Life Sketches 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, FEBRUARY 1991

  Copyright © 1989 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York in 1989.

  Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments to reprint previously published material may be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hersey, John, 1914-

  Life sketches / John Hersey.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1989.

  ISBN 0-679-73196-2

  1. Biography—20th century. 2. United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  [CT120.H435 1991]

  920.073—dc20

  [B] 90-50193

  CIP

  Ebook ISBN 9780593081037

  v5.4

  a

  To William Shawn

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  NOTE

  George Van Santvoord

  Sinclair Lewis

  Henry R. Luce

  James Agee

  John F. Kennedy

  Private John Daniel Ramey

  Father Walter P. Morse

  Robert Capa

  Benjamin Weintraub

  Bernard Baruch

  Alfred A. Knopf

  Janet Train

  Harry S. Truman

  Jessica Kelley

  Varsell Pleas

  Erskine Caldwell

  Children of Holocaust Survivors

  Lillian Hellman

  APPENDIX

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Note

  Harold Ross accosted me in a corridor of the nineteenth floor of The New Yorker’s offices, one afternoon in 1946, during a week when he and William Shawn were editing what I had written about six survivors of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima. On the final page proof at the end of the process, when the magazine was just about to go to press, one of us, I can’t remember who, had discovered a misprint of the mischievous sort that tucks itself plausibly into its context and so hides away from the most alert proofreader. “Misprints!” Ross exclaimed in his wild, half-shouting way. “Let me tell you a story about a misprint.”

  Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, was an odd-looking specimen. It seemed peculiar that the editor of a sophisticated city-slicker magazine—a man who, late at night, was always given the most élite table in the back room at the Stork Club, then the smartest night spot in town—should look like such a hayseed, an absolute rube. He had a wide countryman’s mouth, his complexion was as coarse as the face of the moon, and he wore the hair on his biggish head cropped to about two inches in length, so it stood up in all directions. He gawked at pretty girls and shouted commonplaces to his friends. Never mind. He edited with a very keen pencil and an even keener mind. The magazine always put a piece it had bought quickly into galleys, I suppose so that its editors could measure it against New Yorker standards as soon as possible, and Harold Ross’s way of editing was to write questions in the margins. I once counted more than fifty questions alongside an early galley of a piece of mine. Sometimes they were interrogatory howls of outrage. On the first galley of the tale about John Kennedy in this book, I had put it that toward the end of his ordeal Kennedy, encountering some natives, had given them a coconut, on which he “wrote a message.” “With what, for God’s sake?” Ross’s note asked. “Blood?” He demanded clarity and exactitude. In the Hiroshima piece, I had written of “lopsided bicycles” near the epicenter of the explosion. Ross asked, impelling a change, “Can something that is two-dimensional be ‘lopsided’?”

  He said, that afternoon in the corridor, that he had hated misprints ever since an early issue of The New Yorker, but he had learned, in that green issue, to be humble in his contest with them. It seems that the magazine had bought for that issue an article by S. J. Perelman about the habits and manners of New York theater audiences. Those audiences, Perelman had written, “would laugh at the drop of a ha on the stage.” Ross could see bad trouble ahead. On the very first galley he wrote in big letters: “THIS IS PERELMAN’S JOKE. DO NOT CHANGE TO ‘HAT.’ ” Through galley after revised galley Ross nursed this line unchanged. He grew obsessed by that “ha.” It became so important to him that when the magazine was finally to be run off, he actually climbed into the press, looked up at one of the rollers for the right page—he told me he had learned in his newspaper days to read cold type in its upside-down and backward state—and saw, to his relief, “ha.” Not quite satisfied, he assembled the printers and told them that they must not, under any circumstances, change that word. He went happily home and slept soundly all night.

  In the morning, he went to the office, opened the magazine to the Perelman piece, and saw “hat.” Then he realized that he had lectured the printers at eleven-forty-five. At midnight, a new shift had come on. A zealous artisan had seen the obvious error, stopped the presses, and made the change.

  I retell this story of Ross’s because I have cherished it all my life as a lesson. His story was a fable, the moral of which is: a writer, even more than an editor, should care so passionately about every word he uses that he will be willing to risk his life by climbing into a press at the last moment to make sure the words on the roller are the ones he has chosen—but, alas, he must also know that there is no way in the world for him to produce a work that is perfect in every word. He will, at some point, as Ross did, forget what time it is in all the hours of making. This lesson stands in my mind alongside the terrifying first sentence of Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.” (The emphasis, God help me, is mine.) In the face of such an admonition, I feel, often, as if I am making my life sketches not with a fine pen or a sharp pencil but with a thickish piece of charcoal. The best I can hope for is that the smudged and blurred lines will lie on the page in such ways as to hint at, even
if they cannot really represent, the amazingly clear pictures that I believe I have seen in my mind.

