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Release

Although he never flaunted it, Lloyd Douglas knew his New Testament Greek. And that was probably why he chose the working title, Release, for his next novel,in the summer of 1932.

Luke 6:37 is usually translated into English as, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven,” but a literal translation would be “Release, and you will be released.” The Greek verb is apoluō, which means “to release.” It also means “to forgive,” because that is one example of how you can “release” someone. The point Douglas wanted to emphasize in this new novel was that, in releasing others, we ourselves are released.

Here is how he explained his thesis to Ira Rich Kent, the Managing Editor at Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company on 7/26/1932 (from Box 1, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan):

“This book is not in any sense a sequel to Magnificent Obsession…. The thesis of M.O. was, briefly: How to get what you want, and be what you would like to be, through a practice of a Galilean principle of secret philanthropy.

“The thesis of the present work is: how to get free of the encumbrances which block the way to the expansion of personality.

“The most common of these encumbrances is hatred – prejudice, toxic frustrations, cancerous might-have-beens, bottled-up injustices.”

Notice that his examples go beyond just hatred to include disappointment and frustration that has been “bottled-up.” The title Release has even more meaning in this regard. He continues:

“The solution – to be cryptically disclosed through a process not at all homiletic, but by a device capable of sustaining reader interest – is based on the only comment the Lord offered on ‘the Lord’s Prayer’: If ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will forgive yours.

“Trespasses, in this book, are considered as ‘invasions of rights.’ My ‘Major Personality’ has a right to energies which He has invested in me. I cannot hope to succeed in a large way unless I concede and honor His right to the control of such power.

“My freedom to enjoy; to savor life; to get out of it all that is in it for me by putting into it all that I possess, depends upon my willingness to put myself into complete harmony with His design for me.

“I cannot hope to do this unless I free myself of the encumbrances that weight me down.

“At this point, there arises a quite definite proposal of NEGOTIATION. If I sincerely forgive all who have made life difficult for me, I have offered the credentials necessary for this FREEDOM.

“All this sounds didactic and brittle, as I attempt to explain it; but it will not appear so in the book.”

That part about “negotiation” will almost certainly appear foreign to Christians. We place our trust in Jesus, not in any sort of “negotiations” or “credentials” we may bring. The thing to remember here is that Douglas isn’t talking about salvation, and he’s not using orthodox vocabulary. He’s talking about unleashing one’s potential in one’s daily pursuits, and he’s using the vocabulary of the ordinary person out in the world. His congregations were filled with people who professed to be Christians but who had never done the things Jesus talked about. He’s trying to get them beyond talking about it and actually doing it. And he’s starting at Square One.

In the book (Chapter 15), he has the character Julia explain it this way (and she seems to be referring to Matthew 18 here):

This little piece [of scripture]… doesn’t whine at all. It doesn’t ask you to whimper for mercy.

It’s just a business proposition same as if you owed a thousand dollars to Mr. Smith, and ten other people owed you a hundred dollars apiece, and Mr. Smith said, ‘Pay me that thousand dollars,’ and you said, ‘I can’t – with all these people owing me.’

And Mr. Smith said, ‘I don’t need the money so much, but I like you and want to be friends with you, and as long as you are owing me you’ll be keeping away from me for fear I’ll ask you for it and make you ashamed. And it won’t do any good for me to tell you just to keep the money and forget it, because that would make you ashamed, too, and you would always feel in debt. So – I’ll make you a proposition. If you will cancel all the debts of these people who owe you, and are afraid to face you, so that they can afford to cancel the debts of the people who owe them, I’ll call it square with you. Then we can all be good neighbors again, and nobody will be afraid of anyone else, or shy, or ashamed.’

This all sounds so much more sensible to me, dear, than the way they talk about it at the meetings. It’s just as if God wanted us to do business with Him about these things that have kept us strangers.

Houghton Mifflin published the book in November 1932 under the title, Forgive Us Our Trespasses. Douglas had thought it would be a clever satire of modern art, but it ended up being much more. And, in writing it, he found his mission in life. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Mencken

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been telling you about the tentative plans Lloyd Douglas made sometime around 1930-31 for his next novel, after Magnificent Obsession. He wanted to write a satire about modern art, and apparently it was going to focus on 1920s fiction. As I showed in my last post, it was going to include some of his firsthand impressions of daily life in Greenwich Village, where starving young artists sat in gloomy eating establishments, trying to think up the next big thing.

I’ve also been telling you that his ideas for this next novel changed over time, as the success of Magnificent Obsession, and especially the letters he received from readers, convinced him that his job wasn’t finished. People had questions that he couldn’t answer neatly in mere correspondence. So he took the ideas he had been working on and reshaped them into a novel that would answer some of those questions.

It was around this time that he began talking about the main character of the novel. He wanted the protagonist to grow up “full of poison from his neck to his heels.” He would be modeled after the best-known cynic in America at the time: Baltimore Sun columnist H. L. Mencken.

I don’t think Douglas fully understood Mencken. It would have been hard for anyone in Douglas’s position to be sympathetic toward Mencken, especially since Mencken was so rabidly anti-Christian and anti-middle class.

James D. Hart writes in The Oxford Companion to American Literature (4th edition, 1965) that Mencken was “best known for… aggressive iconoclasm… especially during the decade following the First World War [the 1920s, in other words], when he exhibited a savagely satirical reaction against the blunders and imperfections of democracy and the cultural gaucheries of the American scene…. His critical views were widely influential… although he aroused much popular antagonism” (p. 541).

