To Feel What Wretches Feel

WHITE LOTUS by John Hersey. 683 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

It's too bad about John Hersey. He asked for the silver tongue; he was given the golden touch. He longed to write great novels that would endure for centuries; he has written magnificent volumes of journalism that make the Book of the Month Club. Into the Valley and Hiroshima are classics of reportage. All Hersey's best novels (A Bell for Adano, The Wall, A Single Pebble) are lightly fictionalized feature stories lifted from current history. His worst novels (The Marmot Drive, The Child Buyer) are nonjournalistic creations of an uncreative imagination. But even in the bad novels Author Hersey has always tried terribly hard to make literature. In White Lotus, he apparently tried only to make the Book of the Month Club.

Well, he made it--partly because he is John Hersey, partly because the book encapsules an acute contemporary controversy in an ingenious historical allegory. The controversy is the race question, and the allegory supposes that millions of white Americans are forced to experience what millions of black Americans have experienced during the last two centuries. The reader is invited to see how the whites like it and to conclude that turnabout is unfair play.

Happiness into Hatred. In Hersey's scheme, two centuries collapse into a decade, roughly coinciding with the '20s. Imperial China conquers the U.S., and the yellow hordes shanghai whole populations to the Asian mainland. The heroine, a teen-ager in Arizona, is seized by whitebirders and transported to Peking, where she is sold to a high official and assigned to his wife as a body slave.

At the outset, she is a normal, healthy little WASP who hums happily about her village. But in just a few weeks of slavery she develops most of the characteristics commonly adduced to denigrate U.S. Negroes. Treated as an inferior, she acquires a painful inferiority complex. She loathes herself for being white, and to punish herself she consorts with the filthiest white trash she can find. But even more than she loathes herself she hates the yellows, and to punish them she lies, cheats and steals.

Sold to the owner of a small plantation, she takes part in a slave revolt and is sold again to a dirt farmer, where she works in the fields all day and lies in the woods all night with a big white buck from a neighboring farm. One night her man attempts to escape from his cruel master and is torn to pieces by Chinese bloodhounds. In despair, the heroine flees by a sort of Underground Railway known as "The Mole's Way." To her astonishment, she discovers that a civil war is raging in China; at the end of it, all the slaves are freed.

Epigram into Epic. Legal freedom, of course, does not abolish economic bondage. The heroine shacks up with a tenant farmer and watches a greedy landlord grind him down. Demoralized and dispossessed, the couple drifts to the big city and dissolves into a vast white slum remarkably like Harlem. At the climax, both are caught up in street riots and tandup strikes that gradually evolve into an effective drive for racial equality.

Hersey's moral is clearly commendable; his methods are not. The point of the piece can be made in an epigram, but the author covers almost 700 pages with illustrative incident. Most of it is irrelevant. Some of it is so dull it couldn't even be used in the Hollywood epic this novel seems destined to become. And all of it is expounded in prose that sounds like something clumsily translated from an obscure Chinese dialect. A big man has "sycamore stature." One who defecates "voids his inner pouches." A waning moon is called a "cuticle moon." And whenever Hersey needs an idea and can't find one--it happens all the time--he uses a big word instead: cangue, coffle, fulvous, hame, jingal, liripipe, metayer, panyar, purlin, psora, shroff, sycee.* Anyway, the words are more interesting than the characters. As Author Hersey describes them, not even a white reader can tell the white people apart.

-Definitions for logophiles: cangue--a wooden yoke in which criminals are confined; coffle --a slave caravan; fulvous--tawny; hame--part of a harness; jingal--a primitive cannon; liripipe--pendent part of a hood; metayer--sharecropper; panyar--to abduct; purlin--a horizontal roof beam; psora--an itch; shroff-- a coin tester; sycee--silver in ingots.

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