My Petition For More Space Read online

  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 © 1974 by John Hersey

  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 1974.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080894

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Chapter 1 of this book first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

  v5.4

  a

  I had not been two years

  at the licks before a damned

  Yankee came, and settled down

  within an hundred miles of me!!

  DANIEL BOONE, C. 1801

  quoted in Niles’ Weekly

  Register, May 17, 1823

  The sight of smoke ten miles

  off is provocation to one more

  remove from man, one step

  deeper into nature. Is it

  that he feels that whatever

  man may be, man is not the

  universe? that glory, beauty,

  kindness, are not all engrossed

  by him? that as the presence

  of man frights birds away,

  so, many bird-like thoughts?

  HERMAN MELVILLE

  The Confidence-Man 1857

  We are crowded in, packed in,

  now, and human beings must

  feel that there is a way

  out, and that the intellectual

  power and skill of their own

  species opens this way.

  SAUL BELLOW

  Mr. Sammler’s Planet 1970

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  1

  THIS MORNING I have some hope of reaching the petition windows.

  The tight-packed column of citizens four abreast stretches back along Church Street to the corner of Elm and around toward Orange and out of sight but not imagination. I have been on this line since deep dark, since before five.

  I have now come within a couple of hundred yards of the bureau building. There is less than an hour till I must start for work. This is the sixth day in a row I have tried to make it to the windows.

  I felt a flash of line-fear just then, but I am all right now.

  As usual at this hour, downtown streets are glutted with busses and cargo conveyors and people shuffling on foot to their jobs. Every square inch of concrete and asphalt is taken up. Wheeled traffic worms along at the stipulated pace. On this sidewalk, at the outer edge of our waitline to the right, one infinity of pedestrians, facing us, inches toward Elm, and another, beyond, toward Chapel. It takes a walker fifteen or twenty minutes to move a single block. This is the familiar suffocating physical crush of the morning hours: breast touches shoulder blade, hip rubs hip, one’s shoes are scuffed by others’ shoes.

  In the street, the busses and cargo vans creep along so close together they almost touch each other. The vans, uniform in design, squarish and chunky, white and immaculate, with no writing on them save for tiny numbers on the operators’ doors, look like huge mobile ovens. Across the street, over the tops of these vehicles, I can see the upper part of the wall enclosing the Green. It is a long time since I have stood at the windows in that wall, looking in: at the empty grass, crosscut and gleaming; the score of majestic maples, standing apart, whose leaves turn to each other on stirring air, I think, and whisper, ‘Forest! Forest! Forest, brother leaf!’; the vaulting wire cages with great murmurations of sparrows in them; the three nineteenth-century churches, two built of red brick and white wood, one of brownish stone, their spires pointing the way to uninhabited regions above. The public is not admitted inside the wall. The Green—green space, a museum of openness. The lines of citizens waiting on pavements to get to the windows in that wall, just to gaze at the emptiness within, are the longest in the whole city. One can only hope to look through the windows into the Green on a rest day. I have not attempted it for nearly a year.

  Stacked in this waitline, I find myself urged forward by the hopes of those behind me, so that my body is pressed full length against that of a young woman who wears her hair piled upward and at whose nape there are delicate stray blond curls of an infantile fineness…. It is strictly forbidden for any person, while in accidental or formal proximity with any other person, in waitlines, assemblies, or close passage, to show, offer, signal, or otherwise manifest…What strange murky phrases in our statutes!—’prurient solicitation,’ lascivious carriage’…It is always the man who is caught, for the obvious reason.

  I have come to know this girl. I whisper to her. She turns her head as far as she can and murmurs over her shoulder to me. It is not that we have secrets—we were strangers three hours ago. It is a matter of the psychic abyss between a dialogue of two and communal discussion. We two are in the second row from the right; therefore we have others’ ears—and busy mouths—not only in front and behind, but on either side, too. We have tacitly agreed to try to be alone together in this crowd.

  To my right is a janitor. To my left, a grandmother, a retired circuitry printer. I have come to know them.

  I do not wish to know the man behind me.

  There is the siren for eight fifteen. Forty-five minutes left. I must start for my office at nine, or at nine fifteen at the latest, if I am to get there through these teeming streets by eleven, when my shift of writers is due at their desklets.

  * * *

  —

  THE GIRL‘S dress is blue. She turns her head to the right to murmur something to me. I look at her quarter face slightly from above—cheekbone, little scoop nose, perhaps a large mouth.

