And I thought, precisely, about how hard it is to write about someone you love. The keyboard becomes a kind of Ouija board, taking you toward places you may not have wanted to go. And when the story is one of loss the process is more frightening still…The past was what it was: remembered, imagined, fabricated, reconstructed. No, there is no real way to deal with everything we lose. -—- Christopher Dickey
Photo credit: © Photograph by Peter Turnley
The legendary foreign correspondent Christopher Dickey (1951-2020) was the world’s most interesting man because he loved it so, and the world loved him back—everyone he knew personally, everyone he ever met and every reader who made his acquaintance on the page or through a broadcast and felt that strong bond of trust that forms between a writer and a reader. Chris Dickey told us the truth about the world, no matter how ugly and uncomfortable it was to hear, acknowledge, accept and take steps to change. But he also shared the power, glory, beauty and wonder of every blade of grass and beating heart which is why so many hearts are breaking, especially those of a generation of journalists Chris so generously mentored.
The filaments are so strong between the lines of writers and readers and our lives are changed for the better by their words. Chris died suddenly last week in Paris, where he lived and reported following war zones and international hot spots. Chris, who was the World News Editor at the Daily Beast and a contributor to NBC (previously he was the Paris Bureau Chief for Newsweek, and before that served as The Washington Post bureau chief in Cairo and in Central America) died suddenly from a heart attack at the computer working on his next book. Tributes from friends and colleagues around the globe have been pouring in, all reverberating with the same heartrending shock as our own tectonic plates began to shift upon hearing the news. At such a wretched time in our history, when we need courageous, compassionate, and comprehensive reporting—when we need the Truth—as well as the backstory behind the headlines, the unexpected loss of such a good man from the earth-- is deeply profound. It shakes us to our core.
It is meant to.
I knew Chris briefly when I was starting to contribute articles to The Washington Post in the late seventies. Back then the entire process of being a free-lance journalist was personally terrifying--from the persuasive but short letter to the editor offering to write a story “on Spec” (which means you’ll write for free if they like the idea and then if they don’t like the finished product, off you go, and you can contact them again) to the editing of your feature by a new editor every time until you became a regular stringer.
When I first saw the Daily Beast headline announcing his death, all I could mutter in disbelief was that horrible gut-wrenching denial, “Oh my God, No…” I was talking to my sister at the time and I started to cry, explaining, “Chris Dickey was the kindest editor I’ve ever known.” I’ve been blessed with great editors throughout my career, and “kind” isn’t the adjective I’d use to describe them all. But Chris Dickey was kind and when you read the personal tributes being shared, the one golden word threaded throughout is “kind”, usually followed by “generous” and “grateful.”
Chris’s kindness taught me to think of an editor as an Illusionist rather than an Executioner and he would patiently show you how to tighten, trim and then, make you write the damn sentence all over again, twenty times if necessary. God forbid if it was your favorite sentence. Chris could ferret out those psychically and quickly; and then, in the most charming way, he might even agree that yes, that phrase is clever, you’re good, but it’s not really necessary, is it? It was column inches then, now it’s word count. Read it out loud he would tell you. Listen to the words. The end result, even without your favorite sentence, was that readers assumed you had command of the English language, when you knew that writing was really a sleight of hand trick, if ever there was one. Or a great editor. Great and kind. An unbeatable combination.
In 1999 when I was about to tackle A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance, I knew that I couldn’t write or edit this alone, and so with my colleague Michael Segell, we invited 52 of the best male writers to contribute their unique takes on living an authentic life.
Of course, Chris Dickey was at the top of my wish list. By now Chris was an acclaimed foreign correspondent as well as a best-selling author of both novels and non-fiction, including his exquisite Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son (1998) about his tumultuous, lifelong estrangement and reconciliation with his famous father, the Southern poet James Dickey, a Poet Laureate but also the author of the novel Deliverance which John Boorman made into the 1972 film. Chris confessed he became a foreign correspondent to escape his Father’s constant disapproval. I shared that sentiment when I ran away from home in my twenties to London and Paris for several years.
So, you can imagine how thrilled and grateful I was when Chris agreed to write the essay on a man’s relationship with his father called “The Family Album.” It felt as if this was a benediction on the book.
“Chris Dickey hopscotched across the globe to land stories—and mentored a generation of journalists in how to do the same,” Barbie Latza Nadeau remembers in her moving tribute to her friend for The Daily Beast. Chris Dickey was “friends to spymasters and sheikhs, cardinals and cops, insurgents and intellectuals — and all he ever wanted was for anyone he mentored to try to beat him to a source.”
Barbie Latza Nadeau also shares this insight that made Chris Dickey’s life unforgettable and loss unimaginable: “He was a grateful man, thankful for every person he met, every story someone told him, every article he was able to edit to perfection and for journalism as it was and to what it is evolving. But he was grateful to no one more than his wife Carol who undoubtedly suffered his thrill-seeking years when he risked life and limb to tell stories no one else would, and who was finally getting a chance to enjoy him with fewer distractions.”
Grateful. Generous. Compassionate. Kind. A good man.
When I remember Chris Dickey, I will recall what William Shakespeare suggested about the loss of good men and women:
When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Romeo and Juliet (Act 3: Scene 2)
I send my deepest sympathies to Carol and Chris’s family—kin and kith. Thank you for sharing him with the world.
Bless you, Chris Dickey, for leaving a gaping hole in so many hearts. You were a legend in your own time. And our minds. One singular sensation. Simply the best. I know, a lot of cliches there. I only wish you were here to make me cut them out because you were the real deal and always will be.
Dearest love and gratitude, more than words can say.
Sarah