The Lloyd C Douglas Page

That Remarkable 18th Chapter

(In recent posts, I’ve been telling you about the novel that would become known as Magnificent Obsession. When Lloyd Douglas was writing it in 1928, however, the working title was Salvage. In a future post, I’ll talk about the name change.)

The eighteenth chapter of Douglas’s book, Salvage, was remarkable for at least three reasons.

For one thing, he was poking fun at himself. The spotlight in this chapter is on the Reverend Doctor Bruce McLaren, a feisty minister of Scottish descent, who is modeled after fellow Scotsman Lloyd C. Douglas, D.D. This is remarkable because McLaren, although he is said to be “a good sport,” is also a somewhat comical figure. He is so well-educated, he preaches over the heads of his parishioners (as Douglas himself was doing at his church in Los Angeles, or so his critics claimed). McLaren is a modernist all the way.

“The whole business of institutionalized religion,” he says, “demands reappraisal! It appalls me to contemplate what must be the future of the Church when all the people who are now fifty and up are in their graves! This oncoming generation, now in its adolescence, is not in the least way concerned about organized religion. Religious enough, instinctively, I dare say; but out of sorts with the sects; weary of their bad-mannered yammering at one another over matters in which one man’s guess is as good as another’s, and no outcome promised either in faith or conduct, no matter whose guess is right!”

A little later, McLaren says, “A Christ who can help us to a clearer perception of God needs to be a personality confronted with problems similar to our ours, and solving them with knowledge and power to which we also have access – else he offers us no example at all. But here we have a majority of the churches trying to elicit interest in him because he was supernaturally born, which I wasn’t; because he turned water into wine, which I can’t; because he paid his taxes with money found in a fish’s mouth, which – for all my Scotch ingenuity – I can’t do; because he silenced the storm with a word and a gesture, whereas I must bail the boat; because he called back from the grave his friend who had been dead four days, while I must content myself with planting a rosebush and calling it a closed incident! What we want is a Christ whose service to us, in leading us toward God, is not predicated upon our dissimilarities, but upon our likenesses!”

Now… these are the very same things Douglas had been saying for a long time, almost word-for-word, in sermons, speeches, and articles. But when McLaren says them, we’re supposed to grin. For he’s right, up to a point; but he’s also missing the most important thing – the thesis of the whole book – and we know that Bobby Merrick is about to set him straight.

This reflects an important change in Douglas’s thinking, either just before or during his writing of the non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul.

“I wonder if we modernists,” McLaren says later, “are not somewhat in the predicament of Moses, who had enough audacity to lead the slaves out of their bondage, but lacked the ingenuity to take them on into a country that would support them. We’ve emancipated them; but – they’re still wandering about in the jungle, dissatisfied, hungry, making occasional excursions into paganism and experimenting with all manner of eccentric cults, longing for the spiritual equivalent of their repudiated superstitions – sometimes wishing they were back in the old harness!”

“It’s worthwhile to have fetched them out of that,” says Bobby. “It ought to be equally interesting to lead them on. They mustn’t go back! But they will – if they’re not pointed to something more attractive than the jungle you say they’re in.”

How, exactly, can McLaren lead his people forward? By practicing what Bobby Merrick has just taught him: a message that goes beyond modernism.

In May of that same year (1928), Douglas published an article in the Christian Century entitled, “The Seeming Impotence of Christianity.” In it he asked:

May not the chief difficulty of the churches lie in the fact that we have all been interpreting Christianity in terms of metaphysics to a generation that does its thinking in terms of kinetic energies? Even modernism, for all its twentieth-centuryness, has made no more of a contribution at this point…. The modernist refutes the metaphysics of the fundamentalist by proposing another metaphysics. Both schools are equally absorbed in speculative thought, one hoping to show the public that the other is an infidel, the other hoping to show the public that the one is an ignoramus, but neither of them interested in showing the public that Christianity is a dynamic energy….

In the field of physical energies, it is common knowledge with our boys and girls that an ampere is the current produced by one volt acting through the resistance of one ohm; that a horsepower equals 746 volts-ampere; that a calorie is the heat required to raise a gram of water one degree centigrade. But what the soul can do, under given conditions, by reliance upon and utilization of divine power in fortifying against disappointments, encountering grief, and resisting the demands of appetite, is not only unknown but undiscussed. What manner of vital connection an aspiring soul may practically establish with its Source; under what circumstances spiritual power may be definitely guaranteed; whether prayer may be made a workable pursuit, and, if so, for whom, how, where, and when—these matters are spoken of with vagueness, albeit sung about with pious fervor. This generation has not been trained to think of power as something that should be set to music but set to work.

This is not to mean, however, that the present public is utterly without a spiritual aspiration. An increasing number of yearning people are possessed of the belief that there are certain spiritual energies in existence which, if practically utilized, could extend the reach of a man’s soul exactly as physical dynamics have multiplied the capacities of his eye, ear, and hand. That there is an unseen power, accessible to mankind, is not considered a mere chimera…

Lloyd C Douglas, “The Seeming Impotence of Christianity,” Christian Century, 5/24/1928, pp. 664-667.

This is the second thing that’s remarkable about the eighteenth chapter of Douglas’s novel: in it, Bobby Merrick claims that God can be approached in a manner that mimics applied science.

“Isn’t the modern school just substituting a new metaphysic for the old one?” Merrick asks McLaren. “Our generation is doing all its thinking in terms of power, energy, dynamics – the kind you read about, not in a book, but on a meter! Why not concede the reality of supernormal assistance, to be had under fixed conditions, and encourage people to go after it?”

Douglas’s emphasis here is on the “fixed conditions” – on doing what Jesus taught. To state the matter in religious terms, Merrick shares his testimony with the McLarens. But it’s not the typical tale of sorrowing over one’s sins and asking forgiveness; it’s a story about how he did what Jesus said… and received the promised results.

After the book’s publication, some conservative Christians would balk at the “pseudo-scientific” overtones of the story, but Douglas was really just putting his faith in Christ on the line. He was saying (although not in these exact words), “Do you believe in Jesus’ promises? If so, why be upset if someone follows his teachings and gets the promised results? Why be angry just because they didn’t come to him by following your four-step process? If they come to Jesus by doing what he himself said, how can that be wrong?”

The third thing that’s remarkable about the eighteenth chapter is that Douglas addresses an issue that every college freshman faces in Philosophy 101: the so-called “proofs for the existence of God.”

