TC's Most significant Novel, Part I:


Recently a NY Times columnist said these words about the America we are living through right now. She left out the (and just so you know where I stand, one reasonably ameriorative adjective for them is obnoxious) anti-vaxxers.

Her lament: What has happened to this country? America is reeling backward, strangled by the past, nasty and uncaring, with everyone at one another's throats.

It feels as if nothing can be overcome. Everything is being relitigated.

With a memory like a goldfish, America circles its bowl, returning to where we have been, unable to move forward, condemned to repeat a past we should escape.

This was all prior to the last two days of some well-considered retrospective on two decades of American response to 9/11, whereby all we could claim was that the 9/11 destruction wouldn't change us. That was despite all the evidence it changed everthing: In particular, how so much of America responded with anger, hatred and violence. Oh, I left out a key word: That would be misplaced anger, hatred and violence.

Yet, in the midst of all these, I intend here to consider TC's most important (not just to her, but certainly to her) novel – Dear and Glorious Physician. Again, this is not an Open Road book, which has a $2.99 promotion of 5 TC books (see below). All four came in the period prior to this (from the public's viewpoint, her) masterpiece. I will look at four aspects of Dear and Glorious ....
  1. How it represented, considering her success up to 1958, her chance to write what she really wanted to.
  2. Her quasi-Historical method, and the value of separating her literarily compelling inventions from some concerning aspects that dominated her novels ever after.
  3. What still resonates with modern America, personally valuable, and societically disturbing.
  4. Her take on mothers, and motherhood, in the face of the culminating accolades that wrap a halo around the relation between St. Luke and Mary the Mother of Jesus at the conclusion of the novel.
That's a lot of material! As usual, her 3 Part Novel is dense, weighing in at 572 tiny-print pages (in my edition). This can't be an easy read for moderns. While I have read it quickly, it wasn't overnight, and I have now great experience with her novels, her themes, her predilections and her method. Yet, I would have a lot of notes if I was to weave – in parallel to the warp of her story threads and characters – this all together into one coherent narrative.

So, after reminding everyone of just how successful was this novel to TC, and the biggest family mistake about it, I will take on some of items #1 and #2. I follow that by [excerpts from] two reviews similar to ones I, myself, wrote the other day. There is, though, something interesting in comparing my intention with that of these two reviewers.

I leave for (probably two) later newsletters items #3 and #4. In that, I will include my best attempt to explicate why she was so famous in her day. That last part has to include what she was actually like, including what I know of her directly. Especially what I learned from her two daughters: by assimilating Peggy's autobiography, and by sharing time with Judy. Both wanted TC to care about them. Yes, both wanted the advantage of TC's fame and largesse, though Judy grew up with that while Peggy did not.

During that time, no one had greater access to her, and no one had greater reason to view her dispassionately. When she needed them – desperately – for some time after Marcus Reback died, they got some of that largesse and advantage. Enough to have them think they were getting a version of care. She was noone's warm mother (nor for that matter, grandmother, either). Yet, neither daughter had much experience with what a real mother was like.

In a way this was peculiar, for they could have seen it from the experiences of others their age – as for example, did I and my sister. But then, we had friends in a serious High School experience. It seems neither Judy nor Peggy did. When, however, TC found a way around needing them, she gave them the worst a mother could. Exactly, what her last husband wanted.

Dear and Glorious Physician (1959) had 112 editions published between 1959 and 2012 – in 11 languages

The Doubleday Edition I have has a list of her novels up to 1976, Ceremony of the Innocent. That is one of the few clues I have to the publication date of this edition. She published nothing beyond 1980, the year after what seems to have marked her likely incapacitation from what might have been her second stroke. Those qualifiers are there because her 3rd husband, Robert Prestie, presented himself as a gatekeeper to whatever remained of her personhood from 1979 on to her (well-documented) death in 1985. Here is what Wikipedia, written by ???, says on this issue.
Also in 1979, Caldwell suffered a stroke, which left her unable to speak, though she could still write (she had been deaf since about 1965). [The deafness is a tricky business, for she and Peggy conversed easily, but that was in relatively private circumstances. The deafness of older people today is much attributed to the cacophany of background noise, and that is where TC's deafness seemed to be almost total. So, through whose auspices was this wikipedia written: My sister's?]

Her daughter Peggy accused Prestie of abusing and exploiting Caldwell, and there was a legal battle over her substantial assets.[5] In 1979, she signed a two-novel deal for $3.9 million.[5]
Reference [5] is to Blagden, Nellie. "Silenced by a Stroke, Author Taylor Caldwell Becomes the Focus of a Bitter Family Feud", People Magazine. Vol.14, No. 3, July 21, 1980. There is still a useless link to it. Peggy had one of my brothers type the article verbatim on the typewriter she used to write her autobiography. So, that is still available.

I once wrote a review of a book by the most famous mathematician of the 20th century. I knew him and his subject equally well, but still I was surprised to find that he had my review – definitely not a hagiography – republished in seven languages. Indeed, I only found out because several who had been asked to translate it into their language wanted me to know that J.P. Serre had asked them to do that. He had the power to get what he wanted. Yet, we are talking about sales of around 10s of thousands, mostly to the mathematics libraries of the world.

