by John Hersey
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.
BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY
BLUES
THE CALL
THE WALNUT DOOR
THE PRESIDENT
MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE
THE WRITER’S CRAFT
THE CONSPIRACY
LETTER TO THE ALUMNI
THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT
UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM
TOO FAR TO WALK
WHITE LOTUS
HERE TO STAY
THE CHILD BUYER
THE WAR LOVER
A SINGLE PEBBLE
THE MARMOT DRIVE
THE WALL
A BELL FOR ADANO
INTO THE VALLEY
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1944, 1946, © 1955, 1957, 1962 by John Hersey; 1944, 1945 by Time, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1944.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ebook ISBN 9780593080870
www.vintagebooks.com
Of the material in this book, the following articles-some in slightly different form-were first published in The New Yorker: “Over the Mad River,” “Survival,” “Journey Toward a Sense of Being Treated Well,” and “Hiroshima.”
The following—in somewhat different form-were first published in Life: “Joe is Home Now,” “A Short Talk with Erlanger,” and “Prisoner 339, Klooga.”
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FOR
ALFRED
PREFATORY NOTE
THE GREAT THEMES are love and death; their synthesis is the will to live, and that is what this book is about.
I believe that man is here to stay in spite of the appalling tools he invents to destroy himself, for it seems to me that he loves this seamy world more than he desires, as he dreads and flirts with, an end to it. Moreover, he has astonishing resources for holding on to his life, no matter how bad it may be, as the stories in this volume show again and again. I do not offer this book as a narcotic to lull our fears lest a few men, unhinged by their power, should try their best to blast us all. Quite the contrary: I hope that this volume will give its readers a draught of adrenalin, that bitter elixir, sufficient sips of which may help to put us on our guard against blunderers, tyrants, madmen, and ourselves.
This is a collection of some journalistic pieces on a common theme of human tenacity that I have written over the years. Looking back, I find that in most of my storytelling, in both journalism and fiction, I have been obsessed, as any serious writer in violent times could not help being, by one overriding question, the existential question: What is it that, by a narrow margin, keeps us going, in the face of our crimes, our follies, our passions, our sorrows, our panics, our hideous drives to kill?
I could not claim that the stories in this book cover the front of man’s grip on life. The volume leaves out, to give but two examples of omissions, the indomitability of the Royal Air Force that saved Britain from Hitler, and the struggle of the Negro in the United States for a proper share in what is called, sometimes without irony, “the American way.” The book is not comprehensive, but illustrative. It skips about, as journalism has a way of doing. It starts with an escape from drowning, a form of death that is said to be the reverse of birth, and ends with a story of quite another order of significance, about the delivery of a handful of human beings from an atomic attack. Between, there are instances of survivals that were not at all noble, but rather mean and even squalid; of strength given from without, by partners, friends, families; of utter dregs of desperation; of that mysterious, sometimes almost comical force for life that we call zest; of a frightful selfishness that in certain competitive struggles is the margin of survival; of an altruism that also sometimes saves; and of interventions of luck, fate, chance, or a plan. For the most part the stories are of refusals to be destroyed by devilments devised by the foul side of the human mind. Man’s greatest hazard of violence is not flood or fire or hurricane or ice or earthquake or famine; it is his own capacity to act on the worst in his nature. Drink deeply, therefore, dear reader, of the adrenal wine.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Also by John Hersey
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prefatory Note
CHANCE
Over the Mad River
FLIGHT
Journey Toward a Sense of Being Treated Well
A SENSE OF COMMUNITY
Survival
STRENGTH FROM WITHOUT
Joe Is Home Now
FUNK
A Short Talk with Erlanger
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Prisoner 339, Klooga
Not to Go with the Others
CONSERVATION
Tattoo Number 107,907
THE BIG IF
Hiroshima
CHANCE
Over the Mad River
CHANCE
ONE August night in 1955 a tropical hurricane, which had been given by the United States Weather Bureau the winsome name Diane, bore off her course and skittered up the state of Connecticut. Its winds spent, the storm unloaded on the New England hills millions of tons of water it had scooped up from the Atlantic Ocean during its voyage from the Caribbean Sea.
This is a tale of how one little old lady survived the floods that ensued; I got the account from her and others in her town a few days afterwards. It is a story, really, of the part chance can play in survival, and it tells what bizarre forms chance can take, for there could scarcely be a wilder incongruity than the one provided by its central figures—the tiny, sickly heroine, seventy-five years old, and the burly, disenchanted diabolus ex machina who came to save her life.
Over the Mad River
THAT EVENING, a delicate little old widow named Jessica Kelley spent three pleasant hours in her apartment, at the rear of the fourth floor of Anna Landi’s tenement block, at 375 Main Street, in Winsted, Connecticut, chatting with her nearest neighbor, a middle-aged maiden lady of French-Canadian descent, Yvonne Brochu, who had the fourth-floor front. It was raining very hard, and several times the two women remarked on the pounding of the water on the roof.
