Tag: Writing

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 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 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 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.

Publishing Miracle 4: The Women

by Ronald R Johnson

In my last post, I told you how members of the clergy in North America helped boost sales of the novel Magnificent Obsession after its publication in 1929; but they weren’t the only ones spreading the word. Women’s groups were also helpful. In Douglas’s list of important influencers, he names twice as many women reviewers as he does ministers:

*Mrs. Ada Turnbull, Monmouth, IL
*Mrs. Buena Mimms, Ocala, FL
*Mrs. R. C. Richey, Memphis, TN (at home of Mrs. W. L. Meux at Whitehaven)
*Mrs. M. R. Elikan, Bellaire, OH
*Mrs. Abe Levin, Youngstown, OH
*Mrs. J. H. Davis, Birmingham, AL
*Miss Sue Reese, Salisbury, NC
*Mrs. Charles Gilliam, Warsaw, IN
*Mrs. Theodore A. Switz, East Orange, NJ
*Mrs. Cox, Marion, IL
*Mrs. Danna Sellenberger, Kokomo, IN
*Mrs. Alex Woldert, Tyler, TX
*Mrs. Judson Geppinger, Hamilton, OH
*Mrs. Jerome Lewis, East St. Louis, IL
*Mrs. John Whiteman, Ardmore, OK
*Mrs. Harry W. McGhee, Brownwood, TX
*Mrs. W. E. Smith, Elkhart, IN
*Miss Althea Montgomery, Dean of Women of the Junior College, Washington, IA
*Mrs. Leroy Flanegin, Peoria, IL
*Mrs. E. N. Stone, Chickasha, OK
*Mrs. Wm. B. Mathews, Newport News, VA
*Mrs. Myrna Moore, Oklahoma City, OK
*Mrs. John Garvin, Toronto, ON (Canada)
*Mrs. T. G. Landers, East St. Louis, IL
*Mrs. Lawrence Ely, member of the Westmoorland College Faculty, San Antonio, TX
*Mrs. L. J. Wathen, Dallas, TX
*Mrs. Telis Miller, Hickory, NC
*Mrs. F. E. Ornsby, Cedar Rapids, IA
*Mrs. W. P. Johnson (at Mrs. Frank R. Mayers), Lake Worth, FL
*Mrs. Bessie Kagay, Effingham, IL
*Mrs. Clyde Young, Fort Collins, CO
*Mrs. Harvey Tuel, Rogers, AR
*Mrs. Gable, Richmond, IN
*Mrs. Sophyl Ozersky Levin, Youngstown, OH
*Mrs. James S. King, St. Paul, MN
*Mrs. Clyde Hickerson, Russellville, AR
*Fannie Lou Morgan, Oklahoma City, OK
*Mrs. Odell R. Blair, Buffalo, NY
*Mrs. R. T. Fiske, Buffalo, NY
*Mrs. Wm. B. Gramlich, Kenton, OH
*Mrs. W. K. Royal, Portland, OR
*Mrs. Edward E. Draper, Troy, NY (broadcast over WOKO, Port of Albany, weekly program called “Current Bookshelf”)

Some of the reviews were given at churches, others at libraries, still others at community groups. One was called “The Housekeepers’ Book Club.” Here are a few clippings about them from Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook. Note that this first one makes a mistake on the name of his book:

Some of these groups were very much into culture, reviewing Douglas’s book in the same afternoon as a study of Shakespeare…

And not all of these reviews were positive. One said that, from an artistic standpoint, the book was “negligible,” but the subject matter was important. Another said that the novel was more “rational” than “Christian.”

Women also wrote reviews in local newspapers. Some of these were the paper’s usual book reviewers, while others were columnists who took time out to write about Douglas’s book. As you may have noticed in the list of names above, one woman in New York had a local radio program for book reviews, and she did a segment on Douglas’s novel.

I am especially impressed, however, with a review written by a woman for a denominational paper, The Western Baptist. Her name was Jennie S. Hill, and I’m impressed because she picked up on things that few others – even among male reviewers – noticed.

“There is no padding,” she says, “no unnecessary description, while every trifling incident is vital to the story.” (Some might disagree with her, but Douglas wouldn’t have. He tried very hard to write his stories in a way that condensation of any kind would damage its integrity. I credit Miss Hill with recognizing how important this was to Douglas, even if I can’t defend every little detail of the book.)

