Part II: Enough Light to See the Darkness Subtitled: Seeking a Divine Inspiration, the saga of Taylor Caldwell's relationship with her daughter Peggy is well on its way to completion.

Previous newsletters advertised it as centered on TC's mid-career inspiration to open to her Catholic background by featuring the first (admittedly of many, but still with a unique role) who seriously tried to fathom Jesus – who left no writings of his own. One way to see Dear and Glorious Physician is as TC following St. Luke, as an emulation of his following a path to Jesus's mother Mary.


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Neither writers nor artists can avoid entertaining whether what they do is honest; do they honestly convey something true about the world?

The only biography of TC I know of was that written by the woman Peggy calls Sula (Soula) Chrysoula Soula Angelou. She was TC's housekeeper in the house where TC lived in Florida with her penultimate husband, William Stancell. I have just finished editing the chapters on TC's life in Jacksonville, FL, where she lived with Everett Stancell, the period during which Peggy, a once abused daughter, now became a constant companion to TC in many places, but especially on several many month ocean cruises aboard famous luxury liners. TC complains that she is alone in Florida unless Peggy visits her.

Perhaps this explains why TC confided greatly in Soula. In one of those incidences, Soula, much surprised, records that TC – trying to open Soula's eyes to the world – corrects Soula's insistence on the importance of truth in writing.

Many fiction authors discuss their way to truth. Still, you rarely see point blank just how important to them it is, as is given in this extract from Alissa Wilkinson's article on Flannery O'Conner as portrayed in Ethan Hawke's movie 'Wildcat.'

O'Connor died in 1964, at 39, after years of battling through lupus to write her nervy, weird stories about Southerners, sin, religion and the God to whom she prayed so fervently. ... "Wildcat" is for O'Connor fans, not biopic critics. ... Her peculiar combination of fervent faith, unsentimental satire and flair for the bizarre have made her a patron saint to many writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation.
Hawke's film gets this in spades, spotlighting text drawn from her prayer journals (published in 2013). ... Exacerbated by her physical pain from lupus, the disease that killed her father, and her emotional pain at being back in Georgia, back with her mother, back among people whom she views as having replaced true Christian faith with propriety, niceness and the mandate to uphold social norms.
To understand good fiction requires "the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery."
When O'Connor is bedridden with lupus and asks for a visit from a priest (played by Liam Neeson). ... after listening to her agony, his affect changes. As she does, he understands the pain of trying to see his way through the fog of life.
She begs for reassurance that it’s good to pursue her writing and that God also cares for her. “Is your writing honest?” the priest asks her. “Is your conscience clear?” When she nods, he continues. “Then the rest,” he says, “is God’s business.”
Life is full of cliches, which, upon inspection, either fall apart or are adhered to by denying reality. There is no other place to learn lessons that inform lives than to pay attention to what is around you. When, however, you first catch a lesson and hold it as giving life meaning (out of optimism?), a second look almost always shows you missed a more profound story, one less easily understood or encapsulated. So flees a cliche unless you refuse to let it go.

There is no greater cliche than "We get our just rewards in Life." TC's version tacked on "through God" to the end of that, and it was the soul of her writing from Sound of Thunder (SOT) on. Whether in the Bible, Shakespeare, or many of humanity's greatest writers and stories, what we often label as tragedy says something quite orthogonal to "we get our just rewards." It's more like we get what we get, and on we go until we go no longer.

Jesus saw into mysteries about the connections between people. Such connections have meaning, whether that was a fathomable connection akin to God or not. They are akin to all of the connectednesses in the world that are so difficult to explain. But even if those connectednesses exist, they don't imply we get our just rewards. They do, though, indicate a way humans could relate to the world that wasn't properly used. That is, Jesus was onto something.

SOT, with TC, trying to tie genius together with from whence came rewards, became more consequential in "The Book of Luke." Moreover, the real Luke was a more consequential character than any in SOT. Also, unlike in SOT, TC didn't end DAG with her cliche. Instead, she alluded to the open-endedness of the New Testament, which had yet to be written in DAG (by Luke, Paul, and Timothy).

The only way I can make a serious story of Peggy and TC is to emphasize that they both got what they wanted from life. TC still has worshipers. Was it enough? Peggy didn't even work to have her children care for her, but eventually TC did, which is what mattered to her. Peggy concluded her undivided autobiographical pages by saying they were written for her children. That was undoubtedly a lie or, more kindly, a self-deception. Yet, it was written to justify her life and that of her TC, her Mother. Did it?


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Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell