| |
Comment on this article
A
Life in Writing
John Hersey, 1914-1993
October
1993
by Carter Wiseman '68, Editor
When
John Hersey '36 died on March 24, the nation lost one of its most
admired writers. The author of 25 books, including A
Bell for Adano, Hiroshima, and The
Wall, and numerous articles for the New Yorker and
other magazines, Hersey won the Pulitzer
Prize and set a daunting standard for moral concern delivered
with high literary grace.
But
if Hersey was unique as a writer, he was also distinctly a product
of Yale. Born the son of missionaries in Tientsin, China, he came
to Yale in 1932. While at the College, he played on the varsity
football team, wrote music criticism for the Yale Daily News, and served as class secretary. During the years following graduation,
he maintained close links with the University, and from 1965 to
1970 was master of Pierson College, the first nonacademic to hold
such a post. Hersey's mastership coincided with some of Yale's most
turbulent years, and in 1970 he summed up his feelings about them
in a brief but powerful book, Letter
to the Alumni, which did much to explain what lay beneath
the turmoil spawned by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam
War and their impact on the Yale campus.
Shortly
before Hersey's death, Howard
Lamar, then Yale's Acting President, decided that something
should be done to recognize the writer's many contributions to Yale,
to journalism, and to literature. The result was the establishment
of an annual John Hersey Lecture, the first of which was delivered
March 22 by David McCullough '55, author, most recently, of the
best-selling biography
of Harry Truman. In the course of that talk, entitled "The
Year 1936," McCullough saluted Hersey's many distinguished
classmates but reserved his warmest words for the man, who, he said,
"has portrayed our time with a breadth and artistry matched
by very few. He has given us the century in a great shelf of brilliant
work, and we are all his beneficiaries." When the author died,
at age 78, the news made the front page of the New York Times.
Hersey
was subsequently honored with a memorial service in Battell Chapel
on the Yale campus, and a burial service on Martha's
Vineyard. What follows is a series of excerpts from the tributes
read on those occasions, as well as one from a student's reminiscence
of his former teacher. The introductory appreciation of Hersey is
by his classmate August
Heckscher, director emeritus of the Twentieth
Century Fund, former chief editorial writer for the New York
Herald Tribune, and author of numerous books, including the
recently published biography
of Woodrow Wilson. The Yale Alumni Magazine is grateful to
all concerned for permission to use their words.
Through
a Classmate's Eyes
by August Heckscher
'36
Among
those who gathered as freshmen at Yale in the autumn of 1932, John Hersey quickly became a marked character. He arrived with the
aura of the Far East, where he had spent the first ten years of
his life: a tall thin youth, meditative, firm of purpose; an aesthete
but also an athlete. He became one of a firmly cemented small circle
of friends, but his influence spread, until he was a member of almost
every group in the class where judgment and good advice were sought.
When our class had the effrontery to declare itself "Yale's
greatest," it must have been in part because of our being conscious
of his presence -- and his promise.
Few
could have imagined the turn his career would take. That he wrote
well we knew. As vice chairman of the News he did little
ordinary reporting, but as music critic he showed himself sensitive
and learned. A few of us became possessors of a limited, elegantly
designed edition of his poetry. Music played an important part throughout
John's life and was the subject of his last
novel, but so far as I know he never wrote poetry after his
undergraduate days. He had to find his particular path as a writer,
and as a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge -- and as personal secretary
to Sinclair
Lewis, '07, then at the height of his fame -- John waited and
watched.
World
War II brought him his release and his great opportunity. As war
correspondent for Time and Life he moved through the
major theaters of combat: the Pacific in 1942; the Mediterranean,
Russia, China, and Japan in the following years. His dispatches were
noted for their quiet authority and underplayed emotion. At a deeper
level he was shaping all the while a series of books which appeared
in dazzling succession -- Men on Bataan, Into
the Valley, A Bell for Adano (which won a Pulitzer
Prize and was made into a popular Broadway play
and film),
and in 1946 the triumphant Hiroshima. By the war's end, Hersey
had found his place as a great reporter and, with the acclaim for The Bell, a successful novelist.
A unique
relationship between reportage and fiction was to become his hallmark.
A reporter, he could convey vividly the truth of a situation as
he saw it. Marshaling an immense troop of facts, shaping them, giving
prominence as he saw fit, he went beyond the surface narrative to
reveal a further dimension. And that dimension almost invariably
involved the individual person -- the soldier on foot, the plain
citizen, the ordinary and faintly bewildered member of a confused
society. Yet he felt limits to what even he could do when restricted
to facts alone. Most of his later books are novels. But the fiction
is as spare in its reliance on realistic detail as had been the
reporting; and sometimes (and indeed in his best work) the two forms
become supplementary and almost indistinguishable.
Critics
might complain that Hersey was a reporter at heart and should have
stuck to that trade. But it is worth noting that of his two works
most certain to endure -- Hiroshima and The Wall --
the former is fact, the latter fiction; each is alike in its outward
effect and in mastery of its particular form.
Hersey
went on to a long career as a highly respected author, his novels
appearing year by year with a regularity indicative of his immense
self-discipline and his capacity -- demonstrated as an undergraduate
-- for plain hard work. The books of his mature years were increasingly
in the nature of fables, with a moral drawn from a simple depiction
of facts -- -a sailboat
in a hurricane; suburbanites fighting an infestation of pests;
the individual searching for living space in an overcrowded
world. The situation was invented, but out of it grew emotions
and relationships as real as anything on a battlefield or in a ghetto.
