An Ocean Away

AT HOME, on the newspaper, the reporter ran with the pack. Abroad, an ocean away, he finds himself slowly turning into a human wolverine. He lives and hunts alone.

At home, he could feel the eyes of his aging parents on him, and critical Aunt Matilda’s. Even off hours, this tended to make him behave. Every day, he had to get to the office on time, preferably without a hang-over. And there were Tom and Joe and Lucile and the rest of the gang. It gave him a good feeling. Pretty soon his editor told him what was wanted. That same day, he saw his words in print. He had a deep sense of being where he belonged.

Abroad, though the news agencies and two or three papers do maintain regular bureaus in some few capitals, the chances are that now, as a foreign correspondent, he is quite by himself, in a strange place of which he can never be really a part.

Even a wife and children, if he has them, are not the same curb on his natural waywardness that other relatives are. As for the foreigners, they don’t seem to care what he does. To them he is merely a foreigner.

So he can lie abed as long as he likes. He can stay in or go out. He can wait until evening to have his first drink, or can start before breakfast. He can take the day off — why not two? Wasn’t Al Bose away on a binge three whole weeks without the paper finding it out?

His work is why he is here, and it seems important. But the things that excite people here may not mean much over there. He has to try to remember how folks think at home, and somehow write about here as if he were there.

That man in the poem who shot up a random arrow was fortunate. There was at least a fair assurance that it fell to earth intact. Even to see what “they” did with his cabled story, a correspondent must wait for the mail boat two or three weeks. By that time so much else has happened that the whole paper seems very stale.

However, he looks for his piece. It should have been on page one. He finds it on page sixteen. It appears rather short. That is because they have simply left out the key paragraph — the one in which he explained what the strike was really about. And here — oh, Lord! — a “not” got lost. Instead of that “Communism is not gaining,” they have him saying it is!

Just what do they want over there? Do they know, themselves? He sends them a little feature about the famous old circus clown who, on retiring, remarked that “the only way to live happy is to live in seclusion.” They put it on page one. He sends them another about the Italian shoe clerk who confided to an interviewer that he was “tired of living in historic moments” — and they don’t even use it! Their editorials make him wonder if they even read his stuff.

All this is not supposed to affect his morale. Didn’t his editor, when he left, cordially invite him to keep in touch? But just try to clear up a misunderstanding — over an expense account, say—by letter or cable!

In time a correspondent gets to know all sorts of editors. There is the kind who never tells a fellow a thing except “Hold down” or “Mail it.” Enough such orders will make anyone feel like sneaking a few days off.

Again, there is the editor who is always wiring “Congratulations,” in hopes that this will make a fellow forget about that raise in salary he didn’t get. Then if, encouraged, the correspondent redoubles his zeal, along comes one of those hold-down orders that leave him groggy — until the next congratulations.

Some editors have a mania for trying to improve a man’s copy, thus making the writer say what he didn’t quite mean in a way he didn’t intend. Though this is hard to take, there is something harder. Just when the big international circus is about to move into his territory, and the correspondent has done the preliminary work and is all set to cover this conference that the great world will be watching, he is handed a wire: “Our Washington correspondent, Bill Blah, is arriving with the American delegation and will be in charge. Please give him every assistance.” So Blah will not only steal the story but, in so doing, will make use of another fellow’s experience.

Worst of all is the editor who imagines he knows better what is going on than the man on the spot. Armies have learned, the hard way, to trust the field commander or else change him; not some editors. “Protest to Swiss authorities intolerable delay your cable seventeenth.” “Rush 600word interview Attlee on Truman’s socialized medicine plan.” Protest to the square-headed Swiss? Interview the British prime minister? It comes to a man abroad that, for best results, an editor an ocean away should advise and consult, not order.

In due course, the editor comes on a trip. It seems like a good opportunity to get things straightened out. But events soon reveal that what he came for, really, is recreation. The political crisis, the correspondent’s difficulties with the hidden censorship, the garbling of stories, plainly interest the visitor far less than shows, restaurants, night clubs, and where to shop.

The correspondent himself has a right to home leave after two or three years. For months he dreams of it. Then, one day, there he is, and there they all are, Tom and Joe and Lucile. Who has changed? Is it he or they? Even in their kindness, he detects restraint, as if he had come from serving a prison term. Friends and relatives run him ragged with good old American hospitality, but their questions have shown him that they couldn’t have read his dispatches. And the one thing almost nobody asked him about was his work.

True, he makes friends abroad. He gets to know the other American correspondents. He and they have problems in common and can have a good time together. Full intimacy with them is not easy, however, for these are also his competitors. He meets other Americans, and they carry on endlessly about how wonderful everything was at home, as they now recall it, and how hard it is to keep house or do business over here.

To get to know foreigners is pleasant and rewarding, but even with Englishmen it takes about a year. And when, by studious effort, one has partly broken down the language bar, psychological bars remain. Lest one give offense, one can seldom say to a foreigner what one honestly thinks about his country; nor will he, in the first few years, be wholly frank.

Thus, though perhaps outwardly sociable, the correspondent lives more and more to himself. To know he can lie abed may be gratifying; to do so would be childish. In the absence of office discipline, he sets up a daily routine of his own. Lacking social discipline, he begins to develop that sternest of all the disciplines, selfdiscipline, and takes pride in his growing independence.

Even the unavoidable frustrations help to strengthen his philosophy. For he isn’t abroad just for money or adventure. Where the people are sovereign, as with us, how can they judge rightly unless they are rightly informed? To keep them informed is the correspondent’s job. He has a duty to his government, yes, and to his paper. But the man he must never let down is his reader. It is for this fellow citizen, primarily, that he is working. The thought sustains him through many a faltering hour.

A moment comes, perhaps, after more years abroad than he cares to count, when a correspondent has to admit that he actually likes this specialized, rather lonely life. He has proved to himself he can go anywhere, under any conditions, and get along, in a way, with any nation or race. To go back to the old office, and function again on a team, no longer holds out a temptation; for self-reliance, hard to win, is equally hard to surrender.

Is he only an ocean away now ? Or is it a world?