“Then there is no ‘villain’ in the plot,” she continues. “One feels that the people are just ordinary people, some with more strength of mind than usual, but no single character so unusual as to be called impossible.” (Jennie Hill was the first person to acknowledge this fact in print: that Douglas found a way to make his stories suspenseful without demonizing any of his characters or turning them into villains. That is, in my mind, one of his great accomplishments, and very few reviewers seem to have noticed, even after he had written a number of novels that way. Many years later, a literature professor named Carl Bode would call it one of Douglas’s weaknesses, saying that his characters were too good. But Jennie Hill understood what Douglas was trying to do: portray humans as they appear to us in our own daily lives, not as “good guys” or “bad guys,” but as ordinary people trying to make their way in the world.)

Miss Hill also deserves credit for pinpointing one of the main weaknesses of Magnificent Obsession from the standpoint of communicating Douglas’s message: “The only criticism that could truthfully be made is that difficulties [within the story] are too often solved by the use of money. It is very human to conclude that money can do everything, and though that is decidedly untrue, the lessons that the author would teach would have been made more clear had not the possession of so much money really dimmed the motives of his chief character.” As she said a little earlier in her essay, the real point of the book is “the subduing of one’s own life in order to help someone else to raise his own standing. But to understand it, one must read the book.”

I’ve been analyzing what Noel Busch called “a publishing miracle,” telling you step-by-step how Magnificent Obsession became so well-known. This is one of the steps: women talked about it within their social circles and helped create “buzz.”

But their efforts were amplified by the local newspapers. In the early twentieth century, the life of the community was considered newsworthy in a way that is no longer true in the twenty-first century. I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Harper’s Verdict

by Ronald R Johnson

Eugene Exman to LCD, 1/8/1929. In LCD Correspondence 1926-1930, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 1, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. The University of Michigan holds copyright.

Over the last dozen posts I’ve been talking about Lloyd Douglas’s work on a novel called Salvage during the summer of 1928 (what would later become known as Magnificent Obsession) and of Harper & Brothers’ attempts to make sense out of it. Douglas had put two very different genres together: a novel (specifically, a hospital drama) and a non-fiction treatise about the first few verses of Matthew 6.

In January 1929, Eugene Exman, Harper’s religion editor, gave Douglas his company’s verdict. Four members of the Literary Department had read the updated version and recommended against publication as a novel. They categorized it “between the manuscripts that were almost good enough to publish and those which were obviously important enough to publish.” In his earlier correspondence, Exman had used words like “good enough” and “important enough” to assess the book’s marketability, not its literary quality. Years later, he would claim publicly that the head of the Literary Department considered the book “second-rate fiction and not deserving of the Harper imprint,” but nothing was said about that in his letters at the time. If it was true, however, then it added an extra layer of complexity to Douglas’s task: although he was using fiction techniques to communicate his message, he was under no illusion that he could be regarded as a serious – much less, first-rate – novelist. That wasn’t what he was trying to do at this stage in his career.

True to his word, Exman then tried to publish the book as religious non-fiction. As Harper’s Religion Editor, he had the authority to do that. In retrospect, it seems like a strange move, since Douglas had clearly written the book in novelistic form; but if it was a choice between treating it as a religious book or not publishing it at all, Exman chose the former. But first, he had to get the opinion of an expert.

He sent the manuscript to an anonymous but “prominent” churchman. I’m going to hazard a guess here: it very well might have been Harry Emerson Fosdick. I say that for two reasons. First, because Exman was then a member of Park Avenue Baptist Church, where Fosdick preached while Riverside Church was being built for him. Second, because Exman was patiently trying to win Fosdick over to Harper from Macmillan, and he eventually succeeded. They published 17 books together. (Stephen Prothero, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2023), p. 41).

But whether I’m right or not, Exman showed the manuscript to some “prominent” churchman, who in turn shared it with three other “very discerning people.” The clergyman rejected the book’s thesis and advised against publication on theological grounds. And with good reason, one might argue. The book seemed to promise worldly success. A lot of explaining would be necessary to translate the story into anything resembling traditional Christian theology. That was Douglas’s intention, of course: to speak the language of the unchurched and get them interested in Jesus without sounding like a preacher. But the prominent churchman that Exman consulted was unwilling to go along with it.

“Whether his point is well taken is not of such great importance,” Exman told Douglas. “The thing which concerns me is that the publication of the manuscript would not get his backing as well as the backing of the group in the church he represents.” Once again, the main obstacle was economic. Exman had reason to believe that the book wouldn’t sell.

