Death Be Not Proud
Read Death Be Not Proud Online
Authors: John J. Gunther
Tags: #Biography, #Autobiography & Memoirs, #Death and Dying, #Grief
In Memoriam
JOHN GUNTHER JUNIOR
1929-1947
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; not yet canst thou kill me.
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go—
Rest of their bones and souls’ delivery!
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
—J
OHN
D
ONNE
I want to acknowledge with the deepest thanks the assistance
Frances Gunther has given me in preparation of this memoir. It could not have been written without her wise and discriminating help. In particular many anecdotes about Johnny and several of the lines of his dialogue come from her memories and records, which she has generously shared with me.
J. G.
This is not so much a memoir of Johnny in the conventional
sense as the story of a long, courageous struggle between a child and Death. It is not about the happy early years except in this brief introduction, but about his illness. It is, in simple fact, the story of what happened to Johnny’s brain. I write it because many children are afflicted by disease, though few ever have to endure what Johnny had, and perhaps they and their parents may derive some modicum of succor from the unflinching fortitude and detachment with which he rode through his ordeal to the end.
Johnny was conceived in California, carried across the bosom of the American continent and the Atlantic Ocean by his mother, and born in Paris, on November 4, 1929. We moved to Vienna when he was a few months old, and he went to kindergarten there and had splendid holidays in the Austrian Alps. We moved again to London when he was six, and he had a year and a half in England. Then we returned to the United States. Johnny went to the public school in Wilton, Connecticut, and to several other schools, including Lincoln in New York City, which he loved with all his heart, and finally to Deerfield Academy, in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He died on June 30, 1947, when he was seventeen, after an illness that lasted fifteen months. He would have entered Harvard last autumn had he lived.
I must try to give you a picture of him. He was a tall boy, almost as tall as I when he died, and skinny, though he had been plump as a youngster, and he was always worried about putting on weight. He was very blond, with hair the color of wheat out in the sun, large bright blue eyes, and the most beautiful hands I have ever seen. His legs were still tall hairy stalks without form, but his hands were mature and beautiful. Most people thought he was very good looking. Perhaps as a father I am prejudiced. Most people did not think of his looks, however; they thought of his humor, his charm and above all his brains. Also there was the matter of selflessness. Johnny was the only person I have ever met who, truly, never thought of himself first, or, for that matter, at all; his considerateness was so extreme as to be a fault.
There was that day after the first operation, the operation that lasted almost six hours, when Dr. Putnam thought it wise to tell him what he had. Johnny was too bright to be forestalled by any more myths or euphemisms. As delicately as if he were handling one of his own instruments of surgery, Putnam said quietly, “Johnny, what we operated for was a brain tumor.”
Nobody else was in the room, and Johnny looked straight at him.
“Do my parents know this? How shall we break it to them?”
Then, some months later, when he seemed to be getting better, he felt the edge of bone next to the flap in the skull wound, and looked questioningly and happily at the doctor—a different doctor—then attending him. The doctor was pleased because the bone appeared to be growing back, but with a crying lack of tact he told Johnny, “Oh, yes . . . it’s growing . . . but in the wrong direction, the wrong way.”
Johnny controlled himself and said nothing until the doctor left the room. His face had gone white and he was sick with sudden worry and harsh disappointment. Then he murmured to me, “Better not tell Mother it’s growing wrong.”
I do not want this brief foreword to be a Bright-Sayings-of-the-Children essay or the kind of eulogy that any fond and bereaved parent may be forgiven for trying to put on paper. What I am trying to tell, however fumblingly and inadequately, is the story of a gallant fight for life, against the most hopeless odds, that should convey a relevance, a message, a lesson perhaps, to anybody who has ever faced ill health. But to do this I must first stake out a few facts about Johnny and give the reader some detailed impression of his character. I want to make some part of him come alive again, if only in the feeble light of words. So let me go back briefly into the moist net of memory.
I have been rummaging this past month through all the papers and things he left, things we had saved and treasured from his earliest days—the notebook Frances kept recording his weight and height and other such memorabilia when he was an infant, the first drawings he made, the earliest snap-shots, then evidences of his schoolwork, his letters, his report cards and themes and diaries. Here on my desk is a book-mark, bright with enameled colors, that his beloved Austrian governess helped him make when he could not have been more than two; here also his very last chemical formulae and mathematical computations and calculations, which are far beyond my lay comprehension.
