Seeking a Divine Inspiration: Part II The Sound of Thunder is not just another whopping (607 pages), small-print Taylor Caldwell tome.
It represents the first step in a stunning transformation to the nature of her output. In my 02-25-24 newsletter, I suggested TC wrote SOT centered on three themes:
How easy it is to be led away from God;
The essence and confusion around genius; and
With her conspiracy theories, to explain her view of the forces that cause hostility in the world.
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. Indeed, all she needed was the inspiration that she had a theme that could sell and a backlog of thought that would allow her to sail into the project.
It seems to have festered in her to write DAG, starting as a childhood enterprise. So, she already had attempts in that direction. She appeared to have anticipated this direction while writing SOT, for she has one of her characters mentioning the Magnificat – appropriately taken from Luke's gospel and often referred to as The Song of Mary – a character who extolled it with a humble version of TC's reference to it at the end of 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.
The distinction is this:
There are serious mysteries in Christianity.
The remainder of this newsletter ties #2 to DAG, consequently, for one, using that 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. I've never aspired to be a minister. Still, I will risk raising the mysteries that make the Christianity of the Gospel, whose heft predominated in the works of Luke, Paul, and the New Testament as envisioned by Marcion, such a positive element of TC's writing.
No matter how faithful you might be, you must admit The Holy Spirit is one tough concept.
The distinction between Jesus and God.
Christ's voluntary divestment of his divine powers.
Why do we even have the Holy Spirit? I can think of and have been told many answers, but there are still few more abstract aspects of Christianity.
When you thank heaven for a special meal or having equanimity on a given day, to whom do you address your sincere feelings that you owe this to something outside yourself: God or Jesus? Some say all things flow from God, so … Others say that they more easily connect to whatever is out there by starting – and sticking – with Jesus.
*|FNAME|*, do you know the Greek word Kenosis? An artist friend gave me a version of one of her series of paintings that used that word in their titles. It refers to the relinquishment of some of the attributes of God by Jesus in becoming a man and suffering death. Surely, that is evidence of the difference. Buddhists list Jesus among their most refined non-Gods, designated as Bodhisattvas. It's an inspiring category for humans to emulate.
What does any of this have to do with SOT?
TC wouldn't be the first to think that genius is a human category as akin as possible to godliness. Much of this novel takes on who has the right to anoint others with the genius designation. Here, four siblings are designated by their parents as such. While a fifth, the second child, the parents decided must be the mercantile provider for the others. In the novel, 40 years of anguish for the whole family revolve around the consequences of this parental decision. Later, the story switches these designations. The "non-genius" is eventually credited as the only real genius. Also, typical of TC, all this is explained as the result of the "non-genius" being the strong one, the others weak. Contrary to likelihood, even the four "genius" siblings agree to this weak vs. strong designation. TC has the wise mother insist that the problem is the weak have been subverting the strong.
The anguish persists as a result of all family members having abandoned their faith in God.
There are subtleties brought on by the spouses and the children of the siblings, who the "non-genius" has kept at his right hand by demanding they all live with him while also insisting they owe to his caregiving to fulfill the genius of the categories assigned to them. 607, small-print pages, with a 3-page ending built around TCs thrusting them back to faith in God and love of their country.
Further, we have the usual TC insistence that those liberals and socialists, for whom she can barely flesh out her full disdain, are controlling from afar the evil ones among our country's leaders. She doesn't suggest GPS-controlled space lasers, but despite her usual flippant dismissal of any such thing as progress, she left in an akin mystery how they could have done that.
Then, too, after all (a common TC refrain), many people don't even deserve to be born. Strangely, TC puts those words in the mouth of one of her most empathetic creatures, Margaret (p. 465). Margaret claims this topic is a response to those complaining about the weather: She has them saying the government should do something about that. The book was published at the end of a period in upstate New York during the years of some of the worst snowfalls in America in the 50s. This she put in the mouth of a character whose personality would have been above such picayune considerations. The part of TC that hates can't help infecting her most nuanced thoughts.
One could feel, despite TC's gift for wrapping the stories of many, that she was aware (already at p. 600) that she didn't have a lot of pages left to finish the novel appropriately. Further, Edward, the "non-genius" (turned genius to all his siblings by the end), has remained throughout the novel possessed by wanting, despite his material wealth, to be given a sense of life's meaning. It doesn't happen here. TC hasn't found what to call out for in life's meaning, except to have blind faith in God.
Amid the Great Depression, Edward is on the edge of bankruptcy and has evident inner sickness. He is rescued by the death of his greatest supporter, who left him $5 million (in 1937!). That awkward, against-type ending comes with too many unfulfilled topics bunching up over each other at the end of SOT. TC knew it. That's why the ending is so abrupt despite the long prior read.
How does DAG solve this?
DAG substituted TC's declarations of who is a genius with a certified genius, St. Luke. He, while searching for meaning in life, found it, brought TC fulfillment, money, and readers beyond any of her other novels. No matter how much you might look askance at the old-fashioned writing, the lessons joining SOT and DAG still deserve another look. In subsequent newsletters and my additions to the completion of Enough Light to See the Darkness:Part II:Seeking a Divine Inspiration, I will give that.
If you have come this far, indulge me for mentioning another novel – it was assigned reading in High School – with an astonishing, tragic paeon to the power of America to Europeans.
Giants in the Earth
is a novel by Norwegian-American author Ole Edvart Rølvaag. First published in Norwegian in two volumes in 1924 and 1925, it was published in English in 1927, translated by Rølvaag and author Lincoln Colcord. From Wikipedia Giants in the Earth was turned into an opera of the same name by Douglas Moore and Arnold Sundgaard. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1951. There has never been a more heart-felt avowal to what a foreigner coming to America might have sacrificed to this vision.
Especially the last scene, with the hero, Per Hansa, found at the end of his trek into a snowstorm to satisfy the whims of his mentally crumbling wife, overwhelmed by the roar of the prairie winds. Per Hansa, seeking help against those giant forces, dead, is found propped up against a haystack looking west to the vast US frontier. A dash of reality helps make a case about that which humans must contend. Yet, look at the effort Rølvaag put into bringing his story to the public. He never aimed at a novel every year.
