An unappreciated Fortean.
Janet Miriam Taylor Holland Caldwell was born 7 September 1900 in Manchester England. She seems to have been a natural-born story-teller: at age 6, she won an award for an essay on Charles Dickens; at 8, she wrote her first story; at 12, she finished her first novel—on Atlantis, which already points to her interest in the paranormal and occult. Her father, Arthur, was an artist for the Manchester Guardian when she was born, and, in 1907, moved the family (mother, Anne; Janet; and brother Arthur Jr.) to Buffalo, NY, for another newspaper job. The family was never well-off—Caldwell blamed her parents’s lack of ambition—and they struggled, much to Caldwell’s chagrin. Caldwell would later remember that she didn't have a childhood, or an adolescence: all was work. But she did have a dream. She met Mark Twain when he was visiting Buffalo, and told him she was a writer, too. He said that one day she would be famous.
Janet Miriam Taylor Holland Caldwell was born 7 September 1900 in Manchester England. She seems to have been a natural-born story-teller: at age 6, she won an award for an essay on Charles Dickens; at 8, she wrote her first story; at 12, she finished her first novel—on Atlantis, which already points to her interest in the paranormal and occult. Her father, Arthur, was an artist for the Manchester Guardian when she was born, and, in 1907, moved the family (mother, Anne; Janet; and brother Arthur Jr.) to Buffalo, NY, for another newspaper job. The family was never well-off—Caldwell blamed her parents’s lack of ambition—and they struggled, much to Caldwell’s chagrin. Caldwell would later remember that she didn't have a childhood, or an adolescence: all was work. But she did have a dream. She met Mark Twain when he was visiting Buffalo, and told him she was a writer, too. He said that one day she would be famous.
Census records and city directories have the elder Caldwells moving to Massachusetts some time between 1915 and 1918. Caldwell remembers that she started working at a factory when she was fifteen—which would have been sometime in 1915 or 1916—and taking night classes to become a stenographer. As she remembered, she would leave the house at 6 in the morning and return at 10 pm, having eaten only one meal. If Janet had moved with her parents to Massachusetts, she was soon enough back in Buffalo. Married at age 18 to William Combs, after she went into war work in D.C., the 1925 New York State Census has them living there. They had one daughter. The marriage lasted until 1931. By that point, Caldwell had graduated from the University of Buffalo and gone to work with the immigration service, where she met her next husband.
Caldwell would later recall that she always wanted to be married—she liked the idea of having a man around to care for her, even if she was making her own way in the world. So it’s not a surprise that she married again in 1931. Indeed, she would marry four times. Her second marriage, to Marcus Reback, would be the longest, lasting until his death in 1970. He was an official with the immigration service. Finally settled enough, financially, and with enough time, Caldwell resumed her writing career. She published Dynasty of Death, in 1938, a saga about a family in the munitions business.
The book was published under the pseudonym Taylor Caldwell—the publisher had suggested the name. It was an immediate hit, followed by a long list of bestsellers—she produced 41 novels. Caldwell was a publishing machine, turning out doorstops of a novel every year, all filled to bursting with melodrama Eventually, her work pattern came to be formalized: she would wake up and start writing in the early evening, continuing on until 8 in the morning or so, turning out maybe twenty pages each night, with no revision. Critics mostly dismissed her work, but she was widely read during the middle of the twentieth century, her last best seller coming out in 1981. In time, she even had her novel on Atlantis published. According to her, her grandfather—then a publisher in Philadelphia—had seen it when she was 13 and was scared by its maturity and foresight, and had tried to suppress. But she kept it, despite his suggestion to destroy it. Romance of Atlantis came out in 1975.
Caldwell preferred four-word titles—she thought them lucky. Which was yet another indication of her interest in the paranormal and occult. She had a varied religious background, joining five different churches through her life, from Methodism to Catholicism, and eventually came to know the Bible well, although she claimed that much of her knowledge of the Good Book came later in life. And, if the biography by Jess Stearn—In Search of Taylor Caldwell—is any indication, she never had a conventional understanding of Christianity, but saw it refracted through American New Thought and esoteric traditions, viewing the Bible as a mystical portal—not really a guide—and a brief for faith in general. Many Forteans were drawn to this tradition of metaphysical thought. Certainly she had, related interests—in ESP and spiritualism (her dead father foretold her authorial success) and a foreboding that the apocalypse was imminent.
