CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
in the month before Johnny died, he and Frances had been reading Joshua Liebman’s surprise bestseller, Peace of Mind. Mixing psychoanalytic ideas with can-do Americanism and the teachings of Reform Judaism, Liebman—the thirty-nine-year-old rabbi of Boston’s Temple Israel—sought a solution to the repressions he blamed for the previous half-century of war, revolution, and social turmoil. A lasting peace required individuals who could reckon openly with the powerful emotions that Christianity had for centuries stigmatized, including sensuality, anger, and grief. And Americans, Liebman argued, were poised to usher in this psychically well-adjusted future: because of the country’s traditions of democracy, a more “psychologically mature God idea” lay in their grasp.
Liebman’s was an early mass-market formulation of what would become a commonsensical idea. Rebuilding the world would require more than clearing bomb rubble, demobilizing soldiers, and retooling factories for domestic production. Equally imperative was a psychological reconstruction: the creation of a healthy, self-aware citizenry able to control their emotions rather than conceal them. These were boon years for psychoanalysts, whose ambit expanded from the individual patient to the collective psyche. The threat of atomic warfare only heightened the urgency of the quest. “The greatest prerequisite for peace,” the American president Harry Truman insisted in 1948, “must be sanity—sanity in its broadest sense, which permits clear thinking on the part of all citizens.”
Throughout 1947, John’s Inside U.S.A.—published in May, shortly before Johnny’s Deerfield graduation—dueled with Liebman’s Peace of Mind for the top spot on the bestseller lists. Inside U.S.A., too, partook of the ambient Freudianism. Freud’s apparatus lent itself especially well to the South, John found: “the whole region is a land of paranoia, full of the mentally sick; most Southerners feel a deep necessity to hate something, if necessary even themselves.” But Inside U.S.A. and Peace of Mind shared something more profound: their confidence in the future of America. It was, as John put it, “a lucky country with an almost obsessive belief in the happy ending.”
Harper & Brothers printed half a million copies of Inside U.S.A. That was the largest print run in the history of American publishing, but it was, as it turned out, just a start. Inside U.S.A. was a self-generating publicity machine. John’s portrait of America inevitably provoked Americans to answer back. His characterizations of Houston as a city whose inhabitants thought only of money or of Californians as faddish and cult-ridden incited rafts of articles in the local papers disputing or agreeing with those propositions. Was Indianapolis in fact the dirtiest city in the country, as he’d claimed? He received reams of incensed correspondence on the subject. By the end of the year, the presses were rolling again for a second printing.
Apart from the matter of injured local pride, the reviews of Inside U.S.A. were the best he’d gotten—thousands of them, in nearly every paper in the country. Heavy hitters such as the American historians Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Steele Commager pronounced the book a tour de force, praising Gunther’s gargantuan appetite for facts and personalities, his indefatigable interviewing and jaunty wordsmithing. They relished his optimism about America (which matched their own) and shared his assessment of the nation’s failings (which neither they nor he thought fatal).
Inside U.S.A. wasn’t, Commager conceded, a “three dimensional” book, by which he meant that it didn’t strive, as Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America had, for a larger philosophical point. The book’s critics, few enough but well placed, made the same point less politely. According to Time magazine, Inside U.S.A. was nine hundred–plus pages of fluff, hastily tossed off, “full of impressions passing as insights and facts palmed off as truths.” The New Yorker’s reviewer was more jocular, but the criticism was similar. Gunther wrote without discernment, displayed an “ingenuous amazement at the discovery of commonplaces.” He was like a man bolting a blue-plate special at a railway café, gobbling up impressions without pausing for breath, regurgitating them undigested.
Richard Rovere, the young reporter the New Yorker had sent over to profile John as he was writing Inside U.S.A., had intended to assail him along those lines. But when Rovere took stock of the situation with Johnny, he couldn’t do it. “So you’re the hatchet man,” Johnny had said to him. The more time Rovere spent with John, the more he liked him. Rather than abandoning the profile (which would have hurt John’s feelings), he turned a wry eye on the Gunther phenomenon: his elbow-rubbing with the great and good, his formidable productivity and success, his self-confessed superficiality. “But of course I am an ignoramus,” John told Rovere.
The profile that emerged was gently comical, a portrait of corn-fed, globe-trotting American hubris, the “American century” in book form. “The entire planet is his beat,” Rovere remarked, calling Gunther “one of the half-dozen or so authentic international celebrities.” Slyly riding the line between compliment and mockery, Rovere continued: “he is perhaps the world’s foremost journalist. He is certainly the foremost world journalist.”
