by John Gunther
His life was packed with everything from postage stamps to mineralogy to electric trains to how to cook. He announced to me firmly, “ I have too many hobbies, and I am going to give up five or six of them!” As a self-imposed task, he set about classifying and cataloguing our gramophone records, and he went at this with the utmost attention to minute detail. Composers were indexed on a card of one color, executants on another, titles on another, and so on. He typed each card patiently, sometimes with six or seven different entries for a single record. One day I protested that an index or catalogue was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that he shouldn’t get bogged down in such minutiae. His reply was, “Don’t you understand that I have become a perfectionist, just like you!”
This memoir will contain a good many of Johnny’s jokes, asides, and wisecracks. Actually these were a comparatively recent development. For a long time he was too shy to talk much in company; he was almost painfully ill at ease. Then, in the year before his malady struck him down, his confidence grew steeply. He conquered his own shyness; it was quite a battle, and the dry, thoughtful humor that came to characterize him was among other things a mark of deliberate endeavor. Even as a child, though, when he did speak, what he said was often worth listening to. He could not have been more than six when he announced to me that he had discovered what God was. “God is what’s good in me.”
When he was about thirteen he had a talk with a doctor who asked him to list the things he “wished” most. His answers were, first, happiness and, second, to do some good for the world. Then he added a third—an extra week’s vacation!
The doctor asked him what he would like most if a magician could change everything by the whisk of a wand. Johnny replied with sharp knowledge of his own defects: (1) T o be a bit more talkative. (2) T o be a better athlete. (3) T o stop putting things off. (4) T o be tidier.
Finally to the question “What three things bother you most?” Johnny made an omnibus answer: “School problems, studies, sports, and relations to other boys.” He added, “Relations to parents” and then changed his mind: “ I do not think this bothers me.”
Johnny and Frances were indeed marvelously close. I was close too, closer I think than most busy fathers with growing sons, but not in the way Frances was. Also Johnny saw much more of us together than a child usually sees of divorced parents. Our modus operandi was that he spent the winter and spring holidays with me in New York, and the summers with Frances in Connecticut. But I saw him frequently in the summer too, and almost always for a week or so at the beginning and end of each summer, and Frances similarly saw him a great deal in New York in winter. We overlapped all the time. For years though I traveled widely I specifically arranged almost every job and itinerary so as to be with him during his holidays.
From Frances he got a tremendous lot—his gift for fantasy, the realism and long view of his intelligence, his delicacy of perception, his creative curiosity. From the earliest days she saved out for him books and poems, pictures and puzzles and jokes and parables and anything that would enlarge his conception of life as something to be truly lived. For year after year she encouraged him to read, to think for himself, and to admire wisdom, truth, and beauty.
When he went up to Deerfield for what we did not know would be the last time, she wrote him:
Love God
Even if you get four A’s, be humble.
Overnight, it seemed, Johnny became startlingly, almost frighteningly, intellectually mature. We were walking back from the theater and passed a newsstand and I asked him if he wanted the next day’s paper. He said, “No—sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” One evening we asked him if he’d like to see some movies taken of him when he was a child. He replied, “Only if they’re not too recent—the past is tolerable if remote enough.”
Presently he became a good critic of whatever I happened to be writing at the time. I showed him the first part of an unsuccessful long story; he read it, puzzled, and then exclaimed, “But when does something happen?” He had gone straight to the heart of the difficulty. One of the earliest times we ever talked as man to man about a nonpersonal thing came late in 1943, when he had just finished a course in English history and I was driving him in from Connecticut. The subject of the conversation was William Ewart Gladstone.
Quite parenthetically—this goes back to his early childhood—it was a fragment of his conversation that helped set me out on ten years of work. Inside Europe appeared when we were still in London, and he noticed a shop window, Self-ridge’s I think, full of the English edition of that book. At this time it had never occurred to me to follow Inside Europe with similar books. But Johnny, aged about six, looked again at the window and declared, “ I suppose you will be doing Inside Australia next—or Inside the North Pole.”
