Death Be Not Proud

by John Gunther

  All the things Johnny enjoyed at home and at school, with his friends, with me. All the simple things, the eating, drinking, sleeping, waking up. We cooked, we experimented with variations on pancakes, stews, steaks. We gardened, we fished, we sailed. We danced, sang, played. We repaired things, electric wires, garden tools, chopped wood, made fires. We equipped the Chem Lab Workshop, in the made-over old boathouse, with wonderful gadgets, and tried out experiments, both simple and fantastic.

  All the books we read. All the lovely old children’s books, and boys books, and then the older ones. We read Shaw aloud—how G.B.S. would have enjoyed hearing the delighted laughter of the boys reading parts in Man and Superman in the kitchen while I washed up the supper dishes!—and Plato’s Republic in Richards’ Basic English, and Russell, and St. Exupery. On Sundays, we would have church at home: we’d sit outdoors on the beach and read from The Bible of the World, the Old Testament and the New, the Prophets and Jesus, also Buddha, Confucius, and Mahomet. Also Spinoza, Einstein, Whitehead, Jeans, Schroedinger, and Maugham.

  We talked about everything, sense and nonsense. We talked about the news and history, especially American history, and its many varied strains; about the roots of his own great double heritage, German and Hebrew; about empires past and present, India’s nonviolent fight for freedom, and about reconciliation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. We talked about Freud and the Oedipus complex, and behavior patterns in people and societies, getting down to local brass tacks. And we also played nonsense games, stunts, and card tricks.

  We sailed, and got becalmed, and got tossed out to sea, and had to be rescued. And we planned sailing trips.

  All the things we planned! College, and work, and love and marriage, and a good life in a good society.

  We always discussed things a little ahead. In a way I was experimenting with Johnny as he dreamed of doing with his elements, as artists do with their natural materials. I was trying to create of him a newer kind of human being: an aware person, without fear, and with love: a sound individual, adequate to life anywhere on earth, and living life everywhere and always. We would talk about all this as our experiment together.

  He did his part in making our experiment a success. Missing him now, I am haunted by my own shortcomings, how often I failed him. I think every parent must have a sense of failure, even of sin, merely in remaining alive after the death of a child. One feels that it is not right to live when one’s child has died, that one should somehow have found the way to give one’s life to save his life. Failing there, one’s failures during his too brief life seem all the harder to bear and forgive. How often I wish I had not sent him away to school when he was still so young that he wanted to remain at home in his own room, with his own things and his own parents. How I wish we had maintained the marriage that created the home he loved so much. How I wish we had been able before he died to fulfill his last heart’s desires: the talk with Professor Einstein, the visit to Harvard Yard, the dance with his friend Mary.

  These desires seem so simple. How wonderful they would have been to him. All the wonderful things in life are so simple that one is not aware of their wonder until they are beyond touch. Never have I felt the wonder and beauty and joy of life so keenly as now in my grief that Johnny is not here to enjoy them.

  Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive! You can touch them—what a miracle! You don’t have to hold back sudden tears when you see just a headline about the Yale-Harvard game because you know your boy will never see the Yale-Harvard game, never see the house in Paris he was born in, never bring home his girl, and you will not hand down your jewels to his bride and will have no grandchildren to play with and spoil. Your sons and daughters are alive. Think of that—not dead but alive! Exult and sing.

  All parents who have lost a child will feel what I mean. Others, luckily, cannot. But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.

  I wish we had loved Johnny more when he was alive. Of course we loved Johnny very much. Johnny knew that. Every-body knew it. Loving Johnny more. What does it mean? What can it mean, now?

  Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer. T o me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one’s fellow human beings, of the earth.

  It means obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with the alchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.

  It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth. It means caring more about God.

  I hope we can love Johnny more and more till we too die, and leave behind us, as he did, the love of love, the love of life.

  FRANCES GUNTHER

  Unbeliever’s Prayer

  Almighty God

  forgive me for my agnosticism;

  For I shall try to keep it gentle,

  not cynical, nor a bad influence.

  And O!

  if Thou art truly in the heavens,

  accept my gratitude

  for all Thy gifts

  and I shall try

  to fight the good fight. Amen.

  — JOHN GUNTHER, JR.

  MAY, 1946

  FINIS

  Death Be Not Proud

  1949

  John Gunther’s memoir of his son and the story of his death from a malignant brain tumor received universally favorable reviews when it was published by Harper & Row in February 1949. The anonymous reviewer for Time magazine set the tone by praising Gunther for his emotional restraint, simplicity of style, and personal generosity:

  “Such a book could easily have become an understandable but embarrassing statement of grief, or a father’s equally embarrassing eulogy. This one is neither. . . . Without fuss, in simple, almost conversational style, he expresses the love and comrade-ship he felt for his son, gives a step-by-step account of cancer’s inexorable victory. In so doing, Gunther arouses in the reader an almost deliberate passion to help find the dark enemy and destroy it.”

  Walter Duranty, in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, singled out Gunther as a “first-class reporter” who used his sharp eye and critical intelligence in reconstructing the “blow-by-blow story of the attack and victory of [cancer] in its most malignant form.” Duranty cautioned that readers who “shiver and avert their eyes from the word and thought of cancer” might find the book hard to take, but he felt that ultimately Johnny’s fight for his life was uplifting, even inspiring—a tale whose keynote was “not horror and suffering but bravery, strength, and cheerfulness.” Death Be Not Proud, Duranty concludes, is “a triumphant picture of human heroism in which the hero is truly heroic. T o read it is to grasp the meaning of man’s power to defy Death’s hurt, to be filled with confidence and emptied of despair.”

  Several reviewers noted the universality of Gunther’s book, particularly its deep and abiding meaning for all parents who have watched their children suffer. As Pamela Taylor wrote in her sensitive review in the Saturday Review of Literature: “Most parents have had some of the experiences which are recounted in this book: the anxious, wingless hours in the hospital waiting room while operations are in progress, the unendurable courage of suffering children, so much harder to bear than misbehavior. To all of them, in fact to anyone, this record, set down with the vivid pen of an acute and trained observer, is hard to read; and it is much, much harder to forget.”

  R. L. Duffus, reviewing the book in the New York Times, also dwelled on how painful the book was to read, “for Mr. Gunther spares neither himself nor his reader.” But Duffus felt that ultimately the pain was worth enduring because of the importance of Gunther’s message: “I f we can stand literal descriptions of battles, we ought to be able to stand this. . . . If courage is an anti
dote to pain and grief, the disease and the cure are both in this book. Those who can endure this strong medicine will be the stronger if they read this book.”

  Over the years, Death Be Not Proud has proven to be especially important to young people, as well as to all families who have faced the tragedy of terminal disease. Since its first publication, it has never been out of print.

  About the Author

  John Gunther was one of the best known and most admired journalists of his day. His trademark as a writer was to amass a dazzling array of information about people and places and present his knowledge of the world in a highly readable, entertaining form. His Inside series of books, starting with Inside Europe in 1936, were immensely popular profiles of major regions and countries. One critic noted that it was Gunther’s special gift to “unite the best qualities of the newspaperman and the historian.” It was a gift that readers responded to enthusiastically: the Inside books sold 3.5 mil-lion copies over a period of thirty years.

  John Gunther was born on August 30, 1901, on the north side of Chicago, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a father who, as he later put it, “dabbled in real estate and excelled at drinking.” Convinced as a teenager that a literary career awaited him, Gunther rushed off to Europe in 1922 as soon as he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. His idea was to join the “Lost Generation” of American expatriate writers, but he returned to the United States within a couple of months, where he landed a fifteen-dollar-a-week job as a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News. He hoped that the paper would assign him to Europe as part of its foreign staff, but when the editors refused to send so inexperienced a reporter, Gunther promptly quit and left again for Europe on his own, determined this time to make his way as a foreign correspondent. It was a daring move, but it proved to be the making of his career. In the end the Daily News dad hire him as a “swing man,” taking charge of different bureaus while the senior correspondents were away. Gunther was with the Daily News for twelve years, and at various times was in charge of the bureaus in London, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, and Paris. He also worked for the National Broadcasting Company, the North American Newspaper Alliance, Look magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune.

