"On Being Self-Important" by By Richard Sale

I wrote of my encounter with the Shah’s secret police and a number of you were gracious in finding it interesting. But I also received this reply: 

“Sale's article embodied self-importance. Sale's detailed description of his acting-out, playing a fool, so that the SAVAK stooges would think he was just another dumb American.” PSC 

My story was simply a story, a memory, an offering made in good faith, not a piece of strutting or egoistical self-display. 

When I was a very little boy I never heard a radio and the advent of TV was years off.  I grew up in deep woods. Solitude is the perfect food for the young, solitary soul. I was intensely interested in what I heard and observed. My interests were entirely local. But I made great efforts to remember them and began a kind of mental journal. 

By your twenties, a young person has a general idea of what his or her character is composed of, its habits, tendencies, inclinations, its strengths and its weaknesses. The Spanish philosopher Ortega said, “Tell me that you are interested in, and I will tell you who are.” 

But when you are little kid, the figures of authority were viewed more in terms of the penalties they could bring rather than offering something to emulate. I simply knew that as a boy, that parents were to be feared and teachers were to be feared too. Unfortunately, fear suffocates thought. 

What are we to be? That’s the chief question that a young person ponders. What are we to be? Little by little, figures jut up in our lives that we respect because of their talents, their more penetrating minds or their superior kindness.  At a young age, we have no idea of what a “great” man is, much less the causes that act to create a “great” name. 

Every young person is always trying to fashion trials and tests that determine the range of their talents, their abilities, their ideals, their true inclinations and propensities. We do this by observing and noting, and we specially note failures.  Drastic failures discourage new, improved attempts.

But in our young lives, there are people who seem to embody everything that are strong, graceful and intelligent, and such people seem to display great extensiveness of ability, and on that account are widely admired by others. Our admiration is conditioned by the respect we feel for certain superiors. One of the reasons they loom so large is that a young person lacks any developed or reliable sense of prospective, so looming ideals of an earlier day begin to shrink in size, and new admirations replace the older ones.

 

But the more our mind matures, the better are we able to multiply the possibilities that are open to us. We obtain a better idea of who we are a sharper sense of our innate predilections and propensities. We begin to cobble together the traits were admire -- liveliness, energy, the delights of happiness, and singularity of purpose. 

Our goals change.  Gaining knowledge of the world, and of our self, by making regular exertions, our gaining a deeper set of abilities and finding out ways that those abilities can be measured against others, framing an idea of how our abilities can count – all those enter center stage. We embrace values that have not yet been contaminated by the customary vices of our time. We disdain the greedy, the underhanded, the showy, and the false.  We vow not to obtain any success by base means. 

By my mid-twenties, I wanted an adventurous, strenuous life. As a young man, I was in love with the glamour of the strange.  I became a reporter. I lived with dangerous gangs like The Blackstone Rangers, reported on drug rings, spent a month in a maximum state prison, where I escaped assassination, (I was to be knifed to death by inmates,) , and finally went to Iran. 

Iran 

I was in my late twenties when I went to Iran. My great, great, great grandfather, a Yorkshire clergyman, did first translation the Koran into English. That’s what took me to Iran.  The only country I had ever been in was Mexico which had it s own special allure, but in going to Iran was a gate swung wide open. 

I married an Iranian, and I began to study the country she was from. I had read enough to know of the Persian Empire and its magnificent achievements its literature and epics, but I had never seen Iran. 

I wasn’t simply “curious.” I was studious. Curiosity can be an idle vice -- it can either produce nothing or it can turn into earnest studiousness. I was a dreamy ineffective character as a boy, I did reflect. I brooded on deep rooted impressions which prompted me to learn more about what fascinated me and learn why it did. I observed and remembered what I had seen or read. 

I wasn’t rich boy as my sour critic alleges. At the time I went to Iran, I was working at the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped, working to get jobs for disabled veterans. I was making $19,000 a year. 

My grandfather was extremely rich – he was a war profiteer and he bought his children expensive homes and new cars, but I never enjoyed his riches. 

My father was rich, he was a Hollywood writer and director, but he was an utterly corrupt man who refused to send me to college. He had insulted by step mother (whom I did not like,) and I called him out. I was disinherited for the first time. He spent $750,000 one year on male and female lovers, boats, gambling etc., but he couldn’t afford to send me to college, so I got a $15,000 national defense loan and worked bailing hay on farms near Alton, Ill., and paid the loan back after I got a $4,000 a year job. 

None of his money came near to me.  I was left o myself and my own exertions. 

Retailing or Retaining Experience. 

There is a certain humility required of you if want to be a witness. Think of Pat Lang’s stories about Vietnam. In the story of Savak, I was merely retailing what I had seen.  I prepared for what I saw by first studying the facts, not merely studying them, but memorizing them. I was on assignment to uncover the truth about the shah’s police state and trying to discern if his statements about it coincided or expressed any reality. I did this for The Washington Post. 

