PAST MASTERS: MARK TWAIN / JOHN HERSEY / HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

In my boyhood summers, we lived in a Dutch-fieldstone house a dozen yards from the western shore of the Hudson, and the river’s damp sounds and smells, its wide white expanse of glassy or wind-mottled water, its brackish tides, its ceaseless movement, and its night lappings impinged on my young consciousness unawares. Twenty miles up from the Battery, I waded in the Hudson, swam in it, fished in it (for eels and tommycod and blue crabs), skipped stones on it, shot fireworks over it, and all day dozily studied its upstream and downstream traffic. Catboats, rowboats, and runabouts appeared and went away, while, over in the eastern channel, river freighters and sluggish tugs with low processions of barges made passage with banner-streaming vessels from the great white fleet of the Hudson River Day Line. Way off, along the New York Central’s water-level route, trains silently drew and redrew the straight line of the farther bank.

I must have been eleven or twelve when I first encountered “Huckleberry Finn,” but from the moment Huck and Jim took to the river—their river, the Mississippi—I was overtaken with a thrilling proprietary excitement, because, of course, Mark Twain had it right: this was what a great wide-water, north–south stream was like, and here was how it felt to pass time on its banks. For the first time, literature had confirmed for me a patch of life that I recognized from my own experience.

In the book, Twain appears to give little attention to scenery, but his river-prospect interludes preserve the clarity and unhurried gazings of an empty-sky morning passed within the sound of moving water:

A little smoke couldn’t be noticed, now, so we would take some fish off of the lines, and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep…. Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on a raft, you’d see the ax flash, and come down—you don’t hear nothing; you see that ax go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head, then you hear the k’chunk!—it had took all that time to come over the water.

The famous passage—it comes along early in Chapter 19—lies near the center of this most central American novel, and one returns to it each time with refreshed alertness. One might even look at that “sliding by” and then recall how often Twain uses the word or a variant—not just when he is writing about the river but when he is writing about Huck Finn himself. Huck by turns slides out of houses and bedrooms, slips off quiet, slides into a canoe, slips down a ladder, clears out away from his drunken father, and, with his companion, Jim, hurries again to the raft and lets her go a-sliding down the river. Each of these hero-outcasts holds secret hopes of finding a place for himself somewhere in proper, dry-land society, but they are kept on the run by the grownups they encounter—thieves and lynchers, rapscallions and skin-artists and murderers—during their precipitous vertical odyssey. Almost without noticing, they discover that the great sliding river itself is the only constant, their one fixed home.

“Huckleberry Finn” invites rereading, but I find less sunshine in it each time around. Its cruel and oafish backwater crowds, and the itinerant grotesques who prey upon them, don’t feel all that funny or far away, and the bitter pains of Jim’s condition, on which Twain poured out his irony, are dated more in details than in substance. I notice, too, as I did not before, that Huck and Jim become older in the book, partly as the result of their comical and horrific experiences but really because they are also riding that other stream whose insensible, one-way flow is felt perhaps even by children staring at distant sails and trains on a summer afternoon. In the end, the two run out of river, and so does their story, which becomes less when it must find a way to stop. Time has slid away, and we wish ourselves upstream again, beginning the voyage.

Sidebar, June, 1995

HERSEY AND HISTORY

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which famously constituted the entire editorial contents of this magazine’s issue of August 31, 1946, is a work of sustained silence. Its appearance, just over a year after the destruction of the Japanese city in the first atomic attack, offered one of the first detailed accounts of the effects of nuclear warfare on its survivors, in a prose so stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis as to place each reader alone within scenes laid bare of all but pain. The piece tells the stories of six people—two doctors, two women, a Protestant clergyman, and a German Jesuit priest—as they experience the bomb, suffer injuries, and struggle for survival in the nightmarish landscape of ruin and death, and does so with classical restraint. Hersey never attempts to “humanize” these victims but instead allows them to keep their formal titles—Mrs. Nakamura, Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, and so on—throughout, thus clothing them once again in the privacy and individuality that the war and the bomb have blown away. This was not the way we in America were accustomed to thinking about Japanese citizens, whether seen as the hated enemy or the faceless dead, in the mid-nineteen-forties.