Especially important to Caldwell—at least in her later years—was a fascination with reincarnation and past lives. Her editor, Lee Barker, published The Search for Bridey Murphy in 1952, which—as we have seen with R. DeWitt Miller—piqued the nation’s interest in reincarnation. (The title of Stearn’s biography is a deliberate evocation of this earlier book.) By that point Caldwell had been writing professionally for 14 years, publishing Dynasty of Death (1938); The Eagles Gather (1940) (a sequel to her first novel); The Earth is the Lord's: A Tale of the Rise of Genghis Khan (1940); Time No Longer (1941) (about Hitler’s rise; originally under the pseudonym Max Reiner); The Strong City (1942) (about a steel worker going from rags to riches); The Arm and the Darkness (1943) (about Cardinal Richelieu); The Turnbulls (1943) (a Victorian ne’er-do-well makes good); The Final Hour (1944) (another sequel to her first novel); The Wide House (1945) (antisemitism in New York); This Side of Innocence (1946) (a family saga); There Was A Time (1947) (a love triangle); Melissa (1948) (rich nineteenth-century loves); Let Love Come Last (1949) (tragedies of parenthood); The Balance Wheel (1951) (industrialization and World War I); The Devil's Advocate (1952) (travails of a constitutional patriot). And it may be that Bridey Murphy also piqued Caldwell’s interest; it might also be that she came to consider past lives later. According to Stearn, she was reading his works on reincarnation int he late 1960s, but was not convinced.
Caldwell would remain skeptical of past lives and reincarnation, even as she explored them and found them useful in explaining herself. At times she claimed to do extensive research on her books; at other times, hardly any at all. And yet, outsiders—she insisted—always praised their verisimilitude. French readers could hardly believe she had not been to Paris before writing The Arm and the Darkness. And, she said, she had heard she got the little, intimate details spot on in her other historical works. The evidence for this precision—besides her own claims—I have not seen. But once she started working with Stearn, there came the thought that she had lived many past lives—even if, like R. DeWitt Miller, Stearn was dissatisfied with a simple notion of reincarnation. Under hypnosis, she regressed, as the saying goes, and experienced herself at these other times, in these other places. She was almost always close to the action but not the center—Mary Magdalene’s mother, not Mary Magdalene herself—which allowed her to see with a particularly acute eye.
This may be so much folderol, but there’s a sense in which it connects her to some other authors beloved by Forteans, who would not otherwise seem related. I’m thinking in particular of the weird writers H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Both disciplined their imagination in certain ways to conceive of worlds that might otherwise be impossible to conceive. The poet Philip Lamantia compared Smith’s alien environments to the Islamic notion of a Mundus imaginalis—a purely fictive world that operated according to its own principles, neither sacred nor profane but an issue of the mind. Caldwell, too, seemed to have a sense of her imagination as an alien world—a place that she visited, a place of its own being that she mapped and described.
Much out of line with many other Forteans, though, was Caldwell’s politics. She was a conservative and her 1957 autobiography On Growing Up Tough gave her a chance to vent spleen at liberals. She was, she said, fine letting one live and let live, but liberals were always meddling in other people’s affairs and so had to be stopped. The same year, she publicly worried that America was on the brink of collapse. She prophesied JFK’s assassination and thought LBJ would suffer a similar fate (a prognostication that got her looked at by the FBI). Like other Forteans, she worried about the bureaucratic state and distrusted modern medicine, but her proposed answers to social problems had her stamping on progressives and pining for an authoritative government. Stearn’s book has her yipping at women’s libbers and thinking women should be at the home having babies. She stumped for America entering World War II, joined the Liberty Lobby, and found allies in the John Birch Society. She founded New York State’s conservative party, and denounced liberalism throughout the rest of her life, her later books taking on more and more political ideas.
Caldwell suffered a stroke in May 1980, that left her paralyzed and speechless. She die dog pulmonary failure in 1985—aged 84. At the time, she was debilitated by lung cancer.
Caldwell’s dance with the Fortean Society lasted only two steps—which is not to say that she disliked Fort. Rather, the Society—more precisely, Tiffany Thayer—came to dislike her. Combined with the amount of energy that she spent on her writing, it is no wonder that she was associated with the Society for only three years, her name only appearing in two issues: one to announce her joining, the other to denounce her.
