*|FNAME|*, I either added your name recently to this list, or you were a part of a Newsletter List I wrote on the famous author, my grandmother, Taylor Caldwell (TC) that has been on hiatus for two years.
This message is announcing the first of two parts of a volume titled Enough Light to See the Darkness. I base this considerably on a document of 900 undivided pages – typed long ago – by my mother, Peggy Fried, oldest daughter of TC and my grandfather, William Combs, TC's first husband and found after her death.
I divided the discombobulated original into 18 chapters and parts, then scanned, titled, and created abstracts and supporting HTML files for them. Recently, 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. I will send an advertisement for its appearance on Amazon just before that. Part II is now well on its way to completion. This message ends with a link to the cover page of Part I.
Part I reveals how Taylor Caldwell found fame enough to allow her to write directly and confidently of her conservative insights, starting with her "Dynasty of Death" series. 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. I aim to prod TC readers to explain how they came to understand TC over the years. Also, how that correlated with their understanding of the larger society of conservatives who may not have been readers of her works, though they seem to have picked up her views.
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. Especially those many-month voyages on extravagant ocean liners during which Peggy could see how TC handled her novel productions and her acolytes without Peggy getting the abuse she felt as a teenager. With the many elements in these unusual settings, Peggy saw more clearly the nature of Taylor Caldwell. She saw the darkness that illuminated the source of TC's vision.
Part I shows that TC was fully formed from her hardscrabble, poor Scotch family, which had emigrated to America when she was young. By writing her understanding into her novels, she thought to rise above her birthright. In truth, she brought it along with her and sold it to her audience, presenting it as a hard-fought lesson in becoming "tough" thanks to her conservative view of the world. Peggy tells it all, not realizing that she is part of a three-generation chain of abusive parents.
This complicated relationship spanned 60 years, ending against all odds, with TC's incapacitance at age 80 in 1980, five years before she died. Unlike liberal writers who often use their still-forming characters to puzzle out an understanding of human relationships, TC presented fully formed, from birth, entities who played out roles that would be repeated throughout the ages. This allowed her to write novels of three different types in different world periods that she melded into one viewpoint.
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. Part II enhances that, foreshadowing with "the Unknown God," meant to be a forerunner of Jesus who judged as TC judged. Her 3rd large series of novels brought this viewpoint into modern America. These are often the novels that today's conservatives appear to refer to.