“I love that noise,” Mrs. Kelley said at one point. “It’s so soothing to sleep to. But, gracious, it is teeming tonight, isn’t it, Yvonne?”
Mrs. Kelley, who was seventy-five years old, had long since made it clear to Miss Brochu that she considered conversation one of the purest joys in her altogether joyful life. She once said to her that she had always loved to talk. Just before
her marriage, in October, 1903, her fiancé, a salesman of bars, handles, and trimmings for funeral caskets, told her that the very first things he intended to buy after their wedding were a parrot and a brass bed. On their honeymoon in New York, Mr. Kelley did indeed purchase a fine brass bed; nothing more was said about the parrot, and some weeks later Mrs. Kelley asked her husband why he had not bought one. “Jessica, dear,” he said, “I have you.”
The talk with Yvonne Brochu that evening was pleasurable, for Miss Brochu, a tiny person, barely five feet tall, who was a factory worker at Dano Electric, in Winsted, was sweet and patient and a loving listener. Mrs. Kelley had moved into the Landi block only two weeks before. She and Miss Brochu were old friends, however, having shared light-housekeeping privileges in a boarding house on Case Avenue several years earlier. For the last three and a half years, Mrs. Kelley had taken room and board in the east end of Winsted, near the Gilbert School, and on this particular rainy evening she told her friend Yvonne how trying things had been there. Mrs. Kelley had been a diabetic for three decades, and so, as it happened, had both her landlady and her late landlord in the east-end home. How prodigally those people had eaten! They had pretended to stay on a diabetic diet, but they had thought nothing of gulping down four or five bananas at a clip, a bag of cherries, a box of prunes—between meals, too. He had died from it; he did not live to tell of his gourmandizing. And she had been so close-fisted! Could Yvonne imagine? Mrs. Kelley had been obliged to keep her perfectly good bedside radio wrapped up in paper and string for three and a half years because she hadn’t wanted even a tiny dribble of electricity used on her premises. Be saving of hot water! Don’t waste a cracker crumb! Mrs. Kelley, the soul of charity, spoke of her former landlady not bitterly but in sadness, with a hesitant, sensitive smile from time to time, as if to ask her friend, “Aren’t people a puzzle?”
At about ten-thirty, which was nearly her bedtime, Mrs. Kelley said, “It’s so muggy and close, why don’t you and I take baths before we turn in?”
So they did. Mrs. Kelley’s apartment consisted of a bedroom and a kitchen, each about eight feet by ten and as clean as a pin, and a tiny bathroom. When Mrs. Kelley took her bath, she was very careful to keep her left foot dry, because while she was walking to St. James Episcopal Church on the previous Palm Sunday morning she had stepped off the curb in front of the First National Store at Park Place, with the stoplight in her favor, and a lady hit-and-run driver had dropped, it seemed, out of the carless sky right in front of her and had run over her foot and knocked her down, and as a consequence she had spent four months in Litchfield County Hospital and had had to have her little toe amputated. The foot was still bound up in bandages; a visiting nurse, who helped her with her insulin shots, kept it dressed for her. The winter before, she had sprained that same foot when she slipped on an icy sidewalk on her way to the post office; because she had a will of iron, and because it was what she had set out to do, she had walked all the way to the post office and home again on her throbbing foot. That, too, had cost her some time on her back, though, thankfully, not in the hospital. It seemed that her left foot was her Jonah; nothing had ever happened to her right foot. “That’s my kicker!” she once said to Yvonne Brochu, giving her sound right foot a sharp little swing.
After her bath, Mrs. Kelley dressed for bed and then sat on a small straight chair in front of her dressing table, fixing her gray hair for the night. She walked out into the hall and called good night to Yvonne, who had finished bathing in her apartment. Mrs. Kelley returned to her bedroom, pulled down her tufted bedspread with two bright peacocks on it, got into bed, read a page or two of her prayer book, and dropped off, under the soothing influence of the still drumming rain, into deep slumber.
* * *
—
While Mrs. Kelley slept, hundreds of millions of gallons of rain, part of the fantastic load of water that had been shipped by the hurricane designated as Diane during its voyage up the Atlantic Ocean, were being bailed out on certain hills of northern Connecticut and were washing down them toward Winsted.
