The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (4 page)

Two years before the war’s end, at the apex of the country’s veneration of “our boys” as stolid heroes, here was Hersey listening to stories of emotional dispossession and psychic fragmentation, of discharged soldiers struggling to readjust to civilian life. Two decades before the Vietnam War, Hersey’s interview subjects were articulating a kind of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Hersey combined his best anecdotes into a single composite character called Joe Souczak, and then stitched a single narrative out of his material.

“Joe Is Home Now,” which ran in the July 3, 1943, issue of
Life
, is perhaps a little too melodramatic for a writer of Hersey’s skill; it reads like a movie treatment for a Hollywood postwar weepie such as
The Best Years of Our Lives
. But its formal innovation is important. For one thing, the bleak, gray tones of the story made it an uncharacteristic
Life
feature (by contrast, the same issue contains a jubilant photo essay called “
Life
Goes to an Aircraft-Carrier Party”). The reporting is invisible, concealed by an omniscient voice that moves from scene to scene and unspools Souczak’s anguished internal monologue. The discharged solider, who has lost an arm in the war, encounters indifference and hostility at every turn as he tries to get a job, attempts to reconnect with his girlfriend, and pull his life together.

For all intents and purposes, “Joe Is Home Now” is a work of fiction derived from fact. In a 1985 interview, Hersey articulated why he felt fiction to be a more powerful tool than journalism for revealing the truth behind tumultuous historical events: “The journalist is always the mediator between the material and the reader, and the reader is always conscious of the journalist interpreting and reporting events…. So, to me, fiction is the more challenging and desirable medium for dealing with the real world than journalism. But there are always things that ask for a direct account while the material is still too hot for fiction. In those cases I resort to reportage.”

“Survival,” Hersey’s stirring 1943
New Yorker
piece that recounted Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s harrowing tale of survival after his PT boat
was hit by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific, was reportage that became the springboard for Kennedy the politician; when Kennedy ran for the House of Representatives for the first time in 1946, his father, Joe, had a hundred thousand copies of the
Reader’s Digest
reprint distributed to voters throughout Boston. It’s a tale that’s almost too good to be true—Kennedy, the stalwart and fearless naval officer, saving the lives of his comrades by virtue of sheer determination and fortitude, relying on keen survival instincts and a bit of good fortune. The story was turned into a best-selling book called
PT 109
and was adapted into a Hollywood film as well, transforming Hersey’s profile in courage into American myth—an unintended and somewhat ironic turn of events for Hersey, whose war reportage tended to focus on the antiheroic.

In late 1945 Hersey traveled to postwar China and Japan in search of stories for both
Life
and
The New Yorker
. Before embarking, he sat down with
The New Yorker’s
managing editor, William Shawn, who suggested that Hersey might want to write about the lives of the survivors of the atomic bombs the United States had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Shawn believed that a report on the aftereffects of the most cataclysmic event in the history of warfare might alter readers’ perceptions of what had thus far been an abstraction: the mushroom clouds that had led to Japan’s surrender and America’s triumph. In all the thousands of words that had been written about the bomb, not one had actually considered the human factor, an oversight that Shawn couldn’t fathom and wanted to rectify.

Hersey was drawn to the idea of documenting the impact of the bomb “on people rather than on buildings.” But he was unsure how to approach it—how to telescope an enormous tragedy down to human scale. En route from North China to Shanghai on a destroyer, Hersey was bedridden with the flu and was given some reading material by some crew members from the ship’s library. One of the books, Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, gave him the narrative template for his Hiroshima story. Hersey was struck by the way Wilder retold a tragedy— in his case, the collapse of a rope suspension bridge in Peru—by focusing on its five victims, tracing their lives backward in time up to the point where their fates are intertwined in a single horrific event.

Upon arriving in Hiroshima on May 25, Hersey cast about for any residents of the island who could speak English. Having read a report to
the Holy See on the bombing, written by a German Jesuit priest, Hersey sought out and found Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, who introduced Hersey to other potential interview subjects. All told, he met around fifty people, and then narrowed that group down to six—Kleinsorge, a clerk, a seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, and a surgeon. Hersey spent six weeks rigorously interviewing his subjects, then returned to New York on June 12.

