• When Caesar and Cicero were young, the – still – Republic of Rome was beset by massive corruption. Elite opinion saw Senate office as for those with Senate ancestry. Yet, Cicero, became a Senator on the from his talents.
• Cicero's orations against Catiline – a man universally regarded as the epitome of evil – had a momentous backdrop. We don't know it in Part I, but TC drives the whole novel with the battle between Catiline and Cicero.
• Few have such voluminous writings known to us as did Cicero. He could have been called the King of Hyperbole. Their readers regard them as eloquent, rather than sincere expressions of the truth. Caesar himself, as prolific, remarked on how much Cicero had bared his soul in dictated, then unrevised, oratories.
• History records that Cicero hoped philosophy could substitute for religion. He got this from the wisdom of many of his time's Greek sages, especially Plato. Taylor Caldwell wades out to find a proto-Christian in Cicero.

✺ 04-07-20ORdoesDevils-CaptainsAgain: The impacts of Taylor Caldwell and Ayn Rand on Today's Dystopia

• In the middle '50s and later it was usually Edna Ferber and Pearl Buck as TC comparisons. A more today-oriented comparison seems appropriate with Ayn Rand.
• In a particular novel suitable for comparison: The Devil's Advocate: A revolution is waged against a totalitarian regime in a dystopian modern America.
• One review starts: In the nation now known as The Democracy, independent thought has disappeared. The Constitution is waste paper. A conscienceless president now heads the military: for life. The government has co-opted farmland crops. Citizens are divided between two classes: wealthy corporations and the destitute.
• For those who don't recognize this, it echoes both Big Brother and the daily broadcasts that bombarded inhabitants of apartment buildings in the Russian curtain countries.
• Like TC, Rand's birth year is easy to remember, 1905, tied neatly to the Russian revolution. Explaining why she was an ardant anti-communist. One easily sees why their ideologies and influences on America persist still.
• Rand ties to Neoliberalism, even though that – an ideology that insists money, not humans, evaluate everyting – is not easy to define. Quite another, TC aimed to expose evil; she adamantly wanted you to see it through her eyes.

✺ 04-28-20PillarOfIronII: The Bouchard family and revisiting a dramatic retelling of Cicero's Life

• Here, in Part II of "Pillar ...", TC emphasizes two points: Cicero's excellent legal training under the famous legal scholar Scaivola, and his search for the Unknown God, a surrogate for a Messiah.
• TC has Cicero learn from his Jewish friend that "It is more likely we will not recognize him at all. he will be known by an act of faith only."
• At the end of the Second Part there is a dramatic court room scene. Cicero has decided to defend a former captain under Sulla – Servius – from the Senate charge that Servius has authored a blasphemy against Sulla. This piece of actual history goes far toward showing Cicero's standing even with such a fearsome tyrant as Sulla.
• Servius still insists that Sulla is a merciless tyrant, and Sulla can only respond to whit: Blame me not, Servius, for the people willed it so. On them the curse and the imprecations, and not on me. I am but their creature.

✺ 05-26-20PillarofIronIII: Part III of "Pillar of Iron" and the signing of a contract to turn this novel into a movie

• Here, in TC's longest novel, is one brutal pinnacle in western civilization: A culminating time of pagan architecture and superstitious minds, with ambitious men still competing with Alexander the Great, just prior to the appearance of Jesus.
• An historically famous Roman triumvirate, of Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompey and Licinius Crassus (called the richest Roman) plan to oversee the dismantling of the Roman Republic; yet there is Cicero's quest to understand how the end of the Republic and a hoped-for Messiah can possibly mesh.
• Of course it is TC. The greatest of the enemies is the rabble, the mob, the dregs of society that TC hates.
• Will and Ariel Durant also have this great list of personages, a version of a detailed oil painting. In TC's novel those paint tube labels should include magnificence and squalor, appropriate for scenes from Lord of the Rings.

✺ 06-01-20BIGTCDay: Special sale of 7 Taylor Caldwell novels

• The biggest Open Road sale of TC volumes ever. I listed only half, but with telling, albeit short, abstracts.
• Bright Flows the River, Answer as a Man, The Eagles Gather, I, Judas, Maggie–Her Marriage, Tender Victory, Testimony of Two Men, The Earth Is the Lord's

✺ 06-03-20TimeNoLonger: The Personification of Evil; an ever present TC goal

• Time No Longer takes on describing the feeling of the growing evil embodied in the New Germany.
• It is an explanation of how evil will overwhelm almost anyone, opening with a symbol of evil so blatant, that it could have appeared in a Steven King novel.
• It appeared before Americans understood the holocaust and the full extent of Nazi Germany. It opens with the family view on the hell that had become Germany.
• TC sees evil in terms Nathaniel Hawthorne might have expressed as a mass hysteria that overwhelmed the pilgrims though that doesn't explain it – while she sees evil as EVIL incarnate.

