I have put the links to an Open Road sale of Ceremony of the Innocent below. A previous such Open Road sale brought out comments from several of the readers of this newsletter who had already read the novel. 

I have put a few asides of my own between brackets [ ]'s in the discussions by READER A and READER B. READER A, whose first message to me was on her strong relation with her mother, the person who introduced her to Taylor Caldwell's novels, colors over "Ceremony of the Innocent" in dark bruises. 

Reader B thought she saw, upon reading from Peggy's autobiography Chapter 2, that Peggy's naivete was the model for the novel's heroine, Ellen Porter. Peggy was naive, as much as she affected sophistication. She dropped knowing phrases on subjects on which she hardly even knew the basics. As for what she understood of other people, that was hopeless. She had hardly any other people in her life, except those she met playing bridge with my father. She truncated what learning might have come about because she never asked any questions.  

The ugliness flew out of every paragraph! The novel was so unpleasant that I didn’t even keep the book.  This is the novel Stevie Nicks liked and once mentioned in an interview.

[READER A and I both were fans of Stevie Nicks.]

Obviously TC was making a statement about herself and her daughters. It’s from the early or mid 1970’s. 

[TC published the novel in 1976. It was close to the end of her writing career, which ceased completely in 1980 when she had a stroke from which she never recovered. The setting goes back to Pennsylvania, like TC's novels from the late '30s and early '40s.] 

I think Ellen Porter from Ceremony of The Innocent was like your mother; an innocent who truly believed Life and had no natural weapon of self preservation. Your grandmother wrote Ceremony, using your mother's attributes for Ellen Porter's character. I think your grandmother, my favorite author for years, was an evil woman because of her treatment of her children. 

When I read her [TC's] books now I'll be looking for clues to her attempts to work out her own salvation. A lot of the tropes she used involved abused children, alcoholism, indifferent grandparents to the trauma being inflicted on their grandchildren, madness, lust, anger and suicide.

[This idea that TC was working on her salvation is truely Christian, and I applaud REader B for applying it. Do I believe that is correct? Alas, I do not.]  In my own life words from King David come to mind, "When the the foundations fail, what can the righteous do?" They can do like your mother, survive and transcend or they can become like the ones who abuse them and abuse other's, or they can  destroy themselves in various ways. 

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.

Books saved my life and I've read voraciously since a very young child, and TC since I was 15. The first book read being ,A Prologue to Love - a very sad book. Your comments about your grandmother's work are complementary and so they should be but her character as a person is something else again.

On Reader B's statement on Peggy's resilience. Well, Peggy would give that impression in her autobiography. Yet, hardly in real life. 

When I was young, I thought there was quite a collection of books in the house. Later, however, with more perspective, I saw they were haphazard, mostly unread, and hardly voluminous. What Peggy read was Science Fiction (which I read after she did) and Murder Mysteries (which I did not). The very few that could have shown a more demanding literary taste turned out -- from reading one of Peggy's chapters -- to be from an English class she had taken for the few weeks she attended University of Buffalo. 

There was no evidence, even in Peggy's autobiography, that she actually read TC's books. By contrast, during the years she was in TC's orbit by being included in the months' long voyages on the Rotterdam, she discusses watching her mother produce them.

I always felt that Peggy's disorganized production of the pages of her autobiography, without chapter divisions or titles, was her attempt to imitate TC's productivity. 

Peggy, in middle adulthood, had no awareness of how abusive she had been as a mother. When TC -- after Judy's suicide (in one of the chapters in Peggy's autobiography) -- took Peggy into her orbit, Peggy needed her children to occasionally come on the ships as they came to a port. (Many of us were living in California.)

That was to prove that she had been a good mother. My first two wives brought our children, and on occasion I went too, when the children were very young. Peggy paid them no attention (TC didn't either, of course), but introduced them abstractedly, saying "Michael's children."

Later, someplace I met one of those women to whom we were introduced. I wish I could remember where that was. She  said she suspected that Peggy wasn't much of a mother. I didn't go on at any length, but emphasized Taylor Caldwell wasn't much of a mother, and Peggy copied many of her attributes.

Until I saw Peggy's autobiography I didn't know for certain just how bad a mother was TC.

From TC's novels, you get that TC knew how to draw the characteristics of a certain type of attractive, often portrayed as beautiful, good woman; one supported entirely by some man. Still, she wasn't capable of being one herself.

Peggy was totally clueless. Of course she had none of the resources (hired help, ability to pack her daughter away in a convent) that  TC had. Also, TC was much better educated than Peggy. Still, poor people often are selfless toward their kids. 

On the back page of my copy of "Ceremony of the Innocent," it says "Miss Caldwell holds three doctorates." I cannot imagine what would be the meaning of having three doctorates. (Perhaps honorary?) Especially since TC never alluded to doctorate level expertise in any of her novels. TC's achievement was in writing those many, large novels, and within them, fabricating her complicated but consistent weave of those characters within their life paths.

Peggy was close to nonfunctional most of the time past when I was in 5th grade, when she was a full-blown alcoholic, until after her kids were gone. Certainly when I was in High School, she  basically had little left over to handle life.

Still, somehow TC needed her, almost as a chaperone. Perhaps -- if I read "Ceremony ..." -- the novel would give a hint as to why TC thought Peggy was an appropriate chaperone, beyond convenience once Judy (her sister, a suicide) was gone. Is it possible that TC saw Peggy's obvious innocence about the world as an attractant for the men TC sought on those ships?

It is also possible that TC had no one else to go with her. Superficially that seems unlikely. There were any number of women who were glad to be around TC. If TC paid, then I'm sure they would have gone. My only other thought on that was that TC's behavior could be disgustingly vulgar in private. Peggy knew that. Other women probably did not.