I’m a philosophy professor. I teach the “proofs.” And I see firsthand how irrelevant they are to people’s day-to-day lives. Students don’t resolve their doubts about the existence of God by having the matter “proven” or “disproven.” In fact, most people in this world never find intellectual resolution, one way or the other. They either believe, or they don’t. “We’ll find out when we die,” they say.

In the eighteenth chapter of the novel Salvage, however, Douglas claimed that resolution was possible.

When McLaren says that God is only “an hypothesis,” Merrick says, rather shyly, “I’m afraid I don’t accept that.”

“Oh – Doctor Merrick!” says Mrs. McLaren. “You don’t mean to say that you do not believe in God at all!”

“I mean that I do not think of God as an hypothesis.”

“But – my dear fellow,” says McLaren, “we really have no hard and fast proofs, you know!”

“Haven’t you?” asks Bobby. “I have.”

The text says: “The two forks in use by the McLaren family were simultaneously put down upon their plates. ‘Er – how do you mean – proofs?’ queried his guest.”

Of the three, this is perhaps the most remarkable feature of this chapter: that Lloyd Douglas claims we can go beyond just believing in God, then finding out if we were right only after we die. Douglas claims that, if we do what Jesus says, we’ll find out now. The things he promises will happen. We’ll come into daily contact with the Living God… and we’ll know.

I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can tell you about my own case: when I read this chapter just before starting my junior year of college, I was thunderstruck – not because I wanted to have that experience for myself, but because I already had; I just didn’t realize that it was intellectually permissible to say so. For me, the reading of this chapter was life-changing.

Salvage: Starting Over

by Ronald R Johnson

As I explained in an earlier post, Douglas’s novel Salvage was meant to be in line with the New Fiction of the 1920s, especially the works of Sinclair Lewis. Douglas had already written the first two chapters that way. There would be no moral. In the New Fiction, novels weren’t supposed to have morals. Characters were introduced; they were thrown into a set of realistic contemporary problems; and they must either sink or swim – and, in many cases, the protagonists of the New Fiction would end up sinking. Douglas was too much of an optimist to let that happen to the characters in Salvage, but he was also attuned to the type of novels being written in the 1920s, and he knew there could be no heavy-handedness on his part. He must let his characters “work out their own salvation” (as he said in a letter to his cousin Edith Kirkwood, 11/16/1932, in “Correspondence, Undated,” Box 1, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan).

Up until January 1928, they didn’t.

Douglas checked in on them periodically throughout 1927 but was disappointed to discover they had made no progress since he had last looked in on them. None of them knew what to do; they just sat there waiting for him to tell them. “As if I knew,” he said later (“Pygmalion,” The Kiwanis Magazine, December 1938).

Granted, he had nudged Bobby Merrick a bit in Chapter Two, by way of the head nurse Nancy Ashford, until Merrick decided to devote his life to medicine. But after that, Merrick was supposed to be on his own. To Douglas’s disappointment, he needed more help than that.

On January 20, 1928, Douglas’s daughter Betty suggested that he base the rest of the novel on the subject he had preached about that morning. Although Betty may not have known this, her suggestion amounted to taking the work he had done over the past few months on his non-fiction project, Exploring Your Soul, and inserting it into the as-yet unwritten chapters of Salvage.

This posed a technical issue: how to take information from one book and insert it seamlessly into another book, especially when one was non-fiction and the other was a novel. Douglas’s solution to this problem was ingenious: he turned the non-fiction material into a coded diary, which Merrick and Nancy Ashford would decipher and discuss.

But there was a much bigger technical issue with Betty’s proposal: it would mean making the rest of the story “didactic.” In other words, it would point toward some lesson that the reader was supposed to learn. Ever since the onset of the New Fiction in the 1920s, that was no longer deemed acceptable by the arbiters of literary taste.

Like any good novelist in the 1920s, Douglas did not want to be labeled “old-fashioned.” He had never been old-fashioned in his preaching, and he certainly didn’t want to be an old-fashioned novelist. Besides, in the literary world of the 1920s, that would mean the kiss of death. Douglas had no intention of ruining his reputation before he had even begun.

So he used a number of literary devices to avoid the problems of earlier didactic novels. Instead of quoting scripture, he makes the scripture lesson a mystery to be solved; and when Bobby and Nancy are on the point of quoting an actual Bible verse, he cuts them off mid-sentence. The characters draw attention to the fact that they are about to learn a scripture lesson, and they protest loudly. And rather than making them learn against their will, Douglas has them try the experiment that the scripture suggests. Yes, one could say that the end result was “a didactic novel,” but it was brilliantly conceived, and executed with a playfulness that is absent from the didactic novels of any earlier age.

But there is another technical issue that Douglas didn’t take seriously at all: the fact that the first two chapters of the book lead the reader in one direction, and the rest of the book, from Chapter Three onward, goes in another. He left the first two chapters the way he had written them prior to January 20. He didn’t find it necessary to rewrite them in light of his new idea.

In Chapter Three, Dr. Hudson’s young widow, Helen, puzzles over the conversations she is having with people who have come to pay their respects to her late husband. Dr. Hudson has done much good in the lives of many people, but he has sworn them to secrecy. All these people share a strange vocabulary. Those to whom he loaned money, for example, say that he wouldn’t let them pay him back. “I have used it all up myself,” he told them.

This is the real beginning of the novel, as Douglas conceived it from January 1928 onward. This is what the book is all about.

You might reply, “Oh, but don’t the first two chapters introduce the characters and prepare us for what’s coming?” My answer is, “Yes and no. They introduce the characters, but rather than preparing us for what’s coming, they give us a different set of expectations.”

Let me show you why I think this is a problem.

I’m jumping ahead of the events I’m narrating, but here are two representative samples of how the book would later be reviewed in newspapers and journals. Can you spot the interpretive dilemma these samples illustrate?

Sample One: “a young waster… is saved from drowning at the cost of the life of a famous brain surgeon” (The Congregationalist).

Sample Two: “Surgeon number 1 leaves a manuscript in cipher behind him when he dies and surgeon number 2 translates it, assisted by a nurse” (Winnipeg Tribune).

I ask you: Which of these two summaries has captured the essence of the novel?

Based on Douglas’s intentions from January 1928 onward, I would have to say that Sample Two wins the prize; but most summaries of the book agree with Sample One instead. In fact (although this is also jumping ahead), the book would be converted to the silver screen not once, but twice (in 1935 and again in 1954), and in both cases the moviemakers would assume that Sample One was the essence of the book (as well as the last three chapters).