How did you get off so easy at the New Yorker? John’s friends ribbed him. For the veteran foreign correspondent Leigh White, an ex-colleague of John’s at the Chicago Daily News, the New Yorker profile was galling. He wrote Rovere an angry letter. “Gunther, to me, is the prototype of The Rewards of Mediocrity, a phenomenon which I think menaces the survival of American society in almost every field.” White continued: “I was pained to find you, of all people, in the New Yorker, of all publications, handling with gloves a subject whose skin is at least as thick as that of a rhinoceros.”
Previously, John had been insulated from the charge of middlebrow mediocrity. His luster had been burnished by his exotic travels, his status as an eyewitness, the interviews he’d bagged, his warnings about the rise of fascism, and the audacity of his analysis (or, at least, of Frances’s analysis). But after the war, middlebrow was a label that increasingly stuck to him, not least because of his success with the two engines of mass-market reading culture in America: the Book-of-the-Month Club (a subscription service that provided a vetted selection of books) and the Reader’s Digest (the largest-circulation periodical in the world). Henceforth, the Reader’s Digest would help to fund John’s research and publish many of his articles. Ten of John’s books were Book-of-the-Month Club selections, a record for an American author. Only Winston Churchill had more.
For people who fancied themselves serious thinkers, both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Reader’s Digest stood for conventional thinking and dumbed-down sentimentalism. These were charges that John, after years of similar criticism from Frances, shrugged off. The waspish reviews in Time and the New Yorker annoyed him, but he’d come to terms, more or less, with his lack of “profundity.” What mattered was influence, not the admiration of the bien-pensants, though if one could have both, all the better.
John took pride in the fact that all across America restless high schoolers and housewives—autodidacts as John had been—were cracking open Inside U.S.A. or the revised edition of Inside Europe, learning about the inner workings of the Tennessee Valley Authority or Stalin’s childhood. Courtesy of the Book-of-the-Month Club sales, he could finally pay Johnny’s doctors.
—
“agnes, who?” john nearly said when she called him in May 1947, shortly after Inside U.S.A. was published. During those months when Johnny seemed to be getting better, he’d started dating Jane Perry, the ex-wife of the reporter Jack Vandercook. She was an editor at the publishing company Duell, Sloan and Pearce. “This is the finest girl I ever met, delicately bred, style, brains, marvelous to look at,” John wrote in his diary. “Of course we will marry, but it may be long delayed.”
It had been more than two years since John had seen either of the Knickerbockers. After Agnes flew to Baltimore to take care of Knick during his treatment at Johns Hopkins, they’d taken their daughters to a ranch in Montana for the summer. Knick had returned to broadcasting, and lecturing, and they’d moved from Dallas to Nyack, New York. It was a full reconciliation.
Knick went to Alcoholics Anonymous and quit drinking. Shortly after Churchill decried the lowering of the “Iron Curtain” across Eastern Europe, Knick and Walter Duranty toured the United States debating the question: “Can Russia Be Part of One World?” Knick was arguing the anti-Communist position, as he always had. Walter was taking Stalin’s side, “full of classical erudition and Bolshevik duplicity,” as Knick put it. It turned out his life really wasn’t over, Knick exclaimed to the Hopkins doctor who’d helped him get sober. To his astonishment, Dorothy had asked him to appear on a television program with her. He’d started writing again; he was lecturing and broadcasting on the radio.
Agnes told John on the phone that she’d read all the reviews of Inside U.S.A. “Oh, if only I hadn’t gone to Baltimore,” she said regretfully when they met for lunch.
—
the month after johnny died, John drew up a new will and helped Frances box up Johnny’s things. His girlfriend Jane said he looked terrible. He was drinking too much and plagued by nightmares. He cried whenever he talked about Johnny. He spent a day reading through his and Frances’s correspondence with Johnny, but that hadn’t made him feel any better. His own letters were so brief, so businesslike: he’d arrived in Mexico, the food was peppery, off to Guatemala tomorrow, here are some stamps from Brazil, All my love. By contrast, each one of Frances’s letters to Johnny seemed to him a treasure.
He took the car north, first to Connecticut to see Clare Boothe Luce. Her husband Henry, Clare told him, had never once mentioned Ann’s name after her death; she was only his stepdaughter, but still, she was Clare’s child. At one forty-five a.m., Clare came to John’s room, dressed in a negligé, and woke him up with a knock on the door. They talked for three hours about Johnny and Ann. She’d nearly lost her mind after Ann died, Clare said. Maybe Johnny had died to make John a better person, she hazarded.
That habit—of looking for the compensation in every loss—wasn’t doing John any good. Makes God a son of a bitch, said Red Lewis, when John mentioned Clare’s remark to him. John had stopped to see Red in Williamstown before driving on to Deerfield. He wandered through the empty campus, wondering whether they’d been right to send Johnny there. He proposed to Boyden the idea Frances had about endowing a prize in math or physics in honor of Johnny—she’d wanted something more “alive” than the usual memorial chimes or hospital bed. It was unconventional, Boyden replied. He’d have to think about it.
