Enough Light to See the Darkness: Part I: The Launching of a Conservative Author

By Michael Fried

Taylor Caldwell was the author of 40+ novels that went through three periods of her development as a famous novelist. Her Dynasty of Death Series offered a view of an America governed by unscrupulous movers and shakers who used their growing fortunes to dominate even the halls of Congress. Her Mediterranean novels gave us the founding of the modern world running through Pericles, Julius Caesar, Cicero, and even Genghis Khan, including the sayings – interpreted by the author – of the famous leaders of their day. Especially her masterpiece, saved for when she was at the pinnacle of her fame: "Dear and Glorious Physician," the presentation of St. Luke as a more relatable Jesus, and an offering of the New Testament in the vision – not stated explicitly – of the heretic Marcion. All done with a background of Jesus Christ coming from an ancient persona she called "The Unknown God." Her last series of novels cast modern America as having betrayed its destiny as a supremely conservative entity destined to worship an autocratic leader. This joint biography gives a coherent story relevant to current political events based on Taylor Caldwell as a recognized forerunner of TBD-Conservatism. TC was born in 1900 and was still publishing feverishly until 1980, though she was incapacitated until her death in 1985. Her mistreated daughter Peggy became a complicated appendage to TC's life for what remained of it, including the complex period from 1980 to 1985, while she attempted to wrest control of TC from TC's last husband, Robert Prestie. Only near the end of TC's sentient period did she recognize that Peggy was the only dependable person in her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350931723

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©2023 Michael David Fried

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35093-171-6

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35093-172-3

Contents

Part I Foreword: From Victim to Protector

1 The Indelible Convent

2 Annie Caldwell (1880-1953)

3 College and a few Friends (61-98)

4 Leaving the Rebacks for Gerry

5 Children and the Service

6 104" Blanket of Snow: North Park, then Eggertsville

7 67 Hendricks seen through a Rosette of Ill-fit shards

Part I: Afterword: The launching of a Conservative Author

Part I Foreword:

From Victim

to Protector

This is a joint biography of a mother (my grandmother and famous author, Taylor Caldwell – TC) and daughter (my mother, Peggy) who were entwined their whole lives. That was despite the mother’s abusive behavior toward her daughter until that daughter’s adulthood. What entwined them was Peggy’s attempt to get her mother to care about her. What kept them attached was Peggy’s usefulness to TC, first as caretaker of TC’s second daughter, Judy, and then as someone willing to play lackey to her personal needs.

This isn’t a Mommy Dearest, though I mean no disparagement of that title. Their need was mutual, and Peggy was a complicated lackey. Unaware of the true significance of TC’s life and behavior, but insistent on remaining attached. For instance, there is little evidence that Peggy even read TC’s novels, at least with any feeling.

Explaining TC’s Fame and Peggy’s Role

I refer to TC as a TCB-conservative (TCB = Truth Be Damned). This doesn’t mean TC had no sense that she was speaking some truth, but rather that she understood truth in a way superior to most others and refused to live by a criterion wedded to consistency or conventional morals. She wasn’t alone on this, but she was one of the few who held this view while reaching a large public through her novels, even as she hid the full dimensions of her conspiracy-laden stories.

We live on the edge of what our senses and compulsions insist upon, and because we are humans with an expansive culture, what we think these mean. The former gives us simple truths. We choose deeper ‘truths’ from the latter that persist in time. Like a cancer that would kill us if we lived long enough, such ‘truths’ can survive as long as we do; a few maybe enhanced into seemingly forever.

Since our egos demand our significance, the cohort in which our choices prevail can enhance these ‘truths,’ giving us social reasons (versus consistency checks) to accept them. So many options; so little time and mental energy. Therefore, so many reasons to have others tell us what we should think. Yet, because there are so many choices, how puzzling as to why a small number of cohorts adopt to specific incompatible options. Further, a cohort’s rules to live by – again, inconsistent between cohorts – are often differentially applied within a given cohort according to individual status within each cohort.

