Personality Expansion

The men in Lloyd Cassel Douglas' family have a way of blossoming at the age of 50. His father, a worldly, small-town lawyer for 30 years, suddenly turned preacher. He himself, though he wanted to be a doctor, was also a preacher for three sober decades. In the midst of a series of essays on Personality Expansion Through Private Philanthropy, he decided to write a novel. Magnificent Obsession, published (1929) when he was 52, sold about 225,000 copies. Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1932) and Green Light (1935) sold 267,256 copies. Reason: in his novels he kept right on writing essays on Personality Expansion.

Lloyd Douglas' wife can tell when he is about to start a new novel by two signs: 1) he turns up in a smudged, sagging pair of trousers; 2) he does inspirational reading for his inspirational writing--medical journals and Walt Whitman. One day last year he put on his thinking pants, spotted this Whitman line: Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed the passage with you? Last week he published Disputed Passage (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50). As a personality pamphlet, it is a wow. As a novel, it is nothing much--no better nor worse than other Douglas books. Professor Tubby Forrester is so sour on life that it takes 432 pages for John Wesley Beaven, one of the nicest, cleanest, bravest medical students ever to flay a corpse, to convince the Professor that doctors must be gentle as well as skillful. John Wesley's own life is leavened by what Author Douglas calls his "process of orientation" to Lan Ying ("orchid"), an American girl brought up as a Chinese.

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