Johnny’s first explorations of the external world were in the form of pictures—graphic art. Some of his paintings still hang on the walls in the house in Madison, Connecticut. The violence with which a child sees nature! The brilliant savagery of the struggles already precipitated in an infant’s mind! Here are tigers of the most menacing ferocity—bloody, chewing up baby lambs, with their red jaws open and foaming; then by contrast a group of somnolent, placid, herbaceous elephants; then landscapes mostly in green, with blue trails leading to jagged mountains, and a dirigible soaring in the sky; then boats dancing on blue water, boats with multitudinous white shining sails. Later came airplanes, locomotives, heavy trains. Johnny always had an acute interest in transportation. One of his earliest concepts was “Smoky,” a magic personification of a machine that conquered all frontiers of time and space.
Music came next. Not all children are Mozarts; but almost all are geniuses at one thing or another before they are ten. Johnny had a considerable musical talent, though he did not push it far. He was, like the youngster in Aldous Huxley’s beautiful story Young Archimedes, more interested in the structure of music, in its mathematics, than in playing tunes or listening to melodies. He took violin lessons early and kept his precious recorder close to him till the day he died. When he was about ten he became fascinated with the woodwinds, especially the bassoon. For years his ambition was to own and play a bassoon; this instrument, however, does not exist in miniature form, and of course he was never able to handle one. But he saved regularly out of his allowance to buy one later. He would sit by the hour listening to woodwind music, and we bought him practically every record that exists in which the bassoon is prominent. I remember coming home one day with the Schubert Octet, Opus 166. He listened to it, rocking with excited glee, “Oh, boy! Oh, boy!” Next year he was hard at work composing; in April, 1940, he finished what he called the rondo of his first “symphony.” Later that year he played several of his own compositions at a Lincoln School recital. I was doing a job somewhere and called him on the phone to say that, unhappily, I could not get back to New York in time to hear him. He replied drily, “You could certainly get here if you hired an airplane.”
Concurrently came an engrossed interest in various games, particularly chess. He was beating me at chess easily by the time he was twelve. He became fascinated, too, in weather forecasting, and built up a formidable array of charts and instruments; like Frances, he loved weather in the abstract, all and any kinds of weather. He loved gardening and he tried experiment after experiment in gardening with-out soil, using hydroponics. He loved puppies and small cats and turtles. He loved to collect rocks and study them and to smelt bits of iron out of ore. He loved magic and card tricks, and worked out dozens of tricks, some of which I never got onto. Once we dined with Cass Canfield, my publisher, and Johnny went through his repertoire. “Well,” Cass said, “all I hope is that he grows up honest.”
I do not mean to give the impression that Johnny was any prodigy. He was good at some things, not good at others. His I.Q. at one of his schools was, we were told, the highest ever recorded there, way above the genius level, but his marks were often indifferent. He was a great procrastinator. In one examination, I remember, he was the best of his class in content, and the worst in neatness. He lacked assertiveness and self-reliance. He had plenty of stick-to-itiveness, but this was often badly focused, and he was nowhere near so efficient as he might have been. But in the last quiz he ever took, he got a 99. Twice he won the current-events test at Deerfield, and—characteristically—never told us so. When he arrived at Deerfield he insisted on taking five subjects instead of the usual four. This is a stiff school, and Mr. Boyden, the headmaster, told us afterward that he had never dreamed that Johnny would be able to keep up with all five. The fifth subject was geology; Johnny insisted on taking it because he was so determinedly eager to have a science course every year. He got straight A’s in the final examinations in both algebra and geology. Not till a long time later, when I happened to run into a friend whose son was also a Deerfield boy, did I learn that no one in the school’s entire history had ever taken five subjects in a single year before.
