Life Sketches, John Hersey
Rocca, Francis X.
lthough he is primarily a novelist, the versatile and inconsistent John Hersey is most famous for his nonfiction Hiroshima (1946), in which he reconstructs the lives of six survivors in the days...
...The portrait of Luce, another old boss, is redeemed by pithy evocation: "Abstractions lit up his face, as if in a dazzling son et lumiere at the Sphinx...
...As at that magazine (to whose venerable former editor, William Shawn, this book is dedicated), here the guiding sensibility is liberalism, yet Hersey is not utterly predictable...
...He enthuses: "She has experienced so much...
...The escape from a Nazi deathcamp by the ingenious and intrepid Bernard Weintraub makes for the best story of this type in the book, because Hersey gracefully and economically weaves the protagonist's background into the action...
...Francis X Rocca is a graduate student at St...
...colleague, James Agee...
...On July 18 of last year, the New Yorker published a long piece of his about his old Time, Inc...
...Flattery of a more offensive sort is lavished on the late Lillian Hellman, Hersey's Martha's Vineyard neighbor...
...More persuasively, with remarks on Plutarch and Tennyson, Truman demonstrates that his brand of homespun erudition was the genuine article, if hardly Lincolnesque in stature...
...At least vindictiveness is restrained by dignity...
...He chides the Ivy Leaguers, circa 1968, who vulgarized James Agee's rebellious ideas: Half deafened by rock and roll, they loved his praise of loud music, not noticing that he wrote only of amplifying Beethoven and Schubert...
...and the spirit of William Shawn prevails somewhat over that of Lillian Hellman...
...These were not the sort of absent-minded transpositions that all writers perpetrate occasionally...
...The matter was resolved without litigation and "plagiarism" was one word neither party used...
...By the standards of the soundbite age, Truman was a philosopher king...
...That Agee essay is now part of Life Sketches...
...lthough he is primarily a novelist, the versatile and inconsistent John Hersey is most famous for his nonfiction Hiroshima (1946), in which he reconstructs the lives of six survivors in the days after the detonation of the first atomic bomb...
...Because he is a reporter, Hersey is ridiculed by Truman for his presumed laziness...
...Bernard Baruch, self-made millionaire financier, self-styled Wise Man, and an inveterate show-off, emerges as a sympathetic and impressive character—not least because of his masterful nonstop storytelling...
...He boasts of his diligence, probity, refusal to exploit the privileges of office, and lack of desire for publicity...
...He dismisses Henry Luce's China policy as a terrible idiosyncrasy...
...Significantly, it is not one of the eight New Yorker articles included in this collection, all of which could use tightening—the natural result of editorial indulgence and dollar-a-word largesse...
...The touches of memoir in this book are rare and vivid...
...He gives a tedious account of publisher Alfred A. Knopfs preoccupation with the national parks...
...These interviews hold one's attention, revealing unsuspected conflicts between the generations, as well as the complexity (usually ignored abroad) of Israeli political culture—divided on even the life-and-death issues...
...But by reprinting this now, Hersey is not just being loyal to a friend's memory...
...19.95 Francis X. Rocca 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989...
...the book also contains many errors on matters not derived from Agee's writings...
...Unlike some of his successors in so-called Literary Journalism, such as Joan Didion, Hersey has never indulged in solipsism...
...She has had an abortion"—and so on, a litany of achievements by a "libertine spirit...
...Expressing skepticism about the un-Jeffersonian notion that "all human beings [are] infinitely educable," he champions a policy of "equality of opportunity" in order to sort out the most talented...
...Notwithstanding the pre-Sam Donaldson custom of deference to the President, it is curious that Hersey—the conscience of Hiroshima—does not bring up Truman's decision to drop the Bomb...
...Unlike Baruch, whose blarney is ironical, Truman appears to have had no sense of humor about himself...
...He tries transcribing their remarks, as in a play, with italicized stage directions...
...He tells, in timely contrast to Hollywood's sensationalist distortions, the semitriumphant tale of a black Mississippi farmer's patient, nonviolent struggle to get the vote in 1964...