“Hiroshima” is a short piece, given its concerns, and was read everywhere, one may assume, at a single sitting. Its thirty-one thousand words suffice because they abstain from the smallest judgment or moral positioning, and leave the reader to deal with the consequences and the questions. Nothing in the work has been dramatized, but many individual scenes begin with a simple few words—“Early that day,” “It began to rain,” “Some time later”—that sound like stage directions. Indeed, the meticulous, restrained flow of Hersey’s words, the slow conversations of his handful of characters, and the flattened, burnt-out scenery of the destroyed city contrive to shift the piece from contemporary war reporting to what feels like ancient tragedy. In the same way, the decision to run the piece intact in The New Yorker, with no other text (William Shawn, then the managing editor, conceived the idea and persuaded Harold Ross to go along with it), cleared its setting of familiar and reassuring distractions. What happened at Hiroshima is all that we are allowed to think about.

It is difficult, in this news-drenched age, to imagine how “Hiroshima” was received in its time. Newspapers everywhere devoted lead editorials to it and reprinted front-page excerpts, while the American Broadcasting Company had the piece read aloud (this was just before the television age), over national radio, across four successive evenings. The article became a book, and the book has sold more than three and a half million copies and remains in print to this day. Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust. Neither of these disasters has come to pass in the past fifty years, and that long and unexpected silence, one must conclude, found its beginning in the murmurous eloquence of John Hersey’s report.

Sidebar, July, 1995

DISARMED

Visiting the splendid “Henri Cartier-Bresson in America 1935–1975” show at the Equitable (through November 2nd) brought back for me some brief but still vivid moments spent with the Magnum grand master forty years ago. He was not just the most revered but the most enjoyed member of that celebrated entourage of photographers—Robert Capa, Chim Seymour, and Elliott Erwitt were some of the others—whose work was repeatedly featured in Holiday, where I was a young editor, and whenever he turned up at the office, a diminutive, monkish-looking gent, with smile and Leica at the ready, he was received with complimentary disrespect. “Hank!” cried our art director, Frank Zachary. “Hank Carter! Got the snaps, Hank?”

It was Zachary’s notion that the suave and cosmopolitan C.-B., a Parisian to the core, would respond happily to being treated like an aspiring night-beat news photog with a big-circulation American daily, and even proposed to him that he should go everywhere wearing a porkpie hat with a “Press” placard stuck in the hatband, just like in the movies. “Oh, Franghnk!” Cartier-Bresson protested. He was laughing. “ ‘Got the snaps’—you are…you are exceptionale!” Always, of course, he did have the snaps, and then some, and when we took him out to lunch he would sometimes swiftly lift the Leica, barely pausing in midstride or midsentence, and catch another one—a passing dog or grande dame, a delivery boy across the street with his face at that instant lifted toward the sun—that the rest of us had never noticed.

His cameras were not in evidence on a day when Frank and I called on him and his wife, Eli, in their apartment on the Rue de Lisbonne, in June of l956. I remember their warmth and charm but nothing else about the day except for a heavy, exotic-looking dagger with a curvy double edge that lay on top of a sideboard, its elaborately chased blade catching gleams of sunlight. When I approached for a closer look, Cartier-Bresson and his wife said, in one voice, “Be careful!”

Seeing my surprise, he explained that the knife was a Malayan kris, and that the dark sheen along its blade was probably poison. “I don’t want it to cut you,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to touch it,” I said. I felt like a reprimanded child.

“He means it will cut you if it wants to,” Eli said. She herself was Balinese, strikingly so, and again I stopped in my tracks. She spread her hands in distress and said to her husband, “Can we tell Roger why it’s out on the table like this?”

“Yes,” Cartier-Bresson said gravely. “Normally, in the everyday, the kris rests in this drawer, here below, but now and then it asks to get out.”

“It asks?” I asked.

“It knocks,” he said, rapping a double rap with his knuckles on the sideboard. “And when it asks again we take it out and put it just here for a few days.”

I don’t think I laughed. I said nothing, and Cartier-Bresson, anxious to put me at my ease again, gestured apologetically and remarked that belief or superstition, call it what you wish, was everywhere. “After all,” he murmured, “there are thousands or millions of Frenchmen walking around with a bit of butcher’s string tied around their waist to ward off the mal au foie, the liver disease that we French keep as an obsession.”

A suspicion occurred. “Henri,” I said. “Forgive me, but do you have a piece of string tied around your waist?”

Smiling and shrugging, exuding an interested excitement that was close to pride, he unbuttoned the bottom two buttons of his shirt and revealed a snowy ficelle just inside his waistband, neatly double-tied. He looked like a rolled roast, a genius ready for the broiler.

“So far,” he said carefully, “it has done its work.”

Talk, November, 1996