These
books reflect John's constant concern for the society in which he
lived and his sense of responsibility toward it. Though the most
reticent of men, he was prepared to stand, by word and by act, against
public offenses of the day -- against war, against curtailments
of freedom, and for the individual's right to speak his mind. Spokesman
for the profession of letters, he became recognized as a man of
obdurate courage, though always genial and humane.
In 1965
John returned to Yale as master of Pierson College. It was a happy
time for him, his influence spreading through a new generation of
undergraduates as it once reached out to his own classmates. For
five years he taught writing, advised admiring students, and continued
publishing his own books. Not least, he revivified the Pierson College
press.
He had always been interested in fine printing -- undoubtedly his
long association with Alfred
Knopf was in part due to the publisher's insistence on high
typographical standards.
Yale
had been an important part of John's life -- and particularly the
Yale class of 1936, whose class book he edited meticulously for
several years and whose reunions he attended faithfully. I last
saw John at our 55th reunion, and I remember thinking: "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." Alas,
that was not to be.
As
Others Saw Him
All of
his life John was an unmistakable figure wherever he went,
immediately recognizable (and usually causing heads to turn) on
the wide boulevards of New York, crossing the greens and plazas
of Yale, and strolling along the small streets of Martha's Vineyard
and Key West. In accomplishment, achievement, physical presence,
and character, and in the nature and excellence of his work, John
was unusually and remarkably all of a piece.
Howard R.
Lamar
President of the University, 1992-93
The passions
he described as the essence of the arts burned in him,
but he contained them with a restraint that was almost unearthly.
To be in his presence was to be in an oasis of gentleness, good
humor, kindness, quiet pleasure in others. And yet one sensed underneath,
in John, a pain suffered: perhaps personal, or perhaps the pain
of knowing so much about man's inhumanity to man.
Anthony
Lewis
columnist, the New York Times
John
Hersey was not one to feel that his job was to sell himself. He
didn't have an agent. He almost never gave interviews, and he shunned
the idea of going out on the road to peddle his wares. He even made
his own deals, and he bargained shrewdly. And I always felt that
he was speaking not just for himself but out of a sense of fairness
for all writers who might not have had the leverage to fight for
their own rights.
Judith
Jones
vice president, Alfred A. Knopf
Loyalty
was a quality John Hersey practiced all his life and so he never became one of those authors whose fashion it is
today to pick up and move along, usually in pursuit of greater royalties
or at the behest of a new literary agent, to another house every
so often. He found what he wanted with his first book at Knopf and
treasured the relationship for half a century.
Chester
Kerr '36
roommate, 1934-36
Not only
was he a superb talker like most good writers, he was also a superb listener, like few good writers. And his way
of listening, the expression of his eyes, the turn of the mouth
added immeasurably to the dialogue. I don't know whether it was
his ministerial past or his Chinese past or what, but John's silences
resonated. And he was a gent. He was courtly, he could be sweet,
he could be tough as nails also, but never abrasive. It's hard to
imagine a situation in which John would be abrasive. Impatient.
Pissed off. Fed up. He could be all of those and it was a wonder
to behold. Because you knew when John showed his irritability, something
or someone was truly at fault, and you'd better pay attention. But
mostly, he was civil. He brought a value to civility. A kind of
decent, thoughtful calm. He may have been the last of our civil
writers.
Jules
Feiffer
syndicated cartoonist
A few
years ago, four
people I knew all died within a few months of each other, and I
walked around for a while feeling abandoned and sorry for myself.
I went to the Herseys' for dinner that week, down in the mouth and
limp, and John noticed it, as he noticed everything, and sat down
next to me and asked what the trouble was. I told him about my four
friends dying, about how bereft and sad I felt. And John said, "Would
you rather go with them, Peter?" It was what I needed to hear.
Peter Feibleman
author, Martha's Vineyard neighbor
It was
1983, and
for me and some other budding campus journalists, our final semester
promised a much-anticipated class: John Hersey's ten-student seminar,
"Form and Style in Non-Fiction Writing." Nearly giddy
with our good fortune, several of us referred to Hersey as "The
Man," as in "See you at The Man's class." Surely,
the author of Hiroshima needed no introduction.
But
he surprised us that first day. Speaking in turn, we students each
started to bare our souls and goals. Then Hersey -- his snow-white
hair adding gravity to his long, lean face -- looked up. I thought
he would merely thank us and commence class. "My name is John
Hersey," he began simply, "and I was born in China of
missionary parents." The Man, it seemed, had not lost his humility.
Norman
Oder '83
journalist
In addition
to teaching his classes, each week he met individually with every student to review the previous
week's papers. Every student, every week. He critiqued your paper
in pencil, and in conference would file through his comments patiently,
making sure you understood them, and then would neatly erase the
marks he'd made, as if to say, "I'm gone now, it's up to you,
get back to work."
Bernardine
Connelly '87
writing instructor
In word
play, another interest John and I shared, his approach was wonderfully
deft. A fine example came up in his delicious book
about bluefish. When I murmured something about the appropriateness
of an old Yale Blue writing about the blues and how it brought to
mind his Never-To-Be-Mentioned undergraduate club, John chuckled
and suggested that I take off the book's paper jacket and examine
its hard cover. There, incised in the cloth, was a video-verbal
pun, a bluefish stripped down to its skull and bones.
Felicia
Kaplan
poet, Martha's Vineyard neighbor |
|