While TC didn’t announce her intention to be a TCB-conservative leader, in this Part I, we see her predilections were apparent long before any of her novels were in print. We would never have known without TC’s unintentional, lifelong companion, her daughter, who rose from victim to ever-present – albeit naive – chronicler.

Peggy Fried, nee Mary Margaret Combs, passed away Monday, December 10, 2007. The last 55 years of her life seemed a strange and sad story to those sympathetic. Even for her children, it was hard to find her influence, for she was often depressed, angry and aggressive toward them. Still, an incident in 1974 showed that she may have once expressed some care. A friend at UCLA spied Peggy’s indelible mark in one of my public presentations. I might never have recognized this on my own.

Seeing a Mother Through Depression. Peggy Fried, 03/13/1920 to 12/10/2007

A friend of mine, Peter Trombi, was at UCLA in the middle 70s, not long after I decided to leave my tenured position at Stony Brook for one more attempt at marriage with my first wife. She had left me with the children in New York City to make a further try as a choreographer in the Los Angeles area.

Southern California reminded me of nothing from Buffalo or New York City. Still, at my beginning there, Beverly Hills – just as Rodeo Drive was wrapping itself in a reputation for glamour, and housing prices had not yet gone skyward – was seductive. I gave it a shot.

Peter asked me to give a colloquium on a topic he had heard me lecture on previously. Still, I guessed the audience at UCLA – with some in attendance having come over from Cal Tech – had inappropriate background for it. So, I wasn’t surprised; despite holding up my enthusiasm throughout, the talk wasn’t working. When I concluded, I expected very few telling items of a successful talk: questions.

Thankfully, Peter played a role. Starting with the phrase, Your handwriting is interesting, he proceeded with, Did you grow up in a convent?

No, said I, But my mother did. Why do you ask?

Peter, of Catholic background, was perspicacious and had a telling answer. I’ve never seen anyone write their r’s like that except those trained by nuns. ¹

Sure enough, Peter had hit upon the source of my poor penmanship – significant in grade school for those my age, though it disappeared from the curriculum over 45 years ago – starting from 2nd grade on. I had wholly forgotten – maybe never recognized – that my mother had taught me to write before I went to school. Those strange r’s and unusual capitals still punctuated my handwritten works as they did hers.

No one in the middle 70s wrote their papers on a computer. Few typed them directly. So, when you received communication – as I did then, often from Europe – you could see that different cultures had decidedly different penmanship. Yet, I had never seen anyone else who used such r’s as did Peggy and I.

And there were other distinctions, too. My eclectic reading – again, so different than that of other mathematicians, was undoubtedly the result of books lying around read by my mother. This gave a jolt to a growing-up half-truth that my mother had never cared for her children. Maybe she had at one time, and then, upon the death of a fifth child, just lost any desire to interact with us. Alas, that was much of my childhood, close to all of it for my two youngest siblings.

Still, before alcohol and her inner battles with her mother took over completely, this connection uncovered by Peter Trombi suggested a person who had influences that overrode instruction in the Palmer Method of cursive writing² on which 3rd graders in my day received much instruction. This was clear proof of her intentional presence.

Until I came across Peggy’s autobiography, discovered in 2007 at Peggy’s residence from 1952 until her death – 910 poorly (with a typewriter from the early 60s) typed pages with hand-written corrections – I thought there would be little to resurrect of Peggy’s life, had I cared³ to. Nine hundred ten pages, one after the other, without spaces or titles indicating chapters and few explanations of scene changes.

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1 I put my writing as it still appears today into this jpg, with a phrase that would have appeared on that UCLA blackboard in 1974. The paper eventually appeared as Galois groups and Complex Multiplication, T.A.M.S. 235 (1978), 141–162.

2 An internet search on cursive writing instantly shows the difference.

3 Peggy Fried in her late teens.

How Peggy came to treat TC;

How TC came to treat Jesus

Peggy looks back on the first third of her life from a distance, challenging to decipher. Peggy wrote and stopped at various times with intermittent disruptions, more significantly, from different perspectives. The vehicle by which she rendered this autobiography – a typewriter that suits a place in Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village Museum – doesn’t appear in Peggy’s recounting until well past halfway through this autobiography. It was a gift from Gerry (my father), indicating he was aware of her interest in recording her thoughts on TC. That means Peggy was recording from memory many years. She did it without the most obvious tool of a writer: A written record from some of the past. For example, she talked sparingly about her children but without consulting them. Her ‘facts’ are consistently fabricated (something I have footnoted), often maliciously about their lives.