In other words, the first two chapters attract so much attention to themselves, it becomes very difficult for readers to understand what Douglas was actually trying to do. As it turns out, many people got the message. But many others didn’t.

Then again, Douglas would go to great lengths to make his meaning clear, even devoting an entire chapter to emphasizing the purpose of the book. I’m referring to Chapter Eighteen, and that will be the subject of my next post.

The Sermon That Changed Lloyd Douglas’s Life

by Ronald R Johnson

Lloyd Douglas circa 1926. From Akron 1926 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

On Sunday, January 20, 1928, Douglas preached the third sermon in his series entitled, “Exploring Your Soul.” His topic was “Your Soul: How to Develop Its Peculiar Capacities.”

We don’t have a copy of the sermon. It wasn’t included along with the previous two weeks in The Living Faith, a compilation of his sermons that his daughters published after his death. It’s also not filed with the many sermons that his daughters boxed up and donated to the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. All that we know about the sermon comes from his daughter Virginia’s narration of the events of that day, in the book she cowrote with her sister Betty, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas by His Daughters. So I’ll let Virginia tell the story. About the sermon series, she writes:

“He had long been trying to convince people of the very real power of religion as a working energy in their lives if they would only experiment with it. He wanted them to think of it as a positive force – the ‘dynamics of Christian faith,’ he called it. The clues to this energy lay in the New Testament. Taking for example the words of Jesus – ‘Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them’ – he explained what power could be stored in the personality of anyone who heeded that advice, the power of secret altruism known only to one’s God” (p. 211).

She continues:

The sermons were particularly vivid and clearly illustrated. I remember during the third and last Sunday of the series [I think this is an error; a fourth sermon was scheduled for the following week] the huge crowd strained in their attention as though they were hearing some wonderful secret of living and feared to miss a word of it. Even I was impressed, and moving out with the thoughtfully departing throng said to myself, ‘I shall try that,’ and wondered how to begin.

Our lunch was late that Sunday because so many people had crowded up to the front of the church after the service, waiting to shake Daddy’s hand and thank him. He came home tired but exhilarated.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘no matter what the old guard think of me, there seem to be many people who are grateful and yearning for that kind of talk.’

We were having cold ham that day. I remember all the details of the table, for it was a meal which registered a milestone in our lives. Mother sat down at her place and said, ‘I was helped by your sermon today, Lloyd. I think for the first time I understand exactly what was meant by the idea of secret altruism.’

Betty and I murmured that we too had felt a personal tug and had been inspired by the sermon. It was unusual for us to make such intimate revelations and Daddy was touched.

He took up the carving things and started to serve the ham. ‘The idea has been there in the Bible a long time,’ he said, ‘but its simplicity disguises its power. Once you try it, you realize you have laid hold of something. I wish I could get the meaning across to more people. If I have a message, it’s probably that.’

‘Why don’t you put it into your novel,’ said Betty, calmly buttering a piece of bread.

Daddy seemed transfixed with the carving knife and fork in his hands. Seconds passed and we three looked at him, waiting. Then Mother said excitedly, ‘Is that it, Lloyd?’

He nodded but his face forbade us to say more. It occurs to me now that perhaps he was gratefully acknowledging the power of some of his own secret altruisms. We ate our meal almost in silence. Daddy was far away (pp. 211-212).

The novel Betty was referring to was Salvage, about the rich young playboy whose life was saved at the expense of a great surgeon. For several months, Douglas had been stuck at the beginning of Chapter Three, unsure how to proceed. Betty was suggesting that he incorporate the thesis of his sermon into that novel.

It is unclear whether Betty or Virginia realized that their father had also been working on a non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul, and that his sermon series was based on that book. In fact, he had been writing it as “a three-cornered dialogue.” As he held the carving implements in his hand, his imagination must have been working on a way to take the dialogue he had already written and insert it into the novel, Salvage. Who would present the thesis? And who would play the other two roles of the dialogue?

Before long, he had at least part of the answer: Dr. Hudson would be the one presenting the thesis. After his death, it would be revealed that he had spent his life doing altruistic deeds in secret. Bobby Merrick would learn about this and follow in his footsteps.

Virginia remembers the days that followed:

We asked Daddy questions about his story and often he was not able to answer them. ‘If the doctor’s philanthropies were all secret how is the young man [Bobby Merrick] ever to learn about them?’

‘Perhaps he kept a diary,’ Daddy suggested. ‘In code,’ he added, seeing our doubtful faces (p. 213).

One indication of a skilled novelist is his ability to take an idea that seems doubtful on the face of it and get his readers to believe it. Over the next several months, Douglas would rewrite his “three-cornered dialogue” as the story of Bobby Merrick and the head nurse, Nancy Ashford, decoding the secret diary of Doctor Hudson and debating its contents.

Exploring Your Soul – The Sermon Series

by Ronald R Johnson

From the Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 4, “Miscellanea [1],” Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. (There is a typographical error. The series took place in 1928 and the announcement was made in December 1927. The typo must have occurred when this information was retyped in 1951 from a December 1927 church bulletin.)

During the first four Sundays of 1928, Lloyd Douglas preached a series of sermons based on the book he had been writing entitled, Exploring Your Soul. The series followed the topical outline indicated in the announcement imaged above. The first two sermons in the series can be found in The Living Faith: From His Selected Sermons. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 230-257.

On Sunday, January 6, 1928, he spoke on the subject, “Your Soul: What It Is and How It Operates.” His treatment of the theme was neither systematic nor definitive. Although he avoided giving a definition of the soul, he said, “a man may arise in the morning and wash his face for the same reason that a cat washes hers; and eat his breakfast for the same reason that a dog eats his; and work all day to earn his victuals for the same reason that the horse works all day to earn his…. But when he sits down, quietly, to contemplate the everlastingness of himself, and comfort his mind with his firm belief that he is of eternal stuff; that he proposes to outlive all the material things he sees about him because his essential self was existent long before any of these material things came to be, he immediately puts himself in quite another category than that of the animals. It is his soul that he is dealing with now” (p. 233).

