Arts and Letters

John Hersey in his early years was carried by circumstance into countries and settings the world over. He was born in Tientsin, China, the son of an American missionary there; and by the time he came to America, in 1924 at the age of ten, he was bilingual in Mandarin and English. He went on to Yale where, among other things, he played on a football team that defeated an otherwise all-conquering Princeton eleven; spent a post-graduate year at Clare College in England; and after a New York summer working for Sinclair Lewis (handling his correspondence and copying draft pages of a play), he joined the staff of Time magazine which sent him back to China. In the Second World War, he was assigned by Time to the Pacific Theater and accompanied the Marine Corps units through the murderous fire into the river valley on Guadalcanal. He was next in the Mediterranean, covering the invasion of Sicily. After that there was a period in Moscow, and a tour of Warsaw and its heart-sickening ruins. In 1945, he was back in China and then in Japan, to interview survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima for The New Yorker.

Settled in Connecticut more or less for keeps a few years later, John began to think of himself as a foreigner of sorts: “not an outsider,” in his words, but someone who, wherever he was, seemed to come from another culture. In fact, John Hersey, always coming from somewhere else, became as a result the supreme example of the participant-observer. What he observed was the world itself, as a whole and in its national and regional and cultural segments. What he took part in was the history of his time. He has called himself “a novelist of contemporary history,” and a series of his novels bear witness to that far-spreading subject: from the moving, prize-winning work of 1944, A Bell for Adano, based on visits with the American military governor of the Sicilian coastal town of Licata; through The Wall of 1950, an extraordinarily compelling and profoundly believable fictional account of the Warsaw ghetto from 1939 to its final total destruction in 1943; later such animadversions on the dark and lunatic tendencies of American life as My Petition for More Space of 1974, a wryly surrealistic tale of standing in line for hours to submit a request that sleeping quarters be enlarged from eleven-by-seven feet to twelve-by-eight feet, and climactically, The Call in 1985, the beautifully rendered and richly evocative story of an American missionary in China during the time of (though not taken directly from) Roscoe Hersey.

These works of fiction were ways of participating in history as well as imagining it in narrative. But the participation is even more striking in the journalistic writings. The most famous of these, needless to say, and probably the most famous journalistic act in our century, was Hiroshima, to which The New Yorker gave the entire issue of August 31, 1946. Here, a year after the event, six survivors of the bombing talk about the experience, while the author's calm understating prose sifts through the horror and the debris—fixing the event once and for all in the appalled consciousness of readers around the globe. In 1968, John brought out The Algiers Motel Incident, about the murder of three young black men by police officers during the 1967 riots in Detroit; killings which the author persuades us were racially motivated (as, conversely, was the court's gentleness with the killers).

In these and other undertakings, John Hersey was performing in a particularly cherishable American tradition: that of the literary or intellectual figure who speaks out audibly against the social and political evils of the day. Emerson, a century and a half ago, bespoke the importance and the urgent need of this figure, of the intellectual with the social conscience. In his time as in ours, the literati tended to withdraw from the practical affairs of mankind, and, in Emerson's words, to “betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of thinking…. The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest, censuring their dullness and vice. But," Emerson concluded, "the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.”

This is exactly what John Hersey did, from the time in 1950 that he served on a committee to draft the platform of the Connecticut candidate for governor. He worked, often as an officer, for the Authors League of America, and took his turn repeatedly on national and local boards of education. In this Academy, to which he was elected in 1953 (at the age of thirty-nine), he served as Secretary for fifteen years from 1961 onwards, and as Chancellor for three years in the 1980s. In 1952, he campaigned hard for Adlai Stevenson, and in 1956, with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, he was a speech-writer for Stevenson and helped press the candidate into calling for a nuclear test ban.

Not the least of John's descents into the dusty arena where combatants and demagogues have their being was his service from 1965 to 1970 as Master of Pierson College at Yale. Being the master of a residential college at Yale in the 1960s was itself an act of participating in history, as others will agree. The college campus in those days was a scene of unrest intensifying betimes into a field of open conflict; and that process took place at Yale as strong opposition to the Vietnam war mingled explosively with the well-grounded fears and resentments of black students. It reached its peak in late April 1970, during the trial for murder of a leader of the Black Panther movement. After the drama subsided, John Hersey, who had been in the thick of things all along, wrote a short book called Letter to the Alumni—that is, to the former student residents of Pierson College—recounting the event, looking at the tensions and aspirations which gave rise to it, reflecting on the state of American universities and the society at large.

This is the participant-observer at his best, stirring and entertaining and conscience-quickening, from the opening moment when he quotes W.E.B. Du Bois saying in 1900 that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” to the final projection of two different possible futures: one horrendous, one modestly hopeful. And along the way, preparing for that finale, is the following:

A pressing question for our universities…. Why is this country so open to one set of emotions and their expression—rage, hatred, scorn, put-down, vituperation, vicious criticism, character-killing; and so suspicious of, or hostile to, another—love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, trust, praise, encouragement?

If John Hersey observed with such matchless fidelity, and if he was spurred by what he saw to take part in the history about him, it was because he was, to start with, the quintessential listener. Almost everyone who knew him describes his typical posture as that of listening: not bending down from his great height, so one former student has noted, but remaining “erect as a shore beacon,” so that “his soft-spoken interest seemed to draw people up to his level.”* He listened to students, he listened to friends, he listened to colleagues; he listened to the world. He listened to his wife Barbara—or rather, they listened to each other, for each was always and glowingly aware of the other, with John taking unfailing delight—often expressed in head-shaking delighted laughter—in his life's companion.

He listened to those he worked with and those he disported with—including the friends he would take with him on his boat fishing for blue fish out beyond the Martha's Vineyard harbor (his little book of 1987, Blues, a dialogue on the art and philosophy of angling for this breed is a literary treasure). He took our teenage son out on such an expedition one summer morning and guided him into catching a “blue”; we have a memory of the two of them cleaning the fish and conversing together in the driveway outside the Hersey home. When he was asked recently for a descriptive phrase about John Hersey, our son, after only a moment, said: “an attentive presence.”

Attentiveness like that is singularly endearing, and this suggests the last and deepest of John's identities. It goes with the qualities he listed as insufficiently prized in our country and time: love, kindness, generosity, and the rest. Those are qualities possessed by John Hersey, and qualities he inspired in others. For John, to the end, was an endearer.

*Donald Faulkner, Sewanee Review, Vol. CI, 4.