That incredibly crass question had been shouted by a British television correspondent working his way through huddled masses of European refugees fleeing the Congo in 1960. Behr wrote that “the BBC reporter’s callous cry summed up for me the tragic, yet wildly surrealist nature of the country itself.” But the seasoned men and women of the international press corps remembered the title because, funnily enough, horribly enough, it summed up the cynical practicality necessary to the work they did.
Of course, in those days the business was different. The Internet was nonexistent, pundits were rare and rather poorly thought of, and reporters actually went places—all sorts of places—to see firsthand what was happening in the countless troubled corners of the world that many on the home front would just as soon forget, or didn’t notice at all. “All my real wars have taken place in peacetime,” as Edward put it.
The work was difficult, dangerous and poorly recompensed apart from the camaraderie of the press corps (around a hotel bar, as often as not) and the pure excitement of the chase when a story was hot. The job might sound romantic, but only from a distance. “In my world notebooks are lost, tape recorders jam, taxis break down in remote places, and on my way to the revolution noisy children throw up in crowded planes,” Behr wrote in that famous memoir, which was published in the United States in 1978 with the more anodyne title “Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind the Lines” (Viking).
Born in France in 1926 to Jewish parents from the Soviet Union who held British passports, Edward brought to his work a sensibility that grew out of Europe’s suffering and his own. His father died when he was 10. He fled Paris with his mother when the Germans invaded in 1940 and he landed in London. By the time he was 17, he’d joined the Indian Army (which was still under British command), serving in Indonesia and then Peshawar near the Afghan frontier. After a stint at Cambridge, he signed up with Reuters, then Time Magazine, and finally NEWSWEEK in 1965.
Edward wasn’t sure why he had been so drawn to what he called the “nihilism” of reporting, but he hazarded some educated guesses:
“It could have come from watching the London blitz at close quarters: Why were some streets spared and not others? What possible explanation was there for my aged exiled Russian grandmother’s horrible death in a Nazi concentration camp? It could have been in Sumatra, watching dead and dying village women and children being carried into a first-aid post after a mortar attack. Not being religious, I could not subscribe to the convenient notion of God’s will, and I found the fatalistic attitude of the Indian troops I was with in wartime far more conducive to peace of mind than any Christian attempt to justify the spectacle of human folly around me. … The only recourse, it seemed to me, was to try, where possible, to anatomize such instances, and what better way of doing so than becoming a journalist?”
As serious and sinister as the situations might be that he wrote about, mirth was always part of his work, and also part of his inspiration. He credited Evelyn Waugh’s darkly funny novel “Scoop,” about inept hacks covering a remote African war, for making him think about being a reporter in the first place. And one of the first “serious books” he read when he was a teenager was “Laughter” by the French philosopher Henri Bergson:
“I remember his description of the chimpanzee, tumbling out of the tree and saving itself from hurt at the last moment and causing in its audience of apes the spasms of sudden anxiety followed by relief—chimp laughter,” Edward wrote. “How scientifically valid Bergson’s theories are today I know not and care less. For I have felt the chimp’s escape from danger, and I know that laughter is indeed the surest form of released tension.”
By the time I got to know Edward in the late 1980s he had retired from NEWSWEEK and was working full time, with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm, writing books about a stunning array of subjects, from “The Last Emperor” and “Hirohito” to the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania: “Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite.” Dictators fascinated him and he had met many of the most famous, interviewing the failing Mao Zedong for three hours, even taking tango lessons from Fidel Castro at the British ambassador’s residence in Havana. (Those were early days.) Behr also wrote about the secret life of French crooner Maurice (“Thank Heaven for Little Girls”) Chevalier and the inside story of Prohibition. He made documentary films and was as comfortable working the Croisette in Cannes as he had been around the bar of the Caravelle in Saigon.
When Edward would come over to dinner, we’d eat and drink in the kitchen, talking, laughing, my wife and I listening enthralled as he told tales of the Northwest Frontier and the Algerian War. In the extraordinary year 1968, he’d managed to cover the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the student revolts in Paris and the Russian reconquest of Prague! His lucid good humor made faraway places and their troubled histories seem as exciting and vital as, indeed, they were. As, indeed, they are.
And then, one day while filming a television documentary in Taiwan a few years ago, Edward stood in front of the camera and made no sense at all. He spoke unintelligibly, but with conviction, not knowing at first that a stroke had partially taken away his power of speech. It also devastated his memory. Slowly, over months, the ability to talk returned. But the memories of that extraordinary life were fractured and lost, and the second installment of his memoirs proved impossible to write.
His last years were spent mainly in Ramatuelle, not far from Saint Tropez on the Cote d’Azur, in the company of his wife, Christiane. I know he was often depressed and frustrated at the state of his health and, yes, the state of the world. But I like to think that inwardly he still was laughing wisely. And if you can find a copy of that first memoir, whichever title it bears, you will be, too.