It was a hot night, and John could have driven directly to Twin Farms, but instead, he went to the little inn at the county seat, in Greenfield. He didn’t feel like talking to anybody. Johnny had been dead exactly a month. He ate a steak and drank three Planter’s Punches. He’d brought Johnny’s papers along with him and spent the night putting them in order.
When John got to Twin Farms the next evening, Jimmy was in one of his moods, talking a blue streak. He’d gotten the harebrained idea that Dorothy should run for the presidency in 1948. It was a question of America’s position in the world, Jimmy said. Think of the humane ideals the country could embody! A woman president at this moment was an absolute necessity. Clare Luce could nominate her. She’d introduce Dorothy as a wife and a mother who’d sacrificed one son to war, and who believed in peace. A wife—indeed, three times over, Dinah remarked when Jimmy wrote her on the subject. Dorothy’s acceptance speech would be so grand that she’d sail right into office.
“Very well,” said Dorothy’s husband Max the next day. “I go to Reno and not be in the way!”
I’ve been having trouble with my three Jewish doctors, Jimmy told John. Where in Vermont had Jimmy managed to find three Jewish doctors? John wondered. Did Jimmy have his doctors coming up from New York?
No! Jimmy exclaimed. Freud, Einstein, and Marx.
Jimmy had lost his faith in materialism, once and for all. There were mysteries beyond the physical universe. Think, he said, blue eyes glittering, what the war had shown about the power of electronics! Jimmy’s hair had gone white and he’d gotten thin. He was up at all hours of the night. Dorothy cabled Dinah in London to get the prescription for Jimmy’s sleeping pills.
—
those august 1947 days in Vermont took on a languorous shape. John stayed over at Jimmy’s house. They woke up late and talked until it was time for lunch. Then they went over to Dorothy’s. Her house was only four hundred feet away from Jimmy’s, but John insisted on driving the distance. During the afternoon, they walked in Dorothy’s garden or meandered through town or played with the children—Jimmy’s two daughters were there, and so was Dorothy’s Michael, seventeen now and more obstreperous than ever. “I won’t have foreigners fucking my mother,” Michael shouted one night after a dispute with Max.
In the evenings, John played chess with Max while Jimmy and Dorothy debated. “Slugging talkfests” John called them, marveling at how they kept at it night after night. Dorothy was horrified that the Soviets were extending their tentacles across Eastern Europe and thought no one was taking it seriously enough. Jimmy objected to the way she talked, as if she were addressing a mass meeting of twenty thousand nincompoops. Jimmy’s conversation was impossibly erudite. “Was Plato the first Fascist?” he asked. He burst into song, delivering an aria from Tristan first in Italian, then English. He wanted to talk about the time-space continuum.
How much do you believe in free will? John asked Dorothy and Jimmy. Put a percentage on it, he challenged them.
Fifty-fifty said Jimmy. Half free will, half determinism. Dorothy demurred.
There were questions that John couldn’t rid himself of. Why was it so often a person’s essential organ that failed them? Say, Beethoven’s ears or Milton’s eyes. Or Johnny’s brain.
Why had Johnny died? he asked.
“He’s still alive,” Dorothy chimed in. She’d already written John with that idea. The only thing that comforted her when her stepson died was the idea that “life is transitional between lives.” She quoted Whitman’s lines about immortality: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”
That wasn’t much consolation, John thought. Not for him or Frances, and certainly not for Johnny.
Jimmy didn’t have an answer as to why Johnny had died, but he was certain it had nothing to do with punishing John or Frances. “To think that is to become insane,” he declared. Besides, he added, you can’t measure a life by its duration.
As to Clare’s idea about Johnny’s death making John a better person, Max had a thought. “Maybe you don’t want it to make you better, but it will,” he offered.
John stayed for a week, and then proceeded up through the White Mountains to meet Jane at her family’s summer place. After he’d gone, Jimmy wrote Frances. John had talked about her plans to go to India and Palestine, and her ideas about making peace between Jews and Arabs. Jimmy suggested that she call on the Egyptian diplomat Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the newly formed Arab League, who was staying at the Plaza Hotel. He promised her a letter of introduction to the Grand Mufti when she went to Jerusalem.
John’s visit had been a solace for them all, Jimmy told Frances. “I need hardly tell you that we talked out some trillions of words between us, and explored the unfathomable mysteries of all our concatenated existences for the first time in our lives without evasion.”
