The Bomb That Hersey Dropped

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 391, 20 December 1946, Page 20

The Bomb That Hersey Dropped

Het es was made when the atom bomb was dropped ih Hiroshima, and journalistic history when the American magazine "The New Yorker" devoted the whole of one issue to John Hersey’s 30,000word report of the event. Few happenings in the world of Tournalian: have excited so much public interest; and the action of "The New Yorker" was to some extent paralleled by "The New Zealand Herald," Auckland, in presenting a special supplement containing the "New Yorker" article. Hersey’s "Report on Hiroshima" was also broadcast in its entirety in the U.S.A., and later by the BBC and was heard in New Zealand.

The background story of how Hersey came to write his article, of how "The New Yorker" came to treat it in the way they did, and of

| its.impact on the reading public is told here by

ALISTAIR

COOKE

BBC correspondent in New York.

Yorker is a unique weekly magazine of social satire, superior criticism, and, above all, funny cartoons that represent the. best work of America’s top comic draughtsmen. In the past few years it has become a cliché to remark that its regular feature, "The Talk of the Town," is the parent of a modern conversational Te its devotees The New

style in writing that has many imitators and no equal: Until Thursday, September 5, 1946, all this constituted The New Yorker's main claim to fame. On that morning The New Yorker's subscribers as usual admired the cover (a decorative take-off on _ holidaymakers); thumbed through the listings of Manhattan’s music, movies, night club offerings; folded the paper back comfortably at "The Talk of the Town" to enjoy the clean melancholy satire of Mr. White as he surveyed our cockeyed world from a window on Forty-Third Street. However, for the first time in twenty-one years, Mr. White was miss‘ing. There was no "Talk of the Town." Evidently the weekly feature known as "A Reporter at Large" had been set up in the wrong place-on the first page. The puzzled reader now turned one page and another and another..The "reported" story went on and on. Vanished were the high-priced blondes of Peter Arno, the insanities of George Price's glandular families, the twittering clubwomen of Helen Hokinson. Gone, too, were the theatre notes, the ‘sports column, the priestly lectures on books by Edmund Wilson-everything that records the few certainties of a: New Yorker’s life in an uncertain world. Page after page of this one story, something about a bombing, till at the end of thirty thousand breathless words was the barely explanatory signature-John Hersey, How this phenomenon imposed itself on the breakfast tables and the consciences, first of New Yorkers, then of the Western world, is now one of the classics of journalistic history. Expert on the Far East It started normally enough with The New Yorker’s editors calling in John Hersey last autumn to map out an assignment they had for him in China. He had become in the last six of his precocious thirty-two years the most celebrated of Time magazine’s experts on the Far East. He began with the advantage of being born there, in Tientsin, China, to Roscoe and Grace Hersey, American missionaries, He spoke Chinese before he knew any English, but he was brought back to the United States at 10, and a thorough American boyhood quickly compensated for any Oriental advantages. He went in time to Yale and spent a year, in the mid-thirties, at Clare College, Cambridge. Back in America he achieved the only ambition that interested him and joined the staff of Time. Two years later he got his first. big assignment, to do a survey of American relations. in the Far East. He talked with Chiang Kai Shek, with Matsuoka, and with the General who led the campaign

on Bataan. Three years later he remembered the General and decided to write Men on Bataan. It is worth noting now as a foretaste of the thing he has done best; namely, the re-creation of the everyday life of people he didn’t know in a place where he had never been. Though he was never in Bataan, he went after his picture of the imprisoned men much as Humphrey Bogart reconstructs a murder in one of. Raymond Chandler’s grisly movies. He dived into Time’s library. of newspaper clippings, he tracked down relatives, handled mementoes, old baseball bats, and talked to the corner druggist. From this vigorous. back-tracking he wrote vividly of men dead before he ever heard of them, A Balance Redressed When he sat in The New Yorker’s office last fall, -he -had no particular thoughts about the atom bomb, nonethat is-that belonged to John Hersey more than to several hundred million other apprehensive souls. But while they were discussing the China assignment, one of the editors confessed to a disappointment in the general coverage of the atom bomb. Every paper in the United States, he argued, had printed vast essays on atomic physics, had explained in articles and diagrams what it felt like to be a neutron-slowly approaching a nucleus. But nobody had described what it felt like to be a human being exposed to the swift approach of the bomb itself. Hersey agreed to try and redress the balance. He went to Hiroshima with no special privileges over and above the credentials of a war correspondent. He mooched around the ruined city, visited a hospital, and eventually went through their records of discharged patients, from whom he finally picked out a dozen or more. Then he went off to track them down. He got an interpreter, narrowed the selection and then spent a month with his chosen six-a Japanese minister, a factory office girl, a doctor, a tailor’s war widow, a staff physician of the Red Cross Hospital, and a German Catholic priest. In memory he coaxed

them through each hour of the fatal morning, checking and re-checking their accounts of such objective things as the weather, the crops, what the newspapers said. He made a notebook for each of them. The rest is in his story, which he brought back to the United States in June and deposited with The New Yorker in August. Promise Redeemed The General Manager, William Shawn, looked it over. It was in four parts. Shawn read them-and felt disturbed by the way each piece maintained the suspense by re-digesting the material of the foregoing-a convention The New Yorker always follows to make pieces written as a series also stand alone. He could see only one solution, went to the editor-in-chief, and said so. Harold Ross is a permanently indignant man with red hair, who never takes yes for an answer. His assistant’s proposal made nonsense of twenty-one years of The New Yorker’s history. It was to run the story in one great thirty-thousand word outpouring. Ross paced and swere and wondered. He remembered, however, that in its first issue, in February, 1925, the magazine had printed a simple announcement of its intentions: "The New Yorker starts with a declaration of serious purpose." It was nobody’s fault but Ross’s if the readers had had to wait twentyone years to watch the magazine catch up with itself. The decision was made. It was shared only with Hersey, a printer, and a copy reader. For the best part of two weeks, Hersey worked in The New Yorker’s office 16 hours a day, re-writing and slipping the stuff to the printer. Meanwhile the critics went about their criticising, the cartoons were ‘approved in proof, the fashion notes were solemnly okayed. Then came the morning of September 5 and the result I have described. A Thousand Reprints for Einstein © Ross waited for the subscribers to resign in droves. Only one man, from 3rooklyn, wrote to complain he was not tmused. Suddenly The New Yorker office went down under a bombardment of appeals, applause, and the first congratulations it had ever received from a world-famous physicist and a _ brace of bishops. The regular three hundred thousand copies sold out the first day. By the Monday, "originals" were being hawked at three dollars a copy. (The New Yorker costs fifteen cents.) Fifty newspapers begged to print* it, and a deal was made which charged them alike a dollar-and-a-half per 1,000 of circu‘ation, on the understanding that the proceeds should go to the American Red ‘Cross. Einstein asked for and got 1,000 reprints of the piece. A university asked for 10,000 reprints. The transatlantic wires hummed with arrangements to translate it into French, Swedish, Spanish, and Dutch. In the daze of this second atomic explosion, American journalism doesn’t quite know what to think, but shows a communal guilt in feeling it has been caught short. If some grave quarterly like Foreign Affairs, or The Yale Review had done it, they would have been merely widely praised as fulfilling their heavy responsibilities. But The New Yorker decision has done for Hiroshima exactly what The New Yorker editors wanted Hersey to do for it. His story, coming from such a quarter, makes Hiroshima more than the catastrophe the physicists say it is. It is the deadliest joke of the ages.