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(Janet) Taylor Caldwell (1900-1985) - wrote under the preudonyms Marcus Holland and Max Reiner - original name J. Miriam Reback |
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Anglo-American novelist, a prolific author of popular fiction, that reflected her conservative views. Among Taylor Caldwell's best-known works is Dynasty of Death (1938), an epic story about intrigues and alliances of two Pennsylvania families involved in the manufacture of armaments. Answer as a Man (1980), Caldwell's last major novel, told of a son of immigrants, who rises to success, but his dreams fall apart. "Childish raptures!" said Lucifer, with scorn, his eyes flashing like blue lightning. "Are we indeed whimpering and craven children, or slaves? Can we be content with toys and little deliciousnesses? Are we not mind, as well as emotion? And is not the mind, of both angel and man, the noblest of possessions, and worth exercising? It is in our minds that we approach the closest to Him, Who is all Mind. Mind is the creator of all philosophy, all order, all beauty, all satisfaction, but emotion is the lowliest of the virtues, if it is a virtue at all. Mind has in it the capacity to know all things, or, at least, the minds of angels." (Dialogues with the Devil by Taylor Caldwell, London: Collins, 1968, p. 216; first published in New York by Doubleday & Company, 1967) Taylor Caldwell was born Janet Miriam Taylor Holland Caldwell
in Manchester, England, into a family of
Scottish background. Her father was a commercial artist, who formerly
worked for the Manchester Guardian, before moving to Buffalo, New York, to take up a similar post. Anne, her mother, was a housewife. Caldwell's
family descended from the Clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a
subsidiary clan. Caldwell was brought to the Unites States with her
brother in 1907. She started to write stories at the age of eight. A
creative child, she was first encouraged by his parents, but in
her teens they began to believe that she couldn't make a career out of
her writing and took paper and pencils away from her. Caldwell never
completed high school, but she attended the University of Buffalo. In
1919 Caldwell married William Fairfax Combs, a Navy man. They divorced in 1931 and
Caldwell married Marcus Reback, an officer in the department of
Justice, Buffalo. Between the years 1918 and 1919 Caldwell served in the United States Naval Reserve. From 1923 to 1924 she was a Court Reporter in New York State department of Labor in Buffalo, and from 1924 to 1931 a member of the Board of Special Inquiry at the Department of Justice in Buffalo. With
her second husband Marcus Reback, who served as the
researcher, Caldwell co-wrote several bestsellers, the first of
which was Dynasty of Death. A deliberate marketing gimmic was that it was published under the name of Taylor Caldwell, not under the name of Janet Reback. The story begins from the year 1837 and focuses on the entangled relationships of two families, who control a huge munitions trust. Joseph Barbour is a servant, who becomes a successful businessman and arms manufacturer. His son Martin is not interested in money, he is an idealist and altruist. Ernest, the elder son, is an egoist and believes that money is the greatest power in the world. Ernest loves Amy Drumhill, the niece of Gregory Sessions, owner of a steel factory. However, she marries Martin, who establishes a hospital, and dies in the civil war. Ernest's hardness ruins Joseph, and he is cursed by his mother. Dynasty of Death attracted wide attention when it was revealed, that behind the male pseudonym was a woman. The story was continued in The Eagles Gather (1940) and The Final Hour (1944). As a writer Caldwell was praised of her intricately plotted and suspenseful stories, which depicted family tensions and the development of the US from agrarian society into leading industrial state of the world. Caldwell's heroes are self-made men of pronounced ethic background, such as the German immigrants in The Strong City (1942) and The Balance Wheel (1951). Her stories dealt with ethnic, religious and personal intolerance (The Wide House, 1945), the failure of parental discipline (Let Love Come Last, 1949). The conflict between the desire for power and money and the human values of love and sense of family, was present in works such as Melissa (1948), A Prologue to Love (1962) and Bright Flows the River (1978). In her later fiction Caldwell explored the American Dream and
wrote stories "from rag to riches" course of life, the most notable work in this field was Answer
as a Man. However, the economic success of American capitalism seemed to
her a Pyrrhic victory: "The whole country," Caldwell complained to a
friend, "has become soft, whiney, whimpering, demanding, cowering,
