Tranquilizers in Print

STAY ALIVE ALL YOUR LIFE (300 pp.)--Norman Vincent Peale--Prentice-HalI ($3.95).

A Manhattan taxi driver recently mistook Norman Vincent Peale for a physician. After grumping about the weather and shrugging off the Rev. Dr. Peak's cheery rejoinders ("Good old rain"), the cabby turned to state his symptoms: "Say doc, I've got some pains in my back. I feel terrible." As Author Peale tells it. he replied: "Although I'm not accustomed to practicing in taxicabs, I think you have psycho-sclerosis."

To psycho-sclerotics everywhere, the book news of the year is that the analgesic of Norman Vincent Peale's "positive thinking" is available in a new container. In keeping with Peale's injunction to "think big, believe big. act big," his publishers are planning big (first printing: 100,000 copies) and spending big (initial advertising budget: $45,000). They also expect to keep cash registers Pealing merrily with an offer to book dealers: 15 copies free for every 100 orders of the pastor's backlog, e.g., The Power of Positive Thinking, A Guide to Confident Living.

Peacefulizing the Mind. Stay Alive is not so much written as it is traced from Positive Thinking's phenomenally successful pages. Author Peale issues some categorical imperatives, e.g., "Love your job," "Have a spiritual operation on yourself and get all moral fester removed." The Peale disciple's day begins with mental pushups: 'This is going to be a fine day. I had a splendid night's sleep. I am glad that I am alive. First. I shall enjoy a good breakfast. Then I will have some happy fellowship with my loved ones before the day's work begins." One may take a deep breath before the mirror and say: "I am standing tall, I am believing tall." At the very least, this will "bring the organs of your body into natural position."

During the working day it helps to pray: "Lord, fill me with enthusiasm for my product (naming it)." With nightfall comes the time to "flush negatives," to practice "mind-drainage," or (after the fashion of Author Peale himself) to "visualize 'dropping' mental impedimenta into an imaginary wastebasket."

Since the common psycho-sclerotic spends his days "mouthing negativisms" and cultivating "defeat tendencies," Stay Alive's pages are alive with Before-And-After-Positive-Thinking testimonials. There is the case of the too-busy industrialist who came on hard times. To pay for groceries the man and his wife ("almost strangers to each other") picked blueberries "on opposite sides of a high bush." With "positive thinking" all came right in the end ("We found God and each other in a blueberry patch"). A disgruntled dining-car waiter was about ready to crown some of his patrons with a tray when Author Peale suggested the nonviolent tactic of "shooting prayers'' at them instead. Result: "smiles all around."

Another Peale formula is to keep a memory album of serene events and places, so that when the need for "peacefulizing the mind" arises, one can close one's eyes and focus on a soothing mental image. People with a "happy religion" have a "symbol of victory over themselves" ("The cross is a plus sign"). As for death, Author Peale likes to picture it as a plane flight to "the other side" where, "trusting [the] instruments of faith, you will come in, finally, to be welcomed by the lights on the eternal runway."

Winding the Clock. Says Norman Vincent Peale: "This book is merely a simple effort to help people get some lift into their lives. My idea is that God created us, and he constantly recreates us if we keep in touch with him. Men are something like eight-day clocks--if you don't wind them, they run down."

Author Peale, 58, is self-winding. In October he will celebrate his twenty-fifth anniversary as pastor of Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church, where each Sunday morning he conducts two over ow services for some 4,500 people. The rest of his week is devoted to an average of three out-of-town lectures, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, a magazine column ("Norman Vincent Peale Answers Your Questions"), a radio and TV program (What's Your Trouble?), and the editing of his monthly magazine Guideposts, all of which bring his message to an estimated weekly audience of 30 million.

Born the son of a Methodist preacher in Bowersville, Ohio, Norman Vincent Peale credits his rise to the power of positive thinking. Confesses he: "I had the worst inferiority complex of anyone I've ever met. I've got a little of it now, but I feel that I've been able to master it."

With the appearance of Stay Alive, his ninth book, Peale's sales have vaulted over the 4,000,000 mark. His publisher estimates a "minimal" sale of 500,000 copies for the new book, ten times that of many a bestseller. The Power of Positive Thinking has sold 2,100,000 copies and still sells 1,000 a week. As editor, Peale has still another book coming up next month--Unlock Your Faith Power, featuring religious testimonials from General Douglas MacArthur, Mary Martin, Mrs. Billy Graham, Ed Sullivan, et al.

