The Act of Survival

This past Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. How pale those words seem in describing an event that in its first moment incinerated 80,000 people and left thousands more to die in the coming days and weeks. For many of us the reality of that iconic Monday morning is far removed and almost impossible to imagine. Details about the annihilated city and its population were for a long time sketchy at best to everyone but the few officials who visited the aftermath. It wasn’t until a year later that a full picture of the tragedy in human dimensions was offered by John Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer who published his account in The New Yorker on August 31, 1946. 

William Shawn, managing editor of The New Yorker, discussed with Hersey his astonishment that in the millions of words written about the bomb there was nothing that told the story of what happened through the eyes of who it happened to. Hersey spent three weeks in Japan doing research and interviewing bomb survivors in Hiroshima. His goal was, “…to write about what happened not to buildings but to human beings.” The result was Hiroshima, a 31,000 word story published first in The New Yorker and later by Alfred A. Knopf as a book. Hersey chose a dry, calm style free of emotion, allowing the survivors’ stories to speak for themselves. He said in a letter, “The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator; I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader's experience would be as direct as possible.”

The book begins:

1 • A Noiseless Flash

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

The story continues to follow these six survivors as they make their way through the aftermath of a broken and scorched city. Though the writer’s aim was to keep his own emotions at bay, this new style of journalism nevertheless tips the reader headfirst into the heart and mind of his subjects. The bravery of these six people in the face of such utter loss and defeat makes for a remarkable story.

                 

                            Toshiko Sasaki                       Masakazu Fujii

                    

                   Hatsuyo Nakamura                   Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge

                   

                          Terufumi Sasaki                     Kiyoshi Tanimoto

Realizing this past August 6 was the Hiroshima anniversary, I pulled from a bookshelf my old and carefully preserved first Knopf edition and stood for several minutes rereading the first pages. Hardly raising my eyes, I settled into a chair for the next hour and read the book’s 118 pages with the same fervor of my first reading years ago. This small but powerful book is not one to miss.

John Hersey’s Hiroshima at Amazon

Eighty Years of Humor

Anyone even casually looking at a copy of The New Yorker magazine will notice the cartoons, regular readers of the magazine often confessing to flipping through and reading the cartoons before anything else. Since its founding in 1925 cartoons have been an essential part of the magazine, and the list of contributors reads like a who’s who of cartoon greats: Charles Addams, Reginald Marsh, William Steig, Roz Chast, James Thurber, Liza Donnelly, Chon Day and a few hundred others. Looking back at the work of these cartoonists as it appeared in The New Yorker over the years, provides a comic chronicle of eight decades, a funny, concise and timely commentary on the American experience. The publishers call it ‘the longest-running popular comic genre in American life.’

In 2004 Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers released a massive tribute to The New Yorker and its contributing cartoonists over a period stretching from 1925 to 2004 in the big, very big, The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. This one requires a shopping cart to carry and a very large bookcase to accommodate its 13 x 11 x 1.5 inch measurements and over seven pounds of bulk. The problem with this book is that it requires a library table to read it comfortably. Not satisfied with all the material inside the book’s covers, the publishers added two CDs which include every single cartoon published in the magazine between 1925 and 2004. That’s over 68,000 cartoons all beautifully presented in digital format. The price? Unbeatable. I call it unbeatable based upon the price shown at the link above, but a big nod of thanks is due to my friend K who got tired of hefting her copy up and down and passed it on to me.

One of the highlights of the book is the essays prefacing each decade and introducing the reader to what was happening either in the wider world or on the American scene, along with other cultural pointers that help place the cartoons in a frame of sorts. There are also profiles of the leading cartoonists, those whose contributions were especially noteworthy—Peter Arno, William Steig, Roz Chast. There is a lot to read in this book, but close reading is not a requirement for uncovering hours of enjoyment with the cartoons alone.

I haven’t had time enough to go through the cartoons (or the essays) front to back, but I’ve seen and read enough to realize that Editor Robert Mankoff has done a tremendous job of putting this book together. His work has been complemented by essays from Calvin Trillin, John Updike, Mark Singer, Lillian Ross and others.

The included CDs allow what the backcover calls an ‘easy-to-browse’ system using Adobe Reader to help find cartoons by artist’s name, to look up the cartoons that ran the week you were born, and to pick out cartoons by subject.

Interspersed among the paragraphs above are a few of my personal favorites. The one above from 1935 reminds me of The Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson fifty years later.

The Essayist

One of my favorite essays has for many years been one written by E.B. White in 1941 titled, “Once More to the Lake.” The writer’s name is familiar to many as the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, the children’s stories that have captivated young readers for years. Others may recall a slim volume they read in college called, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. But for many years White’s name was associated with The New Yorker magazine, where his essays were a regular feature, and where his wife was a senior editor.

One of the books I brought home from the final sale at Mandala Books in Daytona, is a 1976 first edition of Letters of E.B. White, collected and edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth. I didn’t realize until later how rewarding this purchase would become. Pages I have so far read are generous in unveiling a man, a personality I was only vaguely familiar with. Because of my fondness for his essay, “Once More to the Lake,” I was quick to look up those letters written around the time of the essay’s first publication in 1941. What I discovered was a wealth of facts surrounding the essay’s background, and even an insight into White’s thesis, or intent with the piece. It shouldn’t really surprise me, since I’ve made similar discoveries about other writers through their letters, most prominent among them probably the poet Charles Bukowski. But it’s alway an eye opening process.

According to notes in the Letters of E.B. White, the writer was on many occasions desirous of revisiting places he had known at an earlier time. Thus it was, in 1941 he returned to the Belgrade Lakes in Maine, site of August vacations during his childhood. This return to a childhood ‘cathedral’ is the basis for “Once More to the Lake,” written for his column in Harper’s, the October 1941 issue.

I had often wondered about the final lines of the essay, which always read like a presentiment of death. I discovered the excerpt below in a letter White wrote ten years after the essay’s initial publication:

‘The essay [“Once More to the Lake”] is about a man who feels a sense of identity with his son—a fairly common feeling. But the sense of identity is all mixed up with a feeling of being separated by the years. A child by his very existence, makes a parent feel older, nearer death. So when the little boy in the essay puts on a cold, wet bathing suit, the man feels the chill, as though he were experiencing it. Only for him it is a truly chilling experience, because it suddenly seems to foreshadow death.’

Letters of E.B. White is a weighty book, and “Once More to the Lake” a somewhat lengthy essay, both of which require longer discussion, at least more than is allowed here. For those interested in the essay, this link will take you to an online version. At Amazon look for Essays of E.B. White and a revised edition of the letters. If you haven’t already, I urge you to become acquainted with the writing of Elwyn Brooks White.