Dunnigan's Wake

THE MIRACLE OF THE BELLS (497 pp.) --Russell Janney--Prentice-Hall ($3).

The publishers call this novel "the publishing find of 1946 . . . the Abie's Irish Rose of publishing." They have elaborate promotion stunts all figured out: they plan to send the author on a "whirlwind" lecture tour of 60 U.S. cities, to talk on religious tolerance under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. They have even worked out advertising tie-ups with tobacco companies--because the book speaks favorably of smoking. They have printed 125,000 copies of the book, which they claim is the largest pre-publication printing of a first novel in publishing history.

Prentice-Hall have good reason to be half out of their minds. As a novel, The Miracle of the Bells is one of the worst ever published; as a business proposition it has cornered the schmaltz market and provides a role for every star in Hollywood.

Religion for Sale. The Miracle of the Bells has also a special importance. It fervently exploits every last one of the most treasured American principles--the brotherhood of races and creeds, human decency, class democracy (it has enough "little men" to man a Liberty ship). Above all, it has a religious theme--and in recent years a slew of novels, good & bad (including The Robe, The Song of Bernadette, The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith) have proved to publishers that in an unhappy world religion, no matter how vulgarized, has a market value second only to sex. In The Miracle, religious faith is trumpeted with a shamelessness that would make an atheist blush.

Hero of The Miracle is two-fisted Broadway Pressagent Bill Dunnigan. Bill always wore white spats, but "he believed that there was in the human heart a greater and deeper emotion than the thing commonly called love." Its name: "Palship." One day, goodhearted Bill discovered a tuberculous Polish girl in a burlesque house, got her the leading role in a movie. She played it like the great actress she had always pined to be--and then collapsed. "Bill," she gasped, "have the bells [of my home town] rung for pop--and me. . . . [And] some little girls with white paper wings ... to stand by my coffin." Then she passed away--to the heavenly studio of "the Great Producer."

Bishops & Orchids. By the time loyal Bill Dunnigan was through giving the little girl a big funeral, her drab birthplace, Coaltown, Pa., was jammed with bishops, Hollywood producers, newspapermen, sobbing atheists, tender rabbis. Orchids poured in from the greenhouses of the rich; the local miner's union donated a handmade altar. Even St. Michael ("the saint who took on Kid Lucifer and put him down and out for the full count") came across with a couple of helpful miracles, and the corpse's ghost made several personal appearances, clad in "a faded blue dress."

Present at the funeral were the Archbishop of Philadelphia, the Governor of Pennsylvania, twelve mayors, the village idiot, a boy choir from New York, "a great baritone" from the Met (he sang Schubert's Ave Maria) and, as pallbearers, the stars of Casablanca, Algiers, It Happened One Night, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Mutiny on the Bounty. No wonder that the producer of her film, who had decided there was no point in releasing a movie whose unknown star was already dead, changed his mind and staged an opening at Radio City Music Hall.

The lessons of The Miracle (in the words of its hero) are 1) that "even . . . Almighty God [can] do with a good press-agent," 2) that there's nothing like a religious revival to make business hum. "For this, thank God," concludes Author Janney, "is America." A few more books like this and it won't be.

Though The Miracle is 61-year-old Russell Janney's first novel, he is an old hand at inspirational writing. Son of an Ohio schoolteacher, he used to write copy for glamor-girl Theda Bara, co-authored the popular operetta The Vagabond King. He also wrote short stories for H.L. Mencken's Smart Set and was a contributor to the first Ziegfeld Follies.

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