Caldwell joined the Fortean Society in 1945, motivated by Holt reprinting The Books of Charles Fort. She wrote an effusive letter to Thayer and he—of course—encouraged her to join, which she did “eagerly.” That there was overlap in the metaphysical interests of Caldwell and some Forteans is suggested by the fact that “in almost the same mail MFS Mary Winthrop Bonavia sent us (as Forteana) a ten-page quotation from Taylor Caldwell’s current best-seller, The Wide House. I am not sure what the quote was, nor what Bonavia made of it: she was a notoriously wide-ranging Fortean, catholic in what she considered falling under the label. The point is, Caldwell was simpatico with some other active Forteans, at least on some matters.
Caldwell’s letter offers some insight into what she got from Fort:
“I am not exaggerating when I say that I was more than just casually delighted to now that these books are again available, and I cannot wait until I can once more have the joy, instruction and pleasure of rereading them.
I first read Mr. Fort’s books many years ago. Since then, I have read literally thousands of others. Yet, none have remained so powerfully in my memory. None have so filled me with wonder, speculation and excitement.
I have quoted parts of these books to numerous friends. I know they will be equally delighted to hear that they can now read them for themselves. So, it gives me really enormous pleasure to spread the news.
I am firmly convinced of this: that those who have missed Mr. Fort’s books are the poorer for it, live much more meager lives, and have never experienced that profound speculation that comes to one who is informed of things ‘beyond coincidence.’”
For me, at least, three points stand out. First, Fort would have played into Caldwell’s sense of herself as an iconoclast—one who saw the world obliquely, but clearly, unlike so many of the masses. Second, the sense of wonder seems to have fed into her own metaphysical inclinations—which, again, unites her with writers such as Lovecraft and Caldwell, although she would otherwise seem to be more in the mold of Ayn Rand. Third, she seems impressed by Fort’s presentation—his style—which impressed a number of other writers, too. As Miriam Allen deFord said, he shot for the scientists but hit the literary world instead.
All of that was in Doubt 13, published in the winter of 1945; she next made the pages—and last made the pages—in Doubt 23, published in the winter of 1948. Thayer had been getting flack from British Forteans—especially Eric Frank Russell—over Ben Hecht, a founder roof the Society who made impolitic remarks about the Palestinian situation. Russell wanted Hecht kicked out, but Thayer was reluctant to do so: the Fortean Society was supposed to be home to all sorts of orphans. It was supposed to have no dogma. He finally buckled by denouncing Hecht—but leaving him in the Society. He then appended a smaller article, titled “More Renunciations”:
“Because of their public acts subsequent to being honored by the Fortean Society, we take this means of disavowing Fortean support for the published opinions of--
“Ben Hecht
“James Burnham
“Norman Thomas
“Taylor Caldwell.”
Thayer doe snot enumerate Caldwell’s sins, but it is safe to assume there was a political clash. Her two novels published in the intervening period should not have set Thayer off. I haven’t found any political statements by her prior to the mid-1950s, but likely there were some. And given her preference for a robust American foreign policy, she would have said something Thayer did not like.
So, Caldwell was a Fortean: she was interested in Fort, read him, and enthusiastically discussed him. But she did not fit into the Fortean Society, and soon enough passed away from it.
Caldwell would later recall that she always wanted to be married—she liked the idea of having a man around to care for her, even if she was making her own way in the world. So it’s not a surprise that she married again in 1931. Indeed, she would marry four times. Her second marriage, to Marcus Reback, would be the longest, lasting until his death in 1970. He was an official with the immigration service. Finally settled enough, financially, and with enough time, Caldwell resumed her writing career. She published Dynasty of Death, in 1938, a saga about a family in the munitions business.
The book was published under the pseudonym Taylor Caldwell—the publisher had suggested the name. It was an immediate hit, followed by a long list of bestsellers—she produced 41 novels. Caldwell was a publishing machine, turning out doorstops of a novel every year, all filled to bursting with melodrama Eventually, her work pattern came to be formalized: she would wake up and start writing in the early evening, continuing on until 8 in the morning or so, turning out maybe twenty pages each night, with no revision. Critics mostly dismissed her work, but she was widely read during the middle of the twentieth century, her last best seller coming out in 1981. In time, she even had her novel on Atlantis published. According to her, her grandfather—then a publisher in Philadelphia—had seen it when she was 13 and was scared by its maturity and foresight, and had tried to suppress. But she kept it, despite his suggestion to destroy it. Romance of Atlantis came out in 1975.
