With this burning objective, Orwell moved to London with only one thing on his mind—to write about this oppressed class. Finding cheap lodging near the Portobello Road, Orwell set about submerging himself into the city’s forsaken underworld just as Jack London had. “I knew nothing about working-class conditions,” Orwell was to write nearly a decade later in The Road to Wigan Pier. “The frightful descent of a working man suddenly thrown onto the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized struggles against economic laws which he does not understand … all this was outside the range of my experience.”
Orwell abandoned the middle-class appurtenances of London life and booked himself into a common lodging house in the same East End slum where Jack London had done his research for The People of the Abyss. In frail health from his Burmese experience, and suffering from an infected foot, Orwell nonetheless plunged into the maelstrom with dedicated mind and spirit.
Orwell’s experiences, which he was eventually to recount in his 1931 book Down and Out in Paris and London, transpired over a longer period of time than Jack London’s (in all, Orwell’s life as a member of the working poor spanned three years). Unlike London, who booked another room in comfortable lodgings in order to maintain a “port of refuge … into which I could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and cleanliness still existed,” Orwell allowed himself no such safe harbor. When his paltry savings ran out, he scrounged around for whatever work he could find, with fitful results. He fraternized with tramps and manual workers and joined up with them in the search for sustainable work. In Paris, he became a kitchen plongeur, scrubbing dirty dishes in a hotel restaurant short of hot water, electric light, and suitable pots and pans.
There was… an atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It was unbearably cramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on them. The cook’s vast buttocks banged against me as she moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders streamed from her:
“Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you not to bleed the beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink! Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What have you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those potatoes alone. Didn’t I tell you to skim the bouillon? Take that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil over!”
This is Orwell the incipient novelist using an insider’s observations to gird a social critique, a reporter replicating the grinding, unrelenting nature of menial labor using a fiction writer’s tools. Orwell’s descriptive powers create a vividly grim tableau. He and his fellow beggars “defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.” A septuagenarian tramp resembled “a herring-gutted starveling.” Boredom “clogged our souls like cold mutton fat.” More so than Jack London, Orwell wanted to transcend the stereotypes and fashion a more nuanced portrait of life lived on the margins. In Down and Out, poverty isn’t monolithic; even the tramps themselves have their own subtle class snobbery, and self-loathing drips from their disparaging comments about their fellow beggars.
The irony of Down and Out in Paris and London is that its verisimilitude is in some respects fabricated. Orwell admitted in The Road to Wigan Pier that “nearly all the incidents described … actually happened, though they have been rearranged,” though what “nearly” means remains open to debate. In the introduction to the French edition of the book, published in 1935, Orwell wrote that “all the characters I have described in both parts of the book are intended more as representative types… than as individuals.” As his biographer Bernard Crick has pointed out, Orwell admired Dickens’s talent for “telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth.” In Orwell’s determination to tell the big truth, he smooths over the messy road bumps of his narrative, conflating characters into composites, or creating them out of whole cloth if necessary.
This was to became a major tenet of New Journalism three decades later—blurring facts and characters like a watercolorist to arrive at some greater emotional or philosophical truth. To this day, journalists grapple with the notion of creating composites, and gifted writers such as Gail Sheehy have been harshly criticized for doing so. For traditional journalists and critics of New Journalism, it’s the antithesis of the well-ordered inverted pyramid technique, but Orwell’s story throws the pyramid’s limitations into bold relief. Lazy journalists can abuse composites, distorting facts into fabulism. But Orwell isn’t excluding or altering facts so much as he’s reordering them, molding the raw material into something compact and cohesive, so that the archetypes can work as representative characters, and his story retains its narrative power.
With the advent of World War II and an epic litany of atrocities to report, journalists brought the global terror home by way of newspaper dispatches and the major newsweeklies, particularly Time and Newsweek. A handful of journalists, most notably the Scripps-Howard syndicate’s Ernie Pyle, managed to convey scenes of graphic horror with a painterly knack for the quotidian. But there were limitations to the ways in which correspondents could report on the horrors of war. In a global conflict that pitted the forces of good against evil, there was little room for nuance or ambiguity and lots of opportunities to beat the drum for American triumphalism.
