November, 1946
Sir:
MAY I ADD SOMETHING to your comment on the Hiroshima New Yorker? The editors of that magazine imagined, and you yourself in your comment take for granted, that the Hersey piece was an indictment of atomic warfare. Its real effect, however, was quite the opposite. What it did was to minimize the atom bomb by treating it as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes—fires, floods, earthquakes—which we have always had with us and which offer to the journalist, from Pliny down to Mr. Hersey, an unparalleled wealth of human-interest stories, examples of the marvelous, and true-life narratives of incredible escapes. The grandness of the disaster and the smallness of the victims are ideally suited to the methods of journalism, which exaggerates and foreshortens simultaneously. The interview with the survivors (Mrs. Margaret O’Reilly, of 1810 Oak Street, housewife, speaking to reporters, said: “When I first smelled smoke, I threw an old coat on and woke the baby,” etc.) is the classic technique for reporting such events—it serves well enough to give some sense, slightly absurd but nonetheless correct, of the continuity of life. But with Hiroshima, where the continuity of life was, for the first time, put into question, and by man, the existence of any survivors is an irrelevancy, and the interview with the survivors is an insipid falsification of the truth of atomic warfare. To have done the atom bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead.
But of this Mr. Hersey is, both literally and temperamentally, incapable. He is The New Yorker’s reporter-at-large, not Virgil or Dante—hell is not his sphere. Yet it is precisely in this sphere—that is, in the moral world—that the atom bomb exploded. To treat it journalistically, in terms of measurable destruction, is, in a sense, to deny its existence, and this is what Mr. Hersey has accomplished for the New Yorker readers. Up to August 31 of this year, no one dared think of Hiroshima—it appeared to us all as a kind of hole in human history. Mr. Hersey has filled that hole with busy little Japanese Methodists; he has made it familiar and safe, and so, in the final sense, boring. As for the origin of the trouble, the question of intention and guilt—which is what made Hiroshima more horrifying, to say the least, than the Chicago Fire—the bombers, the scientists, the government appear in this article to be as inadvertent as Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
There is no question that The New Yorker’s editors did not deliberately plan the August 31 issue as an anniversary celebration of the atom bomb (though one wonders whether they were not competing just a little with it in this journalistic coup that allowed a single article to obliterate the contents of the magazine). The point is that The New Yorker cannot be against the atom bomb, no matter how hard it tries, just as it could not, even in this moral “emergency,” eliminate the cigarette and perfume advertising that accompanied Mr. Hersey’s text. Since The New Yorker has not, so far as we know, had a rupture with the government, the scientists, and the boys in the bomber, it can only assimilate the atom bomb to itself, to Westchester County, to smoked turkey, and the Hotel Carlyle. (“Whenever I stay at the Carlyle, I feel like sending it a thank-you note,” says a middle-aged lady in an advertisement.) It is all one world.
Mary McCarthy