TC's total sales are estimated at 30 million copies according to Google. Astonishing!

When the family, just a few years ago got rights to TC sales, they hadn't a clue. Indeed, they only knew what many knew: Dear and Glorious ... had been a hit. The family individuals certainly have made some money – at the level of mediocre Social Security – in the last year from continued sales. Still, essentially nothing from Dear and Glorious ... because they took the first meager offer from a publisher of electronic books; a publisher that did no advertising.

That Luke had long possessed TC as the vehicle for her vision of Mankind

She writes in the forward of the edition I have
This book has been forty-six years in the writing. The first version was written when I was twelve ... the second when I was twenty-two ... the third when I was twenty-six ... and all through those years work did not cease on this book.
She continues to describe how in abstract Luke's story
is the story of every man's pilgrimage through despair and life-darkness ... through doubt and cynicism, through rebellion and hopelessness to the feet and the understanding of God. This search for God and the final revelation are the only meaning in life for men. [Otherwise we are only animals with futile lives.]
In Part 2 of this newsletter, I will lay out how much her many (famous) characters engage this topic, the meaning of life. As always her novel is a "big read," but in this one we have the telling in the short forward just why this novel stands as a coagulation point for her own personal ambition. The Mediterranean world that enwrapped the story of Jesus was her favorite topic, and as self-aggrandizing as she can be, I do believe the sense of the opening statement of her forward:

She created parables for our time: Exposing what she and so many others wanted for truth

She says a priest (unnamed), who helped us [her husband, Marcus Reback and she] write this book, says of St. Luke,
... Only to Luke did Mary [the mother of Jesus] reveal the Magnificat, which contains the noblest words in any literature.
In claiming that her story is fact, she runs us through a small list of legendary sources that give us the main theme of her life: long ago, and far away (back through the Babylonians, certainly further than the legend of Gilgamesh, the oldest of written coherent story documents), when men knew things that we no longer know. She says they knew
some way of utilizing electricity unknown to us, and now in our present clumsy manner,'' and ''strange 'stones' for the cure of cancer.

For those who know nothing about electricity (OMG is that a lot of people), I suppose it is a piece-of-cake to credit TC with actual knowledge of that statement. Still, TC did have some brains. How could anyone possibly credit the former President for knowledge even more esoteric than that? Freedom lovers who want a cult to guide their lives?

I've mentioned this theme excruciatingly often: She screams whenever she gets the chance,

Man never changes. There is no such thing as progress.

Here, though, in this novel she first honed her penchant to recognize it would suit her take on the ancient world, which is – in her mind – still with us. Just looking at a list of her publications over her 42 years of novel production – and Lord knows I have been looking for keys to understanding it and her – one simple conclusion seems clear (though not stated explicitly). Half-way (21 years) through it, marked by this novel, TC could finally return to her first love, the stories from the near East that possessed her childhood dreams that she had a subject worthy of her desire to be a writer. She states this clearly in a letter to the Descendants grandfather from 1947.

A dream that would take her beyond that crude family (documented by her daughter Peggy) to adulation through her vision of what man was about. With her novels about REAL historical people that she liked… She always put HER words into their mouths! This was the novel where she first started to recognize – the historical record be damned – she could tell her readers whatever she wanted the world to be, and they would believe her.

So, whatever was shared of divinity in Taylor Caldwell, this novel – finally put in print – after 21 years stories on the nature of industrialism and capitalism and the conspiracies that she claimed dominated the lives of most of mankind, initiated her last 21 years. Therein lay her theme that the spirit that could take us beyond our abject sorrows was encapsulated in the lives of St. Luke and St. Paul. Especially their (essentially) joint discovery of the culmination of the story of Jesus. Here she would include every bit and nuance of it that attracted her, though almost all of it was myth. Myth, but a core to her desire to explain mankind to her readers.

There are subthemes on her novels too: One of the newsletter readers has noted the change in TC's writing with ''Testimony of Two Men'' from 1968. She adapted a contemporary style to fit in with all popular novels of that time. This, of course, was after she finished ''The Listener'' trilogy and her dystopian books.

Should we take a needle to calibrate exactly where each of us wish to accept the vignettes so contained here? In its sweep from (the left) 100% fact accepted on faith, to (the far right) cleverly woven legends that serve as her modern version of how Jesus created parables that told us truths about mankind. Such truths that would forever hold because, again, mankind never changed)?

As the thought of Jesus (''The Unknown God'') is injected into this novel everywhere she can, the most positive approach that I – a Jesus worshipper – can give it, is to credit her with intuiting what St. Luke (avant la lettre; and a la St. Paul) divined of Jesus without ever having met Him.

I point out three interesting points about the novel, both indicating how concentrated she intended this to be of what I have just described.

The first words of Part One is an Epictetus quote: ''Surely God chooses His servants at birth, or perhaps even before birth.