  She has in these three hours already filled me with a fe
eling of urgency, of a sort which has long been dormant in me. We must get to the windows! I must get to my job!

  I whisper, ‘Have you seen Zamport’s film?’ I have some vague idea of asking her to see it with me if she hasn’t—even though I already have.

  She answers over her right shoulder, ‘Just last night.’

  ‘Like it?’

  She shrugs. I feel the shrug on my chest. ‘I didn’t like the scene where they stood in the crowd by the—what do you call it? a hydraulic lift? you know? and she told him about the other guy she’d been seeing? Once she had done that…’

  From the bits she has let drop about the man she calls Star, or Starr, and from the heat with which she blames herself for the way her relationship with him has turned out, I can understand why this scene upset her. I say, ‘That’s how those things happen.’

  ‘Mmm-m-m.’ Doubtful.

  ‘I mean, we say irrevocable things on the spur of the moment—without thinking.’

  She does not answer. She is receptive. I feel it. She seems to be waiting for me to blurt out some big item. I want to. I am tongue-tied.

  The main sound is the shuffling of feet. Traffic has an electric hum, people are talking, there are cracks of laughter. In the distance I think I hear the sparrows. The man behind me is a complainer. How tightly squeezed we are! My father told me that early one morning when he was a child he stood on a Cape Cod dune and looked both ways along the sand to the far points where mist dissolved beach and sea into thin air, and there was not a single soul in sight either way!…Still, people in this jammed line are willing to risk a lot: to make new acquaintances.

  * * *

  —

  THE REASON I refer to the retired circuitry printer on my left as a grandmother is that she has told me about Robert, her grandson, who is fourteen, who has had a vasectomy and so can be considered a man, and who is one of four hundred pupils in New Haven who have been chosen this year to learn to read. She is proud of him!—even though she regards the skill he has been chosen for as low-grade. She is gray under the eyes, her white hair is unruly, but there is strength in her face, which has in it a trace—dragged long ago through some southeastern European way station—of Mongol or Tartar; a wideness, almond eyes, high cheeks, irrepressible vigor. She could in another century have been a horsewoman, but she has worked at a stamping machine. I like her.

  I like less the janitor to my right, because he cranes his neck to hear the whispers I exchange with the girl. He is wearing a clean green coverall zipped up the front, with a gold eagle holding red thunderbolts in its talons embroidered on the left shoulder. He has told us he spends his nights on his hands and knees, scrubbing stairs. He sleeps by day, yawns now. He says to the girl and me, taking away our shared tension about ‘irrevocable things’ said without thought, ‘Zamport’s an egomaniac.’

  So I suppose he is. Nowadays it takes great vanity, great force of character, a gift for climbing on others’ backs, tirelessness, and doubtless a pinch of talent for a man to become famous. To stay famous is almost impossible: there are too many with that climbing gift, as there are too many of every sort. But who wants any more to be famous? I would like to change places with the Mayor of New Haven, who is not particularly famous, whose name I can hardly think of—it is an Italian name again. I want to be he, for he has the priceless right to enter the Green, to mow its grass, to stand alone on the vast lawn.

  * * *

  —

  THE GIRL turns her head and asks, ‘Where do you live?’

  In the Marinson building. You know, out Whitney.’

  ‘Luck.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s modern. But’—I put my mouth almost to her ear and whisper; she can surely feel my breath on her neck—’we’re on edge. My petition is for more space.’

  ‘What? You’re going to harm yourself.’

  I am foolish. I know. But I have to try. There is a rumor that they are going to cut down everyone’s space. Maximum dimensions now for a single person are eight feet by twelve. What you actually get depends on the building; space is allotted in inverse ratio to the quality of the premises. I myself have seven by eleven—it is said to be fairly desirable housing, the Marinson. A person’s space is defined by lines painted on the sleeping-hall floor. One must keep all his belongings within his space; trespassing, except during communal hours, even ‘trespassing’ by accidental knocking over of possessions, is severely punished. We had a violent fight the other night because a sleeping man, stirring in a dream, stretched his foot across the line into a couple’s space while they were—at least they said they were—having sexual union. We are told over and over: Survival Is Acceptance. With my petition I may, as the girl says, do myself harm.

  If I succeed in reaching the petition windows.

  The man behind me barks, ‘Move it!’

  The bureau building, now tantalizingly close, is a relic kept standing by the Historical Site Preservation Society. A nineteenth-century romanticization of a twelfth-century concept of power, it is stone-built and sparsely adorned, with squinting arches and Romanesque striations, dark-brown and light-brown in color, its walls spalled and pocked and grimed—a fort for men whose trade it is to say: No.

  Someone behind us has eaten garlic. Other scents on the morning air: the delicious perfume of fresh-clipped grass from over the wall across the street, and acrid whiffs of synthetic resins from the factories down beyond Wooster Square.

  Early-morning mists have given way now, and above the dark roofs of the bureau building white-edged clouds drift in from the Sound, and the brilliant blue interstices pour their reinforcing pigment down on the already blue dress at my chest and wash up by reflection a faint watercolor on the light skin above the collar, a pale, pale sky on the white neck.

  The stair mopper suddenly blurts out, ‘What was that you were saying?’

  He has a dangerous beak of a nose, a double chin, brown hair cut soldier-short, and brown eyes that are much too close together.

  The girl quickly says to him, protecting me, ‘We were talking about our petitions. What’s yours?’

  He is gloomy, taciturn. ‘Protein allotment.’

  I ask, ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  But some sudden suspicion makes his eyes look even closer together than they are, and he says, ‘Forget it.’

  Does he feel that too many people are waiting for his answer? With this question on my mind, I myself submit to a new jolt of line-fear. I hold close around me the four who press hard against me in the line: the girl, the retired circuitry printer, this petitioner in the matter of proteins, and the crab behind me. (This last person concerns me in a negative sense only, but he counts as one of the four.) I can cope with these four who touch me. They are distinct—define themselves by their quirks. But the janitor’s quick shift of eyes, his tally perhaps of real and potential listeners, together with the fact that the circuitry woman is now telling the person ahead of her about Robert, has made me aware that each of the four who touch me touches either three or four, depending on whether he stands in an inner or an outer row. My own circle thus leaps out to include all those who touch the four who touch me. I must not let myself consider the touchers of those touchers of my touchers, for like flash-fire the sense of contact, of being not a separate entity but a fused line-unit, will carry my selfhood out to the sides of the waitline and crackling along it forward and backward until my perception of myself is wholly lost in crowd-transcendence. In that lost state I will be nothing but an indistinguishable ohm in this vast current of dissatisfaction.

  Not that the people in the line melt into an undifferentiated blur. Not at all. The line is a continuum of sharp particulars. There is a tall black man off to the left and ahead of us wearing a big knitted red cap with an elongated visor and a huge blue pompon on top. A man somewhere behind me has a constant chest-wracking cough. A young fellow three away from me thi
nks himself modish in a crazy velour coat with a zebra pattern and a black collar which goes right out to the limits of his shoulders. There is doubtless a strong personality that goes with the strong garlic breath. To me, the thought of being lost in fusion with vivid individualities is far more terrifying than, let us say, facelessness, ego-failure, anomie, exile.

  ‘God damn it, push!’ the cactus-hearted man behind me says. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  * * *

  —

  I TIGHTEN MY CIRCLE again; I try to exclude all the dancing details of the waitline by narrowing my focus to the stray hairs on the neck in front of me. I whisper, ‘The fellow you spoke of—Starr? What went wrong?’

  She murmurs: ‘He was so mean. He had a bad mean streak.’ Then at once it seems she feels a need to punish herself for this judgment. ‘I don’t know what I did that was stupid. I’m so stupid sometimes.’

  I have seen that she lacks self-confidence. I doubt that she is unsure of herself because she lost a man; in fact she probably lost him because of her generosity (to call unsureness by one of its nicknames).

  I will say something to give her confidence—show her how little I have.

  ‘Have I told you’—we have confided a fair amount to each other in three and a quarter hours, but I have not told her this—’that I’m getting a divorce?’

  I have surprised her. Her reflex is an odd one. She turns her head to the left for the very first time, I think, all morning, and for the first time I have a three-dimensional sense of her face. Faces are never symmetrical, and she has some kind of bulge above her mouth on this side—gives this profile a more cheerful, even a mischievous, look. Now I can almost imagine looking full-face into her eyes, though I am not sure how wide her face would prove to be.

  The grandmother, seeing the girl’s face turned toward her for the first time, says, ‘Hello, dearie.’

  But the girl softly asks a question in answer to my question: ‘Is it bad?’