My father in law was top public relations official in the Shah’s regime in Iran’s Ministry of Interior.  I did not like PR people. (Later I would end up marrying a very lovely one) but at that age, I stayed clear of them because they were always peddling something, and what they were peddling usually wasn’t true. 

In Iran, he was still by myself, without weapons or recourse, timid, hesitant, nervous, and determined. At time I was crouched like an animal awaiting the blow, but still determined. 

I loved my father in law, and called him Baba, Farsi for father. He came from a rich, noble Iranian family.  His father had once owned 28 villages. But in Iran, he incessantly prated the Shah’s line, at times sounding like a startling voice that comes out from a child’s puppet. I thought the Shah a murdering tyrant, but he always defended him. It was his job. But he was eager for me to see more of his country that he loved. We would we often drove to place 25 miles out of Tehran.  And suddenly I began to see people who are interesting, lawyers, doctors, students. Without saying a word, I somehow met people who were truthful about the Shah.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that was Baba’s work. 

It was the retelling of their experience that would provide the solid ground beneath my feet when I wrote the series for The Post.     

But Baba always kept his distance from me. He always prated and retailed the Shah’s line. But clearly, he wanted me to see as much of Iran as I could.  One evening, we drove 20 miles out of Tehran and up into the Albourz Mts. I smoked opium with a distinguished Iranian doctor who was no friend of the Shah.  In earlier days, smoking opium was as a kind of martini for well-off Iranians, and my refined Iranians did it. One of Iran’s leaders, Reza Shah, became an opium addict. 

When I entered this lovely furnished room, the servants of the doctor had prepared a small fire of hot goals, and resting in them was a tiny silver utensil displaying even tinier holes. When the coals grew hot enough, the opium, dull pills colored like caramel, was stuck on the outside of the utensils and when the opium melted, you inhaled it.  It didn’t give you any high. It calmed you.  Baba took dangerous chances in taking me to that man’s house because for him, being caught smoking opium meant life in prison, but he wanted me to see a bit of the old Iran. 

My stay in Iran was interrupted by my wife, who went out one day in January and tried to play tennis on black ice, and broke her arm.  As I was leaving, Baba took me aside, and we hugged and kissed cheeks, and he then confronted me, and, his eyes locked in mine, said simply,” Tell the truth.” 

Which I did. 

I warned my wife, that after The Post published the series, that Baba would be violently attacked, and I told her to stay calm and disregard whatever he said about me. Baba would be talking on a government phone, which was tapped, and he would denounce me as a traitorous son in law. 

The call came.  Baba pretended to be furious over the series and he depicted me as a disloyal son in law, and I stayed o the line as he continued to abuse me. This was all according to plan. 

But afterwards, my wife threw a big tantrum, saying that I had sold him out. She completely forgot my warning that Baba was speaking from a tapped phone, and he would have to disown me in order too save further damage to his career. That is one of the many reasons I am not longer married to her.

Why Tell Stories? 

Why do we tell stories? We write to restore things that will be forgotten. If an experience is memorable, we put it down to rescue from the coming oblivion of forgetting. We want to present ourselves in a flattering light.  We tell stories for effect. 

We want people, in some measure, to live through what we lived through.  We detest masquerades. We disdain the pursuit of the trivial. But all stories involved a measure of self-exposure. We use stories to tell people who we are and what we have done, in order to be found admirable in their eyes. 

The truth is not truly true because it is incomplete. Our memories remember only highlights. To dig beneath the surface, takes hard work.  Art may be needed to create truth. The ambition to write well means we have to use artifice. 

No story is a replica of an event. A story must use imagination mixed with fact and literary talent to recreate a scene.  The temptations of any autobiographical writing is the desire to embellish, mould, insert, heighten, diminish, omit, avoid, conceal and distort. Our memories lie; they leave out things, they ignore certain elements. They exaggerate. The mere act of writing shades some of the facts. Details draw near as you write. Are the details accurate? Or are they simply devices? What ends does do they serve by remembering them? The answer is: details have to be accurate or you are simply writing rubbish. The first requirement of any prose is that it must be interesting. It must capture the imagination of those who listen to it. 

But to try and be completely sincere, leads to falsehood. Think of Abraham Lincoln talking of his “poor, ravaged, ugly face.” The desire to be completely sincere, driven too far, can degenerate into posturing and attitudinizing. Sincerity distorts as well as clarifies. 

Remember the exact truth remains out of reach. We try not to invent.  Real life in volume is often flat and disappointing. Our memories mislead and lie, and leave things out while exaggerating others.  Any story makes use of light and shade. 

But the delight in retailing a story gives the narrator pleasure, highlighting where we acted rightly, where we used our study of a situation effectively, where our powers of observation were used to reveal and illuminate an episode in order to stir up memories of listeners that are similar to ours. 

