A Chain Reaction by Peter Leyland

                                                     A Chain Reaction

How our interests define us. I was thinking about the horrors of war, the reality of which is all around us on the news at present and briefly interrupted by a worldwide lament for the death of Pope Francis. This year is the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War with Victory in Europe (VE Day) and Victory over Japan (VJ Day) approaching, and I have been reading recently Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, who was a Booker Prize Winner in 2014 for his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a book which concerned the horror of the Japanese military’s treatment of prisoners during The Second World War. The author had been inspired to write the novel after listening to his father’s tale of experiences in a Japanese POW camp and fictionalising them. I had read the book, and the horrors described there were very real.

 

Flanagan’s book, Question 7, was the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. It is concerned with the dropping of the first atomic bomb in 1945. I was co-incidentally browsing in a second-hand book shop when I came across Hiroshima by John Hersey, a vivid journalistic account of what happened to the population of the city after the Americans had dropped that bomb. I had read the book in the 1960s but had lost track of my copy.

 

In Question 7 Richard Flanagan puts several things together: If H. G. Wells had not written The World Set Free in 1914, he says, which concerned the destructive power of an atomic chain reaction, pioneered by scientists such as Ernest Rutherford and Leo Szilard (who had read Wells’s novel), then the bombing of Hiroshima and the end of the war would never have happened. (He imagines that his father would have died in the camp.)

 

…there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people, or 160,00 people, or 200,00 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make things happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them. (p.238)

 

I thought on further: In 1967 I was experiencing a fervent anti-war period in my life and reading Hersey’s Hiroshima had registered for me the awfulness of what had happened to the population of the city because of the atomic bomb. At that time sixth formers in Liverpool were being shown The War Game, directed by Peter Watkins and although originally commissioned by the BBC, it was not shown there until 1985 when a similar drama, Threads, was screening. This is a paragraph from an autobiographical study that I am writing at present.

 

We were a group of would-be poets, musicians and artists who had formed because of a meeting of school sixth forms at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in 1967 to watch a showing of the film The War Game. It was a pseudo-documentary film where a nuclear war is triggered by China’s invasion of South Vietnam, and the idea presumably was to sensitize us to the prospect of imminent annihilation. In the film the invasion of South Vietnam is followed by the invasion of West Berlin by Russian and East German forces. Events spiral out of control; there is a thermonuclear explosion in the Southeast of England and the film depicts the horrific consequences. It uses a voiceover narration to show the events that would happen in the event of a nuclear strike – the effect on the civilian population, the terror, panic and results of radiation. It shows people looting and killing each other in the search for food supplies as resources dwindle. The film ends in a refugee compound in Dover on the first Xmas since the war where wounded and bewildered civilians are shown in various stages of recovery.

 

I have now reread John Hersey’s book and, pausing frequently for respite, I encountered again a vivid picture of that event. What struck me most forcibly was the silence of a world in which those people were dying because the most powerful flash of light the world had ever seen had made them blind and deaf.

 

The book itself is based on the experiences of six people who were caught up in the blast but survived. In a preface to the book, they are listed as a Roman Catholic priest who was German and five Japanese – a red cross hospital doctor, a doctor with a private practice, an office girl, a Protestant clergyman and a tailor’s widow. The New Yorker after an extraordinary editorial decision published ithe book in full in a special edition in 1946 and the reasoning is stated in their preface. Penguin books were able to publish it in the UK in the November of that year. 

 

Hersey’s narrative takes us through the devastating events that these six people witness as they recover from the initial shock of the explosion. His account, which is put together unemotionally, and which describes the results of the detonation of the weapon, (devised by Oppenheimer and The Manhattan Project which is the subject of a recent film), reads as a story of lives that would never be the same again.

 

It took six months for the Red Cross Hospital, and even longer for Dr Sasaki to get back to normal…For the first four months (he) was the only surgeon in the staff and he almost never left the building; then gradually he began to take an interest in his own life again. He got married in March. He gained back some of the weight he had lost but his appetite remained only fair; before the bombing, he used to eat four rice balls at every meal, but a year after it he could manage only two. He felt tired all the time. ‘But I have to realise,’ he said, ‘that the whole community is tired.’

 

In 1962 a song was written about an imagined apocalyptic event that ‘could drown the whole world’. The song’s structure was based upon "Lord Randall", an English folk song from 1803, where the dying lord calls upon his mother to make his bed quickly. ‘For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.’

The singer was the Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, the song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", released in 1963, which was recently sung by Timothe'e Chalamet, the actor who appeared in the film A Complete Unknown about elements of Bob Dylan's early life. Chalamet sings the first and last verses of ‘Hard Rain’, the fifth and final verse being the most powerful:

 

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what’ll you do now my darling young one?

I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountains so all souls can see it

Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’

But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

 

In 2019 I taught a course for the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) called “Modern Poetry and Beyond” in which I included a session on ballads and balladeers, and which referred to and played ‘Hard Rain’. This was much to the delight of my group of adult students who later formed the core participants of a research study I made in 2022.

 

In April this year Maxine Peake, an actor whose film appearances I have followed, particularly in "Peterloo" where she had read Shelley's The "Masque of Anarchy" in Manchester to support Mike Leigh's film, published an article about journalism. In the article Maxine is discussing her film portrayal in "Words of War" of the Russian journalist and activist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered in 2006, probably by agents of the Russian state under Putin, and she reflects on the fact that it is now becoming extremely dangerous to speak truth. She makes the statement:

 

We rely on journalists to expose injustice, hold power to account, and to shine light into the world’s darkest corners.

 

In 1946 the journalist, John Hersey, had defied the dominant narrative of Hiroshima that the bombings were successful and merciful. With the support of The New Yorker he had published his account of the dropping of the bomb.The purpose of art says Victor Shklovsky in an article referenced by Kelly Roy Polasek in an essay, is ‘to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony…creating the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognising things.’ If we can do this, Polasek continues, ‘we can understand Hiroshima functioning as a work of literature to bring Hersey’s audience not only the facts of the atomic bomb’s effects but also a fully felt sensation of what it was like to experience the blast’.

 

Books and the Arts, as I argue in my work in progress, “A Book about Books”, have the power to transform our lives They can’t make an end to war but can help us to understand its effects, and hopefully encourage us to find solutions.

 

References

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall in The Lyrics 1961-2012 (2016) by Bob Dylan

Question 7 (2023) by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) by Richard Flanagan

Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey

Peterloo (2018) Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Reading books is not just a pleasure...by Peter Leyland in Psyche.co 

26th April 2023

A Book About Books, a work in progress

A Complete Unknown (2024) Directed and co-written by James Mangold

Oppenheimer (2023) Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan

The role that taught me what bravery is, by Maxine Peake in The Guardian, Saturday 26th April 2025

Antiwar Literature and Anti-Censorship at the Dawn of the Atomic Age: John Hersey's Hiroshima in Context (2020) by Kelly Roy Polasek

Words of War (2025) To be released shortly and directed by James Strong

The World Set Free (1914) by H. G. Wells

The War Game (1966) Written and Directed by Peter Watkins

Lord Randall (1803) Anonymous