This newsletter's topic is a description of Enough Light to See the Darkness: Continuing the saga of Taylor Caldwell's relationship with her daughter Peggy, as the production of a draft of the volume heads toward completion.

Part II: Seeking a Divine Inspiration

This follows an Open Road advertisement for TC's The Turnbulls. Two themes to the Part II volume speak to what TC got right – though yet incomplete – that strikes at our understanding of ourselves and the world.

  1. The emulation of a path to bringing Jesus (Christianity) to the world in Dear and Glorious Physician (1959) as TC following St. Luke.
  2. 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.

    3. In the list above, we have two of the most magnificent ways that the ancient world turned – thanks to the edict of the Emporer Constantine – from pagan belief in the kingdom of the Romans and other gods, the gods who set the rules in their particular territories, without concern for the incompatibilities of their different desires. TC gave us these human-centered stories of genius thinkers through the connectedness of all peoples under God in her conservative-saturated view. It may have been inadvertent, which makes it no less remarkable.

    There's no proof of this one-world philosophy any more than there is faultless proof of God. They both open our thinking to what lies ahead in all the great mysteries about the Earth, the Heavens, and mysterious forces we have yet to fathom. Here is the advertisement for the sale of

    The Turnbulls By Taylor Caldwell.
    $2.99 normally $17.99 Expires 8/4/24. The “darkly exuberant and passionate” saga of a man who flees Victorian England in disgrace—only to build an empire of corruption in America (The New York Times).


    Amazon
    Barnes and Noble

    Abstract to Part II:
    Abused, low-energy, agoraphobic and alcoholic, Peggy decided soon into her adulthood that she had a personal duty, a sacred mission, a profound need to care for her abusive mother, the now world-recognized, internationally heralded Taylor Caldwell. TC, the novelistic advertiser, formulaic promulgator, and adamant insister on the right of conservatives to rule America, changed not one whit from her youth, no more than did Peggy. Peggy's reward was the TC-proferred, ocean traversing, luxury-enhanced voyages that TC returned for Peggy's hosting services among TC adulators during the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ruthless abetter, Roy Cohn, Robert Welch, and the John Birch Society, sandwiched between the virulent anti-semite Father Coughlin and the venomous anti-feminist Phyllis Schaffley. All akin to, intertwined with, and influential upon TC.

    Peggy recognized none of these enablers. She was clueless about their influence in TC's 40+ monetarily successful novels. She assumed TC's many attempts to sell herself as a Jesus worshipper were a poetic license cover for TC's unchristian behavior, unaware that TC's audience was taken with the former. Peggy never paused even to remark on TC's watershed event, a crucial divide in her career, the publication on St. Luke of "Dear and Glorious Physician." Something that might have resonated with Peggy's despised time living in a convent.

    Still, Peggy saw and – in her one serious life activity – wrote as autobiographical observations of TC's crude behavior and the personal responses of passengers on those voyages to that – to which she insisted that the hard-working novelist, who presented herself as all-knowing, just didn't know any better – late into both their lives. Until a strange fate intervened in the person of TC's last husband.




    Go here for Part I: Amazon Sales:
    There have been several reorders of the original stock.

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    Michael Fried, Grandson
    For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell