• I added voluminous footnotes and chapters consisting of a Foreword and an Afterword for this Part I. The official publication date is January 15, 2024. Part II is now well on its way to completion.
• Peggy documents that even Adolf Hitler wrote approvingly with a personal invitation for TC to visit Germany with her blond daughters (both brunettes). Part II documents her highest pinnacles with her Mediterranean novels, especially Dear and Glorious Physician on Saint Luke.
• My mother's life was always entwined with TCs. She says it started dreary without a shred of love, something to escape until TC's need brought her to a center. TC turned to Peggy as a companion, and Peggy's documentation of this change illuminated what TC had to offer.
• This complicated relationship spanned 60 years, ending against all odds, with TC's incapacitance at age 80 in 1980, five years before she died.
• The liberal Jesus – of the "Sermon on the Mount" – told us we are not alone in our fear of the unknown; a creator God felt for us all. TC's Mediterranean novels insisted on an unchanging humanity. Part I documents TC's growing desire to inform her readers who is good and who is not.

✺ 01-16-24BuffaloasaCharacter: Charles Krauthammer, a conservative commentator and opinion writer for Time magazine in the 1970s, once wrote an opinion column that started with this phrase:

• The third, and always present, character in Enough Light to See the Darkness was Buffalo, NY, my home town and Peggy's, too. Buffalo was not only quintessential rust-belt, it was also the epitome of a plummet for which you could literally see the rust developing.
• TC relished her success there. Yet, a psychological explanation for why she remained most of her life has no simple explanation. Especially since her novels hardly registered anything about Buffalo.
• So, Buffalo survived, and so did the hard-core predilections of TC. Sean Hannity of Fox News fame 'framed' her among his three great influencers, two of whom were famous Fascists of their time.

✺ 01-31-24TCandJesus-PartI: My phrase for TC's style of conservative is a TBD-conservative: Truth Be Damned. In her hands, this was no simple support for lying, rather the kind of conspiracy view of the world that never required any research or indirect support.

• Toward anyone she didn't care for, TC could throw a dart labeled communist, socialist, or liberal, all three synonymous, making her a part of the (Roy Cohn driven) Joseph McCarthy and John Birch Society upheavals.
• Her primary talent showed in her ability to unravel the threads of complication and accident so they cauterized at the novel's end. She built her conspiracy theories in details centered on small-town life, but found their way to national events and professional and political significance that smacked of her being privy to inside information.
• The Part II Afterword lays the difficulty of TC's instinctive conservatism at the feet of how she insists on genuine support of one of the most liberal figures in human history, Jesus of Nazareth.
• Her most exciting innovation – in any of her novels – was a modern version of the "heresy" of Marcion who insisted St. Luke and St. Paul were – by far – the most crucial ingredients of the New Testament.
• CHAPTER 7: 67 Hendricks seen through a Rosette of Ill-fit shards is crucial to the remainder of Peggy's life. This was the essential move within which Peggy went from a relatively benign influence of Gerry's (her husband's) mother to an all-encompassing attachment to TC.

✺ 02-25-24SeekingDivineInspiration-PartI: What was in flux, because it took some time for those who wanted to be gatekeepers to his legacy, was what exactly was the heart of Jesus' legacy. Among the writings of the time it took a long time to decide which would be regarded as crucial.

• Eventually, during the last third of her career, TC invited her readers to engage with Jesus only through prayer without thinking about the meaning and intention of such prayer.
• Some questions considered: Where did TC pick up this Marcion heresy as her best way to present herself as a person of great religious conviction? How much influence did her presentation of Luke as a supreme carrier of the vision of Jesus have? How did it match with her subsequent novels?
• What is left out of TC's career is the leap in this middle period starting from The Sound of Thunder (1957, SOT), with a break to the following publication Dear and Glorious Physician (1959, DAG).
• The subject of genius takes up the first two (of three) parts of SOT. In these, TC has created a family, four of whose siblings were cast as geniuses – each in a disparate area (music, art, literature, architecture). This, though, is a long, complicated diversion. It is only the fifth sibling (Edward, the strong one) through which this story comes to create a big picture of America before WWI.
• TC does not spare us talk about Satan that gets confused with the role of taxes meted out by the Government. Yet, the heart of this is the complicated relationship between Edward and his siblings. You can see that TC is struggling to find a character of genius who can speak to us of what God has offered us and that we have not accepted.
• TC's most significant unfulfilled promise is DAG. She created, from St. Luke, though he was not formally considered an apostle, a more approachable surrogate to Jesus. It represents TC's attempt to understand the role of genius in preparing us for the world's mysteries.