He was never a great reader—science interested him much more. But as he developed he dipped into books occasionally and I remember how fresh his comments were. Once I asked him what I could bring him to read, and he answered, “Anything provided it is not by George Eliot.” Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln impressed him greatly; in fact, he used his free time during the whole of his first year at Deerfield to read this huge book entire. Incidentally he always subscribed to the New York Times at Deerfield, to keep abreast of the news, though this took a sizable chunk out of his allowance. Frances showed him an advertisement of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd saga when he was in hospital. His simple comment was, “ I prefer to take my Superman straight.”
When he was home from school and I was broadcasting I would often take him to the studio. On November 7, 1942, 1 finished writing a long broadcast, mostly about Russia, at 7 P.M. Then a story began coming in on the ticker about fleet movements in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. So I did a new lead paragraph and went home. Johnny was waiting for me there. I listened to the 8:55 news, which I rarely do, but there was nothing new. Then at 9:02 my secretary called to say that we were landing troops in North Africa. I went down to the office right away and took Johnny with me. I told him what had happened and that of course I would have to rewrite the entire broadcast and maybe would have to ad lib most of it. Instantly, thirteen years old as he was, he asked just two questions: what would the French fleet do, and what about De Gaulle. Neither of these two angles had occurred to me, but it was obvious as soon as Johnny offered the words that they would dominate all that happened next.
His intelligence was, above all, detached and reason-able—and what is a mind for, except to reason with? He could be crisp and sharp-eyed even about phenomena very close. For instance about one of his schools he said, “ I would make the following criticisms. First, too much attention to marks. Second, too much religion. Third, no time for me to develop my own interests. Fourth, group discipline may be imposed unfairly.” He added that something must be wrong with the entire educational system in that, though he was three years behind in French, he made up the whole gap in one term, but had to remain now with the class he caught up with.
Johnny’s generosity—he would give anything away—his affectionateness and amiability, concealed a considerable sturdiness of character. Everybody loved him—down to the corner cop. I have never known anyone so loved. This led some people, especially when he was very young, to baby him, which he resented in his calm, reasonable way. When he was at Riverdale one teacher wrote in her annual report that she had never known him to raise his voice, even out of class. Yet, a couple of years later (I did not discover this till much later) he took off fifteen pounds by limiting himself to a diet of 1,200 calories a day—what an effort of will on the part of a hungry youngster!—without telling a soul. He was gentle, yes, but he did not lack will, as I hope this chronicle will show.
A footnote as to food: once I took him to a restaurant that served a particularly luscious form of ice-cream cake. He nibbled at it tentatively and then his will power broke down and he ate like a trencherman. “Papa,” he said, wiping his mouth, “that was simply irresistible.”
There wa
s absolutely no trace in him of malice, acquisitiveness, or vulgarity. It was almost impossible to make him lose his temper, and during the whole course of his illness and the frightful demands it made on him, I scarcely ever heard him utter a serious word of protest or complaint. He was always obedient—if only because he wanted so desperately to get well. Johnny was a careful boy; he was truly modest and he believed in the goodness of people—he gave out something, so that people entering a room felt at once a warm, compelling, sunny contact. But he was, like most exceptional children, a very complex character. He had the dominant qualities of his generation—factuality, understatement. He was not a backslapper and he was hopeless at hail-fellow-well-met contacts, but everybody respected him. His judgments were quite simple: he disliked bad things, and liked things good. Johnny was as sinless as a sunset. When he uttered that childhood wish—“to do some good for the world”—he was reflecting all the gifts that had been given him, of goodness, gentleness, and warmth of spirit; he was one of those who thought earnestly that he owed the world a living, not vice versa. But he never got a chance, and the world is much the poorer for it.
But it is time now to go on to what I have to tell.