Vernon Louis Parrington, near the end of his massive three-volume work, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (NY: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1930), grouped Mencken with “the younger intellectuals” who offered “a searching criticism of the triumphant middle class, its ideals and its habitat, the town and the city; the repressive tyrannies of its herd mind; the futility of its materialism” (Volume 3, p. 376).

The Macmillan Company’s Literary History of the United States (Third Edition), says of Mencken’s Prejudices: “Mencken’s major quarrels are two: with the Christian moral code whether in its pure state or in a diluted state, and with government by the people, whether under a democratic or communistic form” (1144). Mencken thought the American people were a bunch of “boobs,” and he put his faith in a literary elite that consisted of people he helped make famous – guys like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and James Branch Cabell.

Mencken was the person Douglas modeled his main character after. “I do not think that Mr. Mencken will sue me for slander,” he wrote, “because (a) he will not read the book, and (b) he is too self-consciously omniscient to identify any other portrait of himself than one he might draw; but Dinny Brumm [the hero of the novel] develops into that sort of a person” (LCD to Ira Rich Kent, 7/26/1932). And for Douglas, that meant a person who was “full of poison.”

Douglas’s main problem was getting readers to have sympathy for someone like that. His solution was in two parts: showing readers Dinny’s difficult life growing up, and then giving him star power. “I had thought to make [him] a thin-necked little puke as a child,” Douglas confided – take that, Mencken! – “but I have changed my mind” (LCD to his daughter Betty, 5/16/1932). A month later, he said, “Now he is a ham-handed, overgrown young rake-hell that can hardly keep his shirt on…. I think he will make a larger appeal in the new form” (LCD to Betty, 6/20/1932).

In college, for example, he’d be good on the football field because practice sessions would give him permission to knock the hell out of the rich kids on his team—the Pullman Boys who rode to school in style while he had to sit in Coach Class, the fraternity members who looked down on “barbs” like him. He’d be the crowd favorite in his English Composition course because his biting humor would go over the professor’s head but all the students would catch the joke. He and the college president’s daughter, Joan Braithwaite, would fall in love, but his scathing editorial mocking “the Greeks” (privileged members of fraternities) would also insult her, as the leader of a sorority. He’d get kicked out of school for giving a religious conservative a black eye. And he’d rise to fame as a syndicated columnist because intelligent people all around the nation would love to see him take down the powerful, the self-important, and the dim-witted.

Bob Willett, at Willett, Clark & Colby, planned to publish the book and kept asking about it, but Douglas didn’t want to work with Willett again. The Chicago publisher hadn’t advertised Magnificent Obsession very much outside The Christian Century, and Douglas was sure he wouldn’t promote a second book any more effectively.

Since, years earlier, Douglas had published two non-fiction books with Charles Scribner’s Sons, he decided to give them another try. He met with a “Mr. Perkins” in February 1932 after sending him five rough chapters of the new novel. The meeting went well, apparently, because Perkins asked Douglas for the right of refusal on the book. Douglas did not commit. During their meeting, he learned that Perkins was “a close friend and ardent admirer” of Mencken, a fact which convinced Douglas that Perkins wouldn’t support the new novel with much enthusiasm. That may have been true; however, it’s also unclear whether Douglas realized who this man was. Maxwell Perkins was the editor who not only discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, but also worked hard to get their manuscripts into shape. Douglas might have benefited from that kind of attention, but it is also quite probable that he would have felt stifled. He thought it was a bad fit, and he was probably right.

Although Douglas kept some of the satire he had originally intended for the book, by 1932 he had changed its focus. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Greenwich Village

by Ronald R Johnson

In my last post, I told you about the plans Lloyd Douglas had for his next novel, sometime around 1930-31. It was going to be a satire about modern art and was probably going to focus on the New Fiction of the 1920s. There is reason to believe that some of the book was going to take place in the bohemian artist’s colony at Greenwich Village, in New York.

In their biography of their father, Douglas’s daughters say that they lived in The Village for a short time. As I mentioned in earlier posts, Douglas had sent them to Paris for a year to study. After Lloyd and Besse moved to Montreal in 1929, the girls came “home” and joined them there. The following summer (1930), the girls moved to New York and rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, “hard by the Third Avenue elevated.” Betty, the oldest, “had a good position in the personnel department of a big Brooklyn store” (Shape of Sunday, 240); Virginia was “acting as secretary to an author” (p. 236). It’s not clear whether this “author” had ever had a book published, or why he needed a secretary, but it is clear that he didn’t have any money. He promised to pay Virginia “when his book comes out” (p. 237).

Concerned about the things his daughters wrote in their letters home, Douglas went down to New York to see for himself how they were doing. He was appalled at the poor conditions under which they were living. They were young and carefree and thought it was all rather fun, but he didn’t like it at all. He said nothing about it while he was there, however. He just listened and observed.

“He was very polite in his comments about our living quarters,” Virginia wrote later. “After all, we were in Greenwich Village, a place he had always read about longingly, and the artistic atmosphere was undoubtedly there. Betty and I took him to cellar eating-places where candles stuck into bottles glowed dimly in the gloom. We introduced him to our friends – most of whom were out of work and talked scathingly of the ones who had given up their art and gone home to help Father in the store.

