Ravenous for Personalities

A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY (116 pp.)--John Gunther--Harper & Row ($3.50).

Never again can history be the privileged property of historians. It has been invaded in force by straying journalists who are ready and anxious to assess it long before the scholars. Journalists Mark Sullivan and Frederick Lewis Allen wrote lively and snappy accounts of contemporary history. But of all the journalists who have attempted history none has made more of a name at it than John Gunther, 61, whose seven Inside books have been bestsellers around the world. "My grand design," writes Gunther in this brief but entertaining autobiography, "is to do a political guide to the whole known world of today."

As Gunther tells it, he came to this ambition because he was miscast as a workaday reporter. A Vienna-based correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, he preferred writing features ("I was ravenously interested in human beings") to spot news. "I have scarcely ever had a scoop in my life," he writes, "and it seemed to me, then as now, abysmally silly to break a neck by beating the opposition by a few seconds on a story." Gunther decided that the tumultuous personalities of Europe--Hitler, Kemal Ataturk, Leon Blum--deserved a full-length book. He did some legwork in Europe, grilled correspondents, composed and sent out a questionnaire he has used ever since ("What is the subject's attitude toward religion, sex, money? His pet hates, pet loves? His danger of assassination?") When the answers were in, Gunther wrote Inside Europe in seven months. Published in 1936, it became an immediate bestseller in England and in the U.S., won Gunther a place on the death list in Nazi Germany.

Terrified by the U.S.A. Encouraged by Inside Europe's success, Gunther tackled Asia next--even though he had never been there. He spent ten months touring most of Asia, living off the proceeds from magazine articles he wrote along the way. When Inside Asia appeared in 1939, Japanese censors meticulously snipped offending passages out of every copy sold in Japan, and a self-appointed Chinese publisher pirated the book by photographing the American edition, then distributing copies in China.

Gunther considers Inside Asia the best of his Insides; Inside U. S. A. presented the most problems. "The United States," Gunther writes, "lay like a cobra before me, seductive, terrifying and immense." Gunther managed to examine every city with a population greater than 200,000, but some were more receptive than others. Though he was invited in Texas to address a joint session of the legislature, in Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar threw him out of his office. Gunther found Americans more eager to be interviewed than other peoples, but he also found them more politically naive. Inside U. S. A. was perhaps the least successful of his books.

To write Inside Africa, Gunther traveled 40,000 miles with cataracts that were dimming both eyes, shrewdly noted the strength of African nationalism before most other observers. Inside Russia, published in 1958, was less observant, mainly because of Russian secretiveness. Gunther was always under escort when touring Russia, never got to talk to a Russian alone. But the Russians (who later banned the book) rose to Gunther's challenge to show him "a first-rate lunatic asylum, the academy where you train artists in Socialist realism, and a musician."

Agony after Writing. In his autobiography, Gunther squarely faces the charge most often leveled at him--that his books, with the one exception of Inside Africa, are superficial. "The scholar-specialist," he writes, "who spends 15 years at work on a single village in Peru is much more superficial if you think in terms of the large. My kind of book would never be done at all if I allowed myself unlimited time." Gunther's aim has been to bridge news and history, even though both lose something when lumped together; history becomes too episodic and news loses its freshness. Thus Gunther goes through agonies after writing each book in the fear that new events might put it out of date even before publication. He also must keep revising some of his books. But Gunther has a good journalist's fine eye for the vivid detail, and even an outdated Gunther Inside can still serve as a good introduction to a country or a continent. Gunther would be the last to claim too much for his work. "It is my curse, or my blessing," he writes, "that I have never been able to take myself altogether seriously as a writer."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.