—
on the fifteenth of August 1947, a few days after John left Twin Farms, Nehru raised the tricolor flag of an independent India—saffron, white, and green—above the battlements of the Red Fort in Delhi. The “man of destiny,” as Frances had teasingly called him, was India’s first prime minister. Frances didn’t attend the celebration that the India League of America hosted in New York for the occasion. Nor did Jimmy. Instead, he sent a message, which, despite its gloomy tenor, was read out at the banquet. Pray for India, he admonished: “the religions, separately, and together, should pray, for the dangers ahead are many.”
Jimmy had cut back on his drinking and he resolved to stop smoking, too. He couldn’t say that he was feeling normal, though. At night, he stared at his illuminated globe until it became almost real. It was as if his consciousness had broken free of his body and was roaming the world. He could see things he hadn’t consciously known before, he told Dorothy.
He was having terrible premonitions about India. The British were cutting and running, on their way out executing a hasty political partition of the subcontinent into two independent nations: India and Pakistan, conceived as a new Muslim state. But how could that possibly work? There were Muslims whose families had lived for generations within the new boundaries of India and Hindus and Sikhs similarly situated within the borders of Pakistan. Jimmy followed the news with dread, tuning in to the BBC, which came in via Toronto. However bad he’d thought the violence was going to be, the reality was still worse. Stabbings in the streets of Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta and retaliations in Punjab, where tin-helmeted gangs of men were setting houses and shops ablaze. Everywhere, millions of refugees fled for their lives, east to west, west to east. Whole districts burned and looted. The bodies of children, men, and women stacked up on the sides of the roads.
It was imperative he go to India, Jimmy decided. “Gandhi is going to be assassinated within six months and by a Hindu,” he told Dorothy.
He’d made another decision, too. He wanted Dinah back. Without her, he was a “cave of winds.” He wrote Dinah to ask if he could visit her in London. Then he turned up at her flat—hours late as usual—with the proposition that they reconcile. She’d been too young when they married and he’d expected far too much from her, he acknowledged. He’d either be celibate or remarry her: those were his two options. Think it over while I’m away, he said, before she had a chance to reply.
The truth, Dinah wrote a friend, was that another man was in love with her and she wasn’t sure she could endure the “Wagnerian mists” of life with Jimmy. Maybe it was just that she didn’t have the strength to withstand his delusions. When he went on and on about how the “forces of history” were gusting through the living room, she couldn’t help but feel the draft.
En route to Delhi, Jimmy stopped in Karachi, in the new state of Pakistan. His sympathies had been with those—like Gandhi and Nehru—who favored the preservation of the Indian subcontinent as a single independent nation. Now, as the struggle over Kashmir raged, he saw the other side. It was a reprise of what had happened in Jerusalem two decades earlier. In the Herald Tribune, Jimmy detailed the “Pakistan case” as its officials presented it: their fear that India wanted to “strangle” Pakistan at its birth, evidenced by Nehru’s bid to hold hostage the entirety of the Raj’s military stores and the funds owed Pakistan from the Reserve Bank of India until Kashmir was restored to India.
Though Jimmy hedged his reports with disclaimers about not taking the Pakistani version of the case as “gospel,” his conclusion in the Herald Tribune was unsparing. “India wishes to destroy Pakistan as rapidly as possible,” he wrote. It was an explosive assessment, all the more troubling given his well-known sympathies for the Indian freedom movement. With the matter of Kashmir pending before the newly organized United Nations, the Indian government was anxiously monitoring international opinion. When Jimmy got to Delhi, Nehru summoned him.
Jimmy was to appear at the prime minister’s house on the York Road at seven o’clock in the evening. Nehru was living in a large bungalow, its grounds crowded with refugee tents. The prime minister looked tired and agitated. Point by point, he rebutted Jimmy’s article, getting angrier as he proceeded. Nehru was red-faced, the tendons of his neck protruding. After two hours of dressing Jimmy down, Nehru proffered the carrot that accompanied the stick. He’d arranged for Jimmy to see Gandhi.
Gandhi was staying at Birla House, a sandstone mansion that belonged to an admirer. It was there, in the walled, arbored garden where Gandhi held his evening prayers, that Jimmy first saw him. The Mahatma was seated on a red sandstone pavilion. Wrapped in homespun, his fast for Hindu-Muslim unity just ended, he looked frail.
They held the interview in a high-ceilinged and rectangular room that gave onto the garden through French doors. In the corner was Gandhi’s simple cot with white sheets. As Jimmy entered, Gandhi’s secretary instructed him to take off his shoes. The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his wife were there. Chagrined, Jimmy muttered about the hole in his sock.