“‘Oh, if I could only think of some novelty to catch the public fancy,’ they would groan. ‘Look at the chap who invented the Eskimo Pie: simply ice cream with chocolate around it. He’s made millions'” (p. 237).

Douglas wanted to meet Virginia’s “employer,” but she was equally determined to prevent such a meeting. The man was not only destitute but also deeply depressed, and he spoke rather casually about killing himself. On Douglas’s last day in New York, however, he and Virginia were in a restaurant at a table next to a window, and the starving artist suddenly appeared, watching them. Douglas insisted that he come in and join them, and the two men seemed to hit it off. But it only seemed that way. When Douglas was alone with Virginia afterwards, he called an end to her “employment” (pp. 237-239). And after he got home, he wrote her a letter (LCD to daughter Virginia, November 1930):

LCD to daughter Virginia, November 1930. In LCD Correspondence, Box 1, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

“There is a well-established theory that real art is produced in such kennels,” he wrote, referring to the apartment in which they were living. “I don’t know enough about Art to be in a position to pass on that.” This was typical of Douglas: he liked to make fun of his “country boy” upbringing and to pretend he was unsophisticated. “What little scribbling I have done has amounted to nothing; or next to nothing.” He was talking about Magnificent Obsession. In November of 1930 there was still no reason to consider the book a success. “I make no pretense of understanding how people ought to feel; how cold and miserable they ought to be; how empty of gut; how full of ideals; how frowsy of hair; how out at the seat of the pants one should be in order to make The Great Contribution to Reality.”

But as a parent, he had some strong opinions about the place. Betty was now engaged to be married, but Douglas wanted Virginia to come home to Montreal.

Still, the time she had spent in New York wasn’t a complete write-off. “It has probably been good for you to have had this experience,” he said. “You can make notes on it and come home and write a story. Ye gods – what a lot of firsthand information that ought to go into a novel!”

It’s unclear whether Virginia ever did write a story about Greenwich Village, but Douglas did. This is probably how he got the idea for his satire on modern art. At any rate, the novel he did end up writing was about an aspiring novelist living in The Village. “What a lot of firsthand information ought to go into a novel!” he said.

Meanwhile, Back in Montreal…

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve spent the past few weeks writing posts about how the novel Magnificent Obsession quietly worked its way from obscurity in November 1929 to the Top 25 Bestsellers in April 1931, and upwards from there. But meanwhile, the book’s author, Dr. Lloyd C. Douglas, was busy working as Senior Minister of St. James United Church of Montreal. Because his job kept him busy, and because he was living in Canada, Douglas felt somewhat remote from what was happening. Within the publishing world, his star was rising; but his day-to-day life went on almost as normal.

Almost.

He still had to prepare sermons and visit sick people. He still had to do all the things a pastor normally does. But his incoming mail increased dramatically, as people from all over North America wrote to him about his novel. The things they said, and the questions they asked, convinced him that the publication of Magnificent Obsession had started something he couldn’t walk away from. As he wrote later in his “Author’s Foreword” to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal, “the author became aware that he had not completed his task.” [All quotations that follow are from this “Foreword.”]

As strange as it may seem, he hadn’t realized that before. Magnificent Obsession was an experiment. He took what started out as a secular novel (Salvage) and added a religious thesis to it (Exploring Your Soul) in hopes of reaching a larger audience. But up until now (1930-31), he hadn’t given much thought to what would happen next. What if he did reach a larger audience? What if they needed help applying the thesis to their lives? What if they wanted to know more about the gospel?

As I said, he hadn’t anticipated those questions. He did enjoy writing Magnificent Obsession, and he wanted to do another novel, although his work at St. James kept him too busy to follow through on that wish. But he had no intention of writing another book like Magnificent Obsession. Douglas tried never to repeat himself. His next novel would be about the world of art, with emphasis on contemporary literature. He had some opinions about that, especially now that he himself had published a novel.

But his incoming mail kept nagging at him. “Do you honestly believe in this thing,” people asked him, “or were you just writing a story?” Well, he did believe in it, but he wanted his next novel to be just a story. He had some jokes he wanted to put into it… some rather droll remarks that his more sophisticated readers would enjoy… some critical comments about the state of literature today.

But his mail kept increasing. As he admitted later, “The task of dealing sympathetically with this strange correspondence became a grave responsibility. No stock letter, done on a mimeograph, would serve the purpose. It was necessary that individual replies be sent to all earnest inquirers. One dared not risk the accusation that, having advocated an expensive and venturesome technique for generating personal power, the author was thereafter too busy or lazy to care whether anybody benefitted by such investments.”

So he wrote to them, one-by-one. “Some of the questions were practically unanswerable,” he says, “but it wasn’t quite fair to limit one’s reply to a laconic ‘I don’t know.’ Frequently one’s counsel was pitiably inadequate, but not because it was coolly casual or thoughtlessly composed.”

Here, then, was a busy pastor, daydreaming about writing another novel in his spare time – just for fun – but instead spending all his available time corresponding with people who were prompted by his latest novel to ask for his help with their spiritual lives.

Whether he liked it or not, the shape of that next novel started to change. It would still be about the arts; the main character would be an aspiring young novelist living in “The Village” with other aspiring young artists. But instead of it being a satire as he had originally planned, it was slowly turning into a story about the young man’s soul. And as the story changed, Douglas’s future changed with it. He began to realize that the road ahead did not go in the direction he had envisioned.

