Magnificent Obsession – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Prohibition Begins

The front page of the New York Tribune, Saturday, January 17, 1920, proclaims: “American Nation Permanently ‘Dry.'”

I’ve been telling you about the sermon series Lloyd Douglas preached on the subject of “Personality” at the University of Michigan in January 1920, and in my last several posts I shared his message from Sunday morning, January 18, 1920. Although I haven’t mentioned it, that weekend was on everyone’s radar at the time, and certainly must have been important to the students who filled the balcony of the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, where Douglas was pastor.

For that was the beginning of the Prohibition Era in America.

According to the Eighteenth Amendment, “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.”

“The prohibitionist cause had always been linked to anti-immigrant sentiment,” writes Lisa McGurr in her book, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). During the Great War (WWI) “the nation’s large brewing companies, overwhelmingly in the hands of men of German descent, were further stigmatized as ‘enemies’ and ‘traitors.’ The Anti-Saloon League shamelessly pandered to the hostility to all things German to win the amendment’s passage. The league identified the antiliquor crusade as the ultimate patriotic act. The time had come, wrote one pamphleteer, for a split between ‘unquestioned and undiluted American patriots and slackers and enemy sympathizers.’ The most patriotic act of any legislature or citizen was to ‘abolish the un-American, pro-German, crime-producing, food-wasting, youth-corrupting, home wrecking, treasonable liquor traffic'” (pp. 33-34).

McGurr continues: “With the war effort and wartime patriotism at full throttle, congressional majorities well in excess of the two-thirds requirement submitted the Eighteenth Amendment to the states on December 22, 1917…. On September 18, 1918, Congress introduced a plan for wartime Prohibition at the time that many states were considering ratification [of the Constitutional Amendment]. In doing so, it once again linked the war against alcohol to the war effort. By January 1919, ratification was complete…. World War I sped the process for the achievement of the Eighteenth Amendment to an extent unexpected by even its most avid supporters” (p. 35).

“The House passed a vigorous enforcement code on July 23, 1919” and “the Senate followed suit on September 5.” It was called “The National Prohibition Act, better known as the Volstead Act, after its author, Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead” (p. 36). It was to go into effect on Friday night, January 16, 1920, at midnight, making alcohol illegal in America as of Saturday, January 17.

Lloyd Douglas’s daughter Virginia tells this story in her book, The Shape of Sunday, about one of her father’s weekly meetings with his music director, Earl V. Moore:

“Always after the Rotary Club luncheon at the Michigan Union, Daddy and Earl Moore had a little conference to discuss how things had gone the previous Sunday and review their plans for the following one. One time in 1920 they met as usual and Mr. Moore handed Daddy the program of anthems, hymns, and solos which were being prepared by the choir for the next Sunday,” which happened to be January 18.

“Daddy’s eyes ran down the list and suddenly he raised a horrified hand to his head. ‘Earl! You can’t do this to me.’

“Earl Moore’s face expressed complete bewilderment.

“‘Don’t you know,’ groaned Daddy, ‘what happens at midnight this coming Saturday?’

“Mr. Moore thought and then remembered that at the stroke of twelve that night Prohibition was to go into effect in the United States. The solo he had chosen for Jimmie Hamilton to sing was ‘Ho! Everyone That Thirsteth'” (p. 106).

I can well imagine the balcony rocking with laughter as the University of Michigan students reacted to that!

One more comment before I leave this. There’s a passage in Douglas’s novel Magnificent Obsession that went over my head the first time I read it. It’s in Chapter Three, when Tom Masterson is trying to describe to Joyce Hudson the change that has come over their friend Bobby Merrick. Merrick got in a boating accident while drunk, and the aftermath made him a new man. The chapter opens with this:

‘You say he’s different,’ pursued Joyce interestedly. ‘How do you mean — different? Sober, perhaps?’

Masterson chuckled.

‘Don’t be a fool!’ she growled. ‘You know very well what I meant.’

A page or two later, Masterson tells her:

‘…I just kidded him a little, but he didn’t take it nicely…. ‘What’s the big idea?’ I said. ‘Gone over to Andy Volstead?’

‘What did he say?’ demanded Joyce as the pause lengthened.

‘He said, ‘Hell, no!’ and then mumbled down in his throat that he’d gone over to Nancy Ashford.’

Nancy Ashford is the superintendent of the hospital, and she has talked him into turning his life around and making something of himself. But it’s just like Lloyd Douglas to make a joke out of the Volstead Act — something that religious people, by and large, took very seriously.