Caldwell preferred four-word titles—she thought them lucky. Which was yet another indication of her interest in the paranormal and occult. She had a varied religious background, joining five different churches through her life, from Methodism to Catholicism, and eventually came to know the Bible well, although she claimed that much of her knowledge of the Good Book came later in life. And, if the biography by Jess Stearn—In Search of Taylor Caldwell—is any indication, she never had a conventional understanding of Christianity, but saw it refracted through American New Thought and esoteric traditions, viewing the Bible as a mystical portal—not really a guide—and a brief for faith in general. Many Forteans were drawn to this tradition of metaphysical thought. Certainly she had, related interests—in ESP and spiritualism (her dead father foretold her authorial success) and a foreboding that the apocalypse was imminent.
Especially important to Caldwell—at least in her later years—was a fascination with reincarnation and past lives. Her editor, Lee Barker, published The Search for Bridey Murphy in 1952, which—as we have seen with R. DeWitt Miller—piqued the nation’s interest in reincarnation. (The title of Stearn’s biography is a deliberate evocation of this earlier book.) By that point Caldwell had been writing professionally for 14 years, publishing Dynasty of Death (1938); The Eagles Gather (1940) (a sequel to her first novel); The Earth is the Lord's: A Tale of the Rise of Genghis Khan (1940); Time No Longer (1941) (about Hitler’s rise; originally under the pseudonym Max Reiner); The Strong City (1942) (about a steel worker going from rags to riches); The Arm and the Darkness (1943) (about Cardinal Richelieu); The Turnbulls (1943) (a Victorian ne’er-do-well makes good); The Final Hour (1944) (another sequel to her first novel); The Wide House (1945) (antisemitism in New York); This Side of Innocence (1946) (a family saga); There Was A Time (1947) (a love triangle); Melissa (1948) (rich nineteenth-century loves); Let Love Come Last (1949) (tragedies of parenthood); The Balance Wheel (1951) (industrialization and World War I); The Devil's Advocate (1952) (travails of a constitutional patriot). And it may be that Bridey Murphy also piqued Caldwell’s interest; it might also be that she came to consider past lives later. According to Stearn, she was reading his works on reincarnation int he late 1960s, but was not convinced.
Caldwell would remain skeptical of past lives and reincarnation, even as she explored them and found them useful in explaining herself. At times she claimed to do extensive research on her books; at other times, hardly any at all. And yet, outsiders—she insisted—always praised their verisimilitude. French readers could hardly believe she had not been to Paris before writing The Arm and the Darkness. And, she said, she had heard she got the little, intimate details spot on in her other historical works. The evidence for this precision—besides her own claims—I have not seen. But once she started working with Stearn, there came the thought that she had lived many past lives—even if, like R. DeWitt Miller, Stearn was dissatisfied with a simple notion of reincarnation. Under hypnosis, she regressed, as the saying goes, and experienced herself at these other times, in these other places. She was almost always close to the action but not the center—Mary Magdalene’s mother, not Mary Magdalene herself—which allowed her to see with a particularly acute eye.
This may be so much folderol, but there’s a sense in which it connects her to some other authors beloved by Forteans, who would not otherwise seem related. I’m thinking in particular of the weird writers H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Both disciplined their imagination in certain ways to conceive of worlds that might otherwise be impossible to conceive. The poet Philip Lamantia compared Smith’s alien environments to the Islamic notion of a Mundus imaginalis—a purely fictive world that operated according to its own principles, neither sacred nor profane but an issue of the mind. Caldwell, too, seemed to have a sense of her imagination as an alien world—a place that she visited, a place of its own being that she mapped and described.