  The dates of publication of the life sketches in this book are given at the foot of each title page. The pieces are not presented, however, in the chronology of their coming out in print. They appear, instead, roughly in the order in which I happened to encounter the people who are pictured. In several cases, the subjects were alive when I wrote the pieces but are not now. I have thought it best, nevertheless, to leave the texts, including the tenses of the verbs, just as they were when I wrote them.

  George Van Santvoord

  What looms first in memory is the forehead. Up and up and up it went, incised crosswise with swooping wrinkles which seemed to be the tracks of endless thought. What a castle that long head was! In its keep there must have been brains enough for three normal men. When I first read “Kubla Khan” I could not help picturing Coleridge’s “stately pleasure-dome” as George Van Santvoord’s forehead.

  Second in memory: our headmaster’s eyes. They were as deep as the Atlantic rift. The range of temperature in those eyes was universal—from the heat of the sun to the unimaginable cold of the gaps in the galaxies. Their look could penetrate every fiction and falsehood; they could make a transparency out of a first-year student. But behind every powerful look in them, no matter how accusatory, there lurked a glint of mischief, an ember of something still boyish in the marvelous intellect, and with that glint every student, even in terror, could ally himself.

  And a third memory: his right hand. It was broad, spatulate, and extraordinarily dry—as dry as papyrus. His handshake was limp, flaccid; our student awe of him was sharply heightened when we learned that the weakness in the hand had been caused by a grievous injury in the First World War, in which he had won the Croix de Guerre. And yet what voltage there was in those flattish long fingers! When one was idling, a bit too loudly perhaps, in the Main Corridor, and suddenly from the rear one felt the big limp shape of that hand slip into the crook of one’s arm, it was as if one were being electrocuted.

  The first time that happened to me was no more than a week after I had arrived at the school. The hand slithered under my elbow, and I looked up and saw the great forehead, the grim features, and Jupiter’s eyes. A voice that seemed to come from a stone statue asked me a question: “What was Stradivarius’s first name?” There I stood, brainless, in the dim light of the varnished wainscoting, faint with the smell of floor wax, dizzy with homesickness, and all I could force from my lips was “Uh, sir, I don’t know.” It was not much comfort to discover very soon that this was the standard student answer to the Duke’s questions.

  Within a few days, I was shocked again by the flexible hand, and this time the question was “Is it true that eeny, meeny, miney, mo is counting in Chinese?”

  This time I knew the answer. “No, sir.”

  “Then how do you count in Chinese?”

  I heard my cracking voice, just recently changed, intoning, “Yi, erh, san, sz, wu, lyou, chi, ba, jyou, shr.”

  “I think you are wrong,” Mr. Van Santvoord gravely said. “I believe the correct way to count in Chinese”—this time he mimicked the singsong tones I had used—“is eeny, meeny, miney, mo.”

  My heart leaped then with fear and joy—and it still does today, remembering—because I knew that I was right and the man with the three-story forehead was wrong.

  Only later did I realize that this austere personage, who had to cope with the tidal energies of three hundred and fifty mostly miscreant students, and with endless problems of bricks and mortar, and with ever-furious parents, and with towering eccentrics on the faculty like Doc Rob and Pop Jeff and Uncle Joe Estill and Howdy Edgar and John McChesney, had nevertheless been able, within the very first days of my arrival in his amazing ambit, to breathe an identity into the shapeless clod of a homesick fifteen-year-old that I was, for not only had he known my name, he had known that I had been born in China, he had known that I played the violin. And I became convinced then, and I hold the conviction today, that he knew much, much more, right down to the innermost secrets of my groping adolescent mind.

  And much later still I realized that by putting me in the right and putting himself in the wrong, in the matter of Chinese numbers, he had given me my first small sand grain of self-confidence.

  In this way, and in many other ways, he taught. For he was, above all, a teacher. In the First World War, as an enlisted sergeant, a former Rhodes Scholar, he was designated to lecture the officers of his battalion on military campaigns. At Hotchkiss he could step into any class in place of an indisposed teacher, whether of Greek or trigonometry or modern history or physics, and could teach there at least as well as the incumbent expert. After his retirement, he even made a kind of school of the Vermont Legislature, where, according to the Bennington Banner, “his colleagues listened when he spoke.”

  Any boy who was fortunate enough to attend the Sunday-evening open house at Mr. Van Santvoord’s would be treated to one of his astonishing monologues. The first week, it would be on beekeeping; the next on Zoroastrianism; the next on the methods of construction used in building the Pyramids. We were not old enough to know how truly dazzling those performances were, products of total recall and of a gift for shaping an essay, and yet even our crude perceptions could be jogged into a kind of grudging juvenile uneasiness, the first stage perhaps of wanting to learn, by the spectacle of that beautiful mind at play in the fields of knowledge.

