Tomorrow is the first day when an order of Enough Light to See the Darkness will be sent through the procedure to be mailed. I've put the clickable items to get connection to the actual Amazon sales at the end of this newsletter. The e-book version has been available from the time of my last newsletter on 01/16/24. Here I start with an excerpt from the Foreword, laying out how TC worked. Especially, and its entwining the key element of many of her novels: The source for how TC portrayed her relation to Jesus. I conclude with topics I will use in subsequent e-mails.
*|FNAME|*, TC is, to her core, a conservative. My phrase for it is a TBD-conservative: Truth Be Damned. In her hands, this was no simple support for lying, though she had nothing against that in her actual life dealings. Rather the kind of conspiracy view of the world that never required any research or indirect support. Someone was to blame for what she disliked, and based on her visceral antipathy to certain people – especially liberals – she needed no investigation to create a story about how their perfidy, weakness, or stupidity drove them to be the source of what she hated.
Toward anyone she didn't care for, she could throw a dart labeled communist, socialist, or liberal, all three synonymous. Still, there are serious ingredients required.
When her novels called for subtlety, there had to be evidence in her characters' actions that justified her epithets.
To catch on with her audience, her characters had to represent a believable enterprise, positive or negative; the grander, the better.
She also had to naturally weave the relationship between her positive and negative characters as they discovered each other.
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, in characters with outsized ambition who found their way to national events and professional and political significance that smacked of her being privy to inside information. These episodes purported to inform her readers of how the 'real' world works. Finally, she wrote especially for the reader who already had a version she could bolster of her worldview likes and dislikes.
There is a lot to understand in this. TC required a visceral understanding of her potential audience. It took time for her to go from characters with nuance to more blatant examples of the behavior she castigated. As Peggy's autobiography makes clear, she wasn't subtle at all in her actual lived life.
Many of those with whom she associated were comfortable with her behavior, but it was a massive trial for Peggy.
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. Those of you are Catholic know the INRI letters often etched on crosses. Roman letters designating Him as King of the Jews, the words with which Pontius Pilate announted Him. Nevertheless, she pulled this off despite the hypocrisy of her actions.
Not only did TC ignore the main thrust of Jesus's ministry, but she also insisted progress was a dirty word. She invited her readers to engage with Jesus only through prayer without thinking about the meaning and intention of such prayer. Her most exciting innovation – in any of her novels – was a modern version of the "heresy" of Marcion. Marcion insisted St. Luke and St. Paul were – by far – the most crucial ingredients of the New Testament.
TC's novelistic presentations of them show how little she engaged their thoughts. (I still regard those as a miracle.) Instead, she planted her own words in their mouths using her own plot devices – many sophomoric, like Luke meeting the Three Magi in a Middle Eastern tavern – chunked into the unrecorded spaces in the historical record.
For example, she insists, against a massive historical record of what the world before Jesus was like, that there is a persistent forerunner to His existence. She calls this entity "The Unknown God." This avatar appears without serious description in all her Mediterranean novels. If these threads – an expansion on Marcion and a(n ancient) pre-Christian vision of Jesus – have possibilities, and I believe they did, her fulfillment of them is exasperatingly disappointing.
Part I of this joint biography (of Peggy and TC) lays out how TC recognized that she could succeed by becoming a recognized TBC-conservative. Of course, she couldn't announce herself as that. Yet, if she kept to the less historically documented places in her stories, the appropriate readers for her novels would value her crafting what they had always hoped. There were always skeptics among reader reviews, but fewer than one might have imagined. Thus, her relevance today, with the enthusiastic support of so many to a far less bright Donald Trump, who is even more blatant than she usually appeared in public media.
The theme of TC's relation to Jesus and how that plays today fascinated me, and I hope you. I will revisit that in later newsletters (using writing in the book or the Part II continuation). In a later newsletter, I bring out several important topics that I might know better than you, even if you read all her novels. That was because – even though I was young – I was TC's grandson, I had to deal with Peggy, and TC made a giant presence in Buffalo.
For future messages:
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 mother to an all-encompassing attachment to TC.
It all happened within the confines of Buffalo, but the house they left was in Buffalo proper. While – during this time of hope for the town – this was a move to the expanding suburbs long before the start of its rust-belt descent. Now Peggy was walking distance from TC though she never walked it. Increasingly, TC found she needed Peggy in ways she, too, was slow to realize.
The cover photo is a picture of the two of them aboard The Rotterdam.
The story of TC's voyages on (extremely costly, long world-maneuvering cruises) aboard ocean liners with Peggy along to see her behavior, fame, and "adventures" is enlightening about the nature of such outsize people as TC.
Especially how they manage a vehement combination of deception and sincere righteousness.
Not only was Peggy there for much of it, but she managed a bifurcated combination of skepticism of, and earnest desire to aid, TC. To Peggy, it was the most magnificent part of her life. I did my best to learn how she handled it all from Peggy's part of the writing. I was sensitive – despite my being young – to the political and social atmosphere (Macarthy Hearings, John Birch Society, South African Apartheid, and TC's role in that. Despite its profound effect on TC and her reputation, Peggy was strangely unaware of any of it.
