalin, famous for writing “The General Goes Zapping Charlie Cong,” one of the first pieces to reveal the casual way U.S. forces killed civilians. Tomalin himself had been killed by a Syrian missile in 1973, while reporting the Yom Kippur War.
The destructive energy of a dozen or more Middle Eastern conflicts was concentrated in these few square miles. At the heart was the battle between Palestinians and Jews for control of Israel, to the south. In 1982, Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon to push out the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had been carrying out terrorist attacks against Israeli targets across the world. Although the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, and his closest associates had left Beirut, the Israelis had remained, allying themselves with armed Lebanese Christians. Iran and Syria, both ardently anti-Israeli,
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David Hirst, the Guardian correspondent, said that the idea of spending two years chained to a radiator had given him the strength to fight his way out of a car he’d been bundled into the previous week. “If I’d been James Bond I’d have done it differently,” he said.
