American Stoic

DEATH OF A MAN (181 pp.)--Lael Tucker Wertenbaker--Random House ($3.50).

Charles Christian Wertenbaker was a member of one of Virginia's grand old families, an able journalist (on and off from 1931 to 1948 with FORTUNE, LIFE and TIME), an occasional novelist (To My Father, The Death of Kings), a big man with a strong appetite for good living. This is his widow's story from the time he learned, in the fall of 1954, that he had cancer of the lower bowel until, less than four months later, he committed suicide, at 53, by slashing his wrists with a razor handed to him by his wife.

The book is painful and embarrassing on many counts. It asks the reader to share what Lael Tucker Wertenbaker calls her "abstract joy in the quality of his death," after which her "winter-white skin turned quite black and stayed dark for two days." It reports every intimate clinical detail of the pain, distress and hopelessness that afflict the victim of terminal cancer. As such, it tends to force into silence critics who may feel that they have been invited to share a private rite that Lael Tucker created about her dying husband--but who have doubts about its public validity.

Blood & Champagne. Lael Tucker, herself a reporter and novelist (Lament for Four Virgins), has told her story with literary skill, and much of it will hit home to readers who neither knew nor cared about Charlie Wertenbaker--the anxious visits to doctors, the peering at X rays, the struggle to live with the truth, the flight from France, where the Wertenbakers lived, to New York for an exploratory operation, the futilities of hospital routine in the face of a dead certainty. The operation only confirmed the death sentence and, unwilling to live as "less than a whole man," Wertenbaker collected a large supply of narcotics and returned to die with his family in Ciboure on France's lovely Basque coast. Following this account, few readers will fail to be moved by the pathos of a middle-aged couple who can suddenly no longer say, "When we are old ..."

But it soon becomes clear that these are not ordinary people. No ordinary widow would recall in print that on the night before the journey to the hospital, "weary, and suddenly very weak as he was, Wert made love to me. It was simple and mutual and profound."

The sentence has a Hemingway ring, and not by chance. Social historians could do worse than examine this obituary for evidence of how Hemingway has influenced a whole generation of child actors who have tried to live in the image of his heroes. The book is shot through with the sentimental stoicism of the Hemingway man, and with the hedonist worship of the "art of living," which calls for everything just so--the old-fashioneds must have a touch of honey, the mustache scissors must be of 18th century French make, even the final, fatal razor must be a Rolls.

The cult of death is the other side of the cult of life, as the Hemingway people's worship of the bull ring suggests (it was perhaps no real mistake in identity when, Lael Tucker notes with pleasure, her husband once was mistaken for "Papa" Hemingway at Spain's Pamplona ring). And so a story that is often deeply moving is also overlaid with words and gestures that have the air of gruesome parody, as when Lael Tucker says to her husband in the last moments: "I love you I love you please die." Or when Wertenbaker with one hand holds his bleeding surgical wound (an abscess had formed soon) and with the other twirls a bottle of champagne in a cooler--Bollinger '47.

Toasts & Hubris. The book is crowded with friends who somehow all sound alike. Novelist John (The Wall) Hersey sets the note when he says ("tightly") by way of farewell: "You make me want to write!" and adds in a letter: "My dear, calm friend! . . . You are noble . . . You manage to make a kind of dance of it." Not all will want to follow the last steps of the dreadful dance, when Lael Tucker's second husband (whom she divorced to marry Wertenbaker) visits the dying man and sitting before the fire says: "You are the best . . . Tell me what you want me to be or do."

With fierce, proprietary propaganda,

Lael Tucker pleads a moral cause: a kind of private euthanasia, her husband's "right to die as he wished to, when he chose." She knows that this claim is based on pride: several times during the last painful months, the Wertenbakers gaily toasted what they called their hubris, a word which they thought defined their own gallant pagan defiance of fate. Each reader will have to judge the moral issue for himself; the real significance lies in the fact that, in this book, the issue is only seen in terms of responsibility to oneself and to other human beings, never in terms of responsibility to God. Readers may salute Charles Wertenbaker's attempt to live and die courageously according to his lights; but some may also feel that ultimately this courage was a pathetic and a lonely thing.

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