Death Be Not Proud
1
Johnny came home for the Christmas holiday in 1945, and he looked fit and fine. He was lengthening out physically and otherwise, as children do all of a sudden, responding as it were to the release of some hidden inner spring. We saw a lot of each other, and just before getting on the train to return to school in January, he exclaimed, “Pop, that was the best ten days I ever had!” He didn’t often confess personal emotions so freely, and I was pleased. Then in March, 1946, he came down again for the long spring holiday. Frances and I took him to several Broadway shows, including Show Boat and Antigone—he liked Antigone best; he went to lectures on atomic physics; Frances took him to the public dinner given by the City of New York to Winston Churchill—it was the first, and last, time he ever wore a dinner jacket, borrowed from his uncle; he won the critical game in a chess match against another school (he was captain now of the Deerfield chess team); he monkeyed with his chemicals and read the manuscript of the early chapters of Inside U.SA. which was just then getting under way. I thought he seemed tired, but I did not take this seriously, believing it to be the normal reaction from a regime as vigorous as that of Deer-field, together with the strains of adolescence. He had his usual check with Traeger, our family physician, who pronounced him perfectly all right. Also he had a check with an eye doctor. This was important. Johnny had suffered some eye strain the summer before and was taking exercises to strengthen his visual acuity. The eye doctor found nothing wrong; in fact, the eyes had improved to a considerable degree. The day after the examination by Traeger, Johnny complained suddenly of a slight stiff neck. If this had happened before Traeger saw him, I would have been more concerned, but since he had just been given a clean bill of health, we did not take anything so minor as a stiff neck seriously. Indeed, it disappeared after a day, and Johnny went back to school, sighing a little that the holiday was over but happy and full of energy and anticipation.
Deerfield had an infantile paralysis case that spring, and, as is the custom of the school with its strict standards, all parents were notified at once. Then in the third week of April I had a wire from the school doctor, Johnson, saying that Johnny was in the infirmary but, though he had a stiff neck, there was no indication of polio and we were not to worry. Nothing at all alarming was indicated. Boys get stiff necks and Charley horses all the time. In fact, Dr. Johnson said, he was informing us of Johnny’s complaint only because, knowing of the polio scare and hearing that he was in the infirmary, we might think that he did have polio, which he didn’t. I called Johnny up, and we talked briefly. He was lonely and fretful at missing a week of class work, but otherwise nothing seemed to be amiss. He was going into the nearby town the next day to have a basal metabolism test, and Dr. Johnson asked me to find out from Traeger when he had last had a basal, and what it was. I reported all this to Frances, and thought little more of it. Later we found that Johnny might not have gone to the infirmary at all, since he would never admit it when he was ill and never complained, except that one of his classmates, observing his stiff neck, insisted on his seeing the doctor. Then, wisely, Dr. Johnson held him for observation. Had this not happened, he might have died then and there.
At about three in the afternoon on Thursday, April 25, the telephone rang in our New York apartment. Just at that moment I had finished the California chapters of my book, and I had intended calling Johnny that night to tell him.
Without hesitation or warning Dr. Johnson said, “We’ve had a doctor in from Springfield to see your son—Dr. Hahn, a neurologist. Here he is.”
Dr. Hahn said, “ I think your child has a brain tumor.”
I was too stunned to make sense. “But that’s very serious, isn’t it?” I exclaimed.
Dr. Hahn said, “ I should say it is serious!” He went on, in a voice so emphatic that it was almost strident, “His disks are completely choked.”
“His what?”
“Ask any doctor in the world what that means—choked disks!” he shouted.