In brief, then: Harper had carefully considered publishing the book, but the editors were uncertain whether it could meet their sales goal. Would it do better as a novel or as a religious tract? Their answer was, Neither.

Douglas had hoped to present the Christian gospel in practical terms and to spread his message to an audience far beyond the confines of the church. His book was an experimental piece of writing that could possibly help him attain that goal, but “possibly” was the operative word. Eugene Exman realized that the book was unusual, but he lacked evidence that the general public would recognize its worth. Without that assurance, he could not take the financial risk. “I really believe that it should be published,” he told Douglas, “although this may seem a paradoxical statement; I am sorry the imprint of our House will not appear on your book when it does go out.”

The situation was paradoxical indeed, for Eugene Exman, perhaps more than any other religion editor, went on to publish the books that would both create and give direction to what we now call the SBNR movement (Spiritual But Not Religious). Late in his career, he considered Douglas’s book the one that got away (Prothero, p. 276).

Thirsty Fish

by Ronald R Johnson

I told you in my last post that Eugene Exman, Religion Editor at Harper and Brothers, was working with the Literary Department in the fall of 1928 to get Douglas’s novel Salvage accepted for publication. In November, Douglas told Exman he had come up with a much better title for the book.

LCD to Eugene Exman, 11/15/1928. In LCD Correspondence 1926-1930, Box 1, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. The University of Michigan holds copyright to this item.

“Not at any time have I been entirely satisfied with the name Salvage,” he told Exman. “By the time I had reached the third chapter, the book had outgrown the ‘salvage’ concept.” (And there was a reason for that: because the novel Salvage had now been combined with the thesis of his non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul, making it an entirely different story than he had originally planned.) “I have hit upon a title now that will be sufficiently cryptic to be intriguing to the reader’s curiosity and yet significant enough to be entirely comprehensible to him in due time. I am calling the book…”

(Drum roll, please…)

“…Thirsty Fish.”

Exman must have blinked a few times before responding. “I must confess frankly that it doesn’t register at all with me.”

Nor with me. There is nothing in his private papers that tells us what the proposed title meant to him. Obviously, a thirsty fish is an oxymoron, for a fish lives in water. In reference to Bobby Merrick, the hero of the novel, was Douglas implying that he was surrounded by material wealth but was poor in spiritual things? Or that the spiritual help he needed most was all around him and he didn’t know it? We simply don’t have enough evidence to guess what Douglas had in mind.

The nearest thing to a clue comes from Douglas’s novel Forgive Us Our Trespasses, although that’s getting way ahead of the story. Near the end of that book, Dinny Brumm gets the idea for a novel called Thirst. It’s based on Ecclesiastes 12:6, in which the Hebrew writer advises remembering God before the time of adversity, “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.” (Douglas was quoting from the King James Version.) The idea here is that the person becomes thirsty even unto death, because he no longer has a way to draw water from the well. But that seems like a very different idea from the image of a thirsty fish.

At any rate, Exman never forgot it. Years later, when he wrote an official company history, he included Douglas and his book as a comical sidenote and livened up the story by claiming that, from the very start, Douglas had sent him the manuscript with it already titled as Thirsty Fish (Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 223.)

Meanwhile, Exman and his associates got down to work reading the updated manuscript. As I mentioned in a previous post, Douglas was in trouble. To avert disruption from a core group of conservatives in his congregation in Los Angeles, he had resigned, effective January 1929. He didn’t have any other positions lined up, and both of his daughters were now studying in Europe. He needed an income – immediately. The new book became more important than ever…

X-Man

by Ronald R Johnson

In the summer of 1928, after Lloyd Douglas had combined his novel Salvage with the non-fiction material he had been working up in Exploring Your Soul, he reached out to his most recent publisher to tell them what he was doing.

Douglas’s non-fiction book, Those Disturbing Miracles, had been published by Harper and Brothers the previous year. Since its release, Harper’s Religion Editor had died and was replaced by Eugene Exman, a young man who had recently earned a Masters degree in Religion from the University of Chicago; his mentor had been Shailer Mathews. Because of the influence Mathews had on Douglas early in his career, it seemed like a good fit. (For more information on Exman, see Stephen Prothero, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2023).)

Exman was very interested in what Douglas was doing. But there was a problem. Because the book was technically a novel and he was the Religion Editor, he had to refer the manuscript to the Literary Department. And that’s where the problem came into sharper focus: what genre was this book?

It comes down to this: publishing is a business, and it costs money to print books and distribute them to bookstores. Publishers have to believe that they will recoup their losses before they agree to publish a book. In the case of Douglas’s earlier books, they fit neatly under the heading, “Non-fiction, Religious,” and his publishers knew exactly who would buy them: ministers. All they had to do was add up the number of ministers in North America who could reasonably be expected to buy the book, and that would tell them (roughly) how much revenue the book would earn. It wouldn’t be much, but that was to be expected for religious non-fiction.

In the case of this new book, however, it wasn’t clear who would buy it… or whether anyone would. In September 1928, Exman reported to Douglas that there was “a divergence of opinion” among the members of the Literary Department, “and this divergence of opinion [about the book] largely centers on the sale possibility it has…. We all agree that your manuscript does have literary merit,” he said, but they worried that it would not sell enough copies: “in its present form we cannot be sure that it is good enough to get out of the class of ‘just another novel.’” Despite that evaluative term “good enough,” the focus was on sales. “If… you could indicate in a conservative way what demand there would be for the book [in cities] where you have friends, that would also be of distinct help to us in making a final decision as to its publication.”

On an internal memo, William H. Briggs from the Literary Department confirmed that this was the main consideration. After typing a list of suggestions for improvement from a literary standpoint, he then wrote in pen, beside his initials, an estimate of potential sales: 500 to the religious trade and 1000 to members of Douglas’s past congregations. If it was going to be presented to the public as a novel, then their goal was to sell at least ten thousand copies. Beneath this he wrote “general trade” (the general public, in other words) but was unable to make an estimate. That was the point at issue. In order for the book to reach the sales goal, it would have to appeal to the public. Douglas had written the book with a wider audience in mind, but the editors at Harper were uncertain whether the general public would be interested in such a book.

This was the main issue. If Harper did agree to publish the book, would it be most successful if packaged as a non-fiction religious book just like his others, or as a novel? Exman told Douglas that he was strongly in favor of publishing it one way or the other, and that he would push to have it released as a religious work of non-fiction if it came down to that, but he advised Douglas to make the narrative changes that Briggs and others had suggested.

Over the next two months, Douglas made some of the requested improvements. He also changed the name of the story…

The Open Door at The Christian Century

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

Lloyd Douglas didn’t win the Christian Century’s essay contest in the summer of 1920; he took second place. But it didn’t matter…

From the July 22, 1920, issue of The Christian Century, p. 22. Available online at The Online Books Page.

…because his participation in the contest had excited the interest of the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, and Morrison invited Douglas to submit another article to the Century – right away. “Our readers will be particularly interested in an article from you just now when their attention has been put on the qui vive [on the alert] by your taking one of the honors in the series,” Morrison said. “I hope you will feel not only free, but strongly prompted, to write for us at any time.”

Letter from Charles Clayton Morrison to Lloyd C Douglas, July 22, 1920. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Douglas accepted the invitation immediately. And he didn’t just send one article; he sent Part One of a three-part series. It was called, “Wanted: A Congregation,” and it was some of the finest writing he had ever done up to that time.

Letter from Charles Clayton Morrison to Lloyd C Douglas, August 3, 1920. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Upon receiving the first installment, Morrison gushed, “You write splendidly.” He wasted no time publishing it, even announcing it on the front cover (August 5, 1920), and he encouraged Douglas to send the other two installments as soon as possible.

Notice that Douglas now shares the front cover with John Spargo.

Douglas did better than that: he sent three more installments. But first he asked the editor’s permission. Morrison wrote back pretending to be “quite offended that you felt any inhibition at all in the matter of writing a fourth installment when you were prompted to do so.” He wasn’t really offended; he was delighted that Douglas had been “prompted,” either by his Muse or by the Spirit, to add another installment to the series. “The chances are 102 per cent that whatever you write will be available [he probably means ‘accepted’] for publication in The Christian Century.”

So… now Douglas not only had a series running in the Century, but he also had an open invitation from the editor to send him an article anytime, and to expect to see it published in that magazine.

Elesha J Coffman has written, “In 1920, the Century was not yet a magazine that other papers envied or a place where writers could make their names. By the end of the decade, through savvy and serendipity, it would be both.” (The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainstream (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 63.)

That being the case, Douglas and the Century grew up together, for his frequent contributions beginning in 1920 made his non-fiction writing well-known among America’s Protestant clergy, and at the end of that decade, The Christian Century would play a major role in making him a world-famous novelist.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C. Douglas, fill out the form below:

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