Searching For Steven Vincent

Via email:

Dear Greyhawk,

I just ran across your beautiful post about Steven Vincent. You said a lot of things that were very poignant. Most especially this: "Neither I nor NRO or the NY Times could get his words read by as many people as the bastards who killed him did today." Exactly.

Steven was an extraordinary writer and it was beyond me why his blog went almost unnoticed...despite the claims by bloggers in the last few days that they loved Steven's blog. On days that I checked, the daily hits would hover at less than 200. Last week, Charles Johnson at LGF linked to the blog, and the count went up to nearly 1000 one day.

I've read your blog for many months, and I've never written to you. And I regret it...just as you mentioned that you had regrets that you never emailed Steven. He almost surely would have replied and I think you would have been greatly impressed by his tender concern for our soldiers. Steven and I had many email exchanges over the last nine months. It started when I commented on his blog, and he wrote me a thank you note. I wrote him back and mentioned that I had a son in Iraq. He wrote about my son a couple of times on his blog.

You questioned in your post about using the word "journalist" for Steven. That he was. He was also a hero, and a guy from New York who took too many risks and stayed too many days where he should not have been. I pray that his sacrifice will be worth it.

Chester:

In January I discovered his blog and emailed him to ask some detailed questions about something I had recently read about Iraqi domestic politics. He got back to me in 24 hours with an equally detailed response. I thought that was very charitable of him. Shortly thereafter I invited him to write some guest posts here on Adventures and was flattered when he agreed. I was just a little ole blogger after all, and he was a published writer.

But what an amazing man, who took the time to respond to comments and emails in a way that shames most of the rest of us - myself included. The man had discipline, as Nick Gillespie makes clear:

He was great to work with. His story pitches were clean, crisp, and to the point. He hit his deadlines without fail.

Unlike many journalists, he actually spent much of his time - in retrospect, perhaps too much of his time - out and about, beyond the comforts and protection of an office or an apartment. He was fantastically well-traveled, especially to places on the busted seams of history - places like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong on the eve of its annexation by China.

Steve was a complex person and a quintessential New Yorker. "A natural contrarian" in the words of his friend gallerist Becky Smith, he was a political conservative in the left-leaning art world and a former East Village squatter who dressed in suits.

As his friend Steve Mumford put it, "He was an amateur in the 19th century sense of someone who followed his passions, and he became an art critic because he wanted to be yanked off his feet by a work of art. He became disenchanted as the New York art world he knew from the '80s became increasingly professionalized, and after 9/11 he felt that he had a cause he had to follow. He wasn't an ideologue, but he believed that the Islamic world had to look within itself. And the possibility of dying in Iraq didn't deter him one bit."

He was one of us who believe that the great experiment claiming so many lives in Iraq is the moral hinge on which the world now turns.

Which still leaves endless room for disagreement. On one of the handful of occasions on which I saw him - mainly at political-discussion gatherings at my house - I argued strenuously with Steve for his readiness to believe the worst of Islamic traditions and Shiite theology in particular.

But we shared the American belief that one of the bedrock values of our society is dialogue with complicated people one doesn't always agree with. Steve wanted Iraq to be a place like that - five or 50 or 500 years from now.

Kathryn Lopez:

Vincent, a professional who was a delight to work with, loved Iraq and its people, calling it "Beautiful Basra" in his last e-mail to me. National Review Online is honored to have published Vincent and we're all praying for Vincent's family and his longtime translator.

Steven Vincent, "natural contrarian... political conservative in the left-leaning art world and a former East Village squatter who dressed in suits" was educated at Berkeley:

Steve and I both transferred to UC Berkeley at the same time. At Berkeley, Steve liked to poke fun at the left wing establishment ensconced there. Sproul Plaza is Berkeley's historic main campus square and in our day it was always packed with a dizzying array of booths promoting various liberal causes. Steve wanted to cart in an old covered wagon and dress up like a gypsy, complete with donkeys and unwashed children. He would claim he was from the oppressed country of Bosrovia, which he made up. He created a fake map and squeezed Bosrovia in there somewhere between Roumania and Bulgaria. He wanted to stand on a milk box and make impassioned liberation speeches all day long. He was never quite able to pull that off, but to this day I can't get that hilarious image out of my mind. He was a tremendous wit.

When we met up in New York in 1980, my sister in law got us both jobs as security guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The job were extremely monotonous. I remember one day the museum had closed the main European painting section. Steve was given the assignment of standing at the entrance and telling the public that the section was closed. Everyone kept asking him all day long why it was closed. Steve started a game up to keep his mind active. He tried to tell each person a different reason why the section was closed. "It's the Plague, sir." he would deadpan. "The section has been quarantined. Please step back for your own safety." "It's Black Thursday, Ma'am. On this date in 1888, three French impressionists plunged to their doom off the Loire bridge in Paris. The section has been closed in their honor." Needless to say, Steve had no problem coming up with as many different answers as he needed.

After college, Steve bummed around Europe on the Railpass junket for a few months. He went to Ireland. Many times I heard him tell a fascinating tale of a couple of weeks he spent living in Belfast with some dangerous IRA types. That experience probably whetted his appetite for adventure travel later in life.

I began this discussion with a look at the man who answered emails, and I'll close on the same note. An email to Reason, from a young reader responding to Steven's death and an article by him there:

As a matter of fact, I enjoyed it so much that I wrote Mr. Vincent an e-mail expressing my admiration for the article and asking him about how he got into the freelance journalism business (a field which, as a high school senior on the cusp of college, I was thinking about pursuing . . . and as a rising college sophomore, still am). Not only did he respond -- and from his apartment in Baghdad no less -- he also wrote me probably the best advice I've received yet in my life. He offered tips on how to get into journalism and words of wisdom on how to approach it once there (he was adamant about maintaining an independent voice, which he himself said he was slowly cultivating with his freelance political writing). Perhaps more enticing, however, was his wild and daunting vision of the best way to spend one's twenties . . . working shit jobs, being a down and outer in Paris and London, generally taking advantage of the simple freedom that accompanies that decade of your life in the most exuberant ways possible.

I never met him. I know him well.

Steve's family requests that donations in his memory be made to Spirit of America, an absolutely appropriate and worthy charity we've supported here for quite some time.

If you purchase Steve's book In The Red Zone: A Journey Into The Soul Of Iraq via this link, we'll add our portion of the profits to our donation to SOA too.