Does It Cost Too Much?

by Ronald R Johnson

From the title page of “The Pearl-Trader.” In Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

In my last post I showed how Lloyd Douglas, in 1919, was already moving in the direction his imagination would take him a decade later with his bestselling novels. I’ve been talking about a sermon entitled “The Pearl-Trader” which he preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 26, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

In this sermon he had his congregation imagine a pearl that had special powers (just like Christ’s garment would do in Douglas’s novel, The Robe). Those powers were the kinds of things that the Holy Spirit would do in the life of anyone who followed Jesus, but Douglas helped his congregation to see its effects more vividly by imagining them as properties of an object (in this case, a Super Pearl). As I mentioned in the previous post, this was similar to the plot devices Douglas would use later in his bestselling novels.

But he also anticipated his novels in another way: by imagining the main character (in this case, the Pearl Merchant) raising objections (the very ones that his listeners might be thinking of) and seriously considering them. In this sermon, and in his future novels, Douglas would seek common ground with his listeners (and later his readers), then explain why he thought those objections could be overcome. In this sermon, the Pearl Merchant wants the Super Pearl with its special powers, but the seller’s price is unbelievably high: he insists on the Merchant’s entire pearl collection.

Again, Douglas uses his imagination, but this time he does it in order to lead his listeners through the merchant’s thought process:

“I think I see this man deciding that he absolutely can’t make the trade – for several reasons. He had come to be very fond of hearing himself called a ‘skeptic.’ If he acquired the wonderful pearl, he would have to leave off all his bumptious sophistries and confess to his old friends that he had really come to a decision about a few things, and that he had turned in his stock of doubts for a serene and simple-hearted faith.

“That would be very difficult. I doubt not many a man has gone through life fairly bracing himself against the tug of his own spirit, just because he enjoyed the sensation of having certain solicitous friends and relatives worrying over his soul’s salvation. He fears that once he relieves them of this anxiety, they will lose all interest in him.

“And he may have good cause to think so. The sheep that is out in the dark, fast in a barbed-wire fence, is always a great deal more interesting than the sheep calmly ruminating in the fold. You may recall how the elder brother of the Prodigal felt on that point. Not once had they declared a holiday in his honor; but when this scapegrace tatterdemalion comes home, the whole place is upset. Nor can the Prodigal expect that the general stir caused by his return is going to last forever. After a while, he will become a familiar figure, and people will either forget him, or he will have to distinguish himself for something else besides his erstwhile profligacy.

“The pearl-trader knew all this. And he disliked to give up his ‘Agnostic pearl.’ Moreover, he had grown fond of hearing himself described as a just man. ‘Ah, yes,’ they would say, ‘he’s fair, but a mighty hard customer when it comes to transgressions. Let his enemies look out for themselves. A loyal friend, but a firm and uncompromising judge.’

He hesitated to have any man say, ‘What’s come over the pearl-trader? Getting soft, I should say.’ He hesitated, too, before the idea of loosening up some of his static wealth. It was a satisfaction just to own property. He knew he would be much more interesting to the public as a man of riches than as a philanthropist. Some of his friends would think him foolish.

“I can see him confiding his dilemma to a trusted friend, and I can hear that friend saying, ‘If you don’t want to exchange your entire stock of pearls for this one jewel, why not bargain for a part of it? Let the owner cut it, as he would a diamond.’

“‘No, my friend,’ responds the pearl-trader sadly. ‘One does not cut pearls. I must take it or leave it, just as it stands.'”

What Douglas does in this sermon is the very thing he will do again and again in his novels: he will lead his readers through the main character’s thought process, acknowledging his readers’ objections but showing why the main character decides, ultimately, to do the audacious thing he’s been contemplating. Here is how the sermon ends:

“And so, at length, [the pearl-merchant] carried his precious pearls to the city and spread them out upon a table and received in exchange this most beautiful and wonderful pearl in all the world. No longer did he wander about in quest of goodly pearls, now that he had found the best.

“It is after this manner, said Jesus, that the Kingdom of Heaven is realized in the heart of an individual. For the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

“Which is another way of saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is no easy thing to gain; but that, when a man has the calm discernment to realize its value, he will give up everything in this world to possess it, as they who have known its peace and happiness have testified for ages, by the splendor of their faith and the immortality of their ever-shining deeds.”