Six weeks later, Hersey shaped his copious notes and interview transcripts into a 150-page, thirty-thousand-word story with the title “Some Events at Hiroshima.” The original intention was to run the story in four consecutive issues of the magazine, but that presented a continuity problem; a reader who hadn’t read the first installment would need a synopsis of it to understand the second section, while someone who had already read the first issue would feel bogged down by a recapitulation. Shawn suggested that the entire story take up a single issue—an unprecedented move for the magazine.
The New Yorker’s
editor in chief, Harold Ross, had misgivings about such a radical move;
New Yorker
readers, after all, had grown accustomed to the magazine’s mixture of the serious and the lighthearted. Could readers do without their
New Yorker
cartoons in favor of a long, depressing analysis of unfathomable human tragedy? Ross stewed on the matter for a week, at one point pulling out the first issue of the magazine, which stated, “
The New Yorker
starts with a serious declaration of purpose.” That sealed the deal for Ross—the magazine would run the story in a single issue, to the exclusion of everything else— but not without numerous emendations and changes that Ross believed were essential to delivering maximum emotional impact.

It was customary for
The New Yorker
to immediately set all rough drafts into galley form shortly after they were received, in order for Ross and Shawn to visualize the pieces as they would appear in the magazine. For “Some Events at Hiroshima,” Ross, a meticulous line editor, scribbled hundreds of notes in the margins of the proof for Hersey to read. “It was the first experience I had had with editing as careful as that,” said Hersey, who frequently published stories in
Life
without a single editorial change.

For ten twenty-hour days, Ross and Shawn tabled less pressing magazine matters and holed themselves up in Ross’s office, furiously making changes for Hersey, who rewrote as quickly as he received the pages. When they were done, the editors had over two hundred changes for the
story, the title of which was eventually shortened to “Hiroshima.” According to a
Newsweek
article that ran shortly after the article was published, “no one outside Ross’ office, except a harried makeup man, knew what was going on.”

On his query sheet for the editorial department, Ross laid out some of his thoughts:

What Ross wanted was an exact chronicle of the events as they transpired in real time, much like a documentary movie crew tracking six characters without any subsequent edits. Whenever Hersey got ahead of the story, or referred to something that the characters weren’t experiencing at that specific point in time, Ross suggested he take it out.

Hersey introduces all six characters by describing exactly what they were doing at the moment of the bomb blast, thus giving his narrative an unsettling specificity. The story begins,

Hersey’s story becomes a struggle for the characters to reclaim normalcy in the teeth of an atrocity, and he sticks to the particulars of the
struggle, the small acts of self-sacrifice and resourcefulness that become crucial to his characters’ survival. What makes “Hiroshima” a crucial New Journalism antecedent, among other things, is the way Hersey assiduously describes his characters’ internal reactions, the thoughts racing through their heads when the “noiseless flash” makes its appearance over Hiroshima. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the seamstress, finds herself spared from the total destruction of her house, but the disaster quickly impinges upon her, and she acts quickly.

“Hiroshima” is not a celebration of the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people. It’s far too grim for that. For a magazine that tended to hold to a somewhat genteel line, it’s extremely graphic (“their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”), but its tone is calm and measured. Without undue hysteria, Hersey limns an apocalyptic landscape from precise description, internal monologue, and constantly shifting points of view.

“Hiroshima” was a radical piece of writing for 1946, only a year after the war’s end. It gave a voice and a sense of the tragic to the enemy, and its powerful imagery resonated with those who had never given a thought to—or who had even dismissed outright—the plight of the bomb’s victims. In 1999 New York University’s department of journalism named “Hiroshima” the most important news story of the twentieth century.

Another
New Yorker
writer, Lillian Ross, shared Hersey’s affection for an unadorned storytelling style. A native of Syracuse, New York, Ross’s writing career began auspiciously; as a teenager, she was already a regular
contributor to the literary magazine
P.M
. under the stewardship of editor Peggy Wright. Lillian Ross came to the attention of
The New Yorker
when the magazine offered Wright a job and Wright, who was getting married, instead suggested the services of her young star writer.

Ross believed in functioning as a reporter by proxy and letting her subjects tell the story for her. She relied heavily on direct quotations, her keen observational instincts, and an elegant, uncluttered prose style to move her readers briskly through a piece. “I don’t believe a reporter has the right to say what his subject is thinking or feeling,” she wrote in her 2002 book
Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism
. The 1948
New Yorker
story “Come In, Lassie!” was the first magazine article to chronicle the climate of paranoia that had overtaken Hollywood in the wake of Senator Joe McCarthy’s ongoing Communist witch-hunt and the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten (the story’s title referred to the only actor in town whose politics were unassailable). Ross gained access to some of the city’s most prominent players and used her material to lay bare the conflicting attitudes toward McCarthy and Communism. The story contains entire scenes in which little more than dialogue is used, but with material this rich, Ross didn’t need embellishment. Here is an exchange between Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and John Huston on the set of the film
Key Largo
: