Last week I took one of the chapters from Taylor Caldwell's The Listener and gave it as a somewhat typical example of TC's view of America. One of her bette noire's: '60s child rearing fashions were certainly not what TC grew up in. (Nor what I or my siblings did, either.)

Like many Scotch families, coming to America, they came from lower class homes. They had rough visions of how to treat their children. Although I passed through High School in the late 50's, there were such families in our Buffalo neighborhood, still poor and tough, and – one resonating word for many in those families – brutal.

TC would rise above that in many ways. Yet, she would not quite escape what goes on in the mind of an abused child, which she certainly was. She definitely ended up like her abusers: tough and brutal.

She had her way of telling this story, aimed at her readers in 1971, long after her major novels had sold to large audiences. Well into a period when that hardscrabble life – still indelible in her febrile imagination – could be used to throw darts at her perceived enemies. Those she attacked as she perceived them, not so brutal as was she. Open Road's e-book sale of Growing up Tough, for $2.99 is below.

Ah, but there is another view of TC's mother Annie (spelled Anna in the abstract below). That is the 2nd chapter of my mother's autobiography: Her view of her grandmother, and that Scotch family, and what kind of household TC varnished up in her little autobiography. I have put an introduction to that chapter below the sale.

You will find the full chapter typed out in a link. Instead of TC mouthing her own view of the lessons of such a tough woman, from Peggy you see a different view of those who are overwhelmed. Those whose lives respond to harsh twists that they relieve by claiming they are in control. Their proof? By their controlling others vulnerable to them.


 

On Growing Up Tough

By Taylor Caldwell


$2.99 $17.99


EXPIRES 6/20/20


Biography & Memoir, History



 

#1 New York Times bestselling author

Caldwell shares her rough journey to adulthood in a book that “should be read by every American” (Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette)...Born in Manchester, England, in 1900, her Scottish parents warned her that if she misbehaved at school, she’d be “thoroughly thrashed.” When her family immigrated to America in 1907, life got tougher. Her father died and the family struggled financially. But her mother, Anna, was a firm believer in Women’s Liberation and insisted that Janet could do a man’s job...Janet embarked on her writing career at the age of eight. Eventually, she was discovered by legendary editor Maxwell Perkins and began publishing under the name Taylor Caldwell.

 

 

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Chapter 2: Annie Caldwell (1880–1953). This starts with Peggy's view of TC's hardscrabble life: A Scotch family always in battle. Peggy was born in 1920, many years after TC's description in Growing up Tough. Chapter 1, which I haven't shown you is of Peggy, distraught because of the time she was left on her own in a convent. She had hoped that her father, Will Combs – the grandfather of us siblings – would take her with him after he and TC had separated, though they were not for many years officially divorced. At the end of this present chapter, Peggy returns to the Reback house with her half-sister Judy in her hands, while Marcus Reback learned what he had gotten himself in for. Mr. Reback has a transfer to NYC, from which he commutes. To there TC would visit and take her novels to publishers. Then they all moved to NYC in '36 and '37, just before acceptance of Dynasty of Death for publication.

While, as the abstract on Growing up Tough says, maybe the famous Max Perkins launched TC, there can be little doubt that it was the many-sided research efforts of Marcus Reback that kept guiding TC to her work ethic and the payoff for her preternatural persistence. Too, evidence gathers that TC's diatribes against her visceral enemies were an inspiration to the John Birch Society. Her complete connections to that famous organization have yet to be documented. Still, we know their views appear in publications to this day.


Michael Fried, Grandson
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