Taylor Caldwell, MIA
Once a best-selling author, she’s been silenced by the grave
If email had existed in the 1940s, Ayn Rand and Taylor Caldwell might have been friends. Both born at the turn of the century in different countries — Ms. Rand in Russia, Ms. Caldwell in England — they became celebrated American novelists who told stories to advance conservative ideals and extol the primacy of the individual.
Both began to write as children and published their first novels in the 1930s. Both wrote industriously until they died — both suffering from lung cancer and heart failure — in the 1980s.
While Ms. Rand published just 10 books in her lifetime, her legacy endures and expands. Ms. Caldwell wrote more than 30 novels (many set in Pennsylvania), but her influence dwindles. The Taylor Caldwell Appreciation Society, a cached Web page says, is defunct. The domain name taylorcaldwell.com is offered for sale by a domain squatter. Ms. Caldwell’s books, which just four decades ago topped The New York Times bestseller list before publication, populate the shelves of thrift stores and sell for pennies on Amazon — proof that a thing’s cost has nothing to do with its worth.
The near-collapse of Ms. Caldwell’s empire is a failure of her descendants and her fans, to the detriment of anyone who enjoys a well-plotted novel that teaches and inspires. Even concealed within florid, yellowing covers, her work mocks the publishing machines that spew froth today, the Janet Evanovichs and the Nicholas Sparkses, as well as their readers.
Ms. Caldwell took three to four years to write a novel. (Ms. Evanovich seems to release one every year.) Thirtythree of Ms. Caldwell’s sold enough to be considered best-sellers. In those, and a rollicking memoir, she defended a worldview so conservative that she was embraced by the John Birch Society, the group William F. Buckley Jr. denounced as overly radical. But Ms. Caldwell refused to crouch in an ideological box; she advocated love over duty, scorned mommy culture and, at least later in life, supported abortion rights.
Mark W. Hendrickson, a professor at Grove City College, recommends Ms. Caldwell as one of three female writers every student of economics should read. (The others are Ms. Rand and Rose Wilder Lane.) Ms. Caldwell, he says, had a better command of history than the others, and a broader vocabulary. She wrote historical novels about the apostles Luke and Paul, about Genghis Khan and Cicero. But her gift was inventing her own heroes, many of them rugged immigrants who disdain the vain, prattling culture and endure, not despite hardship, but because of it. It was the theme of her own life.
In her memoir, “On Growing Up Tough,” Ms. Caldwell details a childhood bereft of both love and leisure, a life in which she became a conservative by observing the hypocrisies of the liberal. At 16, she owned two dresses and one pair of shoes and worked 12 hours a day in a factory. At lunchtime, she had to decide whether to spend her allotted 15 cents on either a sandwich or car fare home. (If she ate, it was an 8-mile walk home.)
She decried “The Dolt” who thinks the world owes him a living and whose favorite expression is “I gotta rightta …” and “Big Mama,” worse than Big Brother because she carries the “stupefying and poisoned syrup” of tender, loving care. Big Mama, Ms. Caldwell said, “is infinitely more dangerous to the national character, infinitely more demoralizing.”
“No one, of course, is convinced that our society is in need of protection from our terrible offspring, the result of our secular, ‘loving’ education and the sick pampering they receive in our homes,” she declared.
Ironically, the chief longing of the woman who wrote these words was to be a housewife. “She said that all the time,” confirmed Drina Fried, Ms. Caldwell’s granddaughter, a visual artist and retired educational psychologist on the West Coast.
Finances demanded otherwise and, for much of Ms. Caldwell’s life, she worked day jobs and wrote all night, crafting intricately plotted stories of powerful and connected families in Western Pennsylvania (“Dynasty of Death,” her first novel, was rumored to be based on the Kennedys of Massachusetts, with whom she was conversant) and individuals striving to overcome injustice (“Answer as a Man,” her last published novel, was set in the “dull little town” of Belleville, Pa., because the protagonist’s grandfather ran out of money before he could get to Pittsburgh, the promised land).
Something else separates Ms. Caldwell’s work from that of Ms. Rand’s: her grudging, often furious, belief in God. Ms. Rand was an atheist; Ms. Caldwell, a believer, although she seemed to never forgive God her difficult childhood or the violent assault that left her deaf and her second husband fatally wounded. In 1978, she told writer George F. Smith that her suffering inclined her to atheism, but she had not abandoned Catholicism because “all roads lead to Rome.” It was another way of expressing the words Peter said to Jesus, “To whom, Lord, shall we go?”
Ms. Caldwell died in 1985 and over the past 30 years just one more work has been issued by her family, a novella, “Unto All Men,” released on Kindle. But her granddaughter, Ms. Fried, seeks a resurrection. She and her siblings are working to ensure that all of Ms. Caldwell’s novels are available as e-books (only a handful are now), turn some into screenplays and create a new generation of fans.
There would have to be independent funding, as Ms. Caldwell’s work would be as welcome in Hollywood as that of Ms. Rand, which is to say, it would not be. Her social philosophy was best summarized in terse advise from her beloved grandmother: “Niver trust anyone who weeps for the poor, unless they’re damned poor themselves.”
Them’s fighting words, and hers is a radical and contradictory ideology, but one that, even in the grave, Ms. Caldwell is sufficient to defend.