And to my sour critic I say -- if speaking truthfully of what you have said and done comes down to a mere display of self importance, so be it. It would have been better if, you had you offered some insights or stories of your own rather than libeling mine.

 

Comments

[BabelFish]

Richard, one of the truly great pleasures of being a part of SST is reading your remarkable prose. Please accept my thanks.

And, what are stories if they are not an attempt to place a human reference on the larger frame of events. I grew up in a story telling culture and they created a touch point that allowed me to feel and hear the actors as they moved through their lives during things that were otherwise only history to me. These have been some of the most powerful moments of my life.

[Dubhaltach]

There's a wonderful expression which I've heard a few times when I've visited Ireland:

"F*ck the begrudgers".

Dubhaltach

[BabelFish]

Indeed!

[Dismayed]

It's always a pleasure to read you, Richard. Thank you for sharing.

[confusedponderer]

Mr. Sale,
it's always a privilege and a pleasure to read what you write. Thanks, and keep it coming.

[Bill H]

Part of my growing up was in Arizona, and a bunch of us used to go out past the edge of town where lived an old Hopi guy who spent his days carving Kachinas. We would sit and watch him carving and dressing the latest Kachina and listen, enthralled, sometimes for hours, as he told the story of this particular Kachina and the role that it played in the making of the ancient world. That was sixty years ago and I remember him today with great clarity and fondness.

You remind me of him sometimes, Richard.

[the Unready]

I recall a post where the Colonel mentioned his disdain for people who pestered him for war stories. But I can't stop myself.

Keep the stories coming please Mr. Sale. It's like listening to a Gypsy fiddle. Heart and soul, experience and intelligence.

[Vanasek]

Richard,

Very well stated!

[turcopolier]

unready

Richard's biographic piece is not a war story. pl

[kao_hsien_chih]

Absolutely!

[Charles !]

Cheers Richard. You were there. Keep telling us about it, and yourself as well. We'll sort out the info/source bit.

I recall the same post as the Unready, and cringed a bit - tho I've never cornered our host at a party I have been privileged to be offered a few beyond those posted here. My voyeuristic streak is more intelligence than combat oriented, so I'm 2 for 2 here.

I just finished the first season of Tour of Duty and will watch the other two. Any editorial comment or other observations?

[Charles Dekle]

Mr Sale,
Thank you.
Regards,

[Walrus]

Thank you Mr. Sale for sharing this deeply personal experience with us.

[The Beaver]

Hear Hear !

[The Beaver]

Mr. Sale,

Thank you and I am going back to reread about that piece on Iran.

I have tried to locate that six-part series that you wrote for the Post but to no avail.

[Cee]

Mr. Sale,

Thank you again for another wonderful contribution. You were blessed to have known your father-in-law. He was brave and so are you.

[LeaNder]

"I loved my father in law, and called him Baba, Farsi for father. He came from a rich, noble Iranian family. His father had once owned 28 villages. But in Iran, he incessantly prated the Shah’s line, at times sounding like a startling voice that comes out from a child’s puppet."

Richard, I was fascinated by this passage. Or how you recount it. I am fascinated by Baba, as you experienced him compared to your former wife. ... What a pity journalists never return to such stories. ... In the more personal facts, fiction and interpretation department. Would be too personal, I guess.

And there is a reason why this drew most of my attention.

Recently I stumbled into a really peculiar highly indirect libel of someone I didn't even know on the blog of someone I do. The libel in its own very, very indirect way was a response to a short personal message in the comment section concerning the author. Never quite directly saying it but insinuating he was an antisemite. While responding not even addressing him directly either.

I won't link to it, because I don't want to draw attention to it. I am a certified PR advisor too, and am slightly critical of the field for the reasons you give.

Ironically enough the result was in the end, that I not only became aware of another continuity-of-Nazi-in-postWWII institutions over here, I had actually missed. But I also had the pleasure to meet (email-wise) the thus outed elder German who has been asked to help the person outing him, due to his PhD in history.

***********

Long introduction. Many, many years ago by now, I met an Iranian-German in Berlin's student village. At the time I had no idea how influential he was in the protests against the Shah's regime over here, slightly before I studied in Berlin.

What I remember distinctively though, are his fears of SAVAK at the time.

Can anyone give me a link to the article Richard alludes to here?

[LeaNder]

Ok, no help needed, I guess. I'll check these:

http://tinyurl.com/Sale-SAVAK

[turcopolier]

LeAnder

The ME is a cruel, cruel place. The kind of idyllic society that you seem to think achievable is not. The result of trying to impose the politics of today's Germany or the EU in general in these countries is inevitably the rise of fundamentalist Islam because the locals are unhappy and uncomfortable with our political ideas. pl