lip-licking, feeble – and stupid." (quoted in Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties
by W. J. Rorabaugh, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 5) Real historical events or persons are often potrayed in Caldwell's works. The historical novels include The Arm and Darkness, a fictionalized account of Cardinal Richelieu, Pillar of Iron (1965), fictional biography of Cicero, the Roman senator and and orator, The Earth is the Lord's (1941), a fictional biography of Ghengis Khan. "Beginning with Genghis Khan's birth and ending with his first great victory, the novel is lushly dramatic, more operartic than historically accurate but captures its setting and customs effectively with a wealth of details." (The Biography Book: A Reader's Guide to Nonfiction, Fictional, and Film Biographies of More than 500 of the Most Fascinating Individuas by Daniel S. Burt, Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2001, p. 159) Though Hollywood bought the rights to many of her novels, they were not made into feature films. The Conqueror (1956), in which John Wayne played Ghengis Khan, was based on Oscar Millard's screenplay, not on Caldwell's novel. Religious themes were prominent in several works. Answer
as a Man opens with the clamour of the bells of a little church, on the morning of November 11, 1900,and
ends with renewed faith. "Jason
raised his eyes and smiled. God is good. He moves mysteriously, as the
priests say, but he has his ways, he has his ways! . . . The bells rang
for early Mass, and Jason went into the church, reconciled, and looked
at the high altar and genuflected. Sanctus, Sanctus." (Ibid., p. 503) The
protagonist is Jason Garrity, whose energy drives him forward in life.
"I'm really blessed, thought Jason as he got in his car in the
converted stable and drove up the winding road to Ipswich House. A wife
like no other, remarkable children, and money." (Ibid., p. 239) Then the turning point comes. Caldwell deals also with politics and history. "Jason
restlessly turned the pages of the newspaper. Hell! though
Jason. What can I, as a single individual, do to prevent calamity?
Nothing. Taft is the safest man. He is not an imperialist, like
Roosevelt. Nor a social fanatic like Wilson. I'll vote for Taft." (Ibid., p. 352) Dear and Glorious Physician (1959)
was about St. Luke's search for God. "A portrait so moving and so
eloquent I doubt it is paralleled elsewhere in literature," said a
reviewer in The Boston Herald.
Lucanus, or Luke, the Great Apostle, declares: "Republics decay into
democracies, and democracies into dictatorship. That fact is immutable.
When there is eqality—and democracies always bring equality—the people
become faceless, they lose power and initiative, they lose pride and
indepencence, they lose their splendor." (Ibid., p. 407) Dialogues with the Devil (1967),
possibly inspired by C.S. Lewis' The
Screwtape Letters(1942),
was a study of good and evil. The fictional
correspondence between Lucifer and Michael mixed in the dialogue old
tales, a lost continent, and theological speculations, with the
finesses of a trombone blast. "Nothing is withheld; there is no
struggle; there are no heart-burnings, no room for ambition and
achievement," describes Luficer his democracy. "All is equal; all is
accessible to every soul." (Ibid., p. 39) Clearly a communist judging by the ideas. Caldwell was a registred Republican and an
outspoken conservative. "The American people, no matter their political party,
are basically conservative and love their country," she said in her
memoirs. "The
Liberal knows this better than anyone else. So he fills his press and
all the other means of communication with Liberal lies and treacheries
so that the average conservative American begins uneasily to wonder if
there is something wrong with him, if he is out of step with his fellow-Americans." (On
Growing Up Tough by Taylor Caldwell, Tom Stacey Limited, 1971, p. 27) Caldwell's books sold an estimated thirty
million copies. They were not intended for literary snobs nor leftist critics. Mostly she wrote at night, sometimes from 12 to 24 hours at a stretch. Before giving up cigarettes for good, she smoked three to four packs daily. Caldwell received several awards, among them the National League of American Pen Woman gold medal (1948), Buffalo Evening News Award (1949), and Grand Prix Chatvain (1950). For a time Caldwell was associated with the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. Alarmed by "communist-controlled penetration and subversion" of American government and institutions, she joined in 1961 a group of conservatives, that used a computer to gather and analyze information on "those who would seek to bring revolutionary change to America." Caldwell believed that nuclear war was a real possibility. Though she was first and foremost a writer, not a threat to the national security, the FBI maintained a file on her. In a letter Caldwell wrote to the FBI: "I am the only major best selling novelist in the United States who is not tainted by 'liberalism' and Communism, and who has never belonged to a communist front." ('Taylor Caldwell,' in Ladies for Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in American History by John Blundell, Algora Publishing, 2011, p. 149) During the 1960s and 1970s,