The Super Pearl

by Ronald R Johnson

In my last post I began talking about how Lloyd Douglas indulged his imagination in a sermon about one of Christ’s parables. The title of his sermon was “The Pearl-Trader,” and he delivered it at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 26, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

He imagined the Pearl Merchant having in his collection a pearl from Athens (his Agnostic pearl), another from Rome (the Justice pearl), and another from Alexandria (his Prosperity pearl) – all of them representing attitudes that were probably prevalent among the people in Douglas’s church.

Still using the imagination for which he would later become famous, Douglas described the merchant coming upon a “Super Pearl” that outshone any of the others in his collection. As Douglas says, the merchant “learned that whoever possessed this remarkable jewel would inevitably be strangely influenced by it. First of all, the wearer of this pearl would find his mind set at rest about the inexplicable mysteries of life. He would become invested with a simple, trustful, childlike faith in the reality of an unseen power leading him on by paths which he had previously found hard, but now quite easy to travel. In the presence of these mysterious forces, he would find himself saying, ‘I am persuaded. No; I cannot explain, but I am persuaded!’

“Again, this super-pearl, while it permitted its wearer to deal justly, forever urged him to interpret Justice with Charity, and temper Justice with Mercy. The ‘quid pro quo’ would fail any longer to satisfy the demands of him who wore this pearl. His measure would henceforth be heaped up, pressed down, and running over. His judgments would henceforth be warped in favor of the defendant. He would forgive and forbear and entreat, where previously he had balanced the scales in a spirit of absolute justice, regardless of the circumstances.

“And again, this pearl had the peculiar quality of making its owner ashamed of riches unless they were working for the common good. No man could wear this pearl and pile up wealth for the sake of satisfying his own love of ease. He might be rich, but the riches must not rust. He might be learned, but the learning would have to function, somehow, in the interest of human happiness. He might be famous, but he would have to find and rest his fame on the value of his investment… in the life of the race.”

Do you see what Douglas is doing? He’s anticipating the kind of thing he will do later in The Robe: he’s taking a physical object and asking his listeners to imagine that it produces the kinds of results that are normally produced by the Holy Spirit. He will also do something like this in Magnificent Obsession and Forgive Us Our Trespasses, although in those novels he will treat certain passages of scripture as though they have magical qualities. In all of these cases, he will base entire novels on the insight he’s developing here in this sermon: that people in the modern secular world are much more likely to understand what the Holy Spirit can do in their lives if they are asked to imagine an object endowed with magical properties. To modern sensibilities, that makes more sense, because people can imagine this magical object doing something in their lives, whereas the Holy Spirit’s work requires their cooperation, and they may not want to cooperate. Douglas is saying to his people: “Let’s play a game. Let’s imagine a ‘Super Pearl’ that can change your life. All you have to do is wear it.”

Part of Douglas’s genius was his ability to demonstrate, in very specific ways, how this magical pearl would improve their lives. For the skeptics in his audience, he described how the Spirit gives us a sort of “inner knowing”; it’s not about proving anything but about having a peace and confidence that aren’t based on proof. For the “Justice Only” people in the crowd, he tries to show that “Justice Tempered with Mercy” will lead to a more satisfying moral code. For the “Prosperity” people in his congregation, he argues that the real adventure is not only to acquire wealth but to do it in a way that benefits others.

It is, of course, quite possible for Douglas’s listeners to reject what he’s saying. But again, he uses his imagination to disarm them; and again, he anticipates a method that he will use quite effectively in his novels. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Just Imagine!

by Ronald R Johnson

Sometimes the little things end up being important later, even if we don’t notice them at the time.

In Lloyd Douglas’s case, it was a mere phrase he happened to utter in one of his sermons ten years before the publication of his bestselling novel, Magnificent Obsession. The title of his sermon was “The Pearl-Trader,” and he delivered it at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 26, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

The phrase I’m talking about was: “If we may be permitted to lend our imagination wings…”

His biblical text was Matthew 13:45-46, which says, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls; who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”

There doesn’t seem to be much meat in that short passage, but Douglas used his imagination to make more out of it. From a strictly exegetical point of view, one may argue that he should stick to the text; but from a biographical point of view, the fact that he indulged his imagination on this occasion is significant. And, unlike the average pastor, Douglas’s imagination always produced interesting results.

He says of the pearl trader: “If we may be permitted to lend our imagination wings, we may venture a guess that he… picked up one of his treasured pearls in Athens, the traditional seat of learning. Perhaps he called it his ‘Agnostic’ pearl. It had a special value for him. It stood for a neutral-tinted, convictionless attitude of mind, forever in quest of truth and never satisfied with its booty; forever asking for evidence, cross-examining witnesses and demanding testimony – and never reaching a verdict.