Publishing Miracle 14: Breakout

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been telling you about the various factors that made the novel Magnificent Obsession a bestseller. Unlike most successful books, however, it took a year and a half for this one to make it to the top. On April 18, 1931, eighteen months after its release, Publishers’ Weekly ran a notice about it: “A book which was published in November, 1929, has for some time been appearing on the best seller lists of mid-western stores, and this month its percentage brought it up among the leading twenty-five books of fiction. This is MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, by Lloyd C. Douglas.” It wasn’t in the Top Ten yet, but the quiet path it had taken earned it respect, even from New York critics.

The prestigious Saturday Review of Books called Magnificent Obsession “a readable and refreshing story, with an unusual message.” “The idea of achieving a magnificent personality is not new,” the reviewer said, “but Dr. Douglas’s method is quite different from that of the personality racketeers, and no commercialism soils it.”

Surprisingly, The New York Times had already reviewed the book soon after its release (1/12/1930). On the whole, it was a good review, correctly summarizing the book and saying, “For those with curiosity concerning obsessions, flavored with love and adventure, Mr. Douglas’s book will prove pleasant reading.” There is only one negative remark, and it is difficult to interpret: “Even for those who have a large appetite and enjoy a varied menu, Magnificent Obsession should prove an ample though rather indigestible repast. Besides romance and mystery, it concerns itself with medicine, chemistry, psychology, ethics, religion, alcoholism and altruism, and above all, with the ‘Major Personality.’ Incidentally, a formula for success and happiness is propounded.” (That word “indigestible” would seem to be a negative assessment of the book, perhaps meaning that Douglas tries to do too much; but everything else the writer says is positive.)

The Times mentioned the book again a few years later (1/17/1933), at the start of a story about 1932’s bestsellers: “The year’s marvel, the wholesalers say, was The Magnificent Obsession, which placed sixth on the fiction list after lesser sales during three years on the market.” (It had moved up from the Top 25 in April 1931 to the Top Ten overall by the end of 1932.)

Nothing works like success. Now everybody reviewed the book. That meant, of course, that some would attack it, especially in cities where it had done well. In Kansas City, for example, a frustrated reviewer lamented, “Almost everything is wrong with The Magnificent Obsession. It is poorly constructed, the characters are unreal, the dialogue is not natural, the style is bad, and the plot is unconvincing. It does not even tell a good story.” The headline of the review was, “Why Publishers Go Mad.”

Kansas City Journal Post, Sunday, April 19 (no year).

In Birmingham, Alabama, an entire page was devoted to the subject. A local minister defended the book, but two critics from the paper trashed it on literary grounds. One of the critics called it “the most vulgar book I have ever been forced to read.”

But others were pleasantly surprised by the book.

Emily Newell Blair, the book review editor at Good Housekeeping, wrote in December 1932 that, although many people had urged her to read it, she had avoided doing so because she thought it would be a boring religious tract. “What was my amazement to find it, first of all, a corking good story with something happening in every chapter to hold your interest, characters which were actually alive, and a real plot. It was, in fact, a really good novel, entirely apart from the theme which has made its appeal so wide…” That theme, in the hands of a less gifted writer, would have ruined the story, she said. “That it does not spoil this one is almost proof that the author has practiced what he preaches; namely, that man may enlarge his personality and do anything he wishes if only he will adopt the philosophy of life discovered by the doctor in the book.”

With these words, Blair went farther than any of the book’s other reviewers, even among Christian periodicals. Not only did she claim that the book had technical merit but she also proposed that its author was illuminated by the very power that the book talked about. Then she took the next step that this implied: she wondered “why the thousands who have already read this book are not already practicing it.” Although she was surprised to find it “a really good novel,” she understood the challenge implicit within it. “Indeed, if its message were believed and practiced generally, it would change the world.” Although she was an editor at a secular magazine, she well understood what Douglas had accomplished and she challenged her readers, wondering why more people were not trying the experiment. “Perhaps they are,” she added hopefully.

Over the past dozen posts I’ve described the path Magnificent Obsession took from relative obscurity to the Top Ten bestsellers nationwide. What I find most interesting about its slow ascent is that it illustrates what is now a publishing truism: advertising alone doesn’t sell books; word of mouth is much more effective. There are many different reasons that people become motivated to buy a book, but as is so often the case, Magnificent Obsession got people’s attention by the “buzz” generated through a number of channels: religious, social, and professional. But first, of course, there has to be something in it worth talking about. Magnificent Obsession had that in spades.

And it changed Douglas’s life. I’ll talk about that in my next few posts.

Publishing Miracle 13: The Call to Action

by Ronald R Johnson

In this series I have listed a number of factors that called the public’s attention to the novel Magnificent Obsession after its publication in 1929. Once people became aware of the book, then there were some distinctive features of it that kept them reading and talking about it. But the book did more than that: it also gave them something to do.

Nancy Ashford comes right out and says this in Chapter 11 when she tells Bobby Merrick that, if Doctor Hudson’s journal were to be published, “People would pronounce it utterly incredible, of course; but they would read it – and heartily wish it were true. And I have a notion they would be sneaking off to make experiments, no matter how they might have giggled when discussing the theory with their friends.”

Magnificent Obsession isn’t just a novel; it’s an invitation to try the thing yourself, and see what happens.