Caldwell contributed to the John Birch Society's
magazine, American Opinion, which attracted aging
conservatives and former McCarthyites and occasionally stirred up
conspiracy theories. Caldwell argued that the income tax is
unconstitutional and was created by international bankers to destroy
the dissidents, and that President Kennedy knew too much when he
spoke of "the Gnomes of Zurich" (Swiss bankers and financiers). Beginning from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the
years from 1966 to 1975 in the Unites States saw the
publiction of many novels which more or less directly touched on the
subject of conspiracy. It has been suggested that Joseph
Armagh, the protagonist of Caldwell's Captains and Kings:
The Story of an American Dynasty
(1972), was modelled after Joseph Kennedy. A good from rags to riches
story, it chronicles the life of a penniless Irish immigrant, who comes
to America in
the mid-1800's, and becomes a wealthy and powerful business leader. To
revenge all those who wronged him, he schemes to get his son elected
the first US Catholic president. In
the 1976 NBC miniseries of the novel Abraham Lincoln (played by Ford
Rainey) laments before his
assassination that the warring North and South should not fear each
other but "the financial institution at their backs." (Abraham Lincoln on Screen: Fictional and
Documentary Portrayals on Film and Television by Mark S.
Reinhart, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009, p. 63) The Devil's Advocate (1952), Caldwell's first science fiction novel, was set in the America of the 1970s, where liberal democracy has turned into a Communist style police state. Actually the work, which had much in common with Ayn Rand's thought, was an apology for McCarthyism. Caldwell equated reds and liberals. "I'm perfectly willing to forgive the bastads," she stated in a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., an very influential member of the Birch Society, "after I've planted a good firecracker in their careers or rectums." (Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, p. 43) The Listener (1960) and its sequel No One Hears but Him (1966) were Christian fantasies about a sanctuary, where people tell about their problems to the Man Who Listens. Jess Stearn, a journalist and paranormal writer, published in 1974 a book on Caldwell's past lives. ". . . it was easy to see why she was so familiar with Paul and Luke. She had several lives in the early Christian era. She was a dancing girl in the Emperor Domitian's court in Rome, and was converted by the disciple of John, John of Patmos, who lived to a venerable age." (The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell's Psychic Lives by Jess Stearn, Greenwich, Connecticut: A Fawcett Crest Book, 174, p. 139) Caldwell herself did not believe in reincarnation. With Stearn she collaborated in The Romance of Atlantis (1975), based on a novel she first wrote when aged 12, and I, Judas (1977). Caldwell had one daughter, named Judith, with Marcus Reback; he died in 1970. A few years earlier a burglar had
broken into their home and fatally wounded him. The attacker had also
pistol-whipped her; she was left deaf.
Judith committed suicide in 1979 after a long battle over her father's
will. In 1972 Caldwell married William Everett Stancell, a retired real
estate
developer, whom she had met on a cruise. They settled in Ponte Vedra,
Florida, and divorced
next year, but Caldwell remained in the seaside community until 1974.
Her fourth husband was William Robert Prestie, a 60-year-old Canadian
and a former
Trappist monk; they married in 1978. “Nobody ever helped me. Nobody ever gave me anything. Nobody ever left me anything. Everything I have, I earned myself," Cadlwell said in an interview in 1976. ('Taylor Caldwell, Controversial but Popular Novelist, Dies' by Ted Thackrey Jr., Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1985) Despite a stroke left unable to speak, Caldwell continued writing. He major longterm project was a book on Mary of Magdala. At the age of 80, she finished her 35th novel, and signed a two-book contract for $3,9 million. Taylor Caldwell died of pulmonary failure caused by advanced lung cancer in Greenwich, Connecticut, on August 30, 1985.
Selected works:
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