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WAR IS HELL, AND HELL SUCKSAn Interview with Michael Norman Regarding His and His Wife Elizabeth’s New Book About the Bataan Death March(Page 2 of 2) Your family is very linked to American military history. I’m so glad that my sons didn’t come home one day and say that they wanted to go into the service. It would have driven me apoplectic. Enough is enough. You’re a professor of narrative journalism, right? Kind of a highfalutin title. It is. Can you tell me what it means? Let me just tell you what I try to do. I try to teach writing students how to read like a writer. That’s based on the notion—and maybe I’m echoing Cormac McCarthy here—that all great books are built on the backs of other great books. Also, nobody can really teach you how to write. You must teach yourself. I think that’s true. As a writer, you’re alone with the page. So what I try to do is teach students to read deeply. I teach them to read at the sentence level. It takes a lot of discipline on the one hand, but it also takes a tremendous amount of desire. A lot of students like the idea of being a writer, but nobody likes the work of being a writer. I was lucky. I was trained as a poet, so I had some terrific sentence training. Yeah, I noticed sly little references to lines of Williams’s and Eliot’s in the book. Thank you very much. A couple of my heroes. So is Tears in the Darkness narrative journalism? Yeah, absolutely. What are some other books in that lineage? Again, John Hersey’s Hiroshima. That’s one of the most prominent and admirable works of narrative journalism. Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception is another one. That’s a reported memoir. Any John McPhee, of course, as well. He’s the king. Can you tell me a little bit about the methodology behind Tears in the Darkness? We interviewed some 400 men for the book, roughly 200 Americans. We were originally going to ape John Hersey and pick five or six characters and use their experiences to stand for the whole. Why five or six? We needed that number because we could not find any one man whose experience encompassed all the aspects of the story—the bombing at Clark Field, fighting in the Battle of Bataan, the death march, imprisonment in the Philippines, being on a brutal work detail, being in Bilibid Prison, and then getting on a hell ship and being taken to a slave-labor camp. But then you found the perfect subject. Right. We found Ben Steele, who had experienced all of that. He was also able to talk about his anger and hate for the enemy and how, after the war, he overcame those feelings and began to understand what had happened to him. A number of other men were also able to talk about their bitterness, which, given their experience, anyone could understand. But Ben Steele, perhaps because he was an artist and teacher, was able to add the kind of insight we thought would reach our readers. You went out to Montana to meet him, right? I got to town and called him up and he said, “Let me come out and meet you.” So I’m sitting in front of the motel and he pulls up in this blue pickup with a white camper top, throws the door open, shoves his hand out, leans across the driver’s seat, and says, “Hey, how are you doing?” And he had the biggest grin on his face. As soon as I got in the truck, I got nothing but good humor. And then I started talking to this man and it was clear that he’s really smart and insightful. I thought, Oh my God, this is a writer’s dream. We have just bumbled into a central character here. He’s so important to the book. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks after meeting him that it hit me how perfect his name is, too. Ben Steele? What a name for a survivor of the things this man went through. Yeah, that one kind of got handed to you. It’s pretty impressive how he was able to get over his hatred of the Japanese after the war. He told us a great story. It’s 1959 and he’s working as an associate professor of art. A couple of weeks into the term, who walks into his classroom but a Japanese student. The first thing Ben does is look into those almond eyes and feel hate enter his heart. After class is over, he goes back to his office and says to himself, “I can’t do this. I’m a teacher, this kid’s a student. I have to treat him no differently than anybody else.” Soon enough, the kid finds out that he had been a prisoner of war and Ben finds out that the kid’s parents had been in internment camps in Wyoming. So now he’s afraid that the kid is going to hate him. But the two of them got along very well and by the end of the semester, Ben didn’t have one ounce of hate left in him. Still, I find it hard to fathom the Japanese mind-set during World War II. Was that difficult for you too? I spent a lot of time reading Japanese social psychology and Japanese postwar novels to really understand what had happened in the Japanese training camps. The Japanese soldiers were also suffering. Their casualties on Bataan far exceeded those of the Americans. And you went to Japan to conduct some interviews. It was important to interview some of these men with the same empathy that we felt when interviewing American veterans. The stories of the Japanese soldiers—even the ones that admitted taking part in atrocities like the killing of unarmed prisoners of war—were absolutely heartbreaking. The men that we interviewed were not the guards in the prison camps. They were the Japanese men that fought in Bataan. In that battle, both sides suffered in a god-awful way. I was very affected by the story toward the end of your book about the fate of the Japanese general Masaharu Homma. That’s my favorite chapter. We got really lucky. The late historian John Toland wrote a wonderful series called The Rising Sun, and he interviewed a lot of Japanese officers. I think he also interviewed Homma’s daughter. And he got Homma’s prison-camp diary, but he never used it! Wow. He simply deposited it in the National Archives in Hyde Park, New York. So we were going through every archive in the goddamned world and all of a sudden we see this sheet of paper that says “Hyde Park” and it has written on it, by hand: “Homma’s diary.” We got it and gave it to our translator. She started to work on it, and it had the most heartrending entries in it. He was the perfect representative from the Japanese side for your book. And once we were in Japan, Homma’s son gave us a lot of private stuff that he’s never given anybody. His father was head of the Japanese Propaganda Corps before he became an infantry general, so we got a lot of material. It actually helped to balance my feelings about the Japanese in the Philippines during the war. We really wanted to create a sense of ambivalence in that chapter. We wanted to leave room for the reader to decide. A mistake that many writers make is not leaving room for the reader in the text. It’s the biggest mistake you can make as a writer. Tears in the Darkness is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. See all articles by this contributor
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