The New Yorker, a magazine that found many of its male contributors conscripted into the war effort, published the most imaginative war correspondence. A. J. Liebling, a veteran of the New York World-Telegram, was a master of the low-life profile. A staff writer for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, where he was confined to a few hundred words, Liebling flexed his artistic muscle in the longer pieces he wrote for the magazine, where religious hucksters, bookies, boxers, tummlers, and other fast-buck hustlers were lovingly and humorously portrayed. Liebling, who had done some reporting in France for The New Yorker just prior to Pearl Harbor for the magazine’s Letter from Paris section (he was on a Norwegian tanker headed back to New York on December 7, 1941), returned to Europe in 1942, this time to devote his energies to reporting on the war. His pieces from the front lines, such as “The Foamy Fields,” his classic March 1943 story about the African campaign in Tunisia, are similar in spirit to Orwell’s ground-level reportage. Liebling plunks himself squarely in the middle of his stories and then applies his sardonic yet clinical eye to the particulars of entrenched warfare life:
The five-gallon can, known as a flimsy, is one of the two most protean articles in the Army. You can build houses of it, use it as furniture, or, with slight structural alterations, make a stove or locker out of it. Its only rival for versatility is the metal shell of the Army helmet, which can be used as an entrenching tool, a shaving bowl, a wash basin, or a cooking utensil, at the discretion of the owner.
One writer who straddled the disparate cultures of both Time and The New Yorker, and thus moved seamlessly from weekly deadline dispatches to in-depth reportage, was John Hersey, the whiz-kid Yale grad who covered more terrain during the war—in both the geographic and psychological senses—than perhaps any other journalist of his generation. The son of missionaries based in China, Hersey had a blinkered childhood, unaware of the larger cultural currents unfolding beyond the walls of his father’s mission in Tientsin. When his parents moved to New York in 1924, Hersey attended the Briarcliff Manor public schools, then Yale, where he was a star football player and a contributor to the college newspaper.
Hersey was intent on becoming a journalist from an early age; as an adolescent, he self-published his own newsletter, the Hersey News, and was determined to get a job at Henry Luce’s Time, which was the endgame for many aspiring reporters during the 1930s. For Hersey, Time was “the liveliest enterprise of its type” and he wanted, “more than anything, to be connected with it.” After serving for a short time as novelist Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, Hersey was hired as a Time
copyboy, but he quickly nabbed a plum assignment when Japan invaded China in 1937. Shorthanded, and cognizant of Hersey’s Chinese upbringing, Time pressed Hersey into service. He was only twenty-five years old.
From there, Hersey journeyed throughout Japan, China, and Europe for Time, Life, and The New Yorker; he witnessed German atrocities in Poland and the Baltic states, and reported on the conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists in Shanghai, Ichang, and Peiping. In 1943, Hersey wrote an important antecedent to the impressionistic school of reporting. “Joe Is Home Now” was a piece that drew from forty-three interviews Hersey conducted with returning soldiers.
“Joe Is Home Now” is a key precursor to the wartime New Journalism of John Sack and Michael Herr. Hersey makes no pretense about the story being factual. “I guess I’d been thinking from the beginning, and had been experimenting a little bit with the pieces I did for Life, the notion that journalism could be enlivened by using the devices of fiction,” Hersey told The Paris Review in 1986. “My principal reading all along had been fiction, even though I was working for Time on fact pieces.”
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.
The father said: “How was it in this war, son?”
Joe said: “I don’t know but it’s rougher than the last.”
Joe’s younger brother Anthony said: “How many Germans you kill, Joe?”
Joe said: “Nobody who is a soldier answers that, Tony. You don’t like to talk about it, mostly you don’t even know, the range is big.”
Anthony went over and touched Joe’s empty left sleeve and said: “What happened, Joe?”
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 publi
shed 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:
I am still dissatisfied with the series title.
All the way through I wondered about what killed these people, the burns, falling debris, the concussion—what? For a year I’ve been wondering about this and I eagerly hoped this piece would tell me. It doesn’t. Nearly a hundred thousand dead people are around but Hersey doesn’t tell how they died.
I would suggest… that Hersey might do well to tuck up on the time—give the hour and minute, exactly or roughly, from time to time. The reader loses all sense of the passing of time in the episodes and never knows what time of day it is, whether ten A.M. or four P.M. I thought of this halfway through annotation and mentioned it several times. If I appear to be nagging on the subject, that’s why.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 3