There were questions he needed to ask Gandhi—fundamental questions about the future of the world. “How can a righteous battle produce a catastrophic result?” Jimmy wanted to know. He was thinking of the war against fascism that had ended in the threat of atomic annihilation. Fretting about the hole in his sock, he paced up and down the blue carpet with Gandhi and then sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, talking of the congruence of ends and means. People wandered past the windows, peering in.
“Renunciation is itself the law of life,” Gandhi told Jimmy. After an hour of talking—about Gandhi’s edition of the Bhagavad Gita, the nature of power, the superiority of religion over science, the failure of the United Nations—Jimmy realized he’d already stayed too long. “Well, this is more than I had bargained for,” Gandhi said. “Do you want to come back again tomorrow?” They continued the conversation the following day.
When Jimmy next saw Gandhi a few days later, the Mahatma was in the garden of Birla House, walking toward him across the grass. The evening was brisk, and Gandhi, draped in white shawls, was on his way to the prayer meeting. Jimmy didn’t see the khaki-clad man pushing his way through the crowd. The assassin—a Hindu enraged by the Partition, as Jimmy had foreseen—fired three shots into Gandhi’s belly. The gunshots were quieter and duller than one might have expected.
A couple of yards away from the dying Gandhi, Jimmy, horror-struck, bent double against the brick wall of the garden. In his nightmares about an assassination, he’d thrust an arm or his whole body in front of Gandhi to avert the murder. In fact, he’d failed to save the Mahatma though he would have given his own life to do so. In the Birla House garden, Jimmy’s fingers were burning and, like a child, he put them in his mouth. Later, he’d realize there were blisters on his fingers, as if his own hands bore the shame of his failure to act.
He didn’t go to view Gandhi’s body. It would have been unbearable to see him covered in blood. “How can such things be?” Jimmy asked himself, over and over.
—
after johnny’s death, letters came in by the hundreds: grief-stricken notes from John and Frances’s friends; memories of Johnny as a child from the camp nurse; awkward, tardy missives from boys he’d known. Even people who were never at a loss for words confessed they didn’t know what to write. “In the presence of such grief silence is best,” wrote the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. It was no different from the situation when Judy had died two decades earlier. “I’m terrified of what life can do to us, and will,” Mickey Hahn wrote Frances, “the only thing to say is the rest of what I feel, which is only that I love you.”
After his week at Twin Farms, John returned to New York intending to write something about Johnny. He and Frances had discussed the idea of a memoir when he visited her in Madison. John’s thought was to produce something for relatives and friends, the sort of memorial tract that circulated privately. But as he outlined the book, he abandoned the conventions of the traditional “in memoriam” volume. Rather, he would relate, in clinical detail, the story of Johnny’s illness and death. The relentless advance of the tumor, the short period of remission, Johnny’s undiminished personhood, the fact that he hadn’t become a “vegetable” as the doctors once predicted. His bravery in the face of suffering.
It became the story of how an individual—a boy—confronted death. John started the book just after Christmas 1947. By February, he’d sent the manuscript to a few friends: Dorothy; Bill Shirer; the editor Lewis Gannett; and their family physician, Cornelius Traeger, who’d helped them manage Johnny’s illness. Was it something he should publish? he asked them. Dr. Traeger thought it was a mistake—he disapproved of all the medical stuff, it was too personal—but everyone else who read it urged him to go ahead. According to Dorothy, it had the “purging quality of genuine tragedy.”
Frances gave John her notes about Johnny’s sickness, corrected his typescript, and registered her objections about several details, including John’s description of his visits with Johnny after the divorce. They’d made the decision to include extracts from Johnny’s diaries and letters, lightly edited. Somewhere along the way, she decided to write her own chapter, too. It took the form of an afterword. John recounted the events in a spare style, anguished and dignified; Johnny’s own words gave readers a measure of his character; and Frances’s afterword tried to make sense of what had happened to them all.
People tried to tell her that it was God’s will, or meant to be, that there was a compensation for the loss. Maybe Johnny would have put his scientific talents to bad use. She’d prayed to God constantly during his illness but didn’t believe that God had anything to do with it. What had gone wrong was a single cell, mutating out of control. That was nothing she could grieve about. Her grief, rather, focused on the fact that Johnny wasn’t there to sail his boat or lie on the beach or talk about Freud and the Oedipus complex. That he wouldn’t go to Harvard as he’d planned or marry or have a child of his own. That he wouldn’t finish out the experiment she’d started and he’d picked up: to create a new sort of human being, “an aware person,” as she put it, “a sound individual, adequate to life anywhere on earth.” Most of all, her regret was that she—they—hadn’t loved him enough.
Just to say that she’d failed him, as she did, needed explaining. Of course, Johnny knew they loved him. Still, they’d sent him away to boarding school when he didn’t want to go. They’d divorced. They’d lived while he died. If only other parents could take a lesson from their story. Not to be so impatient with their children. Not to be bored. “I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that!”
