Cliches Come True

ONE LIFE by Dr. Christiaan Barnard and Curtis Bill Pepper. 402 pages. Mac-m///an. $7.95.

It is hard to write the life story of a hero. It is even harder if you yourself are the hero. South Africa's renowned heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard did not entirely surmount this dilemma. In fact, it seems at times as if he or his collaborator, a onetime Newsweek correspondent in Rome, found it hard to choke self-admiration down into a deprecatory gruffness. The poor boy who made good, the youth who kept his head when all men doubted him, the Walter Mitty syndrome--all the treacherous cliches of autobiography are there. What emerges from them, however, is the unmistakable fact that Barnard's story is a cliche come true.

He was poor enough. Barnard's father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Beaufort West, a country town miles from South Africa's big cities. Father comes across as a charmingly inept eccentric who understood God but could never master a car's gearshift. Mother, though, was a ruthless perfectionist who taught her four children that they must always be first in school and never admit defeat.

So driven, young Christiaan learned to study after hours, to win the mile race even though he had no money for track shoes and had to run barefoot, to take degrees in two years that normally took five. With apparent total recall, he reports childhood and adolescent conversations and the courtship of his first wife, a nurse at Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital. "Our hands, which the night before had been pressed upon one another in love, now met and touched in sterile gloves."

Barnard, as he manfully confesses, fainted at his first real operation. He was forced out of his first private practice because of local jealousies but managed to get scholarships when he needed them, including one to the University of Minnesota. There he studied for 21 years under Dr. Owen Wangensteen, who on Barnard's departure wangled a heart-lung machine for him. Barnard is liberal with his "if it were not for the generosity of," particularly to Wangensteen. On the other hand, a new lifesaving operation employing a tube inside the heart--thought up by Barnard during a dull sermon in church --was performed with some revisions two years later by a Canadian surgeon named William Mustard. The doctor notes somewhat sulkily that "today it is known as Mustard's operation."

To Face the World. Barnard's biography conveys something of the real drama of medicine and particularly of the drama of his first heart transplant. The patient, Louis Washkansky, was a sprightly, funny, thorny man, furious at his helplessness and cheerfully willing to put his heart in Barnard's hands. The book captures both the spirit of this crotchety victim and the excitement of that extraordinary operation --even though the prose, at key moments, tends to overflow like a sliced-open artery.

The book ends with Washkansky's death, after only 18 days of new life, and Barnard's undaunted response: "I'm going to America and appear on Face the Nation. I'm going to face the world --and then come back and do a transplant on Dr. Blaiberg."

The ending is both an apology and a boast. Barnard seems to have been genuinely sad to lose his patient but also delighted to face the world. The worry about Dr. Barnard since then has been just that: Is he more concerned with his celebrity than with his arcane art? After facing the nation, he has dined with Gina Lollobrigida, chatted with Sophia Loren and Pope Paul. Across a thousand gossip columns he flashed a smile so wide that it looked as if he were advertising newly capped teeth. Then he was divorced by his wife back in Cape Town and married a pretty young girl from the world of South Africa's Beautiful People who was almost exactly the age of his daughter.

Does this unreported aftermath jeopardize the validity of the book? Perhaps. Read closely, however; all the later developments are there, at least potentially. Here is a man who is obviously one of the great surgeons of any time, a searching, pioneering intellect who questioned accepted practice, a man with a mind like a scalpel--no more or less attractive. As an account of genius, the book tells it like it is. As an account of personality, it tells more than Barnard probably intended. Either way, it is a fascinating report from that shadowy land of the pioneer. How did he do it? Why did he do it? Can I do it too? Would I want to?

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