...There are the usual slurs on the "half-mad [Whittaker] Chambers, whose eyes were hooded with paranoia," and a sneer at "Nixonism...
...Unfortunately, the author also shows his age by reciting vintage shibboleths...
...He is doing his part to obliterate, with immoderate and inapt praise of its perpetrator, the exposure of a colossal hoax...
...a cut-and-paste of recollections by Knopf's cronies of their interminable hikes together...
...Not surprisingly, stories of survival, told in precise and unassuming prose, are among the most compelling in Life Sketches, a collection of eighteen biographical essays, written between 1944 and 1988...
...What was perhaps Hellman's worst sin—fabricating her assistance to a mysterious "Julia" in the anti-Nazi Austrian underground—was not known in 1976, when this testimonial was delivered at an award ceremony...
...Because of Hersey's prestige, this short encomium is a significant boost for what Paul Johnson has called "the Lillian Hellman myth industry...
...Another passage is composed of terse responses, leaving the reader to infer all the questions...
...John's College in Annapolis, Maryland...
...Her cunning evasions before HUAC are a testament of conscientiousness...
...Hersey made a grudging half-apology...
...She is a "moral force," this apologist for Stalin, and a paragon of "decency...
...Sinclair Lewis, whom Hersey served as a secretary for the summer of 1937, he portrays with compassion...
...It is the same reserve that lends Hiroshima its dignity and powerful starkness...
...Otherwise, the interviewer remains invisible...
...A reminiscence of his eccentric headmaster, written for the Hotchkiss alumni bulletin, is canny and affectionate...
...The appearance of longer passages, elaborately rearranged, was even more startling...
...LIFE SKETCHES John Hersey/Alfred A. Knopf/352 pp...
...On the contrary, we find him struggling with the problem of the intrusive interviewer when he talks to the children of Holocaust survivors living in Israel...
...Hersey is of a more responsible generation...
...Hersey has duly fixed the offending passages, and he has added a list of nine sources, including Bergreen's book—but he cannot have been happy about it...
...Hersey enhances the long quotations with colorful descriptions of Baruch in his favorite setting, the Saratoga racetrack...
...I t is less of a pleasure to read about 1. a morning walk and swim with Harry Truman...
...They were delighted by his wondering whether tenant farmers, who were "among the only 'honest' and `beautiful' users of the language," should be forced to become literate by semi-literate teachers—apparently not noticing that he also quoted Kafka, Blake, Celine...
...The book, written twenty years before In Cold Blood, combines novelistic techniques and the fruits of thorough reportage in a narrative that does not pause, except for background...
...This is an act of virtuosity and modesty, since Baruch appears to tell his own story, without any help from Hersey...
...The galley proofs contain this new sentence: Laurence Bergreen's James Agee: A Life has the flaw of indiscriminately presenting details from the fictions as if they were facts...
...A few days later Agee's biographer, Laurence Bergreen, pointed out "about 20 specific examples of copyright infringement" in the article...
...never for ponderous reflection on the Meaning of It All...
...Hersey had appropriated quotes and constructions of this order: where Bergreen had "stories on topics as diverse as butter, cockfights, and quinine," Hersey put "articles on butter, cockfights, and quinine...
...One cringes to think of the obsequies performed by other prominent writers...
...There is no argument on its merits, as if it were self-evident that Mao was preferable to Chiang...
...This enormous backslap was originally one chapter in a privately printed sixtieth birthday present...
...He chortles lewdly, as at a celebrity roast: ". . . she has always wanted to go to bed with an orangutan...
...In the finished bound book, this has been replaced with a milder dismissal...
...Happily unopinionative are the profiles, rendered after a few hours of observation, of a couple of prominent figures...
...So it is disappointing that Hersey is least interesting on the subject of his friends...
...He turns the case study of a gifted sixth-grader into an eloquent and vehement attack on "misplaced egalitarianism" in the public schools...
...H ersey himself has been exposed in a breach of integrity, though less grave than Hellman's...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
