The Good Fight

DEATH BE NOT PROUD (261 pp.]--John Gunther--Harper ($2.50).

On a June day in 1947, Manhattan Physician Cornelius Traeger suddenly took leave of his host, Sinclair Lewis, to visit a patient: "I have a feeling that Johnny Gunther will die this weekend." Johnny did die, of a brain tumor that more than a dozen doctors had fought unsuccessfully for 15 months. Johnny was only 17, a tall, good-looking, skinny kid who had graduated from Deerfield Academy and planned to enter Harvard that fall.

In Death Be Not Proud, his father, Journalist John Gunther, has written both a memoir of Johnny and the story of his fight for life. 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. Gunther is interested in neither tears nor personal royalties (both his proceeds and the publisher's profits go to cancer research for children). Without fuss, in simple, almost conversational style, he expresses the love and comradeship 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.

Johnny Gunther fought back with his youth, with unflinching spirit, with uncommon intelligence. His scientific interest in his illness was enormous--even though, boylike, he had a personal pride in the misfortune that had suddenly made him special. When, after Johnny's first operation, the surgeon told him what he had, Johnny telephoned his friend, Reviewer Lewis Gannett, and reported proudly: "They drilled three holes right through my head." Two weeks later he exchanged letters with Albert Einstein on the curvature of the universe. When the Book-of-the-Month Club picked Gunther's then unfinished Inside U.S.A. (written largely during the costly attempts to save Johnny's life), he tried to cheer his father with, "Well, that solves the financial problem!"

Once Johnny, who had never prayed, said to his mother: "Speaking of prayers, I did think one up." He called it Unbeliever's Prayer and it went:

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.

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