“Sometimes his heart proposed that he take a definite stand for something; espouse a cause and see it through; join hands with a movement and put it over; announce discipleship to some Master and follow him; but always he remembered the Agnostic pearl and remained non-committal. ‘Skeptic,’ his friends called him, and the word was not an epithet but a badge of merit, to his mind. He liked to be called ‘free-thinker.’ I suppose that of all the pearls he had, the merchant loved this one best.”

A lot of people in the church that day could probably empathize with this position – especially freshmen. Douglas continued:

“But not much less ardently did he rejoice in the possession of the flawless pearl he had bought in Rome, the headquarters of jurisprudence. Whatever qualms of conscience the Agnostic pearl aroused in him, this Roman stone, which he called the Justice pearl, stirred him to a self-righteous pride. For Justice was an undeniably fine attribute for any man to possess.

“Sometimes his heart suggested that he waive aside the claims of inexorable justice and invest something in behalf of human woe and wretchedness – even if that misery had but little to justify it. Sometimes he would have been glad to do something, out of the charity of his heart, for a weaker fellow; but always he remembered the Justice pearl. Every man should have exactly his due from him, and no more. Mercy was enervating. Mercy was always wearing its heart on its sleeve and getting itself taken in by imposters. No; Justice would do for him.”

Personnel from the administrative side of the University of Michigan were there that morning, and perhaps they felt the same way. Douglas continued:

“And then there was that most showy pearl of the lot, the one he had found in Alexandria, the home of riches and commercial prosperity. As he rubbed his sensitive thumb delicately over its satin surface, he glowed with satisfaction over its ownership. Just carrying it had brought him wealth. After all, honor and influence were not far away from the man who had amassed much property. It was ever so. Poverty, even voluntarily embraced in the interest of a great cause was nevertheless a serious handicap. Not for any consideration would he part from this jewel which he knew as his Prosperity pearl.”

Members of the Ann Arbor business community were members of the church, including prominent business leaders. Perhaps they could relate to this attitude. Douglas continued:

“But with all his goodly pearls he was not content, but still sought others. He appears to have had a haunting suspicion that somewhere there was a valuable pearl to which he had not yet gained access. I daresay he felt it would be a great pity to have gone through life, bent upon the exclusive business of finding the most valuable pearls, and then discover, perhaps when it was quite too late to achieve it, that the most wonderful pearl in the whole world was not his – could never be his – that he had not even seen it, much less owned it.

“It is this gnawing unrest that brings many of us toward the day of silvering hair and faltering footsteps, fearful that, after all, try as we might to live purposefully, we had somehow missed the very best things – maybe passed them, unnoticed, along the way; maybe tossed them aside, as of no account, in our ignorance of their value. Indeed, the man of fifty sometimes reflects that he remembers the day when he passed a great opportunity to possess something of inestimable worth; and if he might set his life back as easily as we set back our clocks last night [for the fall time-change], he would surely want to go back to that crucial hour and live it again.

“I do not know just how much this pearl-merchant worried lest he was rejoicing in the possession of some second-rate jewels when he was seeking the very best; but I do know that when the Master introduces him to us, he is still seeking pearls, goodly pearls. Still touring about from country to country, by ship and caravan, seeking better pearls than these he owned. It doesn’t look as if he was entirely contented.

“You will find them all along the way, many of them people you have envied for their conspicuous positions, their learning, their culture, their wealth – you will find them, like the pearl-merchant, still in quest of something better than they possess. Restless souls, whose very quest proclaims their dissatisfaction with their accretions.”

We know, of course, that the Pearl Merchant is going to find that one pearl that will outshine the others. But Douglas indulges his imagination in other ways, and what he does next is very interesting. I’ll tell about it in my next post.

The Mission of Lloyd C Douglas

by Ronald R Johnson

Autograph on first page of a customer copy of Forgive Us Our Trespasses.

Although it’s true that the phenomenal success of the 1929 novel Magnificent Obsession changed the life of its author, it was a delayed reaction. Not until he sat down to write Forgive Us Our Trespasses in the summer of 1932 did Lloyd Douglas realize how greatly his life would change. As I told you in previous posts, he had wanted his next novel to be a satire on the state of modern art, with emphasis (apparently) on the New Fiction of the 1920s; but instead, he wrote another novel like Magnificent Obsession, in which the story was based on a portion of the Sermon on the Mount. As he neared retirement from full-time ministry (which he planned to do in the summer of 1933), he had imagined himself as a mainstream novelist, not as a writer of Christian fiction.

