While I have usually been prompted to write a newsletter by a promotion  by Open Road on one of Taylor Caldwell's books, today is a little different. Yes, there is a promotion of Great Lion of God, whose three parts on St. Paul I have previously reviewed in newsletters, I put that promotion, and a link to the family review at the end of this message. 

I have never done a newsletter on her production, Dear and Glorious Physician, centered on her – equally notable – gospel writer St. Luke. 

The latter is not an Open Road book, a mistake on the part of the family which came into the right to promote TC's books only recently. When first approached by a publishing firm we were naive and unaware of what was at stake because of the machinations between Peggy (her daughter, our mother), TC's last husband (Robert Prestie) and TC's enmity against her children and grandchildren based (essentially) on TC's enmity toward all male children. Excluding my sister, I and my other two brothers hardly knew her. She psychotically hated little boys and wouldn't tolerate our presence. 

Even if I wanted to tell you a rich psychological tale of how we came into the right to promote these novels, I couldn't. We don't know why it happened so short a time ago. Still, I have come to understand the America I grew up in at several levels from investigating disparate aspects of TC.

1. The specifics of what I could see of her talents and regard with which she was held in mid-20th century America vis-a-vis other authors (Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Ayn Rand, and possibly relevant to more moderns such as Joyce Carol Oates). 
2. Her effect on her two children: Peggy and her sister Judy (whom I actually knew better than I knew Peggy).
3. Her specific 40+ novels, and their division into recognizable sets much affected by her 2nd husband Marcus Reback.
4. Peggy's autobiography, which I have externally pieced into chapters with extensive abstracts and titles, under the title Enough Light to see the Darkness, compatible with the Eulogy: seeing a Mother through Depression I wrote for my sad mother. 
5. TC's association with the John Birch Society; much stronger than I could ever have predicted when I was young.
6. Aspects of her publicly cultivated persona, especially her willingness to push her relation to Jesus and the Catholic Church.
7. The circumstances of the poor Scottish family in which she both grew up and then to economically outgrew, only to have its struggles psychologically dominate her own life. 
8. Her hatred of liberals, at one with the strongest position held by today's more extreme conservatives, and especially Trump.
9. The consistency of her conservative positions, as promulgated by almost any of her novels, though they started with some nuance and came like thunderous crescendos in the last of her publications. 

My, that is some list, with many solid subtopics! In over 50 newsletters I have touched on aspects of each of these. If these topics were to be a chunks of a book, it would be a surpassingly thick volume. Yet, I didn't include one serious topic.  

Who would, today, care about TC and her descendants considering today's political, religious and aspirational climate?

Except one, I started out the newsletter without a single concern in this direction. The Exception: I wanted Peggy's autobiography to matter. Peggy couldn't have developed her own autobiography in that direction. I was aghast at – in Peggy's last chapter – the tremendous self-deception she carried to her grave. 

So, much rides on the extent to which TC herself could possibly matter. I complete this particular newsletter on a subtopic  of item #1 above as it ties to item #9, the two items that wrap TC within a long-ago America that possibly no longer matters. Still, I hold to the idea that the songs I loved the most when I was young, California Dreaming, Will you still love me tomorrow, Knights in White Satin,  and many others that young people with whom I deal can hardly feel their attractive, are still commanding the air waves of a (yes) long-ago but  yet relevant America. 

My theme today is "TC's Case against those who claim to Understand." This is a huge theme, not one I can do justice here. Rather, by emphasizing the two New Testament novels that I mentioned above (not even her complete Mediterranean series, which also includes Glory and the Lightning  and Pillar of Iron on which I have also spent considerable time). I paint how TC bent her readers at one time to worship her prescience and vision. 

TC was part of the right-wing that, like Hitler, denigrated those who claimed higher understanding. As if such "understanding" was a cheap trick, not worthy of real men. Of course, that was Hitler's case against Jews. Who needed, he said repeatedly, this Jewish mathematics/science like that from Lisa Meitner and Albert Einstein. They were part of the pantheon that produced quantum mechanics and relativity theory. I've said previously, for those who think these esoteric, you would have then to include lasers and GPS. 

In case you don't know who is Lisa Meitner, let me repeat what I once said when I was very young. The perfect woman would be a miraculous combination of Lisa Meitner  and Gene Tierney. To add a bit of ego, I was sufficiently confident I thought I could handle such a woman.

TC  has made many statements on what she thinks people don't need. Like, some of her afterwords that admonished people for caring about space travel, or entertainments, or washing machines, in place of what she claimed was the most important substance: Jesus and  God. She made no difference between them, because she had little to say about Jesus that wasn't a version of how she approached almost everyone. It was as if each person was their physiogeny which she translated into their aura.

This came with one of her great insecurities, which manifested thusly. In the presence of a pretty, charming woman, TC vomited vituperation dominating the scene for attention in a style entirely suited to the uncontrollable jealousy of a  Donald Trump. 

Then, there were her own writing tricks. She vomited florid words (pummeling us with vocabulary, specifics on meal scenes and gardens) without actual relevance to her stories. Her character descriptions weren't any more illuminating than was phrenology. Example: In "Glory and the Lightning" she alludes to something she probably found in Will and Ariel Durant about Pericles – his slightly misshapen head, and his helmut-wearing as a disguise of it – at least 100 times. 

