In covering the world of writing
and writers on this blog, it’s important to note the life of Gloria Emerson.
Emerson was a journalist
and author who, as the New York Times put it “wrote with angry dignity about
the effects of war on Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians” and sadly, on August
3, 2004, at age 75, suffering from Parkinson's disease and fearing she would be
unable to write, and unable to contemplate a future without her lifelong
passion, she took her own life in her
apartment in Manhattan.
In the span of her amazing life, Emerson
worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Vietnam and Paris, as
a writer of nonfiction and fiction books. She won the George Polk Award for
excellence in foreign reporting (1971) a James Aronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism and the 1978 National Book Award in Contemporary Thought for her
book about the Vietnam War, Winners and
Losers.
Emerson was born in Manhattan to a
wealthy, old-line family, the Emerson’s. She began her career in The Times's
women's news department in 1957, ''I applied for a job at The New York Times
many years ago, and felt correctly that my life depended on it,'' she explained
in a note written just before her death. ''I didn't go to college I ran away
from an alcoholic wretched home and went to work on a hotel giveaway magazine…..getting
a job on the women's page was a gift from heaven although I hated writing about
shoes and clothes, all under the eye of the advertising department who measured
editorial mention of retailers. You cannot imagine what it was like in those
days.'' She left the paper in 1960 to live in Brussels with Charles A.
Brofferio, whom she described as ''an ill-suited husband'' she divorced a year
later.
The Times hired her back as a
reporter in Paris in 1964 ''on the understanding that I would cover the haute
couture collections twice a year,'' she explained. Moving to the paper's London
bureau in late 1968, she made her way to Belfast to write some articles about
the conflict in Northern Ireland, and in 1970, as she put it, ''I was allowed
to go to Vietnam because the war was supposed to be over, so it didn't matter
if a female was sent. Et voilà!''
Her only novel, Loving Graham
Greene, published in 2000 was described as "beguiling and memorable... a
funny, moving and strangely profound novel" and was based on her fascination with the British novelist Graham
Greene whom she had interviewed in Antibes in March 1978 for the magazine
Rolling Stone.
In December 1969, Emerson
conducted a combative interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Apple
Records headquarters in London, during which she disputed the effectiveness of
Lennon and Ono's anti-war campaign. The conversation all but left the hopelessly
pampered Lennon speechless and enraged him.
Although I disagree with Emerson’s
politics and her approach to reporting on the war in Vietnam as well as her
anti-Israel stance regarding Gaza, she wrote with passion and centered much of
what she wrote on the ordinary soldiers. Those who knew her said that she was generous
to a fault to veterans, refugees and street beggars and although her literary
voice was always gravely serious, in person, she was eccentrically funny.
