Reading Between the Lines

PICTURE A STOCK market crash. Stock brokers and financiers jumping out of windows. And a run on the banks. Those waiting lines at Harvard Trust getting longer and longer, stretching out into the Square--a massive crowd grasping for its money--so many jammed together that you can't turn yourself enough to see the face of the person behind you. But you take it, because after you can escape the crush and press of the masses and find open spaces like the Yard or the bank of the Charles, or go to your room and shut out the world.

There are no private rooms or open spaces in the world John Hersey describes in his novel My Petition for More Space. Hersey's microcosm of the world--New Haven. Connecticut--is so crowded that its inhabitants stand in line for everything and everything has its allotted time: a twenty minute wait for six minutes in the john, thirty minutes in line for fifteen at the breakfast table, a matter of hours at the Bureau of Petitions in order to ask for a change in one's life a different job, permission to have a child--and to be almost always refused One child is all a couple is allowed, and even that takes years of petitioning. Vasectomy bat mitzvahs every male. There is one unpaved area in the city: the Green, a glass walled lawn with trees The longest lines in the city form every day to look in at it. Living quarters are huge sleeping halls marked off with paint into individual spaces eight feet by twelve feet is the maximum allowable by law for single persons.

There is no privacy. "And just as one who too often handles hard things gets calluses on his hands, so the many who see all the sweet and sad things in all the lives around them get scales on their eyes--with the dulling of sight comes a deadening of feeling." A deadening feeling called acceptance: "Survival Is Acceptance" is the secret of life in Hersey's crammed and creeping world

BUT THERE HAS to be an exception, else there'd be no one to tell the story of New Haven, no longer new or a haven. His name is Sam Poynter, a writer of departmental reports, but a writer nonetheless, to whose eyes "emotions and surprises are wired." Which is why he needs more space. A writer has to see sometimes at middle or long range, and can't be forever "thrilled and cross-eyed."

So he's standing in a line, waiting to enter his plea for more space at the Bureau of Petitions. The pressure in the line is normal, allowing only mass movement but short of crushing the individuals within it. The individual petitions are the usual: one person is asking for a job change, another fot increased protein allowance, yet another wants her grandson, who is among 400 New Haven children chosen to learn to read, to learn instead some "useful" skill. Sam's petition, since it involves the most basic Acceptance, is a threat to these people's notions of security. There is a wave of anger at his impudence, a chant of "get but of the line." Sam almost acquiesces, but someone in the line has an attack of "waitline sickness" and starts screaming an immediate threat to the crowd, for the sickness is contagious. Some cool head replaces the chant with a lullaby, gradually calming the screamer. And when it is quiet, the silence is too tense for anyone to resume hostilities against Sam.

But his weakness has been revealed. He was ready to give up under the pressure of the chant. He is no committed revolutionary. When Sam finally addresses the opaque petition window, his ominous "petition for more space" becomes a simple request to increase his sleeping area by one foot in width and one foot in length to the maximum allowed by law. He complains, "I expend so much physical and psychic energy pushing against people and limits that I am always too tired to do quickly the things I need and want to do." The window replies. "True for everyone, Petition denied."

Sam's failure is that of the American politicians who spend months debating whether the price of gasoline would be fifty or seventy cents a gallon, and never hist at the revolution in consumption patterns that America needs in order to survive. For Sam's country to survive, people must accept sardinehood. And Sam accepts. He'll come back day after next to enter a petition for more time to write his departmental reports. He's found an outlet for his frustrations--"my petition for more time." Sure.

THE ACTION in John Hersey's contribution to the "day-in-the-life" genre covers one hour of Sam's life in line. The rest of the puzzle comes through in Hersey's mastery of the flashback, and even more so in the mind-paragraphs he uses to separate recalled scenes from conversations with fellow petitioners.

Like a strobe light on someone dancing, the flashbacks present a jerky stop-and-start picture: there is Sam's wife, who hears the mouth-breathing of people sleeping and feels the eyes in the dark of the sleeping hall and can't make love: his daughter, who has adapted to her crowded world like a serene snowflake in a blizzard, whom he cannot understand; his father, being twisted and contorted and shook to death by Parkinson's disease; his mother, who believed that humanity was perfectible and gave herself to a life of committees for improvement, and cried when she came home every day--the face she was obliged to make at human truth.

Hersey's human truth gives continuity to Sam's poses in the paragraphs of unspoken thoughts--brain-twinges that evoke corresponding tingles of recognition in the reader. For instance, the opaque petition window--presumably a one-way mirror--blocks sight.

the sense which, more than all the others, defines space, gives lips and breasts and things reality and literature its power. And guides human judgment--for eyes look into eyes to find the elusive truth that spoken words so often blur. The window's glass renders that kind of truth-seeking impossible here. This is what makes authority so infuriating: It always hides its eyes.

This unaccountability of authority hits home even with myopic Harvard students, because it's easy to see the reams of paper and type, telephone-directories-thick, that form the wall between Harvard authority and students.

HERSEY'S WRITING is ideally fitted to the novel's content. The short, almost choppy sentences express conversation well, and almost embody thoughts deliberated and forgotten in microseconds. At times, his Hemingwayesque turn of phrase verges on journalism, but even this is effective. Hersey is trying to sting minds with his nightmare world, and the more matter-of-fact he can be, the greater the impact. He puts you in the lines, where it's easy to feel the invasion and massacre of privacy, easy to remember the tensions of shared or walk-through bedrooms, easy to imagine Harvard Square....

But for all its nightmarish vividness, for all the pangs of truth. My Petition for More Space will never, as Nixon would say, play in Peoria. The United States is approaching zero population growth (ZPG), that is, when families average two children per couple, just enough to replace the parents when they die. The Bureau of the Census says the average now is under three and decreasing. Even if a cancer cure is found, or life expectancy extended, the United States with ZPG will never have the overpopulation Hersey dramatizes. It isn't New Haven, but New Delhi, that has to worry about a crowded world. In places like Calcutta, the overcrowding Hersey visualizes is a reality, but without the organization, acceptance, and efficiency programmed in Hersey's world.

What is gained by alarming Americans to the potentialities of population is lost by the ineffectiveness of American efforts toward family planning in the world--too many over and undertones of imperialism and paternalism.

But these matters are far beyond the scope of John Hersey's novel. It's simply too easy for Americans reading More Space to shut out the world, to take refuge below the trees in the Yard and in the sun along the Charles, because Americans have more space.