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Death Be Not Proud
John Gunther

Two young writers sent me some writing samples. They don't know one another. They went to different colleges. But they seemed to have had the same writing instructor --- never have I seen pages with more description. Really, it was as if someone had told them: “A noun is naked without an adjective in front of it.”

You can read writing like this, but what you're really doing, I submit, is Watching Someone Write. It's like: “Look at me, folks, I'm typing! Out of all the adjectives in the dictionary, I'm reaching deep....thinking hard....choosing this one. Yes!”

And then it's on to the next, over and over again: writing as “Groundhog Day”. And let's not start with the adverbs. And the passive verb forms. And the philosophical conclusions as buttons on anecdotes.

I used to teach writing. Everything I had to communicate took maybe two minutes. As follows: What you're aiming for is what George Orwell called “prose like a window pane” --- that is, prose the reader doesn't notice. Your goal is to put the reader in the room, to involve the reader with the people you're writing about. The way to do that: subject verb object, subject verb object. Adjectives when absolutely necessary. Adverbs never. Why? Because you want momentum, you want your reader moving forward, forward, so his/her first reaction at the end is, “I could have read more.” But there is no “more” because you have ruthlessly cut every superfluous word. Listen to Isaac Babel: “No iron can strike the heart with as much force as a period in exactly the right place.”

That's my lecture, and it never changes because it never needs to. De Maupassant. Babel. Hemingway. Thomas Harris in “Silence of the Lambs.” Jean Rhys. Andre Dubus. Storytellers, all --- and better writers for it.

You can talk until you're hoarse and they're nodding agreement, then they go off and write exactly as they did before. So, clearly, telling isn't the way to teach. Showing is. That is, getting writers who want to do it better --- and, these days, who doesn't need to write? And who wouldn't benefit by writing better? --- to read a book that is a model of clear, cogent, exciting writing.

End of rant. Start of review.

“Death Be Not Proud” could have been the worst book ever written. Consider: John Gunther, Jr. loses his only son to a brain tumor in 1947, when the boy is just 17. And Johnny was no ordinary boy --- he was brilliant, caring, funny. The kind of kid about whom, after his death, people say, “He was loved by everyone he ever met.”

And that's just the summary. In fact, this kid was off the charts. He did original thinking in mathematics and wrote to Einstein --- and Einstein wrote back to encourage him. Unable to attend his boarding school because of his tumor, he got all his work done, aced his college admissions tests and would have gone to Harvard had he lived. And, through his 15-month ordeal of operations and treatments and diets and doctors and hope and despair, he never showed his parents how much he was afraid.

Here's how amazing: When his surgeon told Johnny he had a brain tumor, his immediate response was “Do my parents know this? How shall we break it to them?”

Imagine having a kid like that. Your only kid. And then sitting down and typing 150 pages about him.

Only the geezers among you will recognize the author, but John Gunther was, in his day, a megastar journalist. Just after World War II, he published a book called “Inside Europe,” and it was so successful he went on to write a series of “Inside” books. His novels flopped, but no matter. He was a born journalist --- he knew how to tell a story with style and economy.

And “Death Be Not Proud” is the proof.

“Johnny came home for the Christmas holiday in 1945, and he looked fit and fine.” That's the first sentence of Chapter One, and it's a model. You know the boy is going to die. You know you're in for an emotional wringer. But you also know this father is going to serve it up straight, adult to adult --- he's inviting you to rise to his level.

Big ideas? They're offered as sparingly as adverbs: “What I am trying to tell, however fumblingly and inadequately, is the story of a gallant fight for life, against the most hopeless odds, that should convey a relevance, a message, a lesson perhaps, to anyone who has ever faced ill health.” What he doesn't need to say: That's you, dear reader, that's all of you, later if not today.

This is the story of an emergency --- can the Gunthers find a cure for the tumor before it takes their son? --- and so the writing is, correctly, terse. Over this non-fiction medical thriller Gunther lays a story just as exciting: Johnny's effort to preserve his intellect, to make his mind triumph over his body.

Of course there is no hope. Of course --- cruelly --- Johnny gets better. Several times. Only to relapse. Each time, Gunther just lays it out. You can feel him fraying as he writes, reliving how he frayed as he lived it. But he didn't crack then and so, if only for accuracy, he won't crack now.

There is a scene in this book that should be required reading for everyone who ever has to write. It occurs at the end, when Johnny leaves his bed in New York to attend graduation at Deerfield Academy in Western Massachusetts. He's desperately ill --- he'll die just eight days later --- but he's determined to walk into chapel with his class and grasp his diploma in his left hand, just like his friends.. Gunther takes you through that walk, step by step, the chapel rocking with cheers --- good luck forgetting those pages.

And then the end. The doctors are --- let Gunther have this metaphor --- “helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of death." The world contracts. Now it's mother, father, son, in the saddest of scenes:

Johnny died at 11:02 P.M. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat-like curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little by little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief, Death took him.”

An epilogue follows, but that's it, really. What can I say? Emotion doesn't come cleaner. You could throw a coin against those sentences and it would bounce back --- there's not a weak thought, an excess word.

“Death Be Not Proud” was published in 1949. It isn't likely to go out of print any time soon. The saga of a boy dying? Sure, it grabs you and holds you. But that's because the broken, grieving man who wrote it was so professional he got out of the way and just... told the story.

--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To buy “Death Be Not Proud” from Amazon.com, click here.

Copyright 2007 by Head Butler Inc.