✺ 03-15-24SeekingDivineInspiration-PartII: Since TC produced her novels at a rate that averaged once a year, and even the seemingly 2-year gap in publication date from SOT and Dear and Glorious Physician may be an accident of the two publications falling on year margins. So, it doesn't signify a special gestation period for DAG.

• One evidence this was a serious transformation for TC is just how many of her novels (arguably eight in the 21 remaining years of her productivity) after DAG centered on Jesus. While none did before DAG, not even SOT.
• Luke was an historically certifiable genius. He could communicate the inspiration from Jesus that life had meaning to the extent that his insights, along with others, are among gospel favorites that appear enthusiastically in Sunday sermons.
• There are mysteries: What is the distinction between Jesus and God? Why do we even have the Holy Spirit? An artist friend gave me a version of one of her series of paintings that used the word Kenosis in their titles. It refers to the relinquishment of some of the attributes of God by Jesus in becoming a man and suffering death.
• The ending in SOT, after 607 small-print pages, reveals that TC had no adequate answer to searching for the meaning of life. She needed Luke and his story.

✺ 04-09-04AddendumDivineInspiration: Ross Douthat, a conservative writer for the NY Times started his article Can the left be Happy with the epiphany of Ta-Nehisi Coates – reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder – realizing that he didn't believe in God.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates: "I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does."
• Douthat: "Christianity of the American social gospel tradition, which influenced New Deal liberalism and infused the civil rights movement, and the Marxist conviction that … historical development would eventually bring about a secular utopia – trust the science (of socialism)! ... a good portion of America today – comforted by neither God nor history, [hopes] vaguely that therapy can take their place.
• Really! Therapy? Is that meant to be the replacement the left uses for drugs and alcohol that the masses on the right apply to the despair for their personal lives? It sounds like everyone could use some personal help.
• Jesus, with his magnetic personality and mysterious mission, found his apostles. He was also (miraculously?) blessed with two non-apostles, Luke and Paul, who spent their lives imaginatively understanding how Jesus saw God's way of shielding us from His unfiltered energies as their existence brought forth the largesse he promised.

✺ 04-24-24eNetPressbooks: Recent changes in the location of some Taylor Caldwell works and moving from God-centered to Jesus-centered

• If Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn't so damnably predictable in quoting TC, we might not see the persisting traces of TC's tropes from her novels following the publication of Dear and Glorious Physician.
• Father Coughlin (TC's predecessor), Robert Welch (her contemporary), and the quarter-century younger Phyllis Schlafly rowed in a single boat: Voices on one coherent communism-hating mission with shots at whomever they chose as their personal enemies.
• The Sound of Thunder and five novels following DAG represent a transformation for TC's writing from a God-centered to a Jesus-centered view of Christianity.

✺ 06-02-24TaylorCaldwellsMidcareerChange: St. Luke was searching to understand Jesus and what He had discovered about Man's connection to God. But I got that from the New Testament. What Luke got as a clue and wrote about in his contributions to the Acts of the Apostles was Jesus recognizing the commonality of all Mankind. While he didn't connect the domains of the whole world – DNA, stars, and minds – this was a majestic foray into the nature of the world, Man, and what God had wrought.