  The late 1920s and 1930s were, in Gunther’s words, “the bubbling, blazing days of American foreign correspondents in Europe,” and Gunther worked alongside the greatest names in the field—Dorothy Thompson, William Shirer, Vincent Sheean. “We were scavengers, buzzards,” Gunther later recalled, “out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.” With Europe convulsed by the economic depression and political turmoil that preceded World War II, Gunther interviewed kings and premiers, anarchists and revolutionaries. His negative profile of Hitler secured him a place on the Gestapo’s death list. Lloyd George, Jawaharlal Nehru, Emperor Hirohito, Charles de Gaulle, Eamon de Valera, Leon Trotsky, and Douglas MacArthur were among the many other subjects Gunther profiled.

  During this period, Gunther also published four novels: The Red Pavilion (Harper & Brothers, 1926), Eden for One (Harper & Brothers, 1927), The Golden Fleece (Harper & Brothers, 1929), and The Bright Nemesis (Bobbs-Merrill, 1932) but none of them met with the literary success he had hoped for. Then, in the mid-1930s, Cass Canfield, an editor at Harper & Brothers, approached Gunther with the idea of writing a book of informal, freewheeling political pieces on the European scene. Hoping to scuttle the project, Gunther demanded what he considered the outrageous sum of $5,000, which Canfield agreed to. This was the origin o f Inside Europe, an instant bestseller which went through five updates and eventually sold over a million copies.

  Gunther followed up the first volume with Inside Latin America (1941), Inside U.SA. (1947), Inside Africa (1955), Inside Russia Today (1958), and Inside South America (1967). Each book was the product of painstaking research and exhausting travel. The New York Times reported that for Inside U.SA., Gunther spent thirteen months on the road, visiting three hundred towns and cities. As Times reporter Albrin Krebs wrote in Gunther’s obituary, “He traveled more miles, crossed more borders, interviewed more statesmen, wrote more books and sold more copies than any other single journalist of his time.”

  Hoping to capitalize on his fame as a journalist, Gunther published a fifth novel in 1945, The Troubled Midnight, but like his earlier novels, this book failed to achieve the success accorded his nonfiction books. His subsequent novels included The Lost City (1964) and The Indian Sign (1970).

  Gunther was by all accounts a warm, exuberant, outgoing man with a knack for friendship and a taste for luxury. He loved expensive clothes and fine food, and once joked that he was perennially broke despite his immense success because “I’ve eaten every book by the time it’s published.” Guests at his frequent cocktail parties included Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Marlene Dietrich.

  Gunther, the public figure, was a bon vivant and a modest celebrity, but in private life he suffered disappointment and tragedy. He and Frances Fineman, whom he married in 1927, had a daughter who died four months after her birth in 1929. The Gunthers divorced in 1944. In 1947 their beloved son Johnny died after a long, heartbreaking fight with brain cancer. Gunther wrote his classic memoir Death Be Not Proud (published in 1949 by Harper & Row) to commemorate the courage and spirit of this extraordinary boy. All of the proceeds from this book were and have since been devoted to cancer research for children. Gunther married again in 1948, and he and his second wife, Jane Perry Vandercook, adopted a son.

  John Gunther died on May 29, 1970. He once told a reporter that he wrote basically for himself, “to satisfy my own sometimes peculiar curiosities. In a way, my work has been an exercise in self-education, at the expense of the public.” It was an expenditure the public gladly made, both for the Inside books and for Death Be Not Proud, which has proven to be Gunther’s most enduring literary achievement.

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  Credits

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover photograph © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  Copyright

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1949 by Harper & Row, Publishers.

  DEATH BE NOT PROUD. Copyright © 1949 by John Gunther. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  First PERENNIAL LIBRARY edition published 1965. Reset 1989.

  First Perennial Classics edition published 1998.

  First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2007.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gunther, John, 1901-1970.

  Death be not proud / John J. Gunther.—1st Perennial Classics ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-123097-4

  ISBN-10: 0-06-123097-9

  EPUB Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780062284495

  1. Gunther, John, 1929-1947—Health. 2. Brain—Tumors—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Tumors in adolescence—Patients—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  RC280.B7G86 1999

  362.1 ’9699481 ’092—dc21

  [b]

  98-8377

  11 RRD 10 9 8 7

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