✺ 06-07-20DiatribesofEvil: Transcribing Jesus to today based on "Noone Hears but Him."

• Diatribes on Evil: One of TC's trilogies. I took one example of her bringing home the new testament.
• Chapter 9, The Anointed: The Listener transforms the consternation of an Italian immigrant whose son has decided to go on mission after he has been ordained. True to TC it starts as a diatribe against child-rearing in '60s America.

✺ 06-20-20OnGrowingUpTough: Two intimate views of Taylor Caldwell

• TC would rise above her socially awkward Scotch family in many ways. Yet, she would not escape what goes on in the mind of an abused child, which she certainly was. She ended up like her abusers: tough and brutal.
• As an adult that hardscrabble life – still indelible in her febrile imagination – could be used to throw darts at her perceived enemies. Those she attacked as she recognized, they were not so brutal as was she.
• Yet, in Peggy's autobiography, Chap. 2 there is another view of TC's mother Annie given in full as a link.
• Peggy saw them as overwhelmed. Those whose lives respond to harsh twists that they relieve by claiming they are in control, by controlling those vulnerable to them.

✺ 06-28-20PillarofIronIV: "Pillar of Iron": Not "War and Peace," but damn close

• In this 4th (final) part of the novel, I break down TCs themes and comment on them.
• Christianity, the Old and New Testaments, and the significance of Pagan Religion: Julius Caesar, a strong believer in Pagan Religion who still stands as a collosus.
• What helps to get a handle on this history? I list reasons that tourists today are still amazed everywhere they go in Europe and Africa at precisely what the Romans of the Imperial age wrought.
• I think TC would have been non-plussed at the abstract Open Road put below. As I suggest, contrary to the OR abstract, there were hundreds of years of brutality left under the Roman Regime, and a thousand years of Orthodox Christianity that is still with us in Eastern Europe. All of those struggles with how monotheism gives us all today a vision of the world that no Roman then had.
• Speaking of Substance: What still persists today: those who mindlessly diss people, calling them names, dismissing those they don't like. Empty abstract words, mostly from people with not keenly developed ability to abstract much, thrown at those they don't like. Why, when they can hardly articulate what is right in front of them?

✺ 06-30-20CeremonyoftheInnocent: Taylor Caldwell's take on Innocence

• A Reader A and a Reader B discuss the possibility that TC used her daughter Peggy as a model for Ellen Porter.
• Reader A: I read ''Ceremony of the Innocent'' probably twice... long ago. It's extremely depressing, with intense hatred between a mother and her children. The mother is actually sweet and naive and her children are evil, manipulative and dangerous.
• Reader B: Has the picture the Peggy was resilient. She also thinks TC, near the end of her career, was working on her own salvation. [Alas, neither belief is easy to sustain knowing them.] This phenomenon of genius parents presenting a false front of caring but actually are despicable is new to me even though my mother was such a one. The fact of emotional abuse is new to me and I am not young; 66.
• My response to Readers A and B: There was no evidence, even in Peggy's autobiography, that she actually read TC's novels. By contrast, during the years she was in TC's orbit, included in the months' long voyages on the Rotterdam, she discusses watching her mother produce them. She did, especially as an adult, try to learn from her mother. Yet, it all ends sadly.
• Somehow TC needed her, almost as a chaperone. Perhaps -- if I read "Ceremony ..." -- the novel might hint why TC thought Peggy was an appropriate chaperone, beyond convenience once Judy (her sister, a suicide) was gone.
• Yet, Peggy knew much about TC that others did not. A knowledge that never did Peggy much good.

✺ 07-04-20GreatLionofGod: What marks Taylor Caldwell's novels as conservative?

• A serendiptious juxtaposition allows me to compare Joyce Carol Oates and TC, as both were OR promotions, and both go after evil in their novels.
• A comparison as strange – for these two prolific, well recognized novelists, with formative years but 5 miles apart in Buffalo – akin to the comparison of the economic Nobel Lauretes Frederick Hayak and Gunnar Myrdal.
• I posed for a college class, and readers of this newsletter, the following: One of these authors was very-very conservative, and the other was very-very liberal. Which is which, and why do you think so?