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CHAPTER 1
A Sentimental Journey
When John Hersey was in his sixties he made what he called "a sentimental journey" to Tientsin, now Tianjin, the east China port where he and his brothers had been born and where he had lived until he was ten. He wrote about the trip in a series of four articles published, like the majority of the nonfiction he had written since the mid-1940s, in The New Yorker. He was at an age when it's common for people to look back over their lives and their family histories. He was researching a big novel about the YMCA in China, where his parents had been missionaries. His own life, too, offered plenty to review with pride, though that wasn't the topic of this fifty-thousand-word analysis, or not directly.
More than forty intensely busy, satisfying, at some points glamorous years had passed since the appearance in 1942 of his first book, Men on Bataan, which used journalistic sources to give a ringside view of the United States' earliest efforts to fight back against Japan while those efforts were still going on and it was far from certain that they would succeed. For reasons we'll come to, Hersey would be embarrassed by Men on Bataan, but, together with Into the Valley — a directly personal account of another, smaller but similarly unsuccessful military episode — the book made his name as a war writer, one who understood the popular appetite for heroes but didn't shy away from awkward facts like fear, retreat, or defeat. As early as July 1942, the young correspondent already himself made news. "Well, yesterday evening I had quite an exciting time," an army medic wrote home from a station hospital. "John Hersey was here."
Hersey's globally translated account of the immediate impact on people in Hiroshima of the 1945 bomb has never gone out of print. First published in The New Yorker soon after the first anniversary of the bombing, and filling an entire issue — an unprecedented move for the magazine — Hiroshima was the earliest, arguably the only, work on its subject to have such an impact. Four years later the author also became the first American to publish a novel about the Shoah, and it's hard to imagine, today, just how extraordinary, how huge, how problematic-seeming that achievement was. It's called The Wall. Around the same time, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl was rejected by ten English-language publishers and Primo Levi had difficulty finding a substantial Italian outlet for If This Is a Man.
Novels by Hersey based on other aspects of the Second World War won prizes and were made into films. A Bell for Adano, set in Sicily in 1943, was published while the Italian campaign was still being fought and despite the fact that it hinges on a strongly critical portrait of the American commander, General Patton. The War Lover (1959), set on a U.S. air base near Cambridge, England, is what it says it is: an attempt to depict a man who, not unlike Patton, really enjoys war. Sufficiently trusted to be given unprecedented personal access to serving presidents Truman (in 1950–51) and, in the early 1970s, Ford, to write day-by-day accounts of the workings of the U.S. government, Hersey was nevertheless a forthright critic of many national policies and actions, particularly the Vietnam War, to which he objected publicly even within the White House itself. His participation in the Freedom Summer of 1964, staying with an African American family and writing for a mass-circulation magazine about attempts by people like his hosts to register for the vote was part of a series of battles by him to affect people's attitudes toward race: the attitudes of lawmakers and law keepers, administrators, and politicians, as well as private individuals. This was the heyday of the New Journalism, which Hersey's Hiroshima is sometimes said to have prefigured, and while younger writers were making the genre their own — Joan Didion, Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson, and Nicholas Tomalin, as well as their anthologist Tom Wolfe — Hersey went on contributing to it in his own way. His furious, self-castigating, procedurally controversial exposé of the torture and killing of a group of young people, mainly black, by white police and National Guardsmen in Detroit during the riots of 1967 still resonates all too loudly today, as does his defense of the radical actions of Yale students during the Black Panthers trials, held within shouting distance of the campus two years later — actions that had led wealthy alumni to threaten to withdraw funding from the university.
Hersey himself was a Yalie. Not only that, he was a member of the elite fraternity Skull and Bones and, by the time of these radical interventions, master of one of the university's residential colleges. Unlike many of the New Journalists (or many famous war correspondents), he was a reserved, sometimes aloof-seeming man, "not exactly an Abbie Hoffman type," as one contemporary joked, referring to the anarchist countercultural founder of the yippies. Moderate in his habits except in his devotion to work, physically fit, devoted to his family, a bit formal in dress and manner, he worked from inside the conventional establishment. In his day the youngest-ever fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and soon one of the academy's officers, he served on advisory bodies and commissions of inquiry large and small and was in constant demand as a speaker. The need to keep these activities under control, along with the complexities of his literary affairs — film and stage rights, radio adaptations, translations, paperback reprints — would have persuaded anyone else to employ a small office of assistants, but Hersey had begun his career as an individual with a notebook, and all his life he managed most of his business affairs himself. Again there was something of his parents in this. As a child, he had watched them doing their best for other human beings, within and sometimes despite a massive international organization, in the vast, complexly divided, and rapidly changing China of the early twentieth century.
