Book Review for Readers Only J Penn 1937
The book was probably unpublishable. Almost that fact both the author and his longtime editor agreed. Only the author was determined, and he had on his side a brilliant publishing tape. For more than a decade, starting in 1936 with his Within Europe, the reporter John Gunther had been a fixture on the best-seller lists. From the mid-1930s through the 1950s, no one, relieve the romance novelist Daphne du Maurier, had produced more American best sellers than Gunther.
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Gunther'southward unpublishable book was a memoir: an business relationship of the death, in 1947, of his 17-year-old son, Johnny, from a encephalon tumor. Gunther had started writing while the experience of Johnny'due south disease was nevertheless raw, finishing the book in a few weeks, six months afterwards his son's decease. He'd set out with the idea of a privately circulated memoir, the sort of volume of remembrances printed in a few hundred copies that parents of soldiers killed in action sent to friends and relations. Just equally he finished the manuscript, he began to think it should be published for a wider audience.
Surely the book was likewise personal, Gunther'southward publisher, Harper & Brothers, objected. Who would want to read such a dismal volume nigh a consummate stranger? And wasn't it indecent to broadcast an intimate story of suffering in public? Merely Gunther prevailed. He and his editor came to an agreement: The book would exist published with a notice on the jacket that neither Harper & Brothers nor Gunther himself would take any profits from its auction; all the proceeds from the book would go to fund cancer research for children. And with that disclaimer, a title borrowed from a John Donne verse form, and a dignified vitrify jacket ornamented simply by a minor drawing of a pigeon, Harper & Brothers published Gunther's Death Be Not Proud in February 1949 in a pocket-size print run.
Larger print runs quickly followed. Past the time that I commencement read the book, in 1981, it was a mass-market paperback that had sold hundreds of thousands of copies—a publishing success well beyond annihilation that either Gunther or Harper & Brothers could have imagined. It had been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Hebrew, Castilian, French, Dutch, High german, Swedish, Hindi, and Portuguese, among other languages. For decades, Death Be Non Proud was required reading in many American high schools. In 1960, my mother read it in her tenth-grade civics form in Louisville, Kentucky. It is the merely ane of Gunther'south books that has remained continuously in print.
In our time, when the intimate memoir has go commonplace, Harper & Brothers' queasy reaction to Gunther's projection is a reminder of an era when stringent rules of reticence even so reigned. The public's unexpected embrace of the book is disorienting too. The usual assumption is that the modern, unguarded memoir's origins lie in the narcissism of the 1990s, or the cocky-revelatory zeal of the '70s. Just Gunther'due south surprise hit points to a different genesis: the anti-fascism of the '30s and widespread revulsion at the dehumanizing horrors of World War II. The predominance of the genre today—which we recall about equally a celebration of "I"—had its ancestry in an attempt to heal the collective "nosotros."
By the mid-1930s, the rules about what could—and couldn't—be discussed in public were changing. The First World State of war had toppled hierarchies, fraying parental dominance and upending rules of propriety. The popularization of Freudian ideas helped make talk about familial dynamics and sexual urges at to the lowest degree semirespectable. The newly founded tabloid papers took advantage of the public'southward involvement in private lives, inaugurating "I Confess!" competitions that stoked a market for tales of infidelity, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and other misdeeds. Ship in the all-time confession—anonymously, of course—and the greenbacks prize was yours. In Akron, Ohio, the first Alcoholics Bearding group met in the summer of 1935, propelled past the thought that "sharing," either for confession or for bearing witness, was a first and necessary step on the road to sobriety.
The agents provocateurs of this new civilization of openness were people born, like Gunther and the AA co-founder Bill Wilson, in the couple of decades around the turn of the 20th century. They were members of the and so-called Lost Generation, who, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (a banner member of the lodge), had "grown up to notice all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." Many of them had lived for a spell in Europe, either as soldiers or as expatriates. Collectively, this generation went on to produce a landmark tell-all book about alcoholism and institutionalization (William Seabrook's Aviary) and the frankest account of a union ever published (Vincent Sheean's Dorothy and Cherry), besides equally Gunther'due south pioneering Death Be Not Proud.