Douglas identified a few different types of souls and invited his listeners to think about what type of soul they might be. There are others, no doubt, and the ones he listed are not mutually exclusive – we might recognize ourselves in more than one category. He said:

One man had the soul of a mystic. As a mere child, the consciousness of God’s living presence in his life was at times quite overpowering. He could sit quietly, in rapt contemplation, and sense a kind of inner illumination, a warmth that was other than thermal, an awareness of the Divine affection. It was a very fine, high-grade potential soul – and needed expert handling. His parents were zealous about his physical welfare and saw to it that he knew his hygiene; were careful that he should have balanced rations and his full quota of sleep and the right amount of exercise and recreation. Equally mindful for the training of his intellect, which was quick and precocious, they were inquisitive about his school, his teachers, his outside reading. But it never occurred to them that his soul demanded direction. He learned about souls at the Sunday School.

There was no discipline in that Sunday School, for the reason that not only was the instruction voluntarily offered but as voluntarily accepted, and a good deal of the teacher’s efforts and ingenuity were spent in the sheer task of keeping her wriggling charges quiet enough to avoid disturbing the class adjacent.

To capture their attention and command interest, [the Sunday School teacher emphasized the fantastic stories of sensational events from the Old Testament]. Religion was something that used to be. It used to perform queer tricks. And certain men used to hear celestial voices; but apparently it had gone out of such business long since, for the teacher made no effort to connect this antique lore with present possibilities.

Obviously, what this lad needed, to develop the type of soul he owned, was the direction and influence of some mature person who, like himself, was of sensitive, mystical quality. As he grew up and went to the services of the church, he learned that the main business of the institution was to raise its annual budget (which is not often accomplished, probably for that reason) and around the family table he heard discussions of the main issues which commanded the attention of his parents’ church, and no one of them even remotely impinged upon the problem of his own soul hunger.

In later adolescence, he became absorbed in the affairs of his physical world – his vocational problems, college, love, the new home, his business – and forgot he had a soul. Now and again it throbbed and stretched and sighed, but he ignored it and it went to sleep again. He had the makings of an important spiritual leader but lost his chance to be that through mishandling – mishandling largely charged to the church, and the church’s misguidance (pp. 241-242).

“Another man,” Douglas said,

had a definitely aesthetic soul, but was so unfortunate as to be taught what passed for spiritual culture at the hands of people to whom the love of natural and moral beauty, for its own sake, had never been evoked. Religion was a sheer matter of conduct – their conduct. They had their own little table of mores, and the business of religion was to make everybody behave just like that. As for the loveliness of life, the livableness of life, the profoundly stirring majesty and wonder of the divinely coordinated beauty of life, they couldn’t teach it because they had never suspected it.

Religion was a gospel of don’t. It began and ended with Thou Shalt Not. It had no sunrises and sunsets; it knew nothing of great music, great literature, great drama. In short, it had nothing to offer to an aesthetic soul, and this particular aesthetic soul hungered awhile and dropped off, through sheer undernourishment and anemia, into a rather fitful slumber – occasionally haunted by longings and dreams, but colorless.

Then there are the inquisitive souls – eager to learn as much as they may of God’s will as apparently deducible from Nature, scientific discovery, and the ripest thinking of other inquisitive souls – people who, falling into the hands of confirmed Traditionalists, have been warned that inquiry is infidelity.

Highly socialized souls, who believe only in a gospel of work, should get themselves into some connection where there will be lots of committees to attend and speeches to make and hats to pass and cards to sign and resolutions to enact – a perpetual procession of things accomplished. For them to find themselves in a mystical atmosphere of quiet contemplation might not benefit their souls at all (pp. 242-243).

“One might suppose, from a survey of the churches of the day,” he said, “that there is abundant room for them to do some constructive work on this subject, in assisting men and women to a discovery of the paths to their own souls.

Too many of our churches are so busy regulating or – to speak more accurately – too busy attempting and failing to regulate the public conduct that they have about left off dealing with spiritual matters. All that Religion is about is souls, and their culture. Most of our modern religion concerns itself with practically everything else but souls and soul culture.

Spiritually hungry people come on Sundays to our churches, wishing they might learn something that would improve their celestial contacts and help them find out their peculiar soul-powers; and they go away pretty sure that they’ll have to muddle along without help…. Let organized religion begin talking about these things, and see what will happen to the churches. And to the people who compose the churches (pp. 243-244).

The following Sunday, January 13, 1928, Douglas addressed the topic, “Your Soul: What It Lives On.”

What does the soul live on? What manner of nourishment makes it conscious of its strength and eager to quest adventure with its powers?

First of all, it must be definitely assured of its own importance!

Out! on all these pale and sickly ballads that timidly chirp of ‘You in Your Little Corner and I in Mine’ and ‘Oh to Be Nothing’ and ‘For Such a Worm as I.’

Quite off pitch is the timbre of a feeble voice like that, when it tries to attune itself to the Galilean: ‘Ask What Ye Will, and It Shall Be Done! Seek, and Ye Shall Find! Knock, and It Shall Be Opened!’ (p. 252).

The first thing that nourishes the soul is its awareness that “I am a child of God.” The second thing is to realize that “all men everywhere are children of God. For if all other men are not the spiritual children of God, there is no sense or significance to my claim that I am” (p. 253). The third thing is “to help other men to… an awareness of their Divine Sonship” (p. 254). But the best way to do this, Douglas said, was not by talking about it; it was to demonstrate it (pp. 254-255). He was a little unclear on how to do this through actions rather than words, but in his next sermon he would take this one step further. And it was a very important step.

Exploring Your Soul – The Book

by Ronald R Johnson

From “Sermons [6],” Box 3, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. The University of Michigan holds copyright to this material.

Sometime in 1927 (probably in the fall), Lloyd Douglas began writing a non-fiction book called Exploring Your Soul. Chapter One bore the title, “In Defense of Unconcern.” His files contain seven drafts of the first page. Here is the text of one of those versions (note how it differs significantly from the draft in the image above):

It is neither a jest nor a slander to say of the average thoughtful man today that he knows next to nothing about his soul. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that he thinks this is the case, though that comes approximately to the same thing. Our typical modern of inquiring mind is not embarrassed when confronted with the charge that he is not only uninformed but unconcerned about souls—The Soul as an institution, or his soul in particular. He rises to meet the accusation with a ready smile indicating that his confession of complete ignorance in this matter identifies him as a discriminating person who has learned to distinguish at a glance between problems which invite further acquaintance and mysteries which no man in his right mind can hope to fathom.

Indeed, one gathers from his attitude that all persons who imagine they know anything of certainty or significance about the soul are entertaining delusions from which he is happily free. Toward no other of all the interests which constitute his life does he exhibit such finality of indifference. As for the physical forces at work within himself and throughout as much of the world as obtrudes upon his five senses, his inquisitiveness is unlimited.

–“Exploring Your Soul,” loose pages of manuscript stored with “Sermons [6],” Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

The seven alternative openings in his files differ mostly in phrasing; his main purpose is to acknowledge that his target audience (educated professionals) may initially be turned off by the subject of their “soul.” As he says in one version, “Detailed information is available to [the reader] concerning all the other organs and interests which constitute his life…. The inquisitive man of our time not only knows why he breathes but is on intimate terms with all his bodily equipment. His knowledge of his stomach is precise. He knows just what to expect of it under given conditions. It is no news to him that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

Another draft says, “For considerably less than the asking, he can possess himself of knowledge which only a little while ago was held in the custody of a privileged few, and not too securely held even by them. Information concerning the energies which operate the natural world, until lately vague and incomprehensible, has now been translated into the vernacular, requiring so little of intellectual effort on the part of the ultimate consumer that it may be suspected of our modern vanity over our knowledge of physical facts that it is, of all our prides, the most shallow.”

In still another version he writes, “Practically all the other interests which constitute [the reader’s] life are being illumined by attractive and accurate information to be had without application. But as his knowledge grows concerning the structure, functions, and proper upkeep of his physical equipment, his opinions about his soul have become less satisfying, less secure.”

Where was Douglas going with all this? From this handful of loose pages alone, we aren’t given enough clues to know. Fortunately, he presented these ideas several months later in a sermon series at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles (more on that in my next post), and from that series we can glean his basic outline. This book was going to talk about what the soul is, “How It Operates… What It Lives On… How to Develop Its Peculiar Capacities.” The answers to these questions were going to come not from creeds but from the teachings of Jesus.

At this initial stage (while he was writing his opening paragraphs), he seems to have had more ideas than he ended up using. On the back of one of the pages, he scribbled some notes in pencil. Under the heading, “Christian Credentials,” he wrote: “Matth 5:45 – ‘that ye may be the children of your Father.'” Below this he jotted a double underline as a kind of section divider, then asked, “What makes a Christian?” Beneath this he offered three possible answers, which he listed out of numerical order:

“3. Membership in a religious organization?
“1. Mutual acceptance of a system of beliefs?
“2. Emotional reaction to beauty, [handwriting unclear: either pity or piety], courage?”

After another section divider, he writes, “Christians must bring credentials – (credits),” and below this he lists the following (he gives the scripture text for the first one, and I have added the others in brackets):

“Parable of the forgiven debtor (Matth 18:23)
“Leave there thy gift before the altar. [Mt 5:23-24]
“Doctrine of the ‘Inasmuch’ [Mt 25:31-46]
“Breakdown of caste (If thou make a feast) [Lk 14:7-14]”

By themselves, these handwritten notes, although fascinating, do not tell us exactly where his thought was heading. In light of where he ended up, however, we can draw some inferences. He planned, initially, to offer his readers a number of ways that they could make their souls more immediately aware of God’s presence in their lives. “The Parable of the Forgiven Debtor” would suggest that one might lay hold of the power of God by forgiving other people’s trespasses. “Leave there thy gift before the altar,” although similar, would suggest that the reader drop what they are doing and make amends with others. The “Inasmuch” Declaration, which was important to Douglas throughout his ministry, would be an invitation to treat others as one would want to treat Jesus if he were here in the flesh now, with particular emphasis upon those who are in special need of assistance. And the note about “Breakdown of caste” would suggest that the reader should be on the lookout for opportunities to help others who will not be in a position to reciprocate.

Douglas didn’t end up mining these rich fields. Instead, he settled on a single passage of scripture that seemed to capture the spirit of them all:

Take heed that you do not your alms before men, to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest thine alms, let not they left hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into they closet, and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

Matthew 6:1-6, King James Version

As Douglas said in interviews sometime later, once he had decided on explicating this text, he felt he had grabbed onto “a pretty hot wire.” It needed to be handled in an entirely different way from his recent non-fiction books. Instead of a monologue, he began to write it as “a three-cornered dialogue,” much in the style of his manuscript The Mendicant, which was published under the title Wanted: A Congregation. In that earlier book, the protagonist (a minister) had a series of conversations with an industrialist, a newspaper editor, and a physician about different aspects of his work as a pastor. For this new book, however, Douglas created three characters: one to present the thesis and two others to debate it with him. This was not a novel; it was a dialogue. But he wasn’t writing to an audience of other ministers this time: he was aiming at educated professionals who needed concrete guidance in their approach to God.

Douglas never finished writing the book, Exploring Your Soul. In January of the following year (1928), he presented his ideas in a series of sermons, and the congregation’s reaction led him in an unexpected direction.

Salvage

by Ronald R Johnson

When Lloyd Douglas was living in Ann Arbor and learning about surgery at the University of Michigan’s medical school (sometime between 1915 and 1921), he read a notice in the newspaper that he thought would make an interesting premise for a novel. A physician had drowned while the inhalator that could have saved his life was being used on a young man who had been in a boating accident. Douglas clipped the article out of the paper and carried it in his wallet for years. After thinking about it for a long time, he started writing that novel in 1927. Its working title was Salvage.

He didn’t get very far into it before he realized that the idea by itself wasn’t substantial enough for book-length treatment. In the first chapter he introduced his main characters – Dr. Wayne Hudson, a world-renowned brain surgeon who is also the founder of Brightwood Hospital; his grown-up daughter Joyce, who parties at all hours with her friends, including the rich young playboy, Bobby Merrick; and a young woman named Helen Brent, who is a positive influence on Joyce and, for that reason, has agreed to marry Dr. Hudson and help bring order to their home. At the end of the first chapter, young Merrick, who is drunk, falls overboard in a sailing accident and is revived by Dr. Hudson’s inhalator, just as the doctor himself is drowning and in need of the device.

In Chapter Two, Bobby Merrick wakes up at Brightwood Hospital, where he discovers that his life has been saved at the expense of Dr. Hudson’s. Although he feels bad about it, he doesn’t know what to do. In a heart-to-heart discussion with Brightwood’s head nurse, Nancy Ashford, Merrick decides to make something of himself, so that Dr. Hudson’s sacrifice will not have been in vain. It is implied that, because Merrick has the aptitude for medicine, he will perhaps follow in Dr. Hudson’s footsteps.

And that was all.

In two chapters, Douglas had already accomplished what the clipping in his wallet suggested. The rest would be up to the characters to work out. He assumed that Merrick would go on to medical school… but then… what? Douglas didn’t know. He didn’t even know which way the love triangle would go. Would Merrick end up with Joyce or with Helen?

If you’re familiar with this story at all, I want you to forget everything you know about it, because, at this point in Douglas’s life, the proposed novel had a very different feel to it from the story you’re thinking of. What Douglas had in mind, as of 1927, was a completely secular book – something akin to Arrowsmith, the 1925 Nobel-prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis.

During the late 1920s, Douglas was watching Lewis closely and even considered him his direct competitor. (This comes out in Douglas’s interviews and correspondence around this time.) Lewis knew nothing about medicine, but he did his homework, then wrote Arrowsmith, about a young doctor who is determined to pursue medicine scientifically, rather than in the old-fashioned country-doctor sort of way. This novel must have touched Douglas on many levels. He, too, believed in the scientific pursuit of medical knowledge, and he must have felt himself more qualified than Lewis to write such a novel. But he also must have been repulsed by Lewis’s young hero, who lacks basic human qualities. Douglas wanted to write a book that would take the reader deep into the scientific aspects of the medical profession, but he also wanted his main character to be a good person, worthy of the term “hero.”

Unfortunately, he couldn’t imagine the rest of the story. What was the point of the book? Why should anyone keep reading after Chapter Two? Douglas didn’t know the answers to these questions. All his life he had been sure – as sure as he had ever been about anything – that he was meant to write novels. And yet this one, once he finally started writing it, came to a screeching halt at the end of Chapter Two. And he couldn’t get past it.

Douglas had other projects to work on while he waited. As I mentioned in the previous post, he had his hands full at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, trying to reach professionals and educated people in the city at-large, while being dragged down by some of the core members of his own flock, who were more conservative than any of his previous parishioners had been. This was a big job all on its own. But his latest non-fiction book, Those Disturbing Miracles, was also released at this time by Harper and Brothers, and there were newspaper interviews and correspondence to attend to about that.

And there was something else: he had a big idea for his next non-fiction project. Harper was the top publisher of non-fiction religious titles in America. Now that Douglas had his foot in that door, he was excited about his next non-fiction book. In Those Disturbing Miracles, he had said that faith isn’t merely a belief in supernatural events that happened long ago and far away. To have faith, he said, is to exercise it here and now, by using it to solve the problems of day-to-day life. In this next book, he was going to describe a spiritual adventure in which one could experience the power of God directly… by investing one’s energies in the lives of others and divulging the secret to no one else but God.

What Went Wrong in L.A.?

by Ronald R Johnson

The First Congregational Church of Los Angeles at the corner of Hope and Ninth, back in its horse-and-buggy days. From Royal G. Davis, Light on a Gothic Tower (L.A.: First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, 1967), p. 83.

In the fall of 1926, Lloyd Douglas began serving as Senior Minister at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. He would stay for only two years. (Two years and three months, to be exact: from November 1926 through January 1929.) In their biography of their father, his daughters say repeatedly that he seemed defeated from the beginning, and they are unable to explain why.

I disagree on both points. He wasn’t defeated (although he did resign), and he understood perfectly what went wrong.

I say he wasn’t defeated for two reasons. First, he made a significant impact on the congregation in that very short time and drew to the church people who weren’t interested in it before his arrival. Second, the experience changed his life for the better.

But that’s not my focus today. In this post I want to explain why he had so much trouble working with the congregation.

The answer is complicated. It has to do with the congregation’s demographics, the leadership’s work experience, the membership’s education, and the previous pastor’s inability to let go. (I want to apologize in advance to the current members of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. This is not a reflection on you! I’m just trying to explain what happened a hundred years ago.)

Demographics: the congregation was largely made up of rural Midwesterners who had gone to the West Coast to retire. Douglas didn’t mince words. He told his friend William Gilroy, editor of The Congregationalist, “The main trouble with this church and with all the Protestant churches in this city is (this is confidential) they are largely made up of elderly, retired farmers from Missouri and Iowa whose sole experience with the Church has been gathered in the country and small towns. They want a village church here in the heart of metropolitan traffic, and it cannot be done.” Ironically, he continued, the “erotic erratic culture of the movies is in combination with the frumpy, ignorant, fanatical backwash of the rural middle-west.” (LCD to Dr. William Gilroy, 11/19/1928. In Akron 1926 Scrapbook, Box 6, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.)

Work Experience: the leadership of the church was comprised of non-professionals. Again, Douglas didn’t pull punches. To his friends the Van Vechtens, he wrote on 8/4/1927 (“Notes on Douglas Correspondence for Shape of Sunday, II,” LCD Papers, Box 3): “The chief thing that gives me anxiety is the fact that there isn’t a man on my board of trustees who is a person of affairs. The nearest approach to it is the Chairman of the Board, Fisher, who is the Hudson-Essex agent.” A car salesman, in other words. It didn’t help that Fisher was also, according to Douglas, “a doleful pessimist.” “The rest of the board,” he said bluntly, “are retired nobodies – except one Billy Stevens who operates a big laundry and is a boob from Bubonia. Naturally, they are a timid lot of mournful souls – all of them listening intently to whatever complaints they hear to the effect that the church is too extravagant; the preacher too much of a high-brow; the music too classical; and why can’t we have a lot of announcements from the pulpit in the goodole way. And so forth. Fisher brings me my weekly ration of criticism…” Fortunately, in 1928 a new and more optimistic church board replaced the “sourpusses,” and that made Douglas hopeful. But the core of the old-guard members was still difficult to please. They “subscribe frugally and kick lustily,” Douglas said (to Van Vechtens, 2/17/1928, same file).

Education: In the 1960s, as part of his doctoral research on the life of Lloyd Douglas, Richard Stoppe surveyed surviving members of Douglas’s congregations. Although respondents from Ann Arbor and Akron were routinely complimentary of Douglas, respondents from Los Angeles were divided. The positive responses from Los Angeles were “lavish with their praise and on additional pages or the reverse sides of the questionnaires” gushed about Douglas even more than did the people from Ann Arbor and Akron. The negative respondents, however, complained that “he was too liberal and he used too many big words.” Stoppe says that it is clear from “the content, syntax, and vocabulary” of these responses “that those from Los Angeles who disliked Douglas were uneducated. On the other hand, those who praised him were mostly college graduates, several being doctors, lawyers, or dentists.” Those who didn’t like Douglas called him “a show-off trying to impress people with his learning” (Richard L. Stoppe, “Lloyd C. Douglas.” PhD diss., Wayne State University, 1966, pp. 239-240).

