*|FNAME|*, I want to atone here for my HTML error at the start of the message yesterday. There, I sort of did! Now, I'll introduce the third significant character in Enough Light to See the Darkness.
Charles Krauthammer, a conservative commentator and opinion writer for Time magazine in the 1970s, once wrote an opinion column that started with this phrase:
We can't all have been in the Marines or grown up in Buffalo ...
It could have come directly from Taylor Caldwell's supposed personal autobiography On Growing up Tough, in which she extolled the virtues of having a rough childhood and parents of the style she raised to a new level in her imitation of them. The chapters of that book started as a series of John Birch Society journal articles.
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, but it was also the epitome – from my senior year in High School until I left to get a Ph.D. at University of Michigan (a small number of years) – of a plummet for which you could literally see the rust developing. In my senior year (1959), teachers extolled the coming St. Laurence Seaway that would – they said – take Buffalo from a city with a population of about 640K to one of over a million. Yet, by 1970, that population had dropped to ~350K. That story has been hinted at but apparently not completely developed.
A constant Peggy (who hated Buffalo) lament was to ask why TC remained there. Indeed, she could have lived anywhere after her success, and we know many did leave. But not TC. She 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, mostly centered on Pennsylvania cities in her Dynasty of Death series. Here is her Dynasty of Death plaque on Buffalo's Delaware Avenue Walk of Fame.
Buffalo honored TC, and she appreciated that.
Yesterday, television displayed Buffalo's famous, forbidding weather, with scenes of the 30 hours of work that went into clearing the Orchard Park stadium of snow. As a reward, in the late afternoon, the Buffalo Bills defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers (Pittsburgh, another city that suffered from the rust) in the semi-final AFL Eastern Division to go on its next battle against Kansas City. That still means something to me. My college best friend (and sometimes roommate) played for the Buffalo Bills for five years (and then another five for the Denver Broncos). Of course, Peggy wouldn't have cared about that any more than she would have cared about anything else in my life. Peggy's whole world was a psychological mish-mash centered always on TC.
So, Buffalo survived, and so did the hard-core predilections of TC. Here she is 'framed' as one of the three great influencers of Sean Hannity.
I'm still putting together the ingredients of a website for this newsletter, but I'll repeat yesterday's announcements of the Amazon sales location of the book and the sign-up sheet.