Even in rarefied literary circles, though, self-exposure was even so risky. Take Fitzgerald'southward 1936 excursion into self-revelation: the three essays he published in Esquire magazine, after collected nether the championship The Scissure-Up. Past today'southward standards, Fitzgerald's account of his nervous breakdown, eloquent equally it is, hardly registers on the confessional calibration. He likened himself to a cracked plate, claimed (untruthfully) that he'd quit drinking, and expressed his despair about the future of the novel afterwards the advent of the talkies. His account of "self-immolation" was impressionistic and evasive, written every bit if from behind a veil. He avoided entirely the subject of his wife, Zelda, and her mental illness. Still, his longtime editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt he had committed an "indecent invasion of his own privacy." Fitzgerald himself ended up fearing he'd damaged his reputation permanently.
The fact that so many of the taboo-shredding American memoirists had lived in Europe wasn't a coincidence. They had seen upwardly shut the boxing among fascism, communism, and democracy playing out after the First World War. Inevitably, they took sides and came to rethink their place in the world. This doesn't accord with the stereotype of the Lost Generation, its members drinking abroad their anomie in Parisian cafés. But every bit Brooke Blower noted in her insightful Becoming Americans in Paris (2011), that is considering our conception of the Lost Generation is too limited. They weren't but running away; they were, as John Dos Passos put it, running toward "the whole wide world."
The most avidly engaged expatriates were the foreign correspondents, like Gunther, whose job was to interpret European news for American audiences. International journalism was thriving in the U.S., equally papers such every bit the Chicago Daily News and the Philadelphia Public Ledger congenital up their own bureaus away rather than relying on wire services. Gunther spent his 20s and 30s dashing betwixt European chancelleries, deciphering insurrection attempts and revolutions, trying to explain the rise of fascism and the consolidation of Soviet Communism.
Gunther had arrived in Europe in 1924, a cub reporter from Chicago, dreaming, like many of his journalist friends, of writing the Dandy American Novel. In 1925, he met Frances Fineman, a New York–born Barnard graduate who had go a journalist, and the pair married two years later. An avowedly modern woman, Frances Gunther saw meaningful piece of work and sexual fulfillment as her due: She expected marriage and a career, domesticity and risk. A serious follower of Freud, she underwent at least four psychoanalyses, grappling with the means that she frustrated herself, including by trying—and failing—to write her own books. Stymied by a formidable writer's cake, she involved herself in John'southward reporting, exhorting him to recall harder about both the structural forces—she was also a serious student of Marx—and the psychological dynamics at play in a Europe recovering from a brutal war.
In part influenced by Frances, John came to recognize that the traditional tools of the newsroom hardly sufficed to convey what he was seeing. Objectivity was then, as it is now, the hallmark of the respectable paper. Yet Gunther found it incommunicable to study dispassionately on the rise of the Nazis or the Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfuss's bloody ceremonious war against the Viennese Socialists. He felt mystified by the roaring crowds saluting strongmen and the seemingly irrational, passionate hatreds all around him. Writing articles on elections and banking concern failures struck him as but scraping the surface of events. Like many young Americans, Gunther had taken for granted that the whole thrust of man history was toward liberty. But what if the leaders people freely chose were dictators rather than democrats?
Instead of looking for proclivities to authoritarianism in, say, German or Italian national character, Gunther trained his attention on the dictators themselves. He searched out Hitler's relatives in an Austrian backwater, trying to understand what had made him the human being he was. Gunther's own psychoanalysis in Vienna with Wilhelm Stekel, one of Freud's starting time disciples, helped consolidate his views. He'd gone to Stekel wondering whether psychic strains might explicate his worsening asthma, but soon was talking almost his dissatisfactions with his work and marriage. In his reporting, he started to foreground unconscious urges: the psychological injuries of childhood, repression, frustrated sexual desires.