His 1982 New Yorker series was more, though, than a meditation on origins. "The House on New China Road" contemplates then-new cultural, political, and economic developments against a geologically long history, putting Western privileges and Eastern political upheavals into revelatory contexts. Even the title is rich in meanings. The street the Herseys' home stood on had been known as Recreation Road, after the sports ground that it ran alongside. The language used for place-names, like for everything else in the British concession, was English. Now the street is called Xinhua — New China. To most Western readers in 1982, "New China" meant something unclearly situated between Mao's failed Cultural Revolution and the more outward-looking but still imperfect and unproven reforms of Deng Xiaoping. There's a paradox, too, in the idea of newness in so ancient a setting. Hersey's lens is sometimes long, sometimes wide, but he had learned his trade at Time-Life, so there's also an acutely sympathetic if unsystematic focus on people's domestic circumstances, their ambitions, their compromises and refusals to compromise, above all their individuality. In the course of the weekly installments, he steadily drew away from autobiographical preoccupations — from a stage-setting, disappointable kind of nostalgia — toward optimism about China's present and future. In its emphasis on resilience, enterprise, and the power of education, the approach is characteristic of him: despite everything he had seen by then, and despite an underlying puritan strain of melancholy, he was still hopeful about human beings. Typical, too, is his journalistic knack for being a bit ahead of others on any big story. For all the reforms the country was making and the détente heralded by President Nixon's visit a decade earlier, not all commentators saw in Deng's China an impressively diverse, sophisticated, adaptable, and — in relation to the region's own history and beliefs — surprisingly free culture.
Still, in his return Hersey was also investigating a personal question: whether, as he bluntly phrased it, "my parents' lives had been worth living." There's no way to ask that without also, and perhaps first, wondering about the value of one's own existence. The premises of Hersey's career were moral to an extent that went beyond the engagements he had in common with many of the cultural idols of his time. The period he lived through confronted everyone with questions about whether the world could truly be made a better place — questions or hopes or doubts that, however perennial, are sharpest when they occur, as these did, at times of widespread material growth. Hersey's parents were his first ethical models and, in being determined to emulate them, he was prompted by two extra pressures. He thought he had discarded the religious beliefs they taught him. Whether or not that was true, he thought it and was eager for a purely rational support system for the humanitarianism that, in the elder Herseys, was nourished by Christianity. At the same time he had watched as illness caused his father and therefore his mother, too, to give up their work in China, to settle for the comforts but also the limitations of the Hudson River suburbs of New York and, in his father's case, to die relatively young. The death of fathers, as Hamlet knew, is nature's common theme, but it only happens to anyone once, and for the young man to see his idealized father-hero brought low was a testing experience.
Hersey publicly confronted his childhood's intensest moments in his 1982 series — or as much of them as anyone so uncommunicative about himself could have been expected to. That uncommunicativeness was itself a bit of an illusion, but how Hersey begins is with the classic story of a certain kind of American past:
My father grew up on a small farm in Red Creek, New York, not far from the eastern end of Lake Ontario. He and his brothers worked hard on the farm from an early age, most years going to the local district school only in winter. They had a Methodist upbringing. By prodigies of application ... my father somehow managed to get up the Latin and Greek needed to get into Syracuse University.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were, as he wrote, a time of exceptional American optimism and idealism — or, according to your point of view, of arrogant national self-delusion. Hersey had seen at close quarters some problems endemic in global expansionism and in its often hypocritical-seeming relationship with political and, especially, religious ideals, and these conflicts were among his main themes as a writer. In 1905, Roscoe Hersey had gone to China on behalf of the YMCA, "he thought, for the rest of his life."
At that stage he didn't know a word of Mandarin. He was a gentle, kindly, bookish, unprepossessing person, still and always a hard worker. My mother, besides being good-looking, was quietly strong and serene. She and my father teamed well together in their work ... They were as much interested in the quality of life of the people they served as they were in converting them. They brought medicine, education, science, agronomy, conservation, and ideas for social planning.
The secular emphases here are given a stronger religious context in the book version, Hersey's long biographical novel The Call, published three years later. His parents' work went on through famine, flood, and sometimes violent political change for twenty years.