Peggy’s mother is an acerbic, incessantly mean-spirited, but often a supportive constant in her life. As always, a constant without warmth or commiseration, but sufficiently consistent – once Peggy was married – to have Peggy regard her as dependable, despite sharp edges.

In this volume, I looked back on the first third of Peggy’s life. I reflect on how I avoided despair from dealing with Peggy and Gerry and their dismal parenting and total lack of support for their children. I did manage to do so, though I don’t know the complete details. I led a life without serious adult support, even in school, all the way to adulthood, beyond which all I can refer to is what others would call peers.

Further, as I did above, I did note Peggy’s – arguably positive – influence appeared. So did TC’s. At first, I took it as a heartfelt appearance for the latter. Ultimately, I was deceived by TC’s novels (true, I was in 6th grade) as so many others have been. Misled to believe she was sincere. Deluded to think she had a well-spring of insight.

But not deceived beyond what I could ascertain. I could put 2 and 2 together early on without losing what I had gained from TC. I could accept what I had gained because it came from a more significant source than she. A source she never understood despite her pretense that she was the receptor of a Divine Spark.

TC: What kind of Conservative?

TC is, to her core, a conservative. My phrase for it is a TBD-conservative: Truth Be Damned. In her hands, this was no simple support for lying, though she had nothing against that in her actual life dealings, but rather the kind of conspiracy view of the world that never required any research or indirect support. Someone was to blame for what she disliked, and based on her visceral antipathy to certain people – especially liberals – she needed no investigation to create a story about how their perfidy, weakness, or stupidity drove them to be the source of what she hated.

Toward anyone she didn’t care for, she could throw a dart labeled communist, socialist, or liberal, all three synonymous. Still, there are serious questions here.

When her novels called for subtlety, there had to be evidence in her characters’ actions that justified her epithets.

To catch on with her audience, her characters had to represent a believable enterprise, positive or negative; the grander, the better.

She also had to naturally weave the relationship between her positive and negative characters as they discovered each other.

Her primary talent showed in her ability to unravel the threads of complication and accident so they cauterized at the novel’s end. She built her conspiracy theories in details centered on small-town life, in characters with outsized ambition who found their way to national events and professional and political significance that smacked of her being privy to inside information. These episodes purported to inform her readers of how the ‘real’ world works. Finally, she wrote especially for the reader who already had her worldview likes and dislikes.

There is a lot to understand in this. TC required a visceral understanding of her potential audience. It took time for her to go from characters with nuance to more blatant examples of the behavior she castigated. As Peggy’s autobiography makes clear, she wasn’t subtle at all in her actual lived life. Many of those with whom she associated were comfortable with her behavior, but it was a massive trial for Peggy. The Part II Afterword lays the difficulty of TC’s instinctive conservatism at the feet of how she insists on fervent support of one of the most liberal figures in human history, Jesus of Nazareth. Nevertheless, she pulled this off despite the hypocrisy of her actions.

Not only did TC ignore the main thrust of Jesus’s ministry, but she also insisted progress was a dirty word. She invited her readers to engage with Jesus only through prayer without thinking about the meaning and intention of such prayer. Her most exciting innovation – in any of her novels – was a modern version of the heresy of Marcion. Marcion insisted St. Luke and St. Paul were – by far – the most crucial ingredients of the New Testament.

TC’s novelistic presentations of them show how little she engaged their thoughts. Instead, she planted her own words in their mouths using her own plot devices – many sophomoric, like Luke meeting the Three Magi in a Middle Eastern tavern – chunked into the unrecorded spaces in the historical record.

For example, she insists, against a massive historical record of what the world before Jesus was like, that there is a persistent forerunner to His existence. She calls this entity The Unknown God. This avatar appears without serious description in all her Mediterranean novels. If these threads – an expansion on Marcion and a(n ancient) pre-Christian vision of Jesus – have possibilities, and I believe they did, her fulfillment of them is exasperatingly disappointing.

This Part I of this joint biography (of Peggy and TC) lays out how TC recognized that she could succeed by becoming a recognized TBC-conservative. Of course, she couldn’t announce herself as that. Yet, if she kept to the less historically documented places in her stories, the appropriate readers for her novels would value her crafting what they had always hoped. There were always skeptics among reader reviews, but fewer than one might have imagined. Thus, her relevance today, with the enthusiastic support of so many to a far less bright Donald Trump, who is even more blatant than she usually appeared in public media.

Peggy shows the part of TC that was visceral and aggressive in public toward people toward whom she was jealous or filled with hatred. Her central sincerity was that she showed these traits with people who had no reason to suspect that they deserved such behavior, nor were they of such significance as to raise TC’s hackles. Despite Peggy having often been a victim of TC’s worst traits, somehow, she defends TC no matter what. Though the relationship between TC and Peggy becomes more equitable in Parts II and III, it still is necessary to show TC’s behavior toward Peggy, who had no power over her.

Questioning Peggy’s reliability

Still, I must treat a second topic: Peggy is so self-deceptive. Since she is often unaware of what is happening around her, how can I justify that she offers a unique view into this powerful, mean Taylor Caldwell character? Poor Peggy, overwhelmed, decidedly not a strong personality, and, like me when I was young, without a serious, dependable adult character in her life.

I strive to justify this based on Peggy’s need to have TC be meaningful – not blindly but in some sense of reality – all the while retaining skepticism in various categories of TC’s words and actions from the beginning.

Of the 281 pages – from 900+ that constituted Peggy’s autobiography – Part I constitutes a meaningful third. Part II to page 642 is a slightly more substantial further third on Peggy’s adult involvement with TC during TC’s entire fame and insistent, conspiracy-driven conservatism. Part I is a prelude to the much more TC-as-a-star Part II. Then, in Part III, Peggy battles with TC’s last husband, Robert Prestie. She didn’t have a prayer.

She faces forces beyond whatever powers she ever had. It amounts to a list of faithfully word-for-word-copied depositions, righteous assertions, and, eventually, a wing-and-a-prayer view of the meaningfulness of her life. I don’t dismiss it. Yet, I do not attempt to include it all in the final product.

What legacy could we regard Peggy as having left? A cursory reading of her autobiography – including dividing it into chapters, giving those titles and abstracts to indicate its events and its impact on me – had me wondering what I had missed because, toward her children, she showed no energy. What came clear was that it was not so much an autobiography as it was an observer-generated biography of her mother, the fabulously famous – in her day, my high school years – author Taylor Caldwell.

Peggy’s only visible legacy has to be her autobiography, even if it has yet to be published or had a modicum of its chapters seen, except haphazardly by the ~100 souls who received my 18 months of (50) newsletters. That was aimed at those who had read many of TC’s 40+ novels. Those who were still curious about Taylor Caldwell and one of her daughters. For me, it was a chance to research TC and her influence.

Here are anecdotes of my prior experience on the topic from the decade of the early 60s to the early 70s, the time TC had her greatest presence to the American Public.

How Famous was Taylor Caldwell?

I intend the anecdotes below to give a flavor of just how famous was TC in the period from the early ‘50s through the early ‘80s. There is, of course, no surer test of fame than notoriety. Peggy’s writing covers that territory sufficiently. She can’t document the public adoration of TC because Peggy – without giving the reader much of a hint about this – doesn’t go out into the public.

So, these are four examples of me going out into the public. Let me, however, guarantee in the first three stories, I have yet to find out how the three women who respond to my being Taylor Caldwell’s grandson knew, for I surely wouldn’t/couldn’t have told them. In the 4th, the woman doesn’t know I’m TC’s grandson, at first.