Nancy continues, “I wish I could tell you… you know why I cannot… about the quite startling experiences I myself have had lately…” She can’t tell him because it’s all about serving others and not bragging about it to anybody. But it’s implied that she has done a deed of kindness and has hidden up that secret for her and God alone, and her prayer-life has become more constructive as a result. This isn’t your typical novel. Most of them don’t give the reader something to try after they’re done reading.

But Douglas goes one step further: he hints that he would welcome a letter from them, telling him the results of their experiments.

In Chapter Thirteen, Merrick shares Doctor Hudson’s “secret” with Montgomery Brent, and Brent says he’s going to try it. “May I write to you, sometimes, and report?” Brent asks.

Merrick says, “Glad to have you. But you needn’t try to tell me what you’re doing for anybody else. That’s your affair. Write and tell me if it works – but not what you did to make it work. Do you get me?”

And that’s exactly what readers did. As Douglas tells us in his “Author’s Foreword” to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal, “After a while, letters began to arrive from persons who said they had tried it, and it worked; though they were careful not to be too specific in reporting their adventures, aware that if they told they would be sorry” (p. ix). Of course, not everyone had positive results. “A few lamented the cost of unrewarded experiments and denounced the whole idea as a lot of hooey.” He adds, “The task of dealing sympathetically with this strange correspondence became a grave responsibility” (p. x).

This, perhaps more than anything else, is what made Magnificent Obsession stand out from other novels: it created a community. People “tried” the book’s thesis and corresponded with Douglas about the results. And he wrote back. For the rest of his life, much of his time was spent answering letters like these. Douglas says, “A single post might contain inquiries from a high school boy, a college professor, a farmer’s wife, a physician, a pious old lady, an actress, a postman, a preacher, and a sailor…. I suppose that if all these letters were compiled and printed, they would fill several volumes as large as the novel which evoked them.”

There is evidence that Douglas considered doing something along that line. Around 1932-33, he wrote a To-Do List about these letters, then folded it up and stuck it in the back inside pocket of his Forgive Us Our Trespasses scrapbook. In the To-Do List he said he was going to “Take off mailing addresses from letters,” and then “Letters will be stored.” He seems to have had some long-range plans for them, but he doesn’t mention what he had in mind.

On a personal note, this “Strange Correspondence” is the first thing I looked for when I began studying Douglas’s private papers at the University of Michigan in 2005. Rather than a biography of Douglas, I initially wanted to write the story of this community-building that he did through letter writing. Unfortunately, other than fan letters from GIs during WWII (to which I do devote a chapter in my Douglas biography), Douglas’s daughters did not donate his fan mail to the university archives.

However, the main point I want to make today is that Magnificent Obsession prompted readers to go out and “try” the book’s thesis – and apparently many of them did. In that respect, it was more than a novel. For many people, reading it was a life-changing experience.

Publishing Miracle 12: The Mystery Page

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been listing specific reasons why the novel Magnificent Obsession became a bestseller after its publication in 1929. In today’s post I’ll cover one of the most talked-about reasons: in Doctor Hudson’s secret journal, he says he learned “the secret to power” from a sculptor who clipped a passage out of the Bible and carried it around in his wallet. The author, Lloyd Douglas, wrote the story in a way that builds suspense around the question: “What was on that page?” He gives the essence of the answer, but he never tells his audience what page of the Bible it was.

Here is the passage in which he comes the closest to giving the answer:

From page 138 of the original printing of Magnificent Obsession. This scene is in Chapter 8.

As Laurine Wanamaker Schwan wrote in the Akron Journal shortly after the book’s release (11/1/1929): “This idea is hidden, indeed, in as much mystery and pomp as you will find anywhere. But it is disclosed in bits with much vivid action in between – in bits just big enough to whet your curiosity and interest. And – here is the master stroke of all – is never entirely revealed!”

There is simply this reference to the biblical admonition not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. For anyone who knows the Bible (or has access to a good concordance), that’s enough of a clue to find the passage Douglas has in mind. But why didn’t Douglas give the answer?

Here’s what he said later, in his “Author’s Preface” to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal in 1939 (p. ix):

“The theme of the novel had derived from a little handful of verses midway of the Sermon on the Mount, but all references to the enchanted passage were purposely vague, the author feeling that a treasure hunt in Holy Writ would probably do his customers no harm. Within the first twelve months after publication, more than two thousand people had written to inquire, ‘What page of the Bible did the sculptor carry in his wallet?’ We left off counting these queries, but they have continued to come, all through these intervening years.”

Notice that even now he didn’t give chapter and verse. If you don’t know where the Sermon on the Mount can be found, you’re out of luck. If you do, then you’ll find it exactly where he says: at the midway point of it.

Why all the secrecy? First of all, because this was his ingenious way of attracting the attention of people who didn’t go to church and wouldn’t be interested in hearing about the Bible under normal circumstances. Second, because citing chapter and verse would have broken the spell. This is a mainstream novel, not Christian fiction. Third, as he says in the paragraph I just quoted, he was hoping his readers would get their hands on a Bible and go for “a treasure hunt,” just like Bobby Merrick ends up doing in the novel.

Laurine Wanamaker Schwan, whose review in the Akron Journal I mentioned a moment ago, thought there might be a fourth reason: “Those who want to see this philosophy in black and white are given a hint as to where they may find it for themselves. And this again is a master stroke. For those who might say, ‘Ho hum! Now what is important about that?’ will never be able to find it. Only those few who will click with its meaning… will ever actually see that idea in cold print!” This is an intriguing suggestion, for it echoes what some scholars believe to be the reason for the so-called “Messianic Secret” in the gospels: to communicate with those who are receptive while keeping critics in the dark. But Douglas himself never said this was his intention.

At any rate, Douglas’s technique of keeping the Bible verses a secret was effective, as the two thousand inquiries he received shows. But it’s interesting to see how reviewers handled this feature of the book.

One reviewer gave it away, without so much as a Spoiler Alert. This was in an article entitled, “Unknown, Read by 150,000,” in the Chicago Herald Examiner (2/20/1932). After admitting that the book’s popularity was due, in large part, to the “mystery of the message in a secret code to be solved,” the review ends with these words: “The ‘magic page’ is apparently Matthew vi:1-6.” (Yeah, thanks a lot. What a killjoy!)

One columnist teased his readers, pretending he was about to reveal the secret… then didn’t. He wrote in his final paragraph: “The scriptural passage in which Dr. Hudson found the secret of his power and which is transmitted to Dr. Merrick is not revealed. The reader is privileged to guess. My own is – but this is Lloyd Douglas’s book.” (W. F. Hardy, “As I View the Thing,” Decatur (IL) Herald, n.d.)

Ozora Davis, writing to an audience of ministers and biblical scholars in the Chicago Theological Seminary Register must have felt that information was more important than letting his colleagues discover it for themselves: “The Sermon on the Mount is in [this book],” he said, “and it is such a comment on the sixth chapter of Matthew as I have not read in many a day.” In this case, Douglas didn’t mind the spoiler. A recommendation from Ozora Davis was a big deal in those days.

One religious periodical scolded Douglas for keeping the passage a secret. The reviewer in Personal Power (October, 1931) wrote, “For the benefit of those who cannot find the scripture passage upon which Randolph’s secret was based, look up Matt. 6:2-7. As a preacher, Dr. Douglas should not have kept people guessing like that.”

A severe critic from Birmingham, Alabama, however, went in the opposite direction: he believed that Douglas had kept the passage a secret because the actual biblical text did not support Douglas’s interpretation. Dean Gilbert W. Mead of Birmingham-Southern College, wrote in the Birmingham News-Age-Herald (3/26/1933), “From the first I felt, as probably many another reader did, that the author was playing a cheap trick on us by never telling us just what was the exact scriptural reference out of which the whole obsession grew…. [T]here isn’t a single thing I can see hindering Mr. Douglas from telling us right out what the discovery was – citing chapter and verse – except, perhaps, that he didn’t dare chance the flimsiness of his absurd structure by exhibiting the weakness of the foundation.”

Whatever one’s opinion may be of the technique Douglas used, it was effective. It got people talking. It prompted thousands of them to write to him, asking questions about the Bible. It motivated columnists and reviewers to write about the book in newspapers all across the country. It accomplished, in other words, what every novelist tries to do, and most fall short of: it made an impression on the larger culture.

But, for many readers, it did something more – something that novels rarely do: it offered a call to action. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 11: The Coded Message

by Ronald R Johnson

One interesting feature of the novel Magnificent Obsession is the fact that Doctor Hudson’s journal was written in code, to prevent people from discovering his secret too easily. When Nancy Ashford presents the diary to Bobby Merrick, he is determined to crack the code. Here is the first page of it:

In Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook, there is at least one critic who complains that the code is easy and that it takes Merrick much longer than necessary to decipher it. Personally, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Nancy and Bobby figure out one thing immediately: Dr. Hudson used the last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega, to indicate the end of a line, and he used the Greek letter mu to indicate the halfway point. This was a clue to divide each line into two, like so:

As an example of Douglas’s skill as a storyteller, he has Merrick work on the puzzle so late into the night that he falls asleep at his desk. The next morning when the butler comes to call him to breakfast, he finds him like this, then goes down to the kitchen and tells the cook, “You lost your bet!”

“Drunk again?”

“Quite!”

After the accident that saved his life at the expense of Dr. Hudson’s, Merrick has sworn off alcohol. This is a humorous scene that shows the household staff jumping to conclusions, just like we all do in real life.

Later on, having no better ideas, Merrick tries separating the letters and shifting the second half of the line slightly to the right…

Although I still wouldn’t have seen it, Merrick realizes that the key is to take the first letter from the top line, the second from the bottom line, the third from the top, and so on. He comes up with this:

“Reader, I consider you my friend…”

This is just the beginning, of course. He still has to decipher the whole journal in order to learn the secret that Dr. Hudson worked so hard to conceal. But this is just one example of the way Douglas keeps us in suspense.

When reviewers mentioned the code, they usually included it as one of the interesting features of the book. Some complained about it, however.

From The Congregationalist: “Dr. Douglas does, however, make a certain concession to the present age in surrounding rather simple and elemental Christian facts and experiences with an element of mystery and the occult. Our own judgment is that the diary of the famous surgeon which figures so prominently in the story would have been made both artistically and spiritually more effective if it had been plainly presented in simple English rather than in the unique code which, without the key that Dr. Douglas supplies, would have been difficult to decipher. However, Dr. Douglas probably knows his age and the unreadiness of the sophisticated to appreciate simple things simply stated.”

