Writing that burns the eyes

Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If any occur, there’s a reliable chance John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ will figure among them, and not just because it will have been assigned at an impressionable age in school. For the first time in its history, the New Yorker cleared an entire issue in August 1946 to run the 30,000-word piece in full. In Mr Straight Arrow, his chronicle of Hersey’s career, the former Times Literary Supplement editor Jeremy Treglown relates an account of its reception among the international press corps in Rome — every one rapt, occupying their own cone of ‘silence… even in the bar’.

There’s the stark monomial title and intrinsic what-has-man-wrought grip of the subject but, pushing 75 years after the event it describes, ‘Hiroshima’ owes its hold on generations of readers to mastery of tone. Hersey is unflinching, insouciant even, in describing the ravages of the bomb (survivors’ skin ‘sloughing off’); the trauma it inflicts (a mother clinging to the putrid corpse of her infant); and the barbarities it necessitates (the grim triage of a doctor attending to those who could be helped while spurning the mortally injured).