I. Summer 1961, and Marlice Korber from the far end of the block on which resides 67 Hendricks (the home of Gerry and Peggy):

After finishing at Michigan State University at the end of my 2nd year, during this Summer, I worked at Allied Research Associates in Boston. This was under the guidance of Ted Goodman, my Aunt Judy’s 2nd husband. He figures prominently in Part III Chap. 16: The Death of Judy.

He was an aeronautical engineer. My degree was in electrical engineering. I lived in Brookline and went to work on the M(assachusetts) T(ransit) A(uthority) subway system, known to many from a famous Kingston Trio song of the time.

There were stresses. I was younger than others working at this aerospace company and more telling, everyone else among the younger people went to school at Harvard, MIT or Brandeis.⁴ Midwest universities would have had no cachet with them, and they showed it. Still, there was a great positive: I made $800 a month, a considerable sum for someone my age in 1961, and more than you might guess without an inflation calculator to assess that from so long ago. My first expense, outside food and rent, was driving lessons.

Near the end of summer before Labor Day, I paid $125 for a car: a humped-back, green, dependable 1951 Chevy. On the Friday I completed my lessons and passed the Massachusetts – written and driving – test, I took off for Buffalo. This was 467 miles away through the Massachusetts Turnpike and then the NY portion of Interstate 90, still under construction once you got past Buffalo.

It took most of the night to make that trip, my first trip going over a few city blocks, arriving at 67 Hendricks early Saturday morning. Gerry let me in, and I slept until the early afternoon.

My goal was to find Kent Korber, who played golf with me on the Amherst High School team, for a round of golf. When, however, I got to his house, it was not Kent, but a budding 15-year-old Marlice – previously just his little excitable sister – but now an exciting young lady.

Mike, she greeted me, Kent’s not here. But let’s go visit your grandmother. It was amazing looking at her. So I was fishing for some way to make the unlikelihood that Taylor Caldwell would let me bring Marlice into her house sound like an attempt to make it happen.

I asked what she knew about my grandmother, and she mentioned paperbacks she had gotten from a local drugstore. I didn’t know it then, but during that visit, I found that any drugstore in Buffalo had at least one – I mean, serious, whole magazine-type – rack dedicated just to Taylor Caldwell novels. The only bookstores I knew about were on College campuses, like the Harvard Coop at Coolidge Corner in Brookline. Most people, however, then bought books at drugstores.

So, off in my 1951 green Chevy went Marlice and I to my grandmother’s house. Indeed, although I knew its approximate location, at Audley End, it was still an adventure since driving anywhere was so new to me; it must have taken half an hour to make the no-more-than eight-minute trip, with the last 10 minutes the result of a lassitude based on my having no plan for what to do when we arrived.

The housekeeper/secretary, however, recognized me by name. Here is an embarrassment, for I do not know her name. She was American, a comely woman, likely young, but not to me at the time. I cannot identify her with anyone mentioned in Peggy’s autobiography. Probably, that meant she was there only a short time. Yet, she knew who I was. She asked why I had come. I nodded at Marlice, who was beaming, and ventured, Marlice is a Taylor Caldwell fan, the sister of a friend of mine, and ...

The housekeeper sized the situation up, suggested I show Marlice around the living room and library, an area I had seen before, and let us in, saying: I will tell your grandmother you are here. She will be getting up soon. That was well into that Spring afternoon.

So, I, a tour guide with no planned agenda or script, told Marlice the house was new to me, too. We noted a painting of TC – in the style of a Sargent from the early part of the century – and then the reference books and large globe in the library. Not long after, I could hear the klaxon voice of TC, though not her words.⁵

Then, that voice approached the top of the stairwell, in the foyer, from which there issued: Michael, I forgot to give you your birthday check. A slowly circling check floated from the top of the stairwell to where I could easily reach before it hit the landing.

That 25-dollar check was the only gift that I personally ever got from Taylor Caldwell.

Did I cash it? You bet, but with Gerry, who said he would take it to the bank. In return, he gave me $25. Marlice and I went to Baidel’s, a well-known Amherst High hangout at the corner of Main and Eggert, for banana splits.

