As Foreign Correspondent

I live on a vast pile of junk, comprised of the debris of my past. Books, manuscripts, photographs, watches, notebooks, some empty, some not so empty. From day to day I'm unaware of what lies below my normal field of view. Of course there are a few souvenirs that are out in plain site, on display. On our refrigerator you can find my parents striding across a summer lawn, smiling, full of life. Another, clinging to the steel refrigerator door, is our family photo from 1999--Cherie, me, Sam, and our two dogs. Cherie wears a bright colored vest with pink, red and black hearts, edged with gold thread, which was a favorite of Bistra, my late wife, who made way for the family depicted here. We wear fixed grins, one dog looks peacefully at the camera, the other, ogle-eye, stares blankly. There's a jumble of hands, mostly holding the pets in place. A black swatch near Sam's crossed hands may be the head and ear of our cat, held in Sam's clutches.

Venture into the cellar, the attic or the garage and you will find a kind of archive of past lives. Among the shelves and stacks of milk crates in the garage lie a dozen or so boxes that, until recently, rested peacefully in a barn in New Hampshire, consigned there to a kind never-mind land, consigned there 40 years ago when I closed up my house in the wake of a collapsing career and a disintegrating marriage.

This cache of boxes was for items I didn't expect to need in any near future. Little did I know that I would not see these boxes again for four decades, when, preparing to sell his barn, my friend loaded them into his van and headed to my house across a state border and beyond the boundaries of two careers and three marriages. He had a mischievous expression when he said "I've got your boxes, where shall I put them."

We unloaded them into my garage. Then began a slow, sometimes painful, often poignant process of diving into the boxes, one by one. Now 9 months have passed since I began examining this time capsule of my life at age 33. I still have 3 or 4 boxes unopened as yet. The latest of these incendiary devices yielded many photographic prints--test prints, really--and some fascinating contact sheets. The contact sheets, especially, speak to me like the nocturnal mating calls of owls, across dark distances. Back in those days I always kept my Leica M2 within reach and whatever appealed to my eye I captured as readily and spontaneously as one might shoo a fly. The result is a kind of visual diary. One single roll might capture B.B. King and his band back stage, and on the same sheet a neighbor gathering maple sap in his sugar lot. Roll after roll, contact sheet after contact sheet, I am thrust back in time.

One item from the latest box presents a puzzle. It is a single sheet of stationary; across the top is printed the heading Harper's Magazine and on the line below that, to the left, in smaller type-face the words Editorial Rooms, and to the right, 3 lines that read Two Park Avenue/New York, NY. 10016/Telephone 212 686-8710. The message body was written on a typewriter; clearly it is the original, not a carbon copy. [Remember the days when "CC:" meant the author was making a copy with a sheet of carbon paper?] The date on the upper right side: December 12,1974

Examining this page for the first time since committing it to deep storage it took an effort to reconstruct its significance. The salutation reads "Dear Bob":. Bob must have been Robert Shnayerson, Editor in Chief of Harper's Magazine. The message refers to a "guy who wants to write about Israel." The guy, I knew at once, was me. Here is the full text of the message body, which you can also see on the scan inserted below:

Dear Bob,

Here is the stuff from the guy who wants to write about Israel. He plans to go back in a couple of weeks to write again (at his own expense). He is inexperienced, but I think his stuff shows some promise. He is eager for some direction about which theme to pursue in this writing.

I;ll call you about this next week.

/SIG/

The signature is illegible and I have no recollection whose it might have been. Indeed, I don't remember how I came by the page in the first place.

Below on the left, written in pencil on a slant is written:

Lv for Israel 12/29

Charles Sawyer

New Hampshire

603-428-7508

In the same box I found a manuscript titled "Levantine Diary," which recorded my experiences in Israel the previous spring (1974), shortly after the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War. In fact there were at least three copies of this 16,000 word journal. This piece, I believe, is what is referred to in the main message as "the stuff," and, presumably the material described in the other, longer penciled note in the lower right corner:

This man is earnest + tries hard, but I don't think he has more than promise right now. His writing is not particularly evocative + it is not terribly easy or pleasant to read--he telegraphs his punches, does not choose his words with an eye to subtle distinctions, + he uses too many simple declarative sentences of the same length. I would say no.

RK

I remember, dimly at first, but more clearly now what was going on here. Somehow, I had managed to enter the inner circle of Harper's editors. I came with no standing, whatsoever, no recommenders, no prior publications, just a manuscript and some photos. I didn't even have a story to work on. That was part of my play, actually, to see if they would give me a story line, which would give me a leg up, if I could deliver something that fit the description. All I was asking at this point was a letter of accreditation for the Israeli Press Office, and an expression of interest in what I might produce. RK, whoever he was, recommended giving me the brush off, however slight were my requests. "I would say no," to providing the letter of standing, he was saying. Fortunately, Bob did not follow his advice and I went off to Israel with enough certification to get me an Israeli Press Card.

[An edited version of my "Levantine Diary" appears in a separate item on this SavojBlues portal.]

In 1975, right after this letter was written I traveled in Israel for about 10 weeks. I lived on the Golan Heights for a few weeks, staying in a home of a family in a moshav (collective), called Ramat Megshamim. They just gave me the key to the house while they visited family in Tel Aviv, with a plea that I be very careful not to compromise the kosher status of their kitchen. The father of the family, Bennie, was still grieving the death of his wife the year before when a Syrian artillery shell caught her in the open and cut her down. She was not the first young mother from that agricultural collection to die in this way, a victim to Syrian gunners.

Part of my second Levantine Diary was, to me, quite out of this world. Remat Megshamim's diversified agricultural enterprise, included a herd of beef cattle. There were more than a few of these creatures, minded by a team of genuine Israeli cowboys, who rode herd on them aback sturdy cow ponies. They let me tag along behind them, photographing this surreal John Ford scene as it played out across a battlefield where some of the shrapnel had barely cooled.