Saint-Exupéry himself was restless and uncomfortable in America. He wanted to return to France and fly for his country. He went back late in 1943 and began to fly reconnaissance missions over Africa and southern France. He should not have been flying at all; he was too old, though only forty-four, and too fat. But he insisted and no one stopped him. He set out on a mission over the Mediterranean on the night of July 31, 1944, from which he never returned.
chapter fourteen
Hiroshima and After
Did the old world that was end on that day when the bomb fell from the sky on the unsuspecting citizens of that medium-sized Japanese city, or did it die a few decades later when the Berlin Wall was broached, or a few years after that when the number of electronic messages criss-crossing the globe reached one million billion per second, or … or?
Of course there is no way really to answer the question, but there isn’t any doubt, is there, that the world we inhabit in these first years of the twenty-first century is radically different—almost different in kind—from the one some of us can remember. At least, it feels that way to me. But I’m old enough to remember when there were fewer than three billion human beings on Earth, there was no television, a barrel of petroleum cost $2.40, a pack of cigarettes cost twenty-five cents (and there wasn’t any reason not to smoke), and you could live in Paris (as I did) for $30 a month, drinks included. And there were so many other reasons to think the world was good, although of course difficult, too, with the war over but the Cold War just beginning and children not yet having nightmares about the end of the world.
The end of the world. I wrote in my note about my father’s poetry that he was suddenly aware that we could terminate the human adventure, or story, or tragic-comedy—whichever word seems appropriate. But that was later, after the time of Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz. (Now there was a prophet before his time!)
Anyway, almost all the authors considered in the present chapter were born after the turn of the century. Some didn’t live very long lives; others did; a few were living just a few years ago; and at least one is alive today. They had more than just chronology in common, because all of them were aware of the great change that was occurring. They were, most of them, aware as well of the kind of new world they were perceiving.
JOHN HERSEY
1914–1993
Hiroshima
John Hersey, was born in China in l914 of American missionary parents. He was fluent in Chinese before he learned English, which he did when he was ten and the family returned to the United States. He graduated from Yale in 1936 and took a year at Cambridge; in the summer of 1937 he became the personal secretary to Sinclair Lewis. That autumn he started his long career at TimeLife, ending as a senior editor at Life and a correspondent for major periodicals including the New Yorker. He compiled Men on Bataan (1942) and wrote Into the Valley (l943), based on experiences with a company of marines on Guadalcanal, and A Bell for Adano (1944), which won a Pulitzer Prize and became a radio drama and a Broadway play.
Hiroshima, probably his best known book, was published in 1946. It appeared first in August of that year; the entire text being published in the New Yorker, which devoted the whole issue to it. The issue sold out in a few hours. The entire text was read over the radio in the United States and other countries. When it was published in book form, The Book of the Month Club sent a free copy to every one of its members. In cool, apparently dispassionate prose, the book told the story of how a single plane had dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, at the beginning of August of the previous year. More than 150,000 people were killed immediately by the explosion, which occurred some feet above the ground, thus increasing the devastation, and many thousands more were grievously wounded, some with radiation poisoning that killed them within a few weeks, months, or years. Hersey, one of the first reporters to visit the site of the blast, was able to interview hundreds of the survivors. His dispassionate account could not hide his feelings of horror and sadness as he talked to these maimed and terrified human beings.
The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and another one on Nagasaki a few days later, ended the war with Japan, which sued for peace and was immediately granted it. For the next sixty years Japan was an ally rather than an enemy. America was not only the first to make an atomic weapon but also the first to use one to kill people. Today, we are not alone in possessing nuclear weapons (as we call them now). At least a dozen other countries, some of them small and inimical to our interests, possess weapons that can kill entire national populations, if not the populations of entire continents. And not only all the people but all life excluding perhaps some insects, bacteria, and viruses. This is the stuff of nightmares. John Hersey, was one of the first to waken us. He wrote many other good and interesting books, but in the last analysis none had the same impact as Hiroshima. John Hersey, died in 1993.
WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
1923–1996
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter Miller was born in Florida in 1923 and studied at the University of Tennessee. When war broke out he joined the Army Air Force, flying fifty-three missions over Italy and the Balkans as a tail gunner and radio man. On one mission he was involved in the destruction of the famous Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino, an event that remained in his mind’s eye until he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in January 1996.
He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947 and began to write his great Canticle for Leibowitz soon after. It appeared in three parts over several years beginning in 1955. The first part, “Fiat Homo” (“Let there be man”), describes a half ruined monastery inhabited by illiterate monks at a time some six centuries after a nuclear holocaust has killed most of the people on Earth. Among the treasures of the monastery, however, are some papers with writing on them that the monks can’t read but which they consider to be somehow holy. In the second part, “Fiat Lux” (“Let there be light”), which may take place scores or hundreds of years later, a stranger arrives who is able to read the ancient documents, one of which, he explains, describes in words and diagrams how to generate electricity. He “borrows” the manuscript and shows it to a group of persons who are trying to decipher other ancient manuscripts. Time passes again, perhaps hundreds of years, but finally two and two are put together to describe a weapon of enormous power. Many persons want to explore no further, but the rulers of the land—more or less the western half of what was once the United States—insist that knowledge is never hurtful and forge ahead to make one of the weapons.
The third part of the Canticle, “Fiat Voluntuas Tua” (“Thy Will Be Done”), tells the story of how, owing to a dreadful accident, the peace loving monks and their associates explode a bomb that kills a million persons in the country of the rulers. They apologize and beg for forgiveness, but their protestations are disdained. The book ends when an enormous wave of force envelopes the monastery where all this began, and the old abbot, who is somehow still alive after all these years, is aware before he dies that the end of the world has come.—again.