Lloyd C. Douglas got his start here

We don’t hear much of Lloyd C. Douglas anymore. But several generations ago he was, hands down, one of the most popular novelists writing in English.

And, at the start of his writing career, Montreal was his home.

Douglas was born in 1877 in Indiana and became, like his father, a Lutheran minister. But as Toronto littérateur Greg Gatenby puts it, he never allowed “the vigour of his intelligence to succumb to the dictates of his faith, an approach to the theological which, early in his priestly career, brought him into such feisty conflict with the leaders of his churches that occasionally he and his family were politely asked to move on. Promptly.”

It was just such a conflict, according to Gatenby, that brought him to St. James United Church, on SteCatherine St., early in 1929. He was invited to preach on six successive Sundays; if his sermons were a success, the temporary engagement would become permanent.

His debut was impressive, as The Gazette reported the next day, April 1. In his first sermon, Douglas implicitly dismissed those unsettled by the Darwinian view that humans developed from less complicated beings. Immortality, he continued, is best sought by projecting ourselves into the lives of those who survive us “by words of encouragement spoken at the right time, by personal kindnesses and by the preaching of the cheerful gospel of optimism to the downcast.”

It was an unusual Christianity for that time, seemingly devoid of the mystical, but it went over well. There were some 2,000 people in the big church, many of them standing, and “everybody stayed through and I heard no complaints,” he wrote afterward to his two daughters.

Nor were there any serious complaints after the remaining five sermons. In May he was offered the pulpit for as long as he wanted it.

He and his wife installed themselves in the Haddon Hall apartments on Sherbrooke St., near Atwater, and were soon joined by their daughters. They loved Montreal. “The city is beautiful: massive buildings, weathered grey stone. Our kind of place,” he wrote. “We will have to learn French if we stay. Very Frenchy.”

But the weather could be something else, frigid enough one Sunday in February 1930 “to freeze the hinges of hell.”

He wrote in another letter, “large quantities of the saints assembled at divine service to hear the Word. Unknown to them their minister was wearing a new suit of woollen underwear into which had been knit every manner of thistles and burrs. Ordin- arily I am a man of few gestures, but yesterday I flung myself about in an abandoned fashion whenever there was the least excuse for it.”

So successful was Douglas that eventually his services were broadcast live on radio. Time and again he returned to a central belief: “What we all need is to have some secrets between ourselves and God, besides our sins.”

He was a modest, good-humoured man, with no illusions about his mastery of prose. When he arrived in Montreal, he had already written one novel, but no publisher had taken it. Later that year, a small U.S. house finally brought out a run of 3,000 copies, most of which were bought by parishioners past and present.

The novel was Magnificent Obsession, a melodrama that develops the theme of doing good in secret. Its sales soon skyrocketed — by spring 1931, it was being reprinted every second month — and it eventually was made into two Hollywood movies and a TV series.

And so, in 1933, he left Montreal and the ministry to write full time. His output would include The Robe, about the aftermath of the crucifixion, and The Big Fisherman, about Jesus’s disciple Peter. They were blockbusters, on bestseller lists for months, and in them, as in much of Douglas’s fiction, redemption and forgiveness play their part.

But he did retain a connection to Montreal through his younger daughter, Virginia, who in 1931 married a member of St. James United’s congregation. Years later, Douglas still remembered the cold:

“Montreal is one of the cough-ingest, handerkerchiefingest, sniffliest cities between the North Pole and Pawtucket, Rhode Island,” he wrote to her.

He died in 1951, in the far warmer city of Los Angeles.