How to carry on after the death of a child was a question, Frances recognized, that the war had forced on many parents. Her answer was a counterintuitive one: not to turn away from life, but to love it more. That meant, she wrote, “obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy.” It was a prescription for a kind of world citizenship—“caring more and more about people, at home and abroad, all over the earth.”
You told a story, but Frances has written the inside of her heart, Jane commented to John when she read the typescript. The afterword was marvelous, emotional, real. Only a woman could have written it. John had been searching for meaning, Jane said; but Frances knew what she thought.
—
frances and john called it “Johnny’s book,” which was how Cass Canfield and their friends started to refer to it, too. Given the contention in their marriage about the ownership of ideas, “Johnny’s book” marked a sort of truce. Under the title Death Be Not Proud, the opening line of John Donne’s Sonnet X, Harper & Brothers in February 1949 published all three pieces—John’s, Johnny’s, and Frances’s. For Donne, the phrase “Death Be Not Proud” had conveyed a religious belief in immortality. The memoir, by contrast, represented a bid for a secular afterlife. The volume was slim with a plain cream cover, unornamented except for a small design of a dove amid branches. Inside was a frontispiece of Johnny aged fifteen in three-quarters profile, sober, his blond hair parted on the side. He was wearing a tweed jacket and necktie, off for his first year at Deerfield. On the book’s jacket and in all the advertisements was a notice that both John and Harper’s felt necessary. Profits from the sale of the book would go to cancer research for children; neither the author nor the publisher would benefit.
To air publicly such an intimate story of sickness and suffering was unheard of. There were Victorian autobiographical tracts, often privately printed, that dealt with the death of a child as God’s unfathomable will. People who’d had polio or gone blind or deaf occasionally wrote their reminiscences for publication, accounts of triumphs against adversity such as Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (1903). There were few enough of these kinds of books, a couple dozen. Narratives of illness were still rarer. As Virginia Woolf had lamented a few decades earlier, there was hardly any secular writing about illness. It “has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” she noted. The standard source on American autobiography counts only fourteen titles dealing with illness out of the more than six thousand memoirs published before 1945. None of those are chronicles of cancer, of the twists and turns of treatment; none of them end in death; none are by a parent and about a child.
Was the book too revealing? Was it in fact indecent? The Ladies’ Home Journal ran a long preview of Death Be Not Proud, accompanied by a full-page gouache illustration of a boy with a bandaged head and a snapshot of Johnny and Frances on the beach before he got sick. The magazine was deluged with correspondence; one in every five letters objected to the baring of such a story. What good could possibly come from relating these ghoulish details? protested one woman whose husband had a brain tumor. Some of the book’s reviewers felt similarly. The fact that the proceeds of the book were donated to cancer research helped to diffuse the whiff of bad taste. Nevertheless, it was like eavesdropping on a family tragedy—embarrassing as well as painful for all concerned. “The book is just as breathtaking and shocking as would be a similar confession from a new neighbor, a complete stranger, who suddenly told you his family’s most secret tragedy,” judged the Hartford Times’s critic.
Then the readers’ letters started to arrive. They came by the thousands, telling their stories in the spare, anguished manner of John’s account. It was as if he’d given them not just permission but a template for how to write about their experiences. They sent photos of their dead children, the backs of the pictures a fuzzy black where they were peeled out of scrapbooks.
—
dear mr. gunther, wrote the mother.
My little girl was a clever child, affectionate, and uncomplaining. For months, we made the trip from New Bedford to Boston, sixty miles each way, every day, for treatment. Margaret had a dimple in her left cheek and gray-blue eyes. She would have been eight on her next birthday.
At the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Dr. Sidney Farber was accomplishing miracles with leukemia, we’d been told. My husband and I took Margaret there, to the new clinic. There were two doctors, a nurse and a technician. They were using new medicines, among them aminopterin, and new techniques in transfusion. Margaret’s spleen was enlarged and her liver, too.
The drugs reduced white blood cells and the swellings in the glands and for the first few weeks we could hardly believe our luck. Margaret was one of the fortunate ones! She was almost back to normal, smiling and playing. But the drugs proved toxic, and she felt nauseous all the time. She stopping eating. She’d had two pigtails, but her hair started to fall out—it was the drugs, the doctors said—so I just combed it straight back.
The doctors had warned us about hemorrhaging. It started by epistaxis, and then, she was bleeding from the mouth and nostrils. Carefully, with tweezers, I used Oxycel gauze to pack my daughter’s nose two or three times a week, which kept the nose bleeds in check. Her entire body was covered in reddish purple blemishes. On her left cheek bone there was a spot. Your little girl is the worst bleeder we’ve ever seen, the doctors told us.