II. Spring 1971, Betty Bromberg, cousin of James Simons Chair of the Stony Brook, Long Island, Math. Dept:

James Simons was the chair of the first department of Mathematics to which I belonged, State University of Stony Brook on Long Island.

I’ll tell you about Simons. He and I were not friends, though he was a rare chair who advertised well to the people in his department, even me. He was also not friends with James Ax, who brought me to Stony Brook, but they were long-time associates. Ax, who had recently won one of mathematics’s big prizes, chose to take me for a position granted him at Stony Brook. I mistakenly agreed to that instead of taking an offer of tenure to the University of Chicago. Officially, I was at Stony Brook for eight years but left after four.

In January 2009, the US Senate put five CEOs of monstrous Hedge Funds through a gauntlet. On TV, Simons was the character who did most of the talking.⁶ The money Simons has made puts TC’s terribly fought over royalties in perspective. He was a game player who manipulated far beyond anything TC had done.

There was a party at Simons’ house, and I attended, but without my wife from whom I was on the cusp of separation – if we were ever really together. I was talking to a graduate student in the living room. Barbara Simons came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. Have you met my cousin Betty? You’ll want to.

She pointed to where her cousin sat in the dining room, surrounded by many males in attendance, making her difficult to see. Go ahead, talk to her, continued Barbara. A little later, I did so. It was clear what the buzz was about once I was close enough.

How hard was it for me to talk to Betty with all those guys around her? Answer: Not at all. She saw me on her own, cleared away a space, beckoned with her eyes, and sat me in front of a pile of three books: all thick TC paperbacks she had carried with her on the Long Island Railroad.

Yes, this was a setup, but why? After talking to her, it was clear the point was for her to meet someone who wouldn’t be intimidated by her confident presence. Young women like her had troubles most women would die for.

III. Spring 1972, Clarissa, the personal secretary of Pearl Buck, Centerreach, Long Island:

A phone call from Clarissa, one early morning while I was in the 2nd marriage to my first wife, to our home in Centerreach, LI. She says she has heard about me – from where? – and would like to meet and talk. She had been Pearl Buck’s secretary and wanted to compare notes on Taylor Caldwell versus Pearl Buck. What did they have in common? Did they drive people mad, like she, Clarissa was driven mad?

I’m an unusual personality, and I’m sure that you are, too. Still, neither of us is as unusual as was Clarissa. That, at first, must have been what encouraged Pearl Buck to take her as a secretary. When I met her, Clarissa said, I’m fat, grey and fifty-two. She left out the piercing grey eyes and the lingering from when she was younger of a spectacular presence.

Clarissa continued: Everyone says, ‘That’s alright, Clarissa,’" to which Clarissa said she gave this response: ‘Sure, it’s alright when I’m fat, grey and fifty-two, but when you’re fat, grey and fifty-two, you’ll be the scurvy of the world, the crud, the scorn of everyone’s eye.’

Clarissa sometimes said, ‘You can’t talk now; I say everything because I feel like I know everything: everything! But I’m getting tired, and I’ll be completely silent in a few days.’

This all felt manic-depressive. It was a hardship on her two sad-eyed children, who went everywhere with her even though they were young adults. Clarissa said she started yelling (in a hoarse, deep voice) about three years before I met her. At the end of her tenure with Pearl Buck, she discovered what a monster that woman was – related to the ‘orphanage’ she ran. She scared most women (and some men) and regarded the yelling as just barely substituting for violence.

People with power, women with power, Pearl Buck and Taylor Caldwell with their power apparently do drive people mad, on purpose, but why?

IV. A coterie around a special guest in Little Neck, Long Island:

Peggy retells this second-hand on p. 787 of Chapter 17 of her autobiography. Judy invited my 1st wife (Dorothy) and me to her apartment in Little Neck, where – as Judy always said – Madam and others would be present.

Peggy presents TC as hating to be around women on her voyages, but here, she is surrounded by a coterie, women attending to her presence. She wasn’t interested in me, had shown that repeatedly, and this was many years after the last time I had seen her. I went directly to the hors d’oeuvres table, facing away from her position on the couch, and slowly put some items on a plate.

Sufficiently slowly, I could feel her eyes drilling into my back.

Upon eating one bite into a deviled egg, I swirled around and faced TC, who immediately crooked her finger at me, uttering these immortal words: Young man, you are quite attractive. Your mustache reminds me of that of my first husband.

My natural response: Ah, that makes all the sense in the world [long pause] Grandma! She was startled and exclaimed just one word, Michael?

That was the end of the conversation between TC and myself and the last words of exchange we ever had. The amazed person was me: I was astounded that she knew my name.

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4 Lest you think I hold a distaste on this basis, here are two of my connections to these schools. 1. I turned down a post-doctoral at Harvard (the Benjamin Pierce Fellowship) and instead went for two years to the Institute for Advanced Study. Noted place in modern events: That was where Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein were. I’d already met the arrogance of Harvard professors at Summer Institutes as a graduate student, and the Institute was the better institution. 2. I held a famous math fellowship, The Sloan Foundation Grant, early in my professor career, and I spent a semester each on it at four institutions. One was MIT.

5 TC admitted whenever, with no prompting, she hated her boy grandchildren. What was clear, despite her concupiscence (as it applied to adult men), was that she hated all little boys. I surmised she was responding to what little boys thought of her when she was young.

6 Here is a quote from a NY Times article by Louise Story, March 25, 2009: "As major markets and economies careened downward last year, 25 top managers reaped a total of $11.6 billion in pay by trading above the pain in the markets, according to an annual ranking of top hedge fund earners by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, which comes out Wednesday.

James H. Simons, a former math professor who has made billions year after year for the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, earned $2.5 billion running computer-driven trading strategies."

There have been at least three biographies of Simons: Flash Boys by Michael Lewis on the world of high-frequency trading. The author of The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, by Greg Zuckerman, interviewed me on the phone about Simons three times in 2018. Simons is a Democrat, but Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca were surely a force major in the election of Trump. Of this father-daughter pair, TC would surely have approved.

But Really! How Famous was TC?

Before my newsletter and reading Peggy’s autobiography carefully, I knew almost nothing about TC except a little from what I read from her novels.

On the John Birch Society website, TC is one of the seven faces (with substantial bios). These include Robert Welch, the eminence gris of the JBS, and Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch.

One newsletter attendant among those who received my newsletter was himself a contributor to the JBS newsletter. Despite my offering this URL, he wondered if she was there. TC was there, and she is still there to this day. ⁷

That reader turned out to be as impervious to information as you would expect of any adamant Trump supporter. There were several others of his ilk, but not all the newsletter readers were such. Some engaged me seriously, especially after I had extensively reviewed some of TC’s Mediterranean novels and had put two of Peggy’s early chapters into readable shape.

For example, some readers asked how I could be confident – given the abuse Peggy purported to have witnessed/received – that she wasn’t just disgruntled.

My answer was this: She was there, her reporting on TC’s presence and attitude matched mine, and she was asking TC to care about her, not to expose her to the world. True, Peggy had no more self-awareness than did TC. Yet, TC had moments of recognition with Peggy despite her propensity to mostly play life as a truth-devoid game.

As an author who finally got into print based on an acknowledged attribute, her stories came to fitting conclusions because she had the brains to take them to fitting conclusions. So, unlike many of today’s conservatives, she didn’t get lost in the thicket of her own lies.

Also, among these readers, some were curious about TC rather than worshipful. 40+ novels is something. I didn’t need to read them all: some were so distasteful to me, I couldn’t. Still, I needed to understand TC’s considerable range, the extent of her originality versus her preoccupations. Patricia Nolan Stein has been, throughout, especially helpful. She and her mother were interested in TC’s novels, but Patricia went through America’s machinations and found reason to see TC from a side that wasn’t so colored by adoration.

Peggy never acknowledged TC’s involvement with the John Birch Society nor realized that TC’s articles appeared in the Birch magazines. That completely went over her head, as did McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and all the 1950s and 1960s political events. Both Peggy and Gerry utterly lacked curiosity, though they professed to know just about everything.