If I take it literally, this Calvanistic epigram, takes me on the road to answer a question I have always had: How did Jesus choose his disciples? Further, it suggests why Luke and Paul were full-fledged disciples despite their disagreement with the others annointed as such in the gospels outside that of Luke.

In continuing next time I will include an example of TC seeing herself as painting a literary Picture in a style she hoped was reminiscent of what those hundreds of early and later Renaissance painters envisioned of the lives of the saints. Except: She could put them all together in one volume that played off her forte to write as if the times and places and characters all came together. Whether anyone else knew it or not.

Two reviews that stood out among many

Manuel Alfonseca gave it 3 stars at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59097.Dear_and_Glorious_Physician

I have a problem with the first forty chapters of this novel: It is a compelling adventure story about Roman times, and I'd have liked it without any trouble if the protagonist had been named by another name, for instance, Quintus Nevius. But I cannot identify Lucanus with St. Luke. I think they are too different, from what we know about St. Luke from Paul epistles and Acts of the Apostles. In the foreword, Taylor Caldwell states that Almost all the events and background of St. Luke’s earlier life, manhood, and seeking, also his family and the name of his adopted father, are authentic. However, she doesn't say where she got that information from. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that Information about his life is scanty. Other sources confirm that we know nothing about his life before he appears in Acts of the Apostles and some of St. Paul's epistles.

[TC does this repeatedly, failing to give her voluminous learned sources, though I have personally found her exceedingly few references explicit in the early volumes of Will and Ariel Durant. In a previous newsletter, I noted those volumes were in our house, where there were not a great many serious books, certainly suggested by TC to Peggy What I imply here is that, for the most part she had learned her readers didn't care.]

In chapter 3, when Lucanus is 10 years old, the star appears and the magi travel to worship Jesus. So Lucanus is 10 years older than Jesus. Since Christ was born around 2-6 B.C., this must have taken place around that date. In chapter 7 he is 16 (six years older), so it must be the year 1-4, but Caldwell says we are now in the reign of Tiberius. But Augustus died in the year 14, so the two dates contradict each other. Therefore, this is an anachronism.

[There is more like this from this reviewer, but here the reviewer fails to note that TC has Luke actually meeting the three Magi in a tavern at the disposal of his first physician teacher.]

Between chapters 12 and 20, Caldwell becomes excessively repetitive. Phrases like this: he was filled with seething anger against God, who hates mankind are repeated at least twice a chapter. I think the first three times should have sufficed: the reader doesn't need that this idea be repeated 18 times or more.

In chapter 43 Lucanus starts to write his Gospel in the same year when Christ died and was resurrected and before speaking to the Apostles. This is unbelievable. Luke's Gospel was almost certainly written after Mark's Gospel, in the 50's, 20 years or more after Caldwell says. In fact the three Synoptic Gospels are supposed to have been based on Mark's, or on a previous document that has been lost, which would explain the similarities between them.

Cynthia Egbert gave it 5 stars


I loved this book! We know so little about Luke and I realize that this is fiction but Ms. Caldwell is almost more historian than fiction writer in many ways. Her grasp on Rome and the what lead to its fall is powerful. I had read this initially as a library copy but I had order my own because there was so many great quotes to mark...The following quote is my favorite...

"You misunderstand me, Priscus. I know that it was inevitable that Rome become what she is. Republics decay into democracies, and democracies degenerate into dictatorships. That fact is immutable. Where there is equality - and democracies always bring equality - the people become faceless, they lose power and initiative, they lose pride and independence, they lose their splendor. Republics are masculine, aon so they beget the sciences and the arts; they are prideful, heroic and virile. They emphasize God, and glorify Him. But Rome has decayed into a confused democracy, and has acquired feminine traits, such as materialism, greed, the lust for power, and expediency. Masculinity in nations and men is demonstrated by law, idealism, justice and poesy, femininity by materialism, dependency on others, gross emotionalism, and absence of genius. Masculinity seeks what is right; femininity seeks what is immediately satisfying. Masculinity is vision; femininity ridicules vision. A masculine nation produces philosophers, and has a respect for the individual; a feminine nation has an insensate desire to control and dominate. Masculinity is aristocratic; femininity has no aristocracy, and is happy only if it finds about it a multitude of faces resembling it exactly, and a multitude of voices echoing its own tiny sentiments and desires and fears and follies. Rome has become feminine, Priscus. And feminine nations and feminine men inevitably die or are destroyed by a masculine people."

[I, too, had earmarked this particular passage. All her Mediterranean novels repeat these words on the rabble and democracy placed in the mouths of her famous protagonists. Akin to so many of today's political ''leaders,'' TC hated democracy and most women. Where did they get it from?

Let's give TC and her influence on the John Birch Society credit where it is deserved. More significant than these, of course, is her hatred of taxes, documented in daily life by Peggy. She has Luke in total agreement.]

Again, there are the $2.99 offerings from Open Road.
The Wide House 1945
The Eagles Gather 1940
The Final Hour 1944
The Strong City 1942
Tender Victory 1956


Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell
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