After four months of treatment, the skin hung in dry folds on her buttocks and when the nurse appeared with the needle, she screamed and cried. I came to dread those injections almost as much as she did.
Margaret realized she was sick with leukemia, like the other children in the clinic. Some of them had lymphosarcoma and there was a little girl there, three years old, whose head had swollen to the size of a balloon; her eyes were bruised black and she couldn’t open them any longer. The children died in little bunches, more and more of them as the winter came closer. Eddie is better, he’s gone home, and doesn’t need any more treatment, I told Margaret. But I knew that she saw through me. She realized she might also die.
All those mothers in the clinic tending their doomed children: sometimes it seemed too much. Margaret was too weak to walk but she tried, especially when she knew people were watching her. I carried her whenever I could.
The trips to Boston took up a whole day, and I hardly had time for my other children. The older two read to Margaret when they came home from school. They sat by her bedside. She loved stories and presents. We would have bought her anything. When we said, Margaret, what would you like? she tried to reassure us by asking for toys. But she didn’t have the strength to play with them.
We took her back to the hospital just after New Year’s because her hemoglobin was so low. The doctors put an IV in a superficial ankle vein that evening. The next morning, they’d do the transfusion. My husband was donating the blood. It would be best to do a full transfusion, the doctors said, removing all of her blood and putting in 5000 cc’s of his, but she likely won’t survive it, so we’ll do only a partial one.
She surprised the doctors by dying that night. I am sorry for writing you such a long letter, Margaret’s mother told John. I hadn’t intended to. There is so much I haven’t said, but you see that when I read about your Johnny, I had to write.
—
mostly mothers wrote, but occasionally fathers. Their children were almost exactly like Johnny, they said. Frances and John put into words what they’d suffered. They’d been sitting by their children’s hospital beds, too shocked to cry until they read Death Be Not Proud, and now the tears had come. “You see, your story was mine.” A mother’s sorrow had an apparently universal, essential quality: the Pietà, Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. And yet, they hadn’t been able to talk about their grief before. My minister has told me that it is time to put it behind me. Or: Don’t you ever feel bitter? they asked. “I expect you did, but I suppose that doesn’t help does it?”
A mother whose baby died of pneumonia cut “A Word from Frances” out of the book and put it in her Bible with her baby’s footprints. One father ordered twenty copies of Death Be Not Proud to send to his relatives; his son had polio. Parents felt guilty that they couldn’t afford more treatments and private doctors, or they regretted they had subjected their children to painful operations. Their sons had died in Japanese P.O.W. camps or in the fighting at Guadalcanal and if only they could have been there to comfort them at the end.
It wasn’t just bereaved parents who wrote. Mothers sent letters to say that they’d taken Frances’s advice to heart, enlisting her in the ever-higher set of expectations of motherhood created in the postwar world. They were trying not to be so short-tempered or critical. It wasn’t enough to feed and clothe their children, they’d realized. They had to attend to their sons’ and daughters’ psychological needs, so that their children could grow up to be sound and happy individuals. I am going to see a psychiatrist so I don’t fail my son, reported one woman.
For years, the letters continued to come. Deerfield got mailbags full, too. Visitors arrived asking to see the church where the commencement was held so that they could imagine the scene of Johnny’s graduation for themselves. John tried to acknowledge all the letters, though after a while, it was Jane who read them because he couldn’t face it. They were too sad. Or impertinent. Why don’t you and Frances reconcile? readers inquired. Tune in to the International Lutheran Hour “Bringing Christ to the Nations” on Sunday. Cancer is caused by reheated vegetable oil. Or by divorce. The “separation of his procreators,” judged one California woman, would certainly have caused a brain lesion in a “spirit so marvellous and rare as was Johnny’s.”
Above all else, though, readers wrote to thank them for sharing Johnny—for bringing him to life, for explaining the value of an existence, even one cut so short. It was John’s best book, Dorothy felt certain, for it demonstrated what “a human life could be.” Death Be Not Proud could have been “one more bleat in a slaughterhouse,” as another reporter friend of John’s put it. But it wasn’t, because it transcended one family’s private misery to become a public chronicle, much the way that Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, published in English in 1952, would do. “Thank God there are people like you who still realize the infinite value of one soul when the world is devising new means of mass killing,” one woman wrote Frances.
After a half-century that had claimed, by conservative estimates, more than seventy million lives through war and genocide, the idea that the dignity of the individual needed protecting was a common enough preoccupation. At the newly founded United Nations, delegates were debating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, proclaimed an inalienable right to live free from want and oppression, and—still more novel—to develop fully one’s own personality.
