I told you in my last post that Eugene Exman, Religion Editor at Harper and Brothers, was working with the Literary Department in the fall of 1928 to get Douglas’s novel Salvage accepted for publication. In November, Douglas told Exman he had come up with a much better title for the book.
“Not at any time have I been entirely satisfied with the name Salvage,” he told Exman. “By the time I had reached the third chapter, the book had outgrown the ‘salvage’ concept.” (And there was a reason for that: because the novel Salvage had now been combined with the thesis of his non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul, making it an entirely different story than he had originally planned.) “I have hit upon a title now that will be sufficiently cryptic to be intriguing to the reader’s curiosity and yet significant enough to be entirely comprehensible to him in due time. I am calling the book…”
(Drum roll, please…)
“…Thirsty Fish.”
Exman must have blinked a few times before responding. “I must confess frankly that it doesn’t register at all with me.”
Nor with me. There is nothing in his private papers that tells us what the proposed title meant to him. Obviously, a thirsty fish is an oxymoron, for a fish lives in water. In reference to Bobby Merrick, the hero of the novel, was Douglas implying that he was surrounded by material wealth but was poor in spiritual things? Or that the spiritual help he needed most was all around him and he didn’t know it? We simply don’t have enough evidence to guess what Douglas had in mind.
The nearest thing to a clue comes from Douglas’s novel Forgive Us Our Trespasses, although that’s getting way ahead of the story. Near the end of that book, Dinny Brumm gets the idea for a novel called Thirst. It’s based on Ecclesiastes 12:6, in which the Hebrew writer advises remembering God before the time of adversity, “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.” (Douglas was quoting from the King James Version.) The idea here is that the person becomes thirsty even unto death, because he no longer has a way to draw water from the well. But that seems like a very different idea from the image of a thirsty fish.
At any rate, Exman never forgot it. Years later, when he wrote an official company history, he included Douglas and his book as a comical sidenote and livened up the story by claiming that, from the very start, Douglas had sent him the manuscript with it already titled as Thirsty Fish (Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 223.)
Meanwhile, Exman and his associates got down to work reading the updated manuscript. As I mentioned in a previous post, Douglas was in trouble. To avert disruption from a core group of conservatives in his congregation in Los Angeles, he had resigned, effective January 1929. He didn’t have any other positions lined up, and both of his daughters were now studying in Europe. He needed an income – immediately. The new book became more important than ever…
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 