His embarrassment comes through in an unpublished essay that he had intended for the Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1933. (All quotations in this post are from that essay, “Adventures in Parables,” which is filed under “Addresses and Articles,” Box 3, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. The University of Michigan holds copyright to this document.)

“More or less by accident,” Douglas wrote, “I have become an author of goody-goody stories in which the characters are tiresomely decent and everything turns out happily in the end. This is an offense to modern art in letters, and if I knew to whom apologies should be offered, perhaps I might solicit such shriving as the transgression demands.”

He was joking, but he really did feel like he had been caught trespassing in literary territory. In that sense, the title Forgive Us Our Trespasses was more appropriate than people realized.

“My main trouble, in the opinion of the literary critics,” he continued, “is that I broke all the rules of novel-composition through ignorance. That’s what makes my position in the world of letters so embarrassing. The only woman at the dinner party who dares plant her elbows on the table and hold the squab in her fingers is the lady whose social experience is beyond the reach of query or cavil. If Maggie O’Flaherty did such a thing, the whole solar system would be set back two minutes due to time out for recovery.”

To understand the next example, you have to bear in mind that this was the Great Depression, and Roosevelt wasn’t president yet. At the very moment he wrote this piece, banks all over the country were closing. Douglas wrote, “The only man in town who can afford to wear a greasy old hat is the banker. (Pardon me. I was momentarily thinking of earlier times when bankers had money. If you can think of another word here for ‘banker,’ give him the old hat with our envious felicitations.)”

Then he got to the point:

“The only writer who can take the risk of breaking the laws in respect to the composition of fiction is the sanctioned, seasoned, spurred veteran; which I am not.

“Nobody in these frugal days should waste ink, stamps, and sarcasm in notifying me that Magnificent Obsession and Forgive Us Our Trespasses are, technically, about as bad as stories could be without exposing themselves to censorship in the cause of sound literary production. Perhaps I am too naive to know just how bad they are, but I have a general idea.”

He was being too hard on himself. Although a case can be made that this or that aspect of his first two novels could have been improved, critics with credentials – especially those based in New York – had good things to say about both novels. As I noted in a previous post, there were only a few writers in local newspapers (Kansas City, for example, and Birmingham, Alabama) who trashed Magnificent Obsession, and that trend continued with Forgive Us. But Douglas didn’t consider either of those books literary masterpieces, and that’s why he was embarrassed when some people did criticize them on literary grounds.

“I have only one defense to fall back upon,” he said, “when the really competent critics complain that my stories are shocking examples of How Not to Write a Novel. I am fully aware of it. I do not think of myself as a novelist at all. These things I have written are probably not novels. Perhaps they are modern parables.”

Again, he was conceding too much. They were novels; they just weren’t the kind that was in vogue after the literary revolution of the 1920s. They were “purpose novels”: novels in which the thesis was more important than the plot. And yet his first two books demonstrate that he understood plotting and did it with skill. His only real problem was this: that he was a writer of purpose novels in a day when that genre was considered a thing of the past.

There’s something he’s not telling us in this essay, however. The truth is, he had always aspired to be a novelist – not a writer of purpose novels but of real ones – ones in which the story was everything. Through all his years as a minister, he had waited patiently for that day, when he could shed the clerical collar and WRITE. But when his moment came, his incoming mail convinced him that God had other ideas. As much as he wanted to be “the sanctioned, seasoned, spurred veteran” writer of modern novels, he chose the path he felt his people needed.

This was the mission of Lloyd C. Douglas: to write “modern parables” for people who desperately needed the guidance such stories could provide. When he composed Forgive Us Our Trespasses, he had to make a choice. Would he follow his heart and be the novelist he had always dreamed of being, or would he do what he discerned the Spirit of God calling him to do? Knowing how much it meant to him, I believe it was a gut-wrenching decision. But he chose what he perceived to be his calling. And the rest is history.

This is as much as I can tell you, in these blog posts, about Douglas’s life story. The biography that I’ve written picks up here (1932) and covers the rest of his life, until his death in 1951. If you would like to know more about that book, I send a free monthly newsletter to Lloyd Douglas fans, updating them on the progress of my research and writing. I invite you to fill out the form below, and I will be glad to add you to my list.

In the meantime, future posts at this site will delve more deeply into the documents in the Lloyd Douglas archive: his sermons, speeches, published articles, and interviews. Stay tuned!

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Release

by Ronald R Johnson

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.