Hersey as Philosopher
KEENE, FRANCES
Hersey as Philosopher A Single Pebble. By John Hersey. Knopf. 181 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Frances Keene Editorial staff, N. Y. "Times Magazine": lecturer in English, New York University The...
...This is the story of a young American engineer who, some 25 years ago, was sent by his firm to China to graph the potential of the wild Yangtze River for a dam site...
...Somewhere between the two views lies truth, says Hersey...
...With Western aplomb he asks her abruptly one day: "You love him, do you not...
...The gestures of apparent indifference which drive him to despair he slowly comes to recognize as an acceptance of hardship, a courage, an abnegation and an inner strength of which he had had no previous concept...
...Hersey, one of the true master journalists of this or any age...
...Detached because of his culture, his training, his habits of mind and heart, he slowly finds himself more involved than the Chinese themselves in their own welfare—or so he thinks...
...In these lulls, Hersey unselfconsciously turns poet on more than one occasion...
...The reader minds such passages, with their rub-it-in excesses, as "They had such sad faces...
...He, too, was a man of visions: his idealism went undiminished despite the repeated setback political reforms suffered in his time: and he was a poet...
...In an age when the World Bank brilliantly and conspicuously lakes care of economic updating of "backward" areas...
...The engineer cannot long ignore the fact that the wife of the ship's owner is emotionally bound not to her aging husband but to the head tracker...
...Despite the daily raging struggle between man and the elements, the junk's passage up the river offers the engineer a tranquil period of observation...
...Though A Single Pebble is John Hersey at his thoughtful best, it is not, despite the often intensely moving prose, his best-written book...
...Of the head tracker...
...Thus the distilled wisdom which...
...What strategic span to mark in the mind...
...What point to pick...
...Vaughan's lines...
...Yet he never denies his Western revulsion at the apparent disregard for individuality implicit in the ageless Asiatic belief that man is...
...Reviewed by Frances Keene Editorial staff, N. Y. "Times Magazine": lecturer in English, New York University The Puritan Henry Vaughan had much in common with John Hersey...
...And the wife replies: "Every day on the river he shows me that life is not hard...
...The sight of that path made me wonder whether a dam was the right thing with which to start closing the gap...
...A Single Pebble is Hersey's most philosophically ambitious book to date, for in it he tries to communicate, in parable terms, his conviction that a bridge between old and new concepts of man's freedom cannot be built on material progress alone, no matter how widely shared...
...My soul, there is a country / Afar beyond the stars . . . ." seem echoed by the gentle optimist who lives somewhere in ace-reporter soul-searcher Hersey...
...Since Hersey has tried to make a good and honest book, these editorial exhortations he treats us to are not needed...
...Hersey implies, it took his protagonist a generation and more fully to comprehend...
...Another nut as hard to crack for the young American as the impassive Oriental exterior was the Eastern concept of love...
...Despite his training, which included study of Mandarin Chinese, the young protagonist funis himself spiritually ignorant of much that goes on about him as he travels by junk up the swollen river...
...Old Pebble (a relatively young man), he writes: "Only now on reflection, as I remember the signs of helplessness that lurked now and then momentarily in his eyes, do I see how hard he must have striven for virtue...
...has greatly dared in this book...
...He must have been trying his best to free himself from delusion, to struggle to rise above existence and pain, to speak truth, to be pure, to hurt no living thing, to have self-control, to have a wakeful mind, and rapturously to contemplate his short and awful life...
...I will never forget that scene in those few minutes," and the feckless underlining of "the endless grief of the suffering poor people in the face of disaster...
...In particular...
...like the beasts, dispensable...
...It should reach a wide readership, for ethics, observation, and skill-touched-withpoetic-vision are a rare and beautiful combination...
...Certain themes of the novel so greatly involve the author as to force him to forget his own artist's capacity for detachment...
...A Single Pebble is indeed apropos...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 32