• In the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the great mystery of the Holy Ghost and Jesus's place in the Trinity was declared canonical. The hope that this would dispel the mystery and cement an understanding of Jesus to the world was probably doomed by the abstractness of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), but defying the Nicene Creed became foremost, even if only one of many heresies.
• This newsletter reviews four periods of TC's life from the perspective of her novels, which is almost opposite to Peggy's chapters' perspective.
• These novels covered immense territory, and despite comparisons of her with Ayn Rand that primarily benefitted Rand, TC truly tried to cover the world. She was surely a better writer than Rand.
• That doesn't explain why she managed to cover so much territory despite the limited variations in her characters. The nature of her conservatism and the viciousness of her hatred do.

✺ PartI-TBD-Conservative: The Table of Contents of Enough Light to See the Darkness Part I: The Launching of a Conservative Author (1900–1959). Only a close reading shows the extremity of her conservative nature, though – as witnessed by her daughter Peggy – it was a constant in her private life.

• Her struggle for publication from 1925 to 1938 when TC launched her Dynasty of Death Series. From the core I labeled Chapters 1 through 4 of Peggy's original autobiographical pages.
• In the years after TC's marriage to our grandfather William Combs, through the much longer marriage with Marcus Reback when her fame grew quickly, and Peggy's role changed. From being guided by our father's (Gerry's) mother to the time Peggy's family moved within walking distance of TC, marked by the chaotic closeness they shared aboard many-month-long ocean voyages.

✺ 07-13-24TheJumpfromSOTtoDAG: The only biography of TC I know of was that written by the woman Peggy calls Sula (Soula) Chrysoula Soula Angelou. She was TC's housekeeper in the house where TC lived in Florida with her penultimate husband, William Stancell. Peggy, A once abused daughter, became a constant companion to TC in many places, but especially on several many-month ocean cruises aboard famous luxury liners. TC complains that she is alone in Florida unless Peggy visits her.

• Perhaps this explains why TC confided greatly in Soula. In one of those incidences, Soula, much surprised, records that TC – trying to open Soula's eyes to the world – corrects Soula's insistence on the importance of truth in writing.
• Many fiction authors discuss their way to truth. Still, you rarely see point blank just how important to them it is, as is given in this newsletter of an extract from Alissa Wilkinson's article on Flannery O'Conner as portrayed in Ethan Hawke's movie Wildcat.

✺ 08-03-24SeekingDivInspOverview: Three themes in the Part II volume speak to what TC got right – though incomplete – and strike at our understanding of ourselves and the world.

• The emulation of a path to bringing Jesus (Christianity) to the world in Dear and Glorious Physician (1959) as TC following St. Luke.
• A world of disparate laws, having one law to rule them all (apologies to Tolkien) for servicing a Republican government, displayed in Pillar of Iron (1965) as TC following Cicero.
• Beyond the above, we have the ways the ancient world turned –thanks to Constantine's edict – from pagan belief in the kingdom of the Romans and other gods to the gods who set the rules in their particular territories without concern for the incompatibilities of their different desires.

✺ 08-15-24BracketingTCsCareer: Part II: Seeking a Divine Inspiration: Sometime in the late '70s, there was a common refrain that looking back at Jim Crow was ridiculous: so long ago, not relevant today, and, anyway, misunderstood as being much worse than it was. Thinking people know, for sure, that was ridiculous on all fronts, but it was compatible with TC's thinking.

• Later, a different set of phrases covered the Nazi era: Germany has attoned entirely for that, people there no longer have any of those predilections, and, anyway, it wasn't as bad as people think.
• The resurrection of Hitler's thoughts by Trump and his followers is part of what joins them, still today with TC. Of course, in my – and Peggy's – telling, TC is a sad-sack. Yet, so are Trump and JD Vance.
• TC primarily sought her villains among those she claimed enabled WWI, communists and socialists, abstractly piggybacking on the conspiracy theories of the likes of Father Coughlin. This calls for considerable comment, which will appear in the Part II Afterword.
• Only after the period of DAG and her 'new' religious concentration on Jesus did her conspiracy-mongering concentrate on people from WWII. Especially FDR and the acts of his (first female) cabinet member Francis Perkins, who gave us Social Security, progressive income taxes, and subsidized health care.
• Part II with Peggy's chapters as the core ends with TC married to Robert Prestie but starting to have severe medical problems as she finishes her final two publications: Bright Flows the River (1978) and Answer as a Man (1980).
• The Afterword is based on my journal entries, a version of what Peggy did, to discuss the deaths of TC, Peggy's sister Judy (by suicide) and then my parents, Peggy and Gerry. My addendum is how much I learned about Dying in America.