It was this aim that the Gunthers and their friends had in their sights. For decades, they’d been scrutinizing themselves and each other. Subjects that more orthodox Freudians would have seen as the terrain of the unconscious they treated as problems to be solved through frank talk and rational analysis. Among their legacies, then, was a democratic language of plain speaking about taboo subjects. “Little that was human,” as Dorothy put it, “was alien to us.” Defending the dignity of the individual, to them, meant providing a full accounting of experiences that had previously been thought beyond words. Together, they would help to bring new realms of private life into public view.
—
john married jane in Chicago in March 1948, and when they returned to New York, he brought her to meet Frances, as he’d promised he would. Jane was beautiful and kind, Frances thought, and very much like the sort of girl she’d hoped John would marry. Jane would have been a very good stepmother to Johnny. She made Jane a present of a silk faille evening coat she’d once treasured and a large silver serving dish she’d always imagined giving to Johnny’s bride. Jane and John were off to Europe for their honeymoon.
Seeing John happily married to Jane was like giving up a possession one had long ago prized very much, Frances told Jimmy. She was preparing to leave America herself and contemplating, she said, a life without possessions. Maybe she’d even get to India at last; after Johnny got sick, she’d barely communicated with Jawahar. Jimmy had seen Nehru, he reported, and mentioned Frances’s name. Nehru “glowed at me for a moment like a live coal,” he wrote.
Frances wanted to move to Palestine, but because of her work with the Bergson Boys, she was refused permission. In Madison, she tried to get to work on a book about Arab-Hebrew relations, but her old troubles with writing returned worse than ever. She read and read. You read like other people drink, she lectured herself. Her reporter friends had all had their say. “You must say yours.” She considered electroshock therapy or hypnosis to jolt her out of her frozen state.
After the founding of Israel in the summer of 1948, she sold the Inside House and packed her things, putting aside her old black suitcase with its papers from Barnard—her college essays in anthropology, her little pocket diaries, her masses of notes for unfinished stories and plays—and a packet marked judy. In Jerusalem, she settled into a flat on Ramban Street in the Old City with a terrace that overlooked the hills.
Jimmy’s letter about Death Be Not Proud reached her there. He could hardly read the pages of Johnny’s book through his tears. “You are the mother of a hero, and I think that it makes a difference in the world,” he told her. “Many people will be strengthened because of your brave boy.”
—
in the summer of 1949, Knick left for Indonesia. Dutch colonial rule, interrupted during the war by the Japanese occupation, was finally limping to an end. In a belated bid for favorable publicity, the Dutch government invited a party of eleven American correspondents to tour the archipelago. They were promised “complete freedom of action” as well as an interview with the nationalist leader, Sukarno.
En route to Indonesia from Amsterdam, the correspondents traveled a roundabout itinerary, made necessary because Nehru—expressing solidarity with Indonesian nationalists—had forbidden the Dutch national airline, KLM, from landing in India. From Amsterdam, they flew to Cairo, Aden, and the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, then a British colony. Mauritius to Java was another fifteen to seventeen hours, the longest flight any commercial airliner undertook at that time. The plane would arrive in Batavia with fuel enough for only a few more hours in the air.
It seemed to Knick that he was the only journalist aboard who was actually intent upon work. The others were drunk most of the time on cheap native rum, lollygagging in bed, and nursing their hangovers. If only he hadn’t wasted his time with drink all those years! He might have been able to retire by now. But at least he’d gotten the chance to redeem himself, both as a journalist and as a husband. He and Agnes were finally happy again. “I need to beg you to forgive the brutal way I treated you,” he wrote her from Cairo. “I treasure every tiny glimpse you give me of yourself.”
He was back in the headlines, warning about the Soviet Union’s expansionism, opining about Sukarno whom he thought wasn’t a strong enough leader to forestall the advance of Communism through Indonesia. In his broadcasts, he was sharply critical of both the Dutch (as feeble) and the Indonesian nationalists (as Red). To Agnes he exclaimed: “It is fun to be back in the fore.”
On the way home, the correspondents telegraphed Nehru for special permission to fly over India so that the return journey wouldn’t be so arduous. Nehru agreed to make an exception for them. The correspondents’ plane was fifteen miles north of Bombay when it crashed on Ghatkopar Hill. The rain had been ferocious—a monsoon—and the KLM “Constellation,” a big plane with a rounded belly and a high nose, was circling the airfield for an hour and a half attempting to land. The wingtip of the plane, said witnesses, hit a rock on the hilltop. After that, the plane went down in a shower of sparks. Knick was dead at the age of fifty-one.
Before he boarded the plane in Batavia, Knick had been joking around. He’d recorded his weekly broadcast for the New York station WOR and sent it on an earlier flight.
I’ve provided the world with an unparalleled opportunity for posthumous correspondence, he remarked.