Lighten up! True, Douglas used the coded diary as a way of getting his audience interested, but there’s also a more basic truth here: a coded diary is fun. Douglas wanted us to enjoy reading Magnificent Obsession, and judging from the reviews in his scrapbook, many people did.

The message that Merrick deciphers is based on a page of scripture that is talked about but never entirely revealed. And that is another reason why Magnificent Obsession became “a publishing miracle.” I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 10: Kansas City (and Other Cities)

by Ronald R Johnson

Lists of bestsellers, such as those printed in the New York Times or USA Today, are compiled from periodic reports submitted by certain designated bookstores around the country. These reports may not always be accurate, but they give at least a general idea of the top books that are selling at each of those stores.

After the publication of Magnificent Obsession in 1929, its publisher, Willett, Clark & Colby, had access to sales information for that book and shared it with the novel’s author, Lloyd Douglas. It’s not clear how much time Douglas spent looking at these stats for his earlier non-fiction books, but he became an expert on the subject from Magnificent Obsession onward, keeping track of where his books sold and correlating it with other facts, such as advertising campaigns or his own personal appearances. For this reason, some remarks he made in 1935 are especially helpful in tracing sales of Magnificent Obsession.

This is jumping ahead in the story, but in January 1935 he wrote a letter to his agent/editor Rich Kent, advising him on where to spend advertising dollars for his newest novel, Green Light. “I believe a little ad in a Kansas City paper – The Star, maybe – would do some good. That’s the plexus which drove Magnificent Obsession. Kansas City. They took it up first. They put me on the map…. Kansas City is really the center of the largest sales we had of that book” (LCD to Ira Rich Kent, 1/28/1935).

A Life Magazine photo of a Kansas City streetcorner in the 1930s. From the Amazing Vintage Photos website https://www.vintag.es/2012/04/old-photos-of-kansas-city-in-1938.html?m=1

It would be fascinating to probe deeper and find out why that city was the one where his book sold best. Viewed superficially, it was a mob town, ruled by Tom Pendergast; but as David McCullough notes in Truman (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1992/93), pp. 196-198), despite the Great Depression, life in Kansas City “had never been better” than in the early 1930s (the very time in which Kansas City’s residents were buying Magnificent Obsession). “Compared to other cities,” writes McCullough, “the Kansas City outlook was confident and expansive. There were jobs, and local government – the organization – was providing most of them” (196). It was, in other words, a complex social situation that defies easy analysis, but there were people in that place who actually governed well (including a young judge named Harry Truman), and the overall mood seems to have been upbeat.

It is surely significant, also, that Kansas City was the headquarters of Unity, Inc. Douglas was surprised by the enthusiastic response his novel received from that spiritual organization. He joked to a friend, “Oddly enough, several metaphysical cults have reviewed the book at considerable length and have adopted me into their respective households of faith. Whether, at the present writing, I am in better standing as a Christian Scientist, a member of ‘Unity, Incorporated,’ or as a preacher in the rather conventional ‘United Church of Canada,’ is not quite clear” (LCD to Jewell Stevens, 10/6/1930).

In Douglas’s scrapbook is the July 1930 issue of a Unity publication called Scientific Christian Training. The first 18 pages of that issue are devoted to a retelling of key parts of Douglas’s story. Richard Lynch, the editor, writes, “Here, in brief, is an interpretation of a section of the Sermon on the Mount and of its instructions as to how to draw on the universal Supply that I have never come across before. It is but a reinforcement of all the teachings of Unity” (p. 17).

Douglas shouldn’t have been surprised. In its vocabulary and teachings, Magnificent Obsession seems to agree with the basic principles of Unity as laid out in James Dillet Freeman’s book, The Story of Unity (Lee’s Summit, MO: Unity School of Christianity, 1965). What Douglas offered as a metaphor (God as a form of energy, for example, or Christianity as a kind of science), the Unity organization had been saying very seriously since the late 1800s. To the extent that Kansas City “put [Douglas] on the map,” it may have been because his book was embraced by leaders within the Unity organization.

But Kansas City wasn’t the only metropolitan area that bought the book in large numbers. In his letter to his agent/editor, Douglas also mentions “Buffalo, Chicago…. Nashville. Dallas. Atlanta. Magnificent Obsession and Forgive Us [his second novel] have been rated as bestsellers in Atlanta, GA, for years and years!”

Atlanta was another interesting case. I assume he meant “white” Atlanta, because the city and the state were heavily segregated, and there was little in Magnificent Obsession that would have appealed to the day-to-day lives of people of color. But, as in Kansas City, the white people of Atlanta were optimistic in the years leading up to Magnificent Obsession’s publication and were working to bring their city up to date. They considered themselves part of the New South, and they did what they could to attract business and encourage the arts. (See Darlene R. Roth and Andy Ambrose, Metropolitan Frontiers: A Short History of Atlanta (Marietta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1996), chapter three.) Where Atlanta differed from Kansas City was in its response to the Stock Market Crash in 1929: Kansas City was still doing well in the early 1930s, but Atlanta was hurting.

In many respects, Atlanta seems to have been like Akron during the years that Douglas was there: growing fast, trying to become urbane, but also dealing with significant economic decline. Under those conditions, Akron had drawn inspiration from Douglas’s ideas. Perhaps Atlanta liked him for many of the same reasons.

I haven’t even begun to probe this subject (why particular cities responded more enthusiastically than others to Douglas’s novel), and I’m not sure that I can. Douglas didn’t have enough information himself to draw inferences about that. All he knew was that Magnificent Obsession sold well in certain metropolitan areas. He didn’t know why.