✺ 08-28-24TheDeceptionsofPeace: My last newsletter didn't capture Taylor Caldwell's very different approaches to WWI and WWII. As the text part of Part II: Enough Light to See the Darkness, Subtitled: Seeking a Divine Inspiration, comes to completion, I found myself inspired by Elizabeth Samet's

• Only after the period of DAG and her 'new' religious concentration on Jesusdid her conspiracy-mongering concentrate on people from WWII. Especially FDR and the acts of his (first female) cabinet member Francis Perkins, who gave us Social Security, seriously progressive income taxes, and subsidized health care.
• Lincoln called the founders "Iron Men."In his 1838 speech he was horrified by St. Louis radical mob violence. As in TC's description of troll-like creatures worshipping Cataline, the enemy of Cicero we can see them as avatars of violence prone worshippers of demigogues today.
• He noted that "deep-rooted principles of hate and the powerful motive of revenge" (against the British) were no longer the best resources for perpetuating the Republic. Of these giant oaks, he says "an all-resistless hurricane has swept over them and left just shards of them." They were heroes for their time, but in 1838, violent passion, in the form of the chaos of mob rule, threatened the very rule of law th founders had established.
• Samet says Lincoln recognized that only truth could conquer the dangerous distortions of myth. Twenty years later, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln returned to the theme of generations. In reminiscing over the 80 years of the Fourth of July meetings, he explores the relationship between the men of the Revolution and the present generation.
• That requires connecting future generations based on principles equally sharable by all of mankind. In particular, the hunger of Evangelicals and Baptists to dominate the rest of us can be nothing but an aberration, not for a nanosecond intended by God or supported by Jesus.

✺ 09-23-24TheAfterwordofPartII: What was it all worth? Few would balk if I said of TC, "She was a complicated character." Ah, but I don't believe it. Without – at least as an adult – a Christian synaptic response in her psyche. Yet, she vehemently wrote as if she was driven by something of substance about Jesus.

• Part II of the joint biography of TC and her daughter Peggy ends at Chapter 14, on page 662. The core of Part II is Peggy's chapters 8 through 14, which cover the years of TC's greatest fame and the details of Peggy's relationship with TC, especially the events aboard those excruciatingly expensive voyages on the High Seas.
• A long People Magazine article that gives some sense of what "People" – a magazine at the heart of America during those years that pandered greatly, but with an impressive savvy of what Americans were like – thought of the famous author.
• Those years ended just before the era of Ronald Reagan and Marget Thatcher, two in Democratic countries who had a compatible agreement with TC as to what recommended conservatism, foremost its antagonism to the word "progress."
• This newsletter gives the division of the Afterword in sections that summarize most of TC's life near her end, including what pieces of other biographies of her said from their knowledge of her.
• This Afterword's penultimate section considers TC's personality based on what we learn from Peggy (and my first-hand knowledge). You will find it surprising. At the bottom of this Afterword, I have comments on a deposition of Robert Prestie that, to date, give my best impression of what happened with TC in her last five years (1980–1985).

✺ PartII-SeekingDivineInspiration: The Table of Contents of Enough Light to See the Darkness Part II: Seeking a Divine Inspiration, the saga of Taylor Caldwell's relationship with her daughter Peggy on famous Ocean Liners following her success with the Dynasty of Death series.

• Her phase as a famous author, from 1959 to 1980, as a Conservative Catholic Guru. Seven chapters from the core of what I labeled Chapters 8 through 14 of Peggy's original pages.
• Her marriages from the death of Marcus Reback to her life with her last husband, Robert Prestie, and the everpresent role of Peggy captured through several months of long voyages.