That is, they were conservatives, though Gerry approached the world as if he could convince many he was everyone’s friend. Peggy’s autobiography doesn’t correctly express her inability to interact publicly.

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7 The periodicals was the John Birch Society journal, and a paeon from Robert Welch to TC on their website extols On Growing up Tough https://jbs.org/about-us/taylor-caldwell. Peggy’s ignorance of these times, the JBS, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, her mother’s shrill support of the extremist side within it is astounding.

TC’s Life in Perspective

TC has her own autobiography: a work titled, "Growing up Tough." Yet, like TC’s novels – for which she often claimed voluminous research – as devoid of even meager documentation, there is little reason to believe most of it. Those who put that JBS site together gave it high praise. Explicitly, they said, beyond other of TC’s conservatively driven novels.

This is strange from the view of someone (anyone, as I have found out) who has read a good portion of Peggy’s autobiography. For example, Chapter 2 shows that TC’s mother, Anne Caldwell, TC and Peggy formed three generations of abusing mothers. TC rose straight up out of the horrors of a poor, brutal Scotch family. Still, despite her assumption that she transcended her birth circumstances, she carried it with her and passed it to Peggy.

Peggy, though, was too weak to pass on the legacy except through neglect. Yet, Peggy blasted TC’s phrases from Chapter 2 at her children. I was too young to understand the meaning of I should have had an abortion whenever I disturbed Peggy’s depressive, alcoholic lethargy, but I never forgot it. That was a constant part of the household at 67 Hendricks Blvd., Peggy’s home for most of her life, and what Peggy’s children endured during their young years. But, Peggy got to know her mother outside of this home. It was her role in exchanges there by which her knowledge of TC transcends any others.

The accidents of life after death.

While we hardly ever discussed anything with our father, Gerald Fried, the Buffalo Evening News summary of his life – by my sister, Drina – presents him as normal and having fully lived. His Jewish funeral was packed, and expertly administered by cantor Susan Wehle, with heartfelt testimonials from all quarters that day. I’m still wrestling with that contrast with my mother’s demise.

Susan Wehle died in the crash of a small commercial airliner that had been improperly deiced. Her charisma led to her becoming the center of a cause célèbre on how airlines cut corners in the training and care of their pilots. Here, she directed a beautiful Jewish ceremony for my father that sudden August day when Karen (my 3rd wife) and I flew back from a trip to Alberta, Canada, to which we connected via Great Falls, MT. This setting must be contrasted with the inappropriate ceremony for my mother the following December. The Part III Afterword goes into detail on this contrast.

This volume’s title reflects what would have been my mother’s lifelong depression, excluding the period she finally got back into TC’s circle. She was most sincere in trying to understand her mother. She was happiest when she was included on many of TC’s several-month-long cruises aboard luxury ocean liners. When on these, she never took any shore excursions.

The Material from Peggy

The discombobulated original has been divided into 18 chapters and three parts: I, II, III. From 3/04/09 to 6/15/09, these were scanned and had abstracts and supporting HTML files appended to them. Later, the arduous process of turning these poorly typed scans into readable files produced something recognizable as a volume.

TC was a person who fabricated almost every aspect of her life. When she so deigned to address you, she delivered haughty pronouncements. Her words left you with few alternatives but to worship or dismiss her. Close to home, she got the former.

So, claim I, that makes Peggy’s autobiography a worthy document, not for its literary style nor its insightfulness but for Peggy’s unique place in TC’s life and her heartfelt quest to skeptically understand her mother and have her mother acknowledge her. Consider her the perfect member of a jury where the defendant is notorious but so out of the ken of ordinary people that only a dispassionate viewer can see through their obfuscation.

If TC weren’t so important to conservatism today – a case I make by saying she and Robert Welch defined its preoccupations – it could all be dismissed as a sad commentary on people who professed Jesus but were clueless about Him because their demands overrode any emulation of what He stood for.

Part II considers the nature of TC’s conservatism in more detail by relating it to her novels and what she thought her money