On "Asshood"

In my most recent post I said a certain writer by virtue of his bigotry and ignorance evinced asshood.  "Asshood" is a coinage by Lloyd C. Douglas, who used it in Magnificent Obsession, I think as a word in the mouth of "Bobby Merrick,"* the antihero of that novel, who uses it to describe a drunken binge he regretted.  I've had my share of episodes of asshood in my own life.  But that's another story. 

Enough of asshood.  My mother introduced me to Douglas, an ordained Presbyterian minister who wrote sentimental, inspirational novels about people, usually male surgeons, who have lofty ideals, secular conversions (or at least Christ is downplayed), and romantic obsessions with beautiful women, whom they finally win in the last chapter.  Mother introduced me by happening to have a copy of Green Light in the house.  She never discussed it with me when I was a child but she never discouraged me from reading any book I might find in the house.  Recently I reread Green Light and then for the first time Magnificent Obsession.  I liked them both and in my humble opinion Douglas was a fine literary craftsman, sort of like Henry James, not as "great," of course, but not quite as mannered and -- well, stuffy.  James does have one great story that I've read, namely The Turn of the Screw.

She liked Douglas and also Grace Livingston Hill (The Mystery of Mary was the one novel at home), both of whom wrote "wholesome" escape fiction.  I put quotation marks around "wholesome" because I'm self-conscious after all these years, after I've read post-Mailer novels and such.  I say post-Mailer because even the bumptious "Brooklyn Tolstoy" could not bring himself to have his American soldiers in his 1948 war novel, The Naked and the Dead, say "fuck"instead of the word he used, "fugg."  (Leon Uris also used that silly non-word in Battle Cry, about the Marines in WWII.)  Now, even the ethical James Lee Burke uses the coarsest language as well as the most sublime in depicting good and evil in his wonderful novels featuring his righteous lawmen-heroes, "Dave Robicheaux" and "Hackberry Holland**."


Anyhow, I'm surprised I enjoyed wholesome novels without the usual quota of filthy language after all these years.  Truth and beauty and wisdom are where you find them.

*Played by Rock Hudson in the movie version, which was a lame translation without the well-done narration of Douglas.

**Corrected spelling of Holland.  I'd been misspelling it "Hollander."