Meddling: The previous pastor couldn’t let go. Dr. Carl Patton had been Senior Minister at the church for nine years before Douglas arrived (1917-1926). Douglas thought the two of them were friends. Patton had preceded Douglas at Ann Arbor, too, and there was never any problem there. Los Angeles was different, however. As Douglas told the Van Vechtens (n.d., “Notes… II”), “…it rather upsets the equilibrium of things when a former prophet comes plunging into his successor’s work. It isn’t so good. I know. Patton came out here in April and has been in and around these parts ever since. It is disturbing, and makes everybody restless. Incidentally, I think his attitude toward me and my work has been unpleasant. He hobnobs with the few families who do not like my style; and messes in my parish. Not very sporting of him!” Douglas was right to worry: Carl Patton would end up replacing him at First Church and serve as Pastor again from 1930 to ’34 (Davis, Light on a Gothic Tower, pp. 84-86, 92-95).

The inside of the church (Davis, Light on a Gothic Tower, p. 82). Davis says, “Members and visitors alike… filled even the galleries whenever Dr. Douglas spoke” (p. 90).

As I said earlier, Douglas was shockingly direct when diagnosing the problems he faced. I’m quoting from private correspondence, and in one case he even said, “This is confidential.” But ironically, what happened in Los Angeles became a part of history, for in his spare time, Douglas did something of more lasting importance than his work with a local congregation.

In 1927 he began writing a novel.

The Story Behind an Autograph

by Ronald R Johnson

Reader Michael Lanning contacted me recently asking if I would be interested in seeing photos of a book autographed by Lloyd Douglas. Here’s what he sent:

Courtesy of Michael Lanning. Used by permission.

When Michael emailed me these pictures, I was excited. I knew the story behind this autograph.

On March 8, 1937, Lloyd Douglas and actress Anita Louise appeared together at The Broadway, a Los Angeles department store, to autograph copies of his novel Green Light. Anita Louise played Phyllis Dexter opposite Errol Flynn in the film version, which was in theaters at that time. Here’s an advertisement for that event:

Advertisement, n.d., source not included. In LCD Correspondence, 1937 File, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 1, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

That’s one of the worst photos I have of him, by the way. He usually posed for photographs and was quite photogenic. Around this time, however, he sat for a photographer who told him, “You remind me of Whistler’s Mother.” “I’m going to find another photographer,” Douglas said. This picture, though, was obviously taken by a member of the press corps.

On the day of the event (March 8, 1937), Douglas mentioned in a letter to his agent/editor, Rich Kent: “Today noon I am, with Anita Louise, autographing GREEN LIGHT at a downtown department store. It would not surprise me very much if the young lady failed to show up. Movie actors are notorious for the ease with which they break such engagements, on short notice.”

LCD to Rich Kent, n.d. [March 8, 1937], in LCD Correspondence, 1937 File, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 1, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

But he was pleasantly surprised. On March 16 he wrote, “Anita Louise showed up at the autographing party and gave an excellent account of herself; a very charming and gracious young lady. I liked her very much. She is coming here for dinner tonight. The girls [his wife Besse and grown-up daughters Betty and Virginia] are quite a-pip with curiosity to see her. Homer Simmons, the pianist, is to be here also.”

Douglas and his wife owned a mansion in Bel-Air, a suburb of L.A. (and future home of “The Fresh Prince”).

Douglas and Anita Louise were at The Broadway to autograph copies of Green Light because the movie was in theaters, but the book White Banners had been published the previous October. He gave her a copy of White Banners at that event, and autographed it with this inscription: “Presented to my excellent friend Anita Louise with admiration for a great job in the role of Phyllis Dexter.”

Although I knew about the event, I didn’t know that Douglas gave her a copy of White Banners until I received these images from Michael. If you have any information about Lloyd Douglas that you’d like to share with me, please email me at rjohnsonsmallworld@gmail.com.

My Brief Encounter with the Douglas Family (Part 2 of 2)

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

In my last post I told you about a letter I wrote to Betty Douglas Wilson, thanking her for writing The Shape of Sunday and secretly hoping that she would tell me more about her famous father, Lloyd C Douglas. Here is the handwritten letter I received a couple of months later from her sister, Virginia Douglas Dawson. It was dated September 28, 1986:

“Dear Mr. Johnson,

“I am writing in answer to your letter of July 6th to my sister Betty re our book The Shape of Sunday. Your letter has been a long time en route to me, for as you see by the above [letterhead], I live in Canada and my sister lives in La Jolla, California.

“I loved your letter, coming so many years after the publication of The S of S and making it all seem so in the present. Betty was not the one who wrote the book. I was the one who actually composed it all with Betty, who had a prodigious memory for details, supplying the checks.

“You should hunt around to find my father’s last book, Time to Remember (Houghton Mifflin). In it he began his autobiography and got as far as his college days when he died. I love that book because it sounds just like him talking. He was a most entertaining man who found a lot in life to be amused by.

“Now that I am older than my father was when he died, I wish I could talk to him about things that concerned me little when I could talk to him.

“I never really knew what he was like.

“But just think! That he could be so real and alive in your mind after all these years. What an immortality!

“Thank you so much for your thoughtful letter.

“Sincerely, Virginia Dawson.”

I learned a lot from those few paragraphs, but I was struck most of all by that one sentence: “I never really knew what he was like.” My wife Nancy and I spent hours puzzling over that remark. Clearly, she did know him – intimately! She wrote a whole book about him! While he was alive, he sent letters to both of his daughters a few times a week. They knew more about him than most people know about their parents. What did she mean: I never really knew what he was like?

It took me a while, but I finally came to this conclusion: she had recognized my unspoken request for information about his spiritual life, and she confessed that she was unable to provide it – indeed, she also wondered about it. She never knew that side of him. In her book, she said that she had one conversation with him – only one – about his deepest religious beliefs. I now understand why. As a Preacher’s Kid himself, he knew how hard it was to grow up under the shadow of a minister-father, and he shielded his daughters from that throughout their lives. In his letters, he poked fun at himself. He never forced his religious beliefs on them. As a result, Virginia didn’t know that side of him, and that’s why she couldn’t talk about it in her book, even though it was subtitled, “An Intimate Biography by His Daughters.”

