Another War

By Annalyn Swan

A PRIVATE BATTLE by Cornelius Ryan and Kathryn Morgan Ryan Simon & Schuster; 448pages; $12.95

"What I write about is not war, but the courage of man," Cornelius Ryan once remarked. In his bestselling World War II trilogy (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, A Bridge Too Far), Ryan, a historian and former wartime correspondent, recounted great battles not through statistics but through narratives of personal sacrifice and drama. In A Private Battle, his last book, Ryan re-creates another kind of war: a four-year fight against cancer. Composed of tapes recorded throughout his illness, along with entries by his wife and co-editor Kathryn, Battle is as much a testimonial to the human spirit as any of his other works.

The first lesson Ryan learns from cancer is how quickly the very word alienates the victim from ordinary life. One pair of friends, when told, sink into embarrassed silence, making Ryan feel that he has committed "some unpardonable gaffe." Colleagues and publishers cannot be trusted: "Somebody's bound to say," he notes, " 'Well, we really can't ask Ryan to do this article or count on him to finish this book, because the poor bastard's got cancer.' " Later on, there are the unbearable pain and disfiguring side effects of powerful drugs. Cushing's syndrome, a side effect which Ryan suffered, is particularly excruciating. The face and neck bloat to enormous size, and a small hump appears on the back. "It is monstrous for Kathryn and the children to have to live with this," he notes. "How the sight of me must appall them!"

There is an omnipresent temptation to succumb: "The mathematics of self-pity can be raised to infinity." Instead, although convinced from the beginning that his disease is fatal, Ryan sets out with reportorial objectivity to give battle and to keep accounts. He travels from his Connecticut home to Europe and the West Coast in search of the latest treatments and carefully monitors his progress.

The doctors' diagnoses are the frame work of the Ryans' book. But between them lies the real story: a family's love and strength even as the disease, in Kathryn's words, "strikes and scars them all." The adolescent crises of the Ryans' two children, all but ignored in the face of the family catastrophe, have serious repercussions. Their son Geoff, after experimenting with drugs, runs away from home.

Tension and tears are constant. But there are moments of triumph as well: the completion of A Bridge Too Far, published two months before the author's death; the night Ryan conducts the orchestra in a local production of Finian's Rainbow star ring his daughter Vicki.

Ultimately what is most disturbing about A Private Battle--and the increasing number of other cancer chronicles--is not the individual horrors but the questions they raise about society's inability to cope with the disease. Just as the plague captured the medieval imagination and tuberculosis that of the 19th century, so cancer haunts the modern temper. The mythology, as Susan Sontag pointed out in Illness as Metaphor, is as deadly as cancer itself: "The people who have the real disease are ... hardly helped by hearing their disease's name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil." Ryan's own story is a grim case in point.

Throughout his ordeal, however, the sufferer's courage never flagged. He did not win the battle, but it was a very honorable defeat. --Annalyn Swan

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