Literature After the Bomb : Poets step in where novelists fear to tread

Television and cinema have slighted Hiroshima, but fiction has virtually ignored it. There are reasons for this, of course, including moral ambivalence. “Evil has no place, it seems, in our national mythology,” asserts Tim O’Brien, author of the novel “The Nuclear Age.” Another factor is the technological nature of the atomic attacks. The bombing of Japan may have been efficient but it was hardly stirring; it involved only a small group of airmen, not vast armies; and it was uncomfortably one-sided. Still, it can be said that Hiroshima is everywhere in postwar and contemporary fiction--in its themes of futurelessness and absurdity, and its predilection for violent or vengeful behavior by heroes and anti-heroes alike. The critic Peter Schwenger has observed that the “usual place” for Hiroshima in Western literature is “the unconscious.”

What happened to Hiroshima may be impossible to even imagine, let alone render. (One recalls Whitman’s comment on the Civil War: “The real war will never get into the books.”) Of the few published novels, most focus on guilt-torn scientists at Los Alamos: Pearl Buck’s “Command the Morning,” for example, or Dexter Masters’ “The Secret” and Bradford Morrow’s recent “Trinity Fields.” They do not portray the decision-makers, the bomber pilots or the Japanese victims.

If there are any serious novels exploring the decision to drop the bomb, or the Enola Gay’s mission to Hiroshima, no bibliographer has yet uncovered them. As early as 1946, Mary McCarthy was calling Hiroshima “a hole in human history.”

Among those who called for writers to address the issue, Alfred Kazin wrote: “I don’t care for novelists who ignore what H.G. Wells himself called the ‘queerness’ that has come into contemporary life since the bomb.” Kazin scored the dimness,” “flatness” and “paltriness” of many reputable novelists, calling them “ways of escape” from the nuclear reality.

The work of fiction most directly related to, and inspired by, Hiroshima is an obscure short story written by James Agee. As an American, Agee felt personally implicated in the killing of thousands of civilians; he wrote the first Time magazine essay on Hiroshima, which brilliantly rendered the splitting of the American conscience no less than the atom. Agee considered Hiroshima “the only thing much worth writing or thinking about.” His story, a bizarre fantasy called “Dedication Day,” published in Dwight McDonald’s Politics magazine in 1946, depicts a postwar celebration of the bomb during which one of the scientists who worked on the bomb, who has gone “a little queer in the head,” insists on joining a group of badly injured Japanese survivors, thereby marring “the intended dignity, charm and decorum” of the event. Any attempt to atone for Hiroshima will be viewed as evidence of madness, Agee warned.

Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” published in 1963 shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, is probably the only widely read novel overtly relating to Hiroshima. It opens with narrator interviewing Americans about what they were doing on Aug. 6, 1945 (he’s writing a book on the subject). This leads him to the children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the inventors of the A-bomb who, as it turns out, later created ice-nine, a substance capable of freeing the entire world. “I want scientists to be more moral,” Vonnegut once told an interviewer. The end of the world, or of distant planets, would figure prominently in many of his novels.

If the great Hiroshima novel remains unwritten, a number of major poets have written brilliantly on nuclear concerns, and they have invoked Hiroshima far more often than the novelists. This is especially significant when one considers that the tradition of political poetry in the country was “very, very thin” until Vietnam, as Galway Kinnell has observed. The subject of nuclear war is “inherently very difficult,” Kinnell explains. “If a poem is to be useful, it has to give hope, but if it is to be realistic, it has to cause despair. Despair is built into the subject.”

American poets have applied themselves to Hiroshima more imaginatively and persistently than novelists or film-makers perhaps because they are not constrained by the historical or documentary narrative common to those other forms of expression. They can attempt to get at the meaning of Hiroshima in a more personal, creative, imagistic, even fractured way--an approach the event practically demands. “Atomic Ghost,” a 1995 anthology, includes more than 100 “nuclear” poems, many relating specifically to Hiroshima, written by well-known poets such as Philip Levine, Mary Jo Salter and Denise Levertov.

Shortly after Hiroshima, Randall Jarrell informed a friend that he felt “so rotten about the country’s response” to the atomic bombings that he wished he could become “a naturalized cat or dog.” That year, in “Losses,” he wrote:

We read our mail and counted up

our missions

In bombers named for girls, we

burned

The cities we had learned about in

school

The following year, in “1945: The Death of the Gods,” he pondered the end of the world “when the rockets rise like stars.”

Robert Frost’s “U.S. 1946 King’s X” might be called a topical poem about Hiroshima and postwar atomic policy:

Having invented a new Holocaust

And been the first with it to win a

war

How they make haste to cry with

fingers crossed

King’s X--no fair to use it any

more!

In “The Dispossessed,” John Berryman considered individual versus collective guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

That which a captain and a weaponeer

one day and one more day did, we

did, ach

we did not, They did. . . .

Years passed, but prominent poets would not let go of Hiroshima. Robert Penn Warren’s epic poem “New Dawn” rendered the flight of the Enola Gay in a dispassionate, documentary-like manner. On the other hand, beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg railed angrily, vulgarly against the bomb in the 1950s but rarely invoked Hiroshima.

In the late 1980s, in “Nagasaki, Uncle Walt, the Eschatology of America’s Century,” a young poet, Campbell McGrath, examined how the atomic bombings had psychologically affected his entire generation:

For those reared in the shadow of

the Fat Man

anything less than global thermonu-

clear destruction

seems laughable, wimpy, unrealisti-

cally naive. . . .

We’ve invested so much in World

War III it seems a shame to miss it.

Also in the 1980s, two prominent poets, Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Forche, made highly significant visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Already anti-nuclear in spirit, they achieved a more direct artistic witness in the two cities. Indeed, the subtle brilliance of the poems that resulted shows the value, even the necessity, of such witness in exploring what happened in Hiroshima. “One of the things I’ve learned,” Kinnell said afterward, “is that if one doesn’t feel despair, one has not really understood what’s happened in the world. From now on, it is certain that a kind of despair has to be a component of hope.” That sense is expressed in his powerful poem “The Fundamental Project of Technology,” which grew out of his visit:

If all a city’s faces were to shrink

back all at once

from their skulls, would a new

sound come into existence . . . ?

“We are the poets of the Nuclear Age,” Carolyn Forche exclaimed in 1984 shortly after returning from Hiroshima, “perhaps the last poets, and some of us fear what the Muse is telling us. Some of us are finding it harder to write. . . . There is no metaphor for the end of the world and it is horrible to search for one.” Nevertheless, she would compose one of the most haunting poems about Hiroshima, “The Garden Shukkei-en.” An American visits a place in Hiroshima with a survivor who “has always been afraid to come here.” The poem ends, however, with the hopeful line, “it is the bell to awaken God that we’ve heard ringing.” Forche is telling us that Hiroshima can provide illumination, can “awaken God” and that its bell tolls for everyone. That is precisely the message Americans have resisted for so long, and still must address, even after 50 years.