Hersey's "Hiroshima"

John "The Man" Hersey


Atoms Which Tore the World In Two: Reading John Hersey's Hiroshima
8, October 2008


John Hersey's Hiroshima is a portrayal of Japan, post-atomic bomb. The success of the book is similar to the equation of the bomb, in which the energy of the atoms outweighed its mass. Only one month of interviews became the first and only issue to occupy all the editorial space of the New Yorker. An editorial which became a novel, and went on to sell 3.5+ million copies. Hersey's efforts and energy became outweighed by it's mass, almost instantly upon publication.


From a Western point of view, the almost complete obliteration of a city, and all it's citizens within, unfortunately has almost become easy to distance ourselves from. Sixty thousand killed, one hundred thousand injured, in a city of two hundred fifty thousand, in the newspaper or on the radio, this was merely a statistic. Hersey's account was the first ground-view of the bombing. He made relatable with his vivid, yet matter of fact narrative. In no way does Hersey's work attempt to agonize the reader or draw sympathy from them. Within Hiroshima, the reader witnesses the aftermath, the way that six specific civilians witnessed it; first hand, with no warning, no explanation, one German missionary, six Japanese citizens; two doctors, a secretary, a Protestant Clergyman and a tailor's widow with three children. Each of them have in common escaping the bombing of August 1945 with their lives.

Often, in the case of report; whether it be civil war, genocide, all things atrocious; the view tends to be from overhead. One cannot relate to the removal of a city, of a people. To wake to a different life, is incomprehensible. In Hiroshima, Hersey reports empathy. None of his characters are composite, and none of them had realized their old lives had ended. No one in Hiroshima knew what had happened for quite some time after the bomb had fallen. They reacted with instinct, intuition, they went through unbelievable motions, seemingly unreal. But in those moments, the hours and days following the atomic bomb, they didn't know how to behave. They weren't told or directed. They thought of their families, their lives just as anyone would. And it is that reality which resonates the reader. No, one cannot empathize with a weapon of mass destruction, or even begin to comprehend it, but they can understand community, surprise, family, and "going through the motions." One can understand when instinct kicks in, when one behaves almost robotically to forge on. And it is this quality which locks the reader to Hiroshima, which sold over three million copies. "Though it is imbued with a profound moral sense, it does not preach. It does not hector. It simply tells. The power if it, and of its author, is in the reporting" (Hertzberg).

The son of missionaries, Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, June 17 1914. At the age of ten he returned to the United States with his parents. In 1932 he attended Yale, where he "arrived with the aura of the Far East" (Heckscher). Hersey was highly involved with Yale life, where he was an athlete and member of select clubs and groups. His classmates were aware of his talent, a few of them continued to become "professors of a limited, elegantly designed edition of his poetry" (Hecksher). Hersey was a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge, and personal secretary to Sinclair Lewis.

Following his studies, Hersey became a World War II correspondent for Time and Life. In 1942, he traversed through the Pacific; followed by the Mediterranean, Russia, China and Japan. "His dispatches were noted for their quiet authority and underplayed emotion" (Hecksher). Even at this early stage, Hersey was learning the importance of meticulous reporting and emotional restraint. "At Guadalcanal, Hersey had become a participant rather than just a reporter. The unit he was accompanying came under heavy fire and suffered many casualties; Hersey was pressed into service as a stretcher bearer and was later commended by the Navy for his assistance in aiding the wounded" (Rothman). His first hand experience shaped his pulitzer prize winning novel A Bell for Adano (1944).

Hersey's career includes twenty five books, articles with Time, Life, The New Yorker, and participation in several writer's organizations. With age, his novels turned more in the genre of fable than wartime narrative. With these publications Hersey's concern for society, its inhumanity, and his sense of responsibility toward it were
reflected.

In 1965 he became Master of Pierson College at Yale as lecturer, and then professor. Hersey was a student advisor, taught writing, and continued writing his own books. He also revived the Pierson College Press. Hersey's ten-person classes were extremely anticipated and popular among students, referred to as "The Man's class" (Oder). Though despite his fame, he still began classes with "My name is John Hersey, and I was born in China of Missionary parents." Even then, "The Man...had not lost his humility" (Oder).

John Hersey died March 24 1993 at the age of seventy nine. He died eight years after his follow-up New Yorker article, Hiroshima: The Aftermath and two years after his "Class of '36, Fifty five Year Reunion" where his classmate August Heckscher declared "Now, there is a man whose conversation has never lost its savor. I would like to go on talking with him for a very long while."


(This is the part where I got stuck, trying to describe why I liked the book. Really. I imagined I was sitting in the living room talking to Chloe about it, the way that I had a few days prior:)


I read a book concerned with the first known hydrogen bomb, and its deployment on the Japanese population of Hiroshima. Usually I shy away from any kind of war-time, or battle narrative. I was once forced to watch Saving Private Ryan and I cried for days. But happening upon an excerpt of this book, I felt not only extremely intrigued to continue, but prepared. Hersey's detail did not gouge at my imagination or attempt to sicken me. It was almost cold in its wealth of words. It is obvious within Hersey's work that he does not feel the need to tell, but show. He allows the reader to make their own judgments and fabricate their individual emotional responses. I felt as if I could hold in my hands his humility and humbleness as an author and reporter. He was so aware that the story was not within his experience in Hiroshima, not about his interviews with the people. The story lies in the reactions of six specific pedestrians to the horror. Not once does he include himself in the book. A book which he spent one month interviewing for, and the following year writing, re-writing and editing.

My appreciation and understanding in general surprise me in reading Hiroshima. Hersey manages to fuse universality with this history. In reading, one is forced to ponder how they would deal with such an event. Who they would search for, what they would save, what they would lose. These thoughts are so mind-numbing, the kind one pushes immediately from their minds. Hersey understands this inability to perceive, and helps the reader avoid such with his quick plot movement. There is no time for meditation on emotion, the plot transitions quickly between characters, filling the pages with detail, minor characters, vivid physical descriptions of people and places, and paints a picture of this incredulous place.

Hersey's hallmark of accuracy in reporting is accompanied by an affluence of descriptive imagery. Hiroshima is a quick read that I put away in one sitting, yet, the process was perhaps doubled by my time spent in recording quotes "that I liked." From the first few pages when he describes the onslaught of the bomb as "a sheet of sun" (Hersey 17) I was hooked by his language and vocabulary; simple, yet just just subtly beauteous enough. He travels onward to the events of character becoming buried or thrown about. He eases the impact of these events on the reader in calmly claiming "There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books" (Hersey 33). This seemingly horrifying event becomes manageable by the reader, and somehow poetic.


In personifying a tornado-like hazard which followed the bomb, Hersey uses language to parallel the sight to the instance of "going mad." He concretes the image with physical description, yet rolls the mood out cooly over the reader; "...the twisting funnel- pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting. Father Kleinsorge put a piece of cloth over Father Schiffer's eyes, so that a feeble man would not think he was going crazy" (Hersey 60).


Hersey understand how to make an image resonate, create its remembrance. My favorite use of his language in the book is the juxtaposition of human torture and a stunning backdrop. "At a beautiful moon bridge, he passed a naked living woman who seemed to have been burned from head to toe, and was read all over" (Hersey 73); this image inserts itself in the reader, out of necessity for it is followed pages later by a second trip across the bridge, and "...this time the woman was dead" (75). This example perfectly instills Hersey's general accuracy and adeptness, in portraying the immediacy and horror of Hiroshima.




Works Cited


Hendrik Hertzberg. Obituary, John Hersey. The New Yorker, April 5, 1993, p. 111

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. Great Britain, 1966. Penguin Books Ltd.

Rothman, Steve. The Publication of "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker. January 8, 1997. http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php

Various Authors. A Life In Writing: John Hersey, 1914-1993. Yale Alumni Magazine, October 1993. http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/93_10/hersey.html.