To make all Americans think positively is too vast a job for any one man, and Author Peale can take comfort from the fact that he is not alone. The Peale-type self-help book is one of the major phenomena of the publishing business. Hardly a week passes without a new title being added, e.g., You Can Change Your Life, Live Longer and Enjoy It, Don't Grow Old--Grow Up!, You Can Stop Worrying, Living Can Be Exciting, Turn on the Green Lights in Your Life. Says a spokesman for Prentice-Hall: "In a good inspirational year these books can account for 25% or more of our total bookstore sales.'' Among the most successful

P: Love or Perish, by Smiley Blanton (Simon & Schuster; 164,000 copies sold so far). Puckish Smiley Blanton, 74, has for 19 years spread psychiatric good cheer belowstairs at the Marble Collegiate Church in the clinic which he founded with Dr. Peale and still heads. More than most psychiatrists, he understands that the meaning of love extends beyond the ability to make it. But his book is a hodge-podge of marital, parental and occupational anecdotes.

P: TNT--The Power Within You, by Claude Bristol and Harold Sherman (Prentice-Hall; 85,000 copies), is about as noisy as the mental dynamite it promises to detonate--that something which will "release you from chronic nervous tensions, chase the butterflies out of your stomach . . . and enable you to face things you've been running away from, for years!" The authors rattle on like pneumatic drills and 200 pages later bore through to the autosuggestive heart of the matter: "Your main, over-all theme in life, of course, is: 'I am going to succeed in everything I undertake! ... I am going to succeed in everything I undertake!' (Repetition, reiteration. Tap-tap-tap! Always tapping, pushing forward. Repeating, repeating--seeing yourself doing it, over and over--visualizing, 'I can! . . .' 'I will! . . .' I believe it--and it is so!')"

P: How to Live 365 Days a Year, by John A. Schindler (Prentice-Hall; 300,000 copies), substitutes "E.I.I." for tap-tap-tap. "E.I.I." stands for "emotionally induced illness," which Author Schindler, a Wisconsin M.D., declares to be responsible for more than 50% of all the sickness in the U.S. Schindler came to this conclusion by trial and error, and admits once ordering the removal of a gall bladder from a woman whose pains actually ceased only with the return of her soldier son. Psychosomatic medicine receives some strikingly visceral tributes from Schindler's subheads, e.g., "The Colon Is the Mirror of the Mind," "From the Emotions, Too, Stem Most Belches," "Gas."

P: Autoconditioning, by Hornell Hart

(Prentice-Hall; more than 100,000 copies), offers seven commandments for self help. The Four Don'ts: 1) "Don't acquiesce ignobly!" 2) "Don't evade craven-lyi" 3) "Don't .attack vindictively!" 4) "Don't rush rashly!" The Three Do's: 1) "Do grapple courageously!" 2) "Do cooperate creatively!" 3) "Do adventure spiritually!" All of this is achieved by putting oneself in a semihypnotic trance, the main danger of which "is that you might go to sleep." If sleep is evaded, one flips to the front of the book and charts one's emotional score on a "Mood Meter" which contains 30 ratings from + 15 ("Ecstatic") to -15 ("Miserable"), with such in-between moods as +9 ("Gay") and -11 ("Disgusted").

P: The Mind Goes Forth, by Harry and Bonaro Overstreet (Norton; 47,000 copies), is the third panel in the self-help triptych that began with The Mature Mind and The Mind Alive. Author Harry Overstreet once distinguished himself by calling the boy who stood on the burning deck a moron. Reason: "He did not have the intelligence to adapt himself." To judge by the recurrence of "mind" in their titles and the absence of thought in their books, the Overstreets are little better off. They emphasize "interpersonal relations," for which one needs to be "mature." The books plant psychological nostrums and all-too-truisms amid a jungle of jargon--"reality disorientation," "hate-patterned," "againstness." End result: very heavy goingness.

What accounts for the vast demand for such books? Says Dr. Peale: "Americans are a great people. They are agitated, though--agitated by ideals. When they don't live up to the ideals, that's what gets them in trouble . . . Tennessee Williams said in an interview that everybody he knows is troubled. Well, not everybody I know is troubled; I think I have helped some of them, for which I'm thankful . . . It's a movement among the masses. I always write for the humble people. That's why I understand them."

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