Then, her lack of subtlety about history which she manipulated shamelessly within the periods without historical record (then; it is better now). By that she intended to pound into the heads of her readers her insistence that mankind never changed. In one sense it was a blander, though more vehement, version of Hobbesian philosophy. This, without doubt was TC's biggest theme. 

Somehow it is as if being liberal means that you think about things you aren't supposed to. Rather you should just accept on faith the ancient words of those she anoints. Or on the words she herself constantly planted as asides in the mouths of classical dignitaries about the true nature of mankind. 

So, what was the nature of TC reader-dom? Were there among her readers some that took to heart Jesus's admonition to (attempt at least) to increase their love for all of Mankind?

It isn't the heart of modern conservatism. Yet, however TC was able to picture her own heart, she rarely found a place in it to nurture such thoughts, not even for her daughters. 

Ah, but yes! Among TC's  readers were some who sincerely worship Jesus and his message(s) and his brilliance. For example, she insisted that Aspasia, as much a goddess in antiquity as we have, searched for "The Unknown God." Even in the mythical 1st third of Pillar of Iron, Cicero searches for the "The Unknown God." 

She has St. Paul come upon both Jesus and his mother Mary  in downtown Jerusalem around the time of his instigation of the stoning of St. Stephen.  St. Luke (whom she refers fervently to as Lucanus) not only meets Mary, but early in the novel his physician guide introduces him to The Three Magi. Cicero, Caesar and Cataline all grow up in the same neighborhood of Rome, go to the same school, develop their enmities in grade school, and right to the end, each have the same relation with the Roman mob (they should have been called the deplorables) that TC professed to hate. Cicero – without agreement in his voluminous writings – often entertains thoughts of "The Unknown God."

Here, though she did have a point toward her insistence that mankind never changed, repeated in novel after novel. For example,  whatever we learned about "The Unknown God" came down from a more ancient civilization. Older than the Greeks, Older than the Assyrians, Older than the Egyptians, older still than any of those. I'm sure she would have insisted, older than the Cro-magnons, or the Neanderthals, or the Australopithecines, if she could even have been induced to admit there were such. 

Serious Jesus worship, though, likely, wasn't for her main audience. Others agree what attracted her followers was the vast landscape of her characters. Her intelligence as it showed in weaving together this varied crowd she created into a coherent story that told of a world of secret, nefarious, creatures who managed to somehow control our lives. Indeed, she made this better than plausible precisely because her characters actually seemed to have human traits. 

Right from the first, in Dynasty of Death,  she tells us that the character Ernest Bouchard, one who eventually comes to epitomize those who seems to control the destinies of us more pitiable creatures, only later comes to realize that he will never love anyone more than he loves Amy Dumphill. 

Many would say, for God's sakes, it's in so many of the reviews, that TC's legion of readers cared little that her Biblical/ Mediterranean novels had fake scenarios and little substance.  They wanted to be entertained.  Still, her more conservative readers seemed desparate to have learned from TC the secret ways of the world. That suggests more than entertainment. Again, her smartness seemed to suggest someone who could follow uncommonly complex machinations. Such readers pictured themselves as being in on conspiracies. Certainly TC hinted that she knew many convoluted plots that the naive would find implausible.

Like how, in the middle to late '50s,  most of the US government (including Dwight Eisenhauer) were secret communists. ''Wake up, Wake up!'' said TC, ''Or it will be too late.''

Where have I heard that before? She and the Birchers were one on that. Mostly, her heroes already knew the "truth" – straight from TC – when they were teenagers – with the aid of savants who were the source of TC's "insights" on democracy and the rabble. What TC wrote to the mouths of these savants clearly did please her readers. 

Then, there are the earlier novels that seem to have a difference voice, "Testimony of Two Men," "Time No Longer," "Tender Victory" and the "Dynasty of Death" quatrology. These I claim, Marcus Reback heavily influenced. Too, there is the question of on whom can we model TC? 

Matthew Rozsa, writing recently in Salon, lists what Sam Roberts gives as Roy Cohn (Joseph McCarthy's puppet-master)'s influence on Trump: 

"Roy was a master of situational immorality . ... He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat." 

My best friend in High School was a great disappointment to me because that was his ploy when dodging his infidelities, questioned by his first wife, and that he successfully evaded with his second wife. You don't have to be an evil genius to be an asshole with considerable charm.

Still, TC's career didn't use this Trumpian trope. Indeed, considering how well known she was, she hardly ever appeared in public. Then, too, thanks to Peggy's autobiography and some incidents I actually saw, I know in detail how badly behaved TC was in semi-private situations. 

I raise this here, for – while Trump  still gets oodles of attention, for the glee expressed by his followers – of equal significance for both Trump and TC was the much smarter Roy Cohn. Someone with whose life trajectory there is a much better comparison. That would include the tawdry endings of both Cohn and Caldwell. I need to work on just how one can express those endings without revolting an audience. Say, with neither pandering in shadenfreude nor overlooking the tragedy that this was the best that such talented people could do with their lives.