I couldn’t have known it at that time, but twenty years later, through a series of coincidences worthy of a Lloyd Douglas novel, I would begin the research necessary to answer my own question. And I would do it by reviewing the very same source material Mrs. Dawson had in front of her when she wrote her book. I’ll tell you more about that sometime, but for now I’ll just say this: there is no existing biography or doctoral dissertation that does an adequate job of describing the evolution of Lloyd Douglas’s thought. That’s what I’m trying to do. God willing, I’ll have a rough draft completed by Spring/Summer 2024.

Stay tuned!

For regular updates on the progress of my Lloyd Douglas research, please supply the information below.

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My Brief Encounter with the Douglas Family (Part 1 of 2)

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

In the summer of 1986, I wrote a letter to Betty Douglas Wilson c/o Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company. Lloyd Douglas published all but one of his novels with Houghton Mifflin, and a year after his death in 1951, Houghton Mifflin published The Shape of Sunday, in which his daughters (Mrs. Wilson and her sister, Mrs. Virginia Douglas Dawson) shared their memories of their father. My letter, dated July 9, 1986, was sent to thank them for writing that book.

I had read a library copy of The Shape of Sunday three years earlier and had, in the meantime, garbled some of the details. Virginia Dawson was the one who actually wrote that book. Of Lloyd’s two daughters, she was the one who wrote short stories professionally. He had high hopes for her and wanted to see her succeed as he had done. (One of her stories was dramatized for television: “The Rockingham Tea Set” starred newcomer Grace Kelly. Click here to see the episode on YouTube.)

Betty was not a writer, but she was her father’s most loyal fan, and she had very strong opinions about both him and his public image. In 1951, only a few months after Lloyd’s death, the two women (now in their forties) reread all the letters he had written them over the years and studied his scrapbooks. Houghton Mifflin also loaned them their files of correspondence with him. (His daughters would later donate all this information – 6 boxes and 2 oversized volumes – to the University of Michigan, where I myself have been doing my research since 2005.) Their findings were written by Virginia and published a year later. (I’ve been studying that material for 18 years and still haven’t finished writing my results!)

At any rate, when I wrote my fan letter in the summer of 1986, I thought it was Betty who wrote the book. Here’s what I wrote:

“Dear Mrs. Wilson,

“I am writing to thank you and your sister Virginia for writing The Shape of Sunday (you actually did the writing, didn’t you?) and for getting your father’s sermons together in book form as The Living Faith. I am twenty-eight years old and have been studying his writings with great personal interest ever since I was sixteen. For many of those intervening years, I read and reread his novels to try to imagine what kind of man Lloyd Douglas was. He was fun, I could tell that – but he was also extremely learned, not in a bookish sense but in the sense of having learned about all of life. He could’ve been a doctor, although I guessed he wasn’t; he was conversant in the fields of literature, art, music, theater, sociology, psychology, and the physical sciences; he had obviously met the Greenwich Village crowd and had seen Europe, not to mention most of America; he could describe in minute detail the lives of the wealthy and the poor; and just when I thought I had exhausted the list, I’d discover something else he knew about. But most importantly, he knew the human soul, and he knew and could describe Jesus better than anybody I’ve ever known. I couldn’t exactly picture what Lloyd Douglas must have been like as a person, but I really wanted to, because I wanted to be like him.

“I don’t know if he realized that, while his books opened the door to possibilities most of us never knew existed, they also whetted our appetites to learn what he actually knew about those things firsthand. Yes, it took novels like that to reach those of us who never would’ve thought about such things otherwise, but I don’t know if he realized that, once he got us hooked, we would’ve been glad to read anything he had to say about the subjects of personal power and poise – whether he wrote it as fiction or as a non-fiction treatise.

“That’s why I was jubilant one day at a used bookstore to find an old copy of The Living Faith. So far as I knew at the time, that was the only book in which Lloyd Douglas spoke his mind and explained his convictions in depth, without having to speak through fictitious characters. For putting his ideas into practical terms in my own life, The Living Faith was the most helpful of all his writings. But even after finding that book, I’ve always had a deeper desire to know how Lloyd Douglas learned so much – what course did he follow to become so knowledgeable, and what was he like as a person?

“I eventually found The Shape of Sunday in a library, and it answered many of my questions. Most of all, though, it was a delight to read about this man who had already done so much for me through his writings, and to see how much fun he was to be around. You did an excellent job of describing him in all his humanity and warmth. (And you wrote it with his brand of wit, too.) Of all the research I’ve done about his philosophy, The Shape of Sunday and The Living Faith have helped me the most, and I wanted to thank you.

[I got a little gushy in the next paragraph, talking about what a great novelist her father was and saying I wished my own generation knew about his books. Then I said:]

“Tom Wolfe, in his book, The New Journalism, says that non-fiction stories, written in novelistic form, are more gripping than fiction because the reader thinks to himself, Wow, this really happened. But your father’s novels are even more gripping because the reader thinks to himself, My God, this really CAN happen – to ME! All I have to do is try the experiment.

“I think it is not at all unlikely that the works of Lloyd Douglas – like Julia’s hidden letter [in Forgive Us Our Trespasses] or Doctor Hudson’s secret journal [in Magnificent Obsession] – will find its way into the hands of people who desire to know the terms of a better life, even years after the books are out of print. I only hope that some of those people are also able to read The Living Faith and The Shape of Sunday as well.”

I’ll be very honest here. This was more than a fan letter. As much as I had enjoyed reading The Shape of Sunday, it also left me somewhat bewildered. A lot of things didn’t add up. I had questions about the man but didn’t know how to ask them – which is just as well, because if I had verbalized them, they would have seemed impertinent. The Shape of Sunday portrayed Douglas as an entertainer; after reading it, I couldn’t bring his spiritual side into focus. And that was the side of him that mattered most, in my estimation.

If Lloyd Douglas had still been alive, I would have traveled cross-country to meet him and talk with him; but he died six years before I was born. The people who knew him professionally were also gone. His daughters were the only living link I had to him. I was hoping they’d read between the lines and answer the question I didn’t know how to ask.

Houghton Mifflin forwarded my letter to Mrs. Wilson (who was now living in La Jolla, California), and she realized it was really meant for Mrs. Dawson (who had lived in Montreal since the early 1930s). In late September, I received a handwritten reply from Virginia Douglas Dawson. She seems to have sensed that I still had lingering questions, and I found her response deeply puzzling. Although I didn’t know it at the time, her offhand remark would set the agenda for my own archival research at the University of Michigan twenty years later.

To be continued…