Already the major line of his brief life was drawn sharp and clear—his passionate love for science. Many things Johnny did sloppily, and after many false starts and delay, but his scientific drawings and charts almost always had an exquisite precision. By the time he was fifteen he had veered away from applied science; what he loved and intended to devote his life to was scientific theory, science in the abstract, as pure and undiluted as he could get it. He had not quite decided whether to be a physicist or a chemist; probably he would have chosen the trans-Uranian borderland between the two. He was an experimentalist. He liked the pragmatic approach. He had a small laboratory in our apartment; I think now of the procession of happy hours he spent there with his chemicals, weights and measures, retorts, tools and electrical apparatus. Once a lady joked with him about his interest in sums and figures. He replied, “You don’t understand at all. Arithmetic bores me. What I am interested in is mathematics.”
Atomic physics fascinated him, of course. As the prize in one of the quizzes he won, he chose an advanced college text on the atom—something far beyond his powers at the time. He would secretly read it at night, a little at a time, absorbing it “by osmosis” as he said, after the dormitory had gone to bed. In February, 1945, seven months before the new world blew wide open at Los Alamos and Hiroshima, he wrote a theme actually about atomic fission and what its consequences might well be. The last thing I have in his handwriting is a pitiful distorted scrawl—and once his writing had been so graceful and confident!—
Wonderfull!
(sic)
Relativity of dimensions.
Perhaps I might allude to other aspects of his personality, though I hope these will become clear, in oudine at least, in the pages to follow. Johnny was a sensitive boy, quite diffident and shy, quite hesitant, a boy who chose his friends carefully and then held them, and very serious—though he loved to laugh and his smile was radiant. Perhaps I have given the impression that he was somewhat on the stuffy side. Never! In plain fact he was the sunniest of creatures.
He adored fantasy. He was an inveterate daydreamer and once when Frances mentioned his habit of introspection he replied, “Oh, but I spend hours analyzing myself!” One of his headmasters, Mr. Hackett of Riverdale, who was very fond of him, told us when Johnny was about twelve, “You know your son lives in a world altogether his own.”
This is from a letter a friend wrote Frances after his death:
I am always a little afraid of children—and yet when I first met Johnny as a little boy, he completely wiped out that gulf which I usually feel with the younger generation. I never felt it with him. He was always a person and my friend.
Another friend began a long letter:
He was such a mixture of both of you, and so himself. He was so young and yet he took such a serious view of life. So many of the children of my friends are inconsiderate brats that I was almost taken aback by his quiet, attentive manners. How almost formal he was.
When he read a book, he would often stop, as if considering what he had read, then go back and read something over. He talked very little about his school but he never seemed to have that competitive brash something so many schoolboys have.
Another of our friends told us later that, dropping in to see us when Johnny was home, he was careful not to make any unwise remark—he always wanted to be at his best with him, fearing, too, that his best might not be quite good enough, since Johnny, even at this early age, reminded him “of a Chinese sage.”
Johnny was irritated by his lack of prowess at athletics. But you should have seen him sail a boat! He was never one of a gang, and had little interest in team play, but he swam very well, rode, and played lacrosse. At Camp Treetops in the Adirondacks, where he spent several summers, he was captain of the baseball team—if only because everybody liked his humor and trusted his fairness of mind. One of his camp counselors wrote:
His swimming is excellent, and he is acknowledged by the boys themselves to be the best long-distance swimmer in the group. . . . It’s his nature to be jolly and unaggressive. . . . If he can’t hit a home run, he’s not the least unhappy about it. . . . By every rating I have made out, he was the most popular boy in the group.
There was also a note:
We noted that John never arrived on time for any distasteful task.
“It is extremely difficult,” wrote one of his early teachers, “for Johnny to keep his personal belongings in order.” Johnny’s slouch! The way his hands dug deep into those long pockets! The way he hesitated and groped and said “Urn” and “Urn”! He had an almost unparalleled capacity to lose things. Once at Deerfield he mislaid and never found one of a pair of shoes. Once we walked in a windy snowstorm from our apartment to a restaurant around the corner, and in that distance of two hundred yards he managed somehow to lose his hat. I was with him; we searched everywhere; the hat had simply disappeared, and was lost without a trace.
“ I keep working on his absent-minded ways,” another teacher reported. “His books and possessions are left behind him everywhere. Life is entirely too full for him to manage the practical details of living.”