Winsted’s Main Street lies along the north bank of the Mad River. For several hundred yards downstream from what Winsted people call “the center”—the point where Elm Street crosses Main and then the river—nearly all the Main Street stores backing on the watercourse were surmounted by rickety wooden tenements, mostly three or four stories high, many of them connected to each other on the river side by continuous wooden porches. These porches were tied together vertically by stairs here and there, which were supposed to serve as fire escapes by way of the stores below. Anna Landi’s tenement block, in which Mrs. Kelley slept so soundly that night, was the fourth building below the center bridge; it contained, on the street level, the county agent’s office, the Metropolitan Cleaners & Dyers, and Irving’s Smart Shop. Directly across the river from the Landi block, and facing on Willow Street, was the upper end of a substantial factory building, Capitol Products, where electric toasters and hot plates were made. The backs of the buildings on both sides of the river made a kind of canyon about forty feet wide, with the Mad River in its bed. The river there is normally five or six feet deep.
The Mad River rises in the town of Norfolk, about five miles west of Winsted’s center; its watershed lies in rugged foothills of the Green Mountain range, most of which are precipitous on their eastern slopes and are blanketed by forests of birch, ash, basswood, black oak, hemlock, and laurel. Winsted itself lies in an irregular bowl formed by the steep slopes of Street Hill, Pltt Hill, Ward’s Hill, Second Cobble, and several lesser hills. Southwest of the city and high above it is Highland Lake, which has become a pleasant summer resort not only for inhabitants of Winsted but also for vacationers from far-flung areas of Connecticut. Highland Lake is two miles long and averages a third of a mile in width, and it runs north and south, at its northern end, which is about half a mile from Main Street, it empties into a ravine leading to the Mad River. In 1771, the surface of the lake was raised four feet by a wooden dam and bulkhead. Thirty-five years later, a spring freshet and thaw broke the dam, but the weakness had been spotted beforehand, and a working party of men and teams was standing by when the break occurred; they hauled a huge tree trunk into the breach and with spars, planks, straw, swingling tow, and gravel prevented a disaster. The next year, a new bulkhead raised the surface of the lake another foot. In 1860, a causeway was built across the northern end, protected by a strong retaining wall and two wide overflow spillways, which raised the surface of the lake five feet higher yet. All this damming was for water power. At one time, the waters of Highland Lake turned the wheels of eleven factories scattered down the ravine, which drops a hundred and fifty feet in its half-mile course before it joins the Mad River in Winsted’s west end.
Over the years, while Winsted has grown from a cluster of villages to a city of eleven thousand inhabitants, the Mad River, swollen by overflowing water from Highland Lake, has several times risen abruptly and washed out here a bridge and there a house or two. During a spring freshet in 1936, and in the New England hurricane of 1938, the Mad River overflowed into Main Street, and after a flash flood on New Year’s Eve of 1947–48, the Mayor of Winsted, P. Francis Hicks, prevailed on Army engineers to spend a quarter of a million dollars dredging the river where it parallels Main Street.
* * *
—
At about one o’clock in the morning, a man named Arthur Royer, who lived on the third floor of the Landi block and who had been out visiting friends during the evening, came home. By that time, the river had risen enough so that a couple of inches of water were flowing down Main Street, which slopes to the east. Royer, another of Winsted’s numerous French Canadians, tends to be a worrier, and he thought that perhaps before going to bed he should tell the old ladies on the top floor that the river was swollen. He climbed to Miss Brochu’s door and knocked. For a very long time there was no answer. “Just anyone banging on your door at one o’clock in the
night, would you open?” Yvonne later asked Mrs. Kelley. “And a man’s voice! I was glad the door was locked.” Royer shouted to Miss Brochu awhile in French, and finally, hearing his words, she roused herself, put on a dressing gown, and answered the door. Royer told her about the water in Main Street and went downstairs.
Yvonne looked out of her window and hurried across the hall into Mrs. Kelley’s apartment, and at the door of the bedroom she said, “Jessie! Jessie! Put on the light!”
Mrs. Kelley, awakening, felt concern for her friend. She turned on a bedside lamp. “Yvonne, what is it?” she said. “Don’t you feel right? Has something happened to you?”
“The water is coming up,” Yvonne said. “You can see it in the street. Come in the front and look out the window.”
“Gracious, I don’t think I want to do that, Yvonne,” Mrs. Kelley said.
Miss Brochu was quite excited, and finally Mrs. Kelley said, “Yvonne, I think we should get dressed.”
Miss Brochu went back to her apartment, and both ladies put on their clothes. While they were dressing, at about one-fifteen, they separately heard the sirens of Winsted’s Civil Defense alarm system, and Mrs. Kelley relieved her distress at hearing this wailing with the thought that Art Royer, downstairs, had a Civil Defense armband. He would be informed. People would come if there was danger. Later, after she had gone into Miss Brochu’s front room and had looked at the glistening, shallow water running down Main Street under the street lights in the rain, she discussed Royer’s C.D. brassard with her friend, and Yvonne agreed that help would come if help was needed.