These recollections weren't uncontested. Disagreements arose between him and Arthur, the eldest brother, over matters of fact and interpretation to do with their upbringing, and also about ways in which — if at all — their story should be told. Still, some memories were uncontroversial, if only because in their particular form they were unique to the teller. John described their house and its surroundings, the recreation ground opposite with its bulbous pavilion, the local church, their schools (first a traditional English establishment close to their home, then its new American equivalent, farther off), and was delighted to find some of these buildings still standing in 1981, as some remain today. The former British concession has been sub-segmented by the "Five Roads" — hectic multilane urban thoroughfares — that now give the area its name, but tree-lined avenues and residential streets between them are being preserved and, in some cases, restored as part of China's new urban conservationism. It's more common than not, as in the case of what was 5 Recreation Road, for them to be in scruffy multi-occupation and for apartments within them to be jostling between uses as family housing, cafés, and motor-repair workshops, but plaques bearing the words "Historical and Stylistic Architecture of Tianjin: General Protection" have sprung up everywhere. Meanwhile, even when what existed has been torn down and built over, there are continuities. The former recreation ground is now home to a gym and a state-of-the-art tennis school.
Townscape apart, Hersey wrote, too, about family, pets, and boyhood friends. Among the latter was an eclectic mix of colonial immigrant and national neighbors and friends. The contrasts were not all between rich Westerners and poor Chinese. As one of the "concessions" ports, Tientsin was full of outsiders who preserved what they could of their past within their national ghettoes, little tax havens that were also separate jurisdictions as well as conservation areas for cultural beliefs and practices. Some people were there of their own volition, others by force of circumstance. The violinist Paul Federovsky was in the second category. John was musically gifted and was taught to play the violin by this "terribly poor and starkly thin" Russian who had fled the recent revolution with his wife, Olga Averino, a soprano later well known in the West. In 1924 the couple managed to get from Tientsin to Boston, Massachusetts. They flourished as professional musicians in the United States, where the adult Hersey saw them from time to time, but in Tientsin the boy "tortured that sensitive man with my first tentative strokes of the bow. Once he actually screamed and threw his hands over his ears." Other local exiles included a Socialist German Jewish family whose clever son Israel Epstein, having broken a leg when he was nine years old, impressed Johnny by embarking on an attempt to write a two-volume history of the world. "Eppy" was to spend most of his life in China and was among several of the Herseys' former acquaintances imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. But in the intricate cosmopolis of the 1910s and early '20s John also regularly slipped into the servants' quarters. They were, he wrote, "used to having me around and often forgot I was there, for I used to sit still, watching the old cook lazily lift and put down his rose-water pipe, punctuating his puffs of the pale smoke with sage sayings." This cook was the source, too, of an impressive range of Chinese swear words, and at the same time as the boy learned demotic Chinese (though never, Arthur later reminded him, quite as well as he himself had done), he discovered how strange Western customs seemed to his kitchen friends. Why, at Christmas, did the Herseys worship a tree? Worse, why was so well-brought-up a boy unable to explain the practice?
In retrospect it was the cosmopolitanism that struck him most: the distinctiveness of each foreign quarter of Tientsin — a segregated mêlée epitomized now as then by Wilhelm Kiessling's famous international restaurant: not so much fusion as compartmentalization. More intimately, the musician manqué remembered sounds: "A servant ... singing a passage from a Chinese opera in a high falsetto ... men in this dusty city clearing their throats, like lions roaring; the thrifty clicks of an abacus in an open fruit stall" and the noises, too, of the family making music, Grace on the piano, Roscoe Senior on the cornet, or just listening to records on their wind-up Victrola gramophone. There were also the less rarified oddities of any childhood. The rubbish bins of nearby colonial clubs enabled John to make a very full collection of corks and bottle caps. He won a prize for it, handed out with other awards by the American commander in chief William Durward Connor, who understandably assumed that these relics had been procured from the boy's father. "Envious congratulations" were due, he joked, to (the, in fact, deeply temperate) Mr. Hersey, for "making this remarkable accumulation possible." John acted as servant and messenger for his elder brothers, Arthur and Roscoe Junior, especially in connection with a secret society that met in an attic hideout constructed by the latter, and did his fierce bit as a foot soldier in their gang wars.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Mr. Straight Arrow"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jeremy Treglown.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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