Here’s a commonsense suggestion. It’s probably safe to say that word-of-mouth advertising, in 1929, 1930, and 1931, was most effective at the local level. If a person bought the book because they heard about it from a friend, that friend was probably someone they interacted with face-to-face. Long-distance telephone service wasn’t a part of people’s daily life yet. Letter writing was, and that may have played a role, but, of course, none of the technologies that are so much a part of our lives today (telephone, internet, social media) were available then. So it may be safe to say that good sales in one city and poor sales in another may have had a lot to do with word-of-mouth advertising (or the lack thereof) in each of those cities.

And while we’re on the subject of conversation, the novel itself had certain features that lent itself to discussion around the watercooler and elsewhere. I’ll talk about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 8: The Jules Verne Touch

by Ronald R Johnson

I am retracing the steps by which the novel Magnificent Obsession became a bestseller. I’ve already mentioned the support the book received from local newspapers and from people within the medical profession. Today we’ll see how those two factors intersected: a development in medical technology mirrored an important series of events in the novel, and this fact was reported in at least one newspaper.

In the novel, Dr. Merrick is trying to decrease mortality during brain surgery by inventing a tool that simultaneously cuts brain tissue and cauterizes the area around it, preventing bleeding. He has the general idea, but he can’t quite figure out how to place the vacuum tubes. This is all crucial to the plot because, as he meets the requirements of Dr. Hudson’s “theory” (or in other words, does what Jesus teaches in the opening verses of Matthew 6), he has a moment of clarity in which he sees the details that have been eluding him. Not only does he build the device and revolutionize brain surgery, but he also experiences the reality of God in the process.

Douglas didn’t make this up off the top of his head. In an interview with the Montreal Gazette (reported 11/25/1932), he said, “I started Magnificent Obsession while I was in California, before I came to Montreal. There I knew Dr. Carl Wheeler Rand, who is considered the most eminent brain surgeon on the west coast. I went to him and told him I had a strong desire to have a character in my book invent some surgical device and asked him if any work was being done along that line. He said that tentative experiments had been made with an electric cautery, but they had never been successful. He added that if I used the idea, it was possible there would be a few surgeons who would be interested in the fact.” Then he added, “Dr. Rand gave me nothing by way of detail, and when young Dr. Merrick thought in his dream of rearranging his vacuum tubes, it was my own idea.”

The Gazette interviewed Douglas because of a news item that had come to them over the wire from Des Moines, Iowa, where a man named Paul C. Rawls had demonstrated for local surgeons a device just like the one Merrick invents in Magnificent Obsession. The Gazette quoted the dispatch from Des Moines as saying, “Paul C. Rawls, the inventor who was granted a patent yesterday, explained how the use of vacuum tubes enabled him to obtain higher frequency electric current, thereby making possible the new knife.”

In their headline, the Gazette claimed that Douglas had “the Jules Verne touch.” They were referring to the science fiction writer whose novels anticipated many technological breakthroughs.

Below is a copy of the first page of Mr. Rawls’s patent. Click here for the link to Patent Number 1,945,867 on Google Patents. Below is an image of the diagram included with that patent.

What mystifies me about all this is that, in 1926, three years before the publication of Magnificent Obsession, Dr. Harvey Cushing invented a device which (if I am not mistaken) fits the same general description. As Elizabeth H. Thomson notes in her biography, Harvey Cushing: Surgeon, Author, Artist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), Cushing realized as a medical student at Harvard in 1894 that bleeding would have to be controlled before brain surgery could be done successfully (p. 62). By 1910 he had begun using silver clips (p. 171), which helped somewhat; but he kept working on the problem.

Thomson writes: “In the autumn of 1926, Cushing used for the first time an electric cautery apparatus in a brain operation. In general surgery and in genito-urinary surgery, high-frequency currents had been used for some time in dealing with both benign and malignant growths, but it was Cushing who established their value in neurological surgery. With the cooperation of Dr. W. T. Bovie, a physicist with the Harvard Cancer Commission who had previously developed apparatus for dealing with cancerous growths, he experimented with currents and equipment until they had one current that would cut tissue without attendant bleeding and another that would coagulate a vessel which might have to be cut during the course of an operative procedure” (pp. 247-248).

There is no mention of vacuum tubes, but the device itself sounds very much like the one Merrick invents in Douglas’s novel. This in no way diminishes Douglas’s reputation as a novelist, but if we’re going to talk about the real-world invention of this device, it seems to me that Dr. Cushing beat P. C. Rawls. However, based on Douglas’s conversation with Dr. Carl Wheeler Rand, which I presume took place in 1928 when Douglas was writing the novel, Dr. Rand and his West Coast associates had so far been unable to reproduce Dr. Cushing’s work with complete success.

What this means for Douglas is that he was aware of the problem that brain surgeons were trying to solve in the last years of the 1920s, and he built that problem and its likely solution into his novel. This made his novel current and fresh and based on facts – something you don’t normally get from a novel.

Below, also from Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook, is a clipping about a doctor in Boston demonstrating a similar device. This clipping doesn’t say whether it’s the one invented by Harvey Cushing (in Boston) or the one invented by P. C. Rawls, or maybe a third invention. At any rate, it’s another instance that shows how current Douglas’s novel was, and why so many health professionals were interested in his book.