  He was born, it may have been, two centuries too late. His mind was as large and wide-ranging and noble as those of the men who wrote The Federalist Papers, who designed octagonal Monticello, who tempted the charges of a thunderhead with a wired kite. “As a member of the Yale Corporation,” Dick Gurney wrote in the Lakeville Journal, “he sat between Senator Robert Taft and Secretary of State Dean Acheson without awe or embarrassment, for the excellent reason that he probably knew more about most things than they did.”

  Yes, he was a man of the Enlightenment. He was a poet. He painted watercolors of wildflowers. He was an aviarist and an apiarist; a topographer and a cartographer. He was an angler who in his seventies scorned the use of rubber boots or waders in frigid Northern streams. He was a moderator of town meetings, a legislator. He was a dairy farmer, whose fine bulls gave their seed for breeding throughout the Northeast. He was a Puritan, an equestrian, a philosopher who sweetened his thought with pipe smoke.

  Like a true eighteenth-century man, he was completely in tune with nature, as many a student can testify who learned woodcraft from him. He revered all creatures of the meadow and woodlot—horses, woodchucks, badgers, bears. He was a botanist. His heart was torn between the beautiful rare ducklings he raised on the hockey pond in the warm seasons and the equally beautiful owls that snatched them away for prey. He was a trainer of homing pigeons who, scorning Western Union, released the birds in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, to wing home to Hotchkiss carrying in their message capsules the scores of just completed football and baseball games against the archrival, The Hill.

  Some years after I had graduated, Mr. Van Santvoord invited me to give the Hotchkiss Commencement address. The day before graduation, he was sitting on the veranda of the Headmaster’s House with half a dozen pairs of parents—not his most beloved category of humankind. He said, “Well, John, you have an audience here. Why don’t you rehearse your speech for tomorrow?” I thanked him and said I thought one performance would be more than enough. “All right, then,” he said, “I have a commencement speech for them.” He went into the house and fetched a volume of short stories by the colloquial satirist George Ade, and he read out loud the whole of “The Fable of the Last Day at School and the Tough Trustee’s Farewell to the Young Voyagers,” a story of a small-town businessman’s exceedingly practical advice to a graduating class. Mr. Van Santvoord read in the tone of a kind father reading his little children to sleep. I will never forget his mock solemnity as he read the
last sentences of the story: “ ‘I will now ask you’—the Trustee said—’to come up and get your Sheepskins. Take this precious Certificate home and put it in a Dark, Cool Place. A few Years hence when you are less Experienced, it will give you a Melancholy Pleasure to look at it and Hark back to the Time When you knew it all. Just one word in Parting. Always count your Change, and if you can’t be Good, be Careful.’ ” He looked up. There was a stunned silence. He broke it, that little fire of mischief burning bright in the deeps of his somber eyes, by saying, “Since you enjoyed that story so much, I’ll read another.” And he read “The Horse Maniac and What Caused the Filing of the Suit.” Then he read “The Two Wives Who Talked About Their Husbands.” And THEN he read “The Old-Time Pedagogue Who Came Down from the Shelf.” And after that the parents fell over each other heading for the nearest exit. Mr. Van Santvoord looked very surprised at their sudden departure.

  GEORGE VAN SANTVOORD

  “Is it true that eeny, meeny, miney, mo is counting in Chinese?”

  Was his notorious treatment of parents mere rudeness for its own sake? I am certain it was not. I think it was a combination of a deep, deep shyness he had, along with a shrewd sense of alliance with the secret souls of the boys in his school, who were condemned by nature in their formative years to a helpless war with the very idea of parenthood. They could see that on this painful battlefield, as elsewhere, the Duke was on their side.

  And so again and again we come back and back to that quality of mischief in him. It could be heard in his Socratic questions. His massive severity had a bubbling laughter close beneath the surface. He was a whole man, and he wanted his charges to open their eyes to the many shades of light in life. Character in a boy was more important to him than high marks. His smoking pledge had sharp teeth—students were kicked out not for their smoking but for breaking their word. But grim rectitude was not his aim for us; to be whole and healthy, a person had to see the force in human affairs of irony, of absurdity, of folly, and of fun. And so he always teased as he used his luminous mind to teach—his mind that was like a display of aurora borealis on a north-wind night. He wanted a man not just to be learned, but rather to be wise, decent, humane, generous, forgiving, and light of heart in heavy days. As to all these traits, he gave us the great gift of his example.