Much out of line with many other Forteans, though, was Caldwell’s politics. She was a conservative and her 1957 autobiography On Growing Up Tough gave her a chance to vent spleen at liberals. She was, she said, fine letting one live and let live, but liberals were always meddling in other people’s affairs and so had to be stopped. The same year, she publicly worried that America was on the brink of collapse. She prophesied JFK’s assassination and thought LBJ would suffer a similar fate (a prognostication that got her looked at by the FBI). Like other Forteans, she worried about the bureaucratic state and distrusted modern medicine, but her proposed answers to social problems had her stamping on progressives and pining for an authoritative government. Stearn’s book has her yipping at women’s libbers and thinking women should be at the home having babies. She stumped for America entering World War II, joined the Liberty Lobby, and found allies in the John Birch Society. She founded New York State’s conservative party, and denounced liberalism throughout the rest of her life, her later books taking on more and more political ideas.
Caldwell suffered a stroke in May 1980, that left her paralyzed and speechless. She die dog pulmonary failure in 1985—aged 84. At the time, she was debilitated by lung cancer.
Caldwell’s dance with the Fortean Society lasted only two steps—which is not to say that she disliked Fort. Rather, the Society—more precisely, Tiffany Thayer—came to dislike her. Combined with the amount of energy that she spent on her writing, it is no wonder that she was associated with the Society for only three years, her name only appearing in two issues: one to announce her joining, the other to denounce her.
Caldwell joined the Fortean Society in 1945, motivated by Holt reprinting The Books of Charles Fort. She wrote an effusive letter to Thayer and he—of course—encouraged her to join, which she did “eagerly.” That there was overlap in the metaphysical interests of Caldwell and some Forteans is suggested by the fact that “in almost the same mail MFS Mary Winthrop Bonavia sent us (as Forteana) a ten-page quotation from Taylor Caldwell’s current best-seller, The Wide House. I am not sure what the quote was, nor what Bonavia made of it: she was a notoriously wide-ranging Fortean, catholic in what she considered falling under the label. The point is, Caldwell was simpatico with some other active Forteans, at least on some matters.
Caldwell’s letter offers some insight into what she got from Fort:
“I am not exaggerating when I say that I was more than just casually delighted to now that these books are again available, and I cannot wait until I can once more have the joy, instruction and pleasure of rereading them.
I first read Mr. Fort’s books many years ago. Since then, I have read literally thousands of others. Yet, none have remained so powerfully in my memory. None have so filled me with wonder, speculation and excitement.
I have quoted parts of these books to numerous friends. I know they will be equally delighted to hear that they can now read them for themselves. So, it gives me really enormous pleasure to spread the news.
I am firmly convinced of this: that those who have missed Mr. Fort’s books are the poorer for it, live much more meager lives, and have never experienced that profound speculation that comes to one who is informed of things ‘beyond coincidence.’”
For me, at least, three points stand out. First, Fort would have played into Caldwell’s sense of herself as an iconoclast—one who saw the world obliquely, but clearly, unlike so many of the masses. Second, the sense of wonder seems to have fed into her own metaphysical inclinations—which, again, unites her with writers such as Lovecraft and Caldwell, although she would otherwise seem to be more in the mold of Ayn Rand. Third, she seems impressed by Fort’s presentation—his style—which impressed a number of other writers, too. As Miriam Allen deFord said, he shot for the scientists but hit the literary world instead.
All of that was in Doubt 13, published in the winter of 1945; she next made the pages—and last made the pages—in Doubt 23, published in the winter of 1948. Thayer had been getting flack from British Forteans—especially Eric Frank Russell—over Ben Hecht, a founder roof the Society who made impolitic remarks about the Palestinian situation. Russell wanted Hecht kicked out, but Thayer was reluctant to do so: the Fortean Society was supposed to be home to all sorts of orphans. It was supposed to have no dogma. He finally buckled by denouncing Hecht—but leaving him in the Society. He then appended a smaller article, titled “More Renunciations”:
“Because of their public acts subsequent to being honored by the Fortean Society, we take this means of disavowing Fortean support for the published opinions of--
“Ben Hecht
“James Burnham
“Norman Thomas
“Taylor Caldwell.”
Thayer doe snot enumerate Caldwell’s sins, but it is safe to assume there was a political clash. Her two novels published in the intervening period should not have set Thayer off. I haven’t found any political statements by her prior to the mid-1950s, but likely there were some. And given her preference for a robust American foreign policy, she would have said something Thayer did not like.
So, Caldwell was a Fortean: she was interested in Fort, read him, and enthusiastically discussed him. But she did not fit into the Fortean Society, and soon enough passed away from it.
