Books: Death, Be Not Proud

ERIC by DORIS LUND 345 pages. Lippincott. $7.95.

It should be recorded—not in the spirit of sneering at misfortune—that books about slow expiration from leukemia have become something of a literary genre. In his best novel, Blood of the Lamb, Peter DeVries wrote obliquely about his daughter’s leukemia. Stewart Alsop collected nerve and wits long enough during a remission to write Stay of Execution about his own plight before he died. Football Player Brian Piccolo’s death became first a fond memoir by his friend Gale Sayers, then a TV film called Brian’s Song. Now Freelance Writer Doris Lund offers Eric, a book about her son’s successful four-year struggle to live courageously as this disease slowly destroyed him.

These are good, loving, honest books, resonant with the best that the human spirit can bring to life and death. But books, like people, provoke shabby reactions when they run in packs. To this confusion of responses must be added a bit of professional cynicism: that leukemia, like tuberculosis and unlike, say, cancer of the bowel, is a good literary disease. It offers a succession of intensifying crises, separated by weeks or months of remission during which the sufferer appears to be totally healthy and timid hopes of a permanent cure are raised. Surefire theater, in short. Such thoughts cannot be entirely dismissed, though Eric Lund’s story must be considered on its own merits. When Lund’s leukemia was diagnosed, he was a fairly ordinary 17-year-old Connecticut boy of the now apparently rare sort called “normal”: tall, blond, outwardly untroubled, a fine soccer player. He was waiting for summer vacation to end so he could enter the University of Connecticut and try out for the freshman team. By the time of his death four years later, Eric had become an extraordinary man. Leukemia, which killed him, forced him to live at the level of heroism.

Part of what made Lund so extraordinary was his driving vitality. He missed college that first year, but when drugs brought him to his first period of remission, he began to slog his wasted body through an incredible training regime, running ten to 20 miles a day, never doubting that he could enter the university and make the team. He did both. The disease hung on. Remissions were achieved each successive time by a more dangerous and exhausting use of drugs. With each reprieve, Lund began running again, rebuilding weight and stamina. By his junior year he was a soccer star, the captain-elect for the next season, and in the opinion of writers who had no knowledge of his illness, a potential All-America.

In his final season, Eric played only a token ten minutes. After that he returned to his deadlier contest in the Ewing Eight ward of the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in Manhattan. He had been in and out of the ward since the beginning of his illness. To his friends there—an old woman with no larynx, a boy with no jaw, a man whose flesh had wasted away, and one or two people his own age—he became an un-defeatable rallying point. He mocked doom by plotting “jail breaks” and rebellion against the staff. He laughed at cancer by drawing and circulating absurd cartoons. Once, he and another man smuggled themselves out of the hospital in a laundry cart—and then of course returned to Ewing Eight. He fell in love with a young nurse, and during his periods of parole they lived together with astonishing cheerfulness.

In the end, he died horribly. Leukemia books all end that way. But each story of a life ends with a death. What Eric Lund’s mother says in this book, with much courage and dignity of her own, is that Eric lived a lifetime. The reader turns the last page hoping he will never see another book about leukemia but grateful for this one. ∙John Skow