He proceeded to describe other symptoms, and implored me with the utmost urgency to get in touch at once with Dr. Tracy Putnam, the best man for this kind of thing anywhere within range; in fact, even before talking to me, he and Johnson on their own responsibility had put in a call for Putnam. The next half hour passed in a grinding crisscross of calls. I talked to Traeger, I called Deerfield back, I got in touch with Frances who was out in Madison, I reached Putnam, I consulted Traeger once more, and by half-past four I was at 168th Street, waiting in Putnam’s office. We picked Frances up in New Haven and, driving hard through greasy rain on an ugly, gritty night, with the windshield smeared all the time by fog and thick penetrating mist, reached Deerfield at about ten. Putnam said little as we drove, with our hearts dropping out of us. Five minutes after I got there I knew Johnny was going to die.
I cannot explain this except by saying that I saw it on the faces of the three doctors, particularly Hahn’s. I never met this good doctor again, but I will never forget the way he kept his face averted while he talked, then another glimpse of his blank averted face as he said goodbye, dark with all that he was sparing us, all that he knew would happen to Johnny, and that I didn’t know and Frances didn’t know and that neither of us should know for as long as possible.
Johnny himself was cheerful. They hadn’t told him that we were en route; he jumped up in bed as we came in and murmured, “Well, for goodness’ sake!” I saw that his right eye hung down slightly on his cheek.
Johnny thought that he had polio. He tried to grin.
Frances stayed with him; I talked to the doctors, and later we told her that Johnny had some sort of “pressure” (that was the euphemism the doctors chose to employ at this time) within his skull, and must be operated upon as soon as possible. She took this without flinching, and returned to Johnny to make him comfortable. I could not bear to look at his eye, limp on that cheek that way. Then I got a more or less consecutive account of what had happened.
Dr. Johnson, suspecting nothing so grave as this, had sent Johnny into Greenfield that morning—luckily with a nurse—for his metabolism test. Johnny talked of playing hooky and going to the movies. Then the nurse—good girl!—noticed that he seemed to be stumbling ever so slightly and that when he walked down a corridor or through a door, he brushed the wall on the left side. On closer examination she saw that his eyes were not coordinating; he had a squint. This scared her, she reported the matter to Johnson, Johnson made an optical check and at once called Hahn in, and Hahn took a spinal tap which showed an almost unbelievably heavy pressure in the fluid encasing the brain, as well as the choked optic disks that indicated fierce pressure behind the optic nerve.
That first spinal tap!—the first of many, and spinal taps can be frightening as well as painful. All the other tes
ts!— some of them lasted a full hour, with every reflex in the body being laboriously investigated. For fifteen months, hardly a week passed that Johnny did not have some kind of examination or other; for month after agonizing month there were the bandages and dressings to be changed every day; day after day, with never even the slightest respite, he faced and went through the most exhausting medical procedures. Yet, I give my word on it, no whimper ever came out of Johnny after the first operation, no word of unreasonable protest or appeal, no slightest concession to terror or giving way to misery. In fact, his reactions were by and large the opposite. He got angry sometimes but he never blubbered. Soon he became fascinated, as a bright child would, with his own illness, and particularly with all the techniques the doctors applied—he demanded to know the precise reason for every step both theoretically and in the realm of concrete therapy. He helped the doctors in the most active possible manner and indeed came presently to regard himself with detachment and curiosity almost as another person on whom emergency experiments were being performed. “ I am quite a guinea pig,” he would say.
And the doctors! So many doctors! We had thirty-two or thirty-three—maybe more, including some of the most famous specialists in the world—before the end. Every doctor who dealt with him, except possibly one, every one of those thirty-two or thirty-three doctors came to love him, and I truly think half a dozen would have gladly given their lives to save him. But very soon we discovered several things about doctors. One is that they seldom, if ever, tell you everything. Another is that there is much, even within the confines of a splinter-thin specialty, that they themselves do not know. Let me salute all those doctors. They had the best will in the world, and nothing in the entire province of modern knowledge applied to this particular ailment was left unsearched; indeed we tried some things that had never been tried before, but the frontiers of medicine are in some fields astonishingly limited—not to say unknown—and there are still mysteries in Johnny’s case that no medical man can altogether account for.