Feeling the globe crashing in around them, he and Frances tracked for themselves how the patterns of public life—a dictator's machinations, the betrayal of one nation by another—translated into private relations betwixt husbands and wives, parents and children. This was what Virginia Woolf chosen in Iii Guineas (1938) the inseparable interconnection between the "tyrannies and servilities" of the public and private worlds. The global economic crisis of the Great Depression, John idea, had precipitated his own personal upheaval.
Armed with a psychological framework, the Gunthers defended themselves to understanding how the pathologies of world leaders became the stuff of international crises. Gathering information about Stalin'south family unit life and Mussolini'due south marriage, near Atatürk'south mother fixation, about the emotional makeup of Hitler'southward henchmen, John bankrupt the rules regarding fit topics for reporting. He put his statement correct on the outset page of Within Europe: "The fact may be an outrage to reason, but it cannot be denied: unresolved personal conflicts in the lives of various European politicians may contribute to the plummet of our civilization." So strong was the proscription against such disclosures that Gunther thought he'd have to publish his book anonymously.
In the cease, Gunther signed his name to the book, figuring he didn't desire to stay a newspaperman forever anyway. Inside Europe became a sensation: hurriedly reprinted, translated into 14 languages, and banned in Deutschland, a fact that Gunther's other publishers ballyhooed in their advertizing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's son Franklin Jr. took the book on his European honeymoon. The young John F. Kennedy toured the continent with Inside Europe in hand, his guide as he weighed the comparative evils of fascism and communism. The book fabricated Gunther enough money that he could quit his day task as a reporter and devote himself, as he'd always wanted, to writing books, novels as well as nonfiction. In September 1936, he, Frances, and Johnny, then half-dozen, moved back to the United states subsequently 12 years abroad.
In the decade that followed, Gunther scored two more publishing hits with his Inside Asia (1939) and Inside Latin America (1941), accompanied Full general Dwight Eisenhower in the invasion of Sicily, and became the sort of international skillful asked to opine on everything from Japanese military strategy to the fortitude of the British home forepart. FDR invited him to the White House for a tête-à-tête. He and Frances separated in 1941 and then divorced in 1944, their troubled matrimony a microcosm, they both thought, of a globe at war. She went on to become an agog apostle against the British empire: an Indian nationalist—a confidant of Jawaharlal Nehru's—and then a Zionist, and a leading figure in the American pressure campaigns for both causes.
In the bound of 1946, Gunther was busy writing the book he'd planned about democracy, Within U.S.A., when 16-year-old Johnny was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The prognosis was grim; radiations therapy began immediately, and the doctors' bills piled upwards. John cried so much that Frances feared he'd collapse. But he had to work. He'd barely made a dent in the book's projected fifty-plus capacity and was running out of money. While Johnny was undergoing treatment, John visited him at apex and in the evenings—Frances was there all afternoon—and returned to his office, writing until one or 2 a.m. every night. Thank God for the end of daylight savings time, he noted in his diary: It gave him an extra hour to work. The Book-of-the-Month Club had called Inside United states of americaA. every bit its selection for June 1947, a guarantee of big sales. To make that deadline, Harper & Brothers was typesetting the book a chapter at a time, as quickly every bit Gunther finished them.
He met his borderline, and Inside U.S.A. hit the marketplace with the largest initial print run in the history of American publishing, a one-half-million copies. Johnny died a month subsequently, on June thirty, 1947. At the terminate of the summertime, Gunther put his son's papers in club: his schoolwork, his diaries, the letters he and Frances had exchanged with Johnny when they were away for eight months in 1937–38 reporting from Asia and, later, when he left for boarding school. John talked with Frances about writing a "Johnny volume." He arranged the hundreds of condolence messages they'd gotten—brief, embarrassed missives from friends and acquaintances, people never at a loss for what to say, acknowledging that the Gunthers' grief was "across words." Only later Christmas, he started writing.
The book, Gunther decided, would accept three parts: his own narrative, then Johnny's lightly edited letters and diaries, and an afterword by Frances. Gunther had been jotting downwardly notes and phrases all along on the colored slips of paper he always kept nearby. An old reporter'southward habit: He'd recorded fragments of conversations, the offhand comments doctors and nurses made, Johnny's wry observations. His subject wouldn't be Johnny's life—the usual territory of the "In Memoriam" volume—just how he'd endured sickness. He was writing a blow-by-blow business relationship of "what happened to Johnny's brain."
It was, Gunther recognized, an "unconventional" approach. The standard mid-century source on American autobiography counts only 13 titles dealing with illness out of the more than six,000 memoirs published earlier 1945. None of those is a chronicle of cancer, the subject of most illness memoirs today. Afterwards the 2d Earth State of war, scientific advances in cancer therapeutics were just starting to extend survival rates, and with the new medical possibilities came a new narrative form, which derived its suspense from the twists and turns of treatment.
Gunther brought the skills of a spectacular newsman to comport on the story, taking the reader right into the state of affairs with him. The call from Deerfield Academy, where Johnny was a junior, had come on an April afternoon in 1946. "I recollect your child has a encephalon tumor," the doctor had blurted out. Gunther raced to western Massachusetts, picking Frances up in Connecticut on his way from New York. As soon as he saw the look on the doctors' faces, he knew there was no promise of a recovery. 3 days later, Johnny underwent a 6-hour surgery at the Neurological Institute of New York. "I got half of it," the surgeon told John.
In the fourteen months that followed, the Gunthers consulted more than than 30 specialists. They searched for the latest medical miracle. Johnny was the first brain-tumor patient in the United states to be treated with mustard gas, an early form of chemotherapy; Gunther himself delivered the canisters full of the toxic stuff to the hospital. As Johnny grew sicker and sicker, they turned to the refugee physician Max Gerson, who insisted that a diet of fresh vegetables, no salt, no fat, and scant protein could cure cancer. And and then, for some reason the doctors couldn't explain—was it the X-ray treatment, the mustard gas, or the diet?—the tumor seemingly retreated. "I was beside myself with a violent and incredulous joy. Johnny was going to recover after all!"
Gunther wrote without euphemism. His metaphors were precise, his descriptions unflinching. The event of that first surgery was akin to the "explosion of a .45-caliber bullet," a doctor told him. He fabricated use of a clinical vocabulary, translating the linguistic communication of the medical example study: Papilledema, he explained, was swelling of the optic nerve; a ventriculogram required drilling holes through the skull. The surgeons left Johnny's skull open up so that the tumor wouldn't be driven in; the flap of scalp that covered the soft spot was the size of a human's paw. When the tumor began to grow again, a few months after the remission began, the surgeon excavated more than four inches into the encephalon, unable to find good for you tissue.
The multi-perspective memorial volume was a classic Victorian class, but Death Be Not Proud gave it a new purpose. Because each part struck a unlike emotional annals, together they functioned equally a sort of Inside Us—taking the reader into the family's private dynamics to understand how they'd coped. Gunther's tone was restrained and dignified: "As to our own emotions I am trying not to write about them." He was reining in his feelings even equally he was writing of intimate experiences, exposing just enough to make evidently the weight he was carrying. The battle among the doctors over which form of handling to pursue "all but destroyed the states." At times, Johnny seemed "subconsciously hostile to me as if out of resentment at my adept health." Johnny talked about expiry with Frances, but almost never with John, changing the subject when his father walked into the room.
Johnny's letters and diaries reproduced in the second part of the book bore witness to his character. They filled in the details of his life before the tumor: the appreciating young son writing home from summer camp, the prodigious schoolboy playing chess, experimenting in chemistry and physics. He maintained a chipper tone even later on he got sick, valiantly cloaking his fear in humor. "I take discovered Utopia hither," Johnny wrote to a friend while in the infirmary. "No athletics, No worries." In his diaries, he admonished himself to make the best use of the time he had left, getting on with his schoolwork and his science projects. He fretted near his parents. In Nov 1946, equally his tumor erupted again, he wrote: "Ask parents what you can do to make them happy."
Frances's afterword was the most personal and unabashedly emotional of the three parts. She wrote almost her human relationship with her son, her attempt to "create of him a newer kind of human existence: an aware person, without fear, and with love." To remake a war-ravaged earth required people who cared about others, and Frances had started with her son. She'd reared him to become a cooperative rather than competitive person. Simply now that he was dead, she was consumed by guilt. She felt remorse nearly sending Johnny to boarding schoolhouse; she regretted the divorce: "I wished we had loved Johnny more when he was live."
In 1949, the yr that Death Be Not Proud was published, new ideas virtually both the individual and collective psyche were taking root. Rebuilding after the 2d World War would require more than simply clearing abroad the bomb rubble and restarting industry; for the fragile peace to hold, a psychological reconstruction was imperative. President Harry Truman sent a message of encouragement to be read aloud at the American Psychiatric Association'south annual meeting. "The greatest prerequisite for peace," he observed, "must be sanity—sanity in its broadest sense, which permits clear thinking on the part of all citizens." To foster a sane and salubrious postwar society, people would need to learn how to express the emotions they'd kept bottled upwards.
This was the context in which Death Exist Not Proud caught fire. The old strictures on self-revelation that had hemmed in Fitzgerald hadn't entirely disappeared. Co-ordinate to the Hartford Times' book critic, Gunther's volume was "simply as scenic and shocking every bit would be a like confession from a new neighbour, a complete stranger, who of a sudden told yous his family unit'due south nigh cloak-and-dagger tragedy." Just for every critic who objected to Gunther's "almost indecent" disclosures or the memoir'south "nauseating" details, many more than applauded its frankness and bravery. To read it was to undergo "a magnificent homo feel," wrote the Chicago Tribune's influential critic Fanny Butcher.
For John Donne, the phrase Death be not proud had conveyed a religious belief in immortality. "Decease, one thousand shalt die," Donne had written: "One curt sleep past, we wake eternally." Expiry Be Not Proud, by contrast, represented a bid for a secular afterlife, a testament to Johnny's backbone. As much as it was nearly ane boy, it was as well most the worth of the individual writ large. In their son's illness, the Gunthers saw the same sort of dynamic that had haunted them in Europe—information technology was "as if the design of Johnny's illness were symbolic of so much of the conflict and torture of the external world." The boxing between Johnny's fine mind and the savagery of the tumor was like the fight they'd witnessed in fascist Vienna and Berlin: "A primitive to-the-death struggle of reason against violence, reason against disruption, reason against brute unthinking force."
To insist on the value of a single existence was to strike back at that shocking disregard for homo life. Gunther's memoir was a literary analogue to the work and then nether way in international constabulary, where new concepts of human rights were existence invented. As Death Be Not Proud went to printing in the fall of 1948, delegates at the recently founded United Nations were debating the Universal Annunciation of Human Rights. That document proclaimed an inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and, still more novel, to develop fully one's ain personality. After half a century of war and genocide that had claimed past conservative estimates more than seventy million lives, the defenders of the individual were gaining the upper hand.
The reading public received the book just that manner. "Thank God there are people similar you lot who nevertheless realize the infinite value of i soul when the earth is devising new means of mass killing," one woman wrote to Frances. Death Be Non Proud became an instant best seller. In American college towns as in county seats, information technology topped the listing of the books that patrons requested in public libraries. As soon as the kickoff excerpts appeared in Ladies' Habitation Periodical, and so one of the largest-circulation magazines in the United States, the Gunthers establish themselves deluged with letters. Readers thanked them for having the courage to put their "own hearts into impress." Some correspondents took the Gunthers' relative openness nigh their divorce every bit an invitation to annotate, and urged the couple to reconcile.
Past far the largest number of letters, and there were thousands of them, came from grieving parents. Their children had died of meningitis, leukemia, or glioma; their sons had been killed in activity in Germany or died in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Mostly mothers wrote, just occasionally fathers did as well. Some unburdened themselves at great length, filling pages and pages, as though they hadn't been able to talk to anyone. A minister's attempt at consolation—"Nosotros know it must be for the all-time. God doesn't make mistakes"—had proved no comfort at all. These parents blamed themselves, as Frances had. They felt guilty that they couldn't afford more treatments and private doctors, or they regretted subjecting their children to painful operations. Don't you e'er feel bitter? they asked the Gunthers. "I wait you did, but I suppose that doesn't help does it?"
These letters contain an amazing archive of the repressed grief in mid-20th-century America. Readers peeled pictures of their loved ones out of photo albums, to enclose with their letters. A female parent whose baby had died of pneumonia cut "A Word From Frances" out of the book and put it in her Bible with her baby'south footprints. 1 father ordered 20 copies of Death Be Non Proud to ship to his relatives; his son had polio. Gunther had put their family's suffering into words. In plow, readers adopted his manner of narrating the class of an affliction, telling him their stories, interspersing the clinical details with everyday accounts of how they'd tried to cope. It was equally if he'd given them not just permission but a template for relating their experiences.
Kickoff in the tardily 1950s, a different set of readers—readers similar my mother—took up Gunther's book. English teachers assigned Death Exist Not Proud; the tribute to selfless bravery fit well on civics syllabi too. Information technology became a popular selection for teen book clubs. Young readers wrote to Gunther in increasing numbers. They wished they'd known Johnny: He was the sort of male child they'd like to befriend or, someday, marry. They saw him as a model against which their ain character should be measured, certain that they barbarous far short of his example. "I only wish that I could be one-half the person Johnny was!" wrote one high-school girl from Scarsdale, New York.
Gunther's teenage readers recognized Death Be Not Proud'due south redemptive message. It was a book about an individual whose selflessness was his most salient feature. As an eighth-grade boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, put it, "His fight for life was not only for his mortal body but the lives of millions of people." Merely Johnny's wasn't the self-sacrifice of a Christ effigy or the hardened backbone of a soldier. Information technology was something altogether more recognizable to immature readers. Students put themselves in the shoes of Johnny, Frances, or John. Teachers encouraged that sympathetic identification by asking their pupils to write essays from the perspective of one of the "characters" in the book.
And yet, adolescents were so gripped past Expiry Be Not Proud precisely considering it wasn't fiction. Like Anne Frank: The Diary of a Immature Daughter, which was translated into English in 1952, Gunther's memoir demonstrated how life had outpaced fiction, as "millions of people all over the world," in the words of ane Connecticut girl, shared in the "tragedy of your son's expiry." It wasn't "similar the average book," she added, "perchance considering this really happened." Teenagers requested photos of Johnny, details of his scientific discipline experiments, more data almost the couple'south divorce. "Some people would say, 'Oh, its just a story, don't let it bother you'," 1 reader wrote; "simply when yous realize that it really took place, it makes a person stop and think."
Gunther's young readers were the Baby Boomers, born into the prosperity and stability of a postwar world. Some of them later marched on Washington, protested the war in Vietnam, and somewhen popularized the slogan "The personal is political," an idea that owed much to the slippage between geopolitics and inner life that Gunther and his generation had starting time chronicled. Youth movements don't spend much time paying homage to their elders, and the rebels of the 1960s were no exception. But what the Boomers had learned from their transgressive 1930s forebears was that repression had to exist combatted past openness and that no subject was beyond words.
For this, at least in function, they had a once ubiquitous, now largely forgotten reporter and his ex-wife to thank. In 1926, Virginia Woolf had lamented how few writers had taken on the subject of disease. Sickness, she wrote, ought to exist "amid the prime themes of literature," alongside love, warfare, and jealousy. John Gunther paved a way to talk nearly cancer and decease in public, about divorce, pain, and parental remorse. He did so precisely because he was a reporter who'd taken from the hellish earth of the 1930s and '40s a confidence that the individual needed defending and that the total range of man experiences had to exist told. In the side by side decades, when telling all became the norm, some part of that original impetus got lost, as the imperative to tend to the mutual good faded. If the "I" became detached from the "we," that was above all else a measure of the tardily 20th century's good fortune.
This article appears in the April 2022 impress edition with the headline "The Man Who Told All." When y'all buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a committee. Thank yous for supporting The Atlantic.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/john-gunther-death-be-not-proud-grief-genre/622834/
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