Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road. - book reviews

National Review, April 17, 1995 by John Shelton Reed

SURELY most readers past their youth remember Erskine Caldwell -- if not as the youthful peer of Faulkner and Wolfe, at least as the author of vaguely smutty drugstore paperbacks with lurid covers. Some may be reminded of him by current events: recently in NR Florence King noted ``the descent of the Clintons back into the Erskine Caldwell novel whence they came.'' But in 1987, when Caldwell died, I suspect many were surprised to hear that he had lived that long, and for younger folk the one-time ``World's Best-Selling Author!'' has dropped completely off the screen. Dan Miller, for instance, begins this biography with the startling admission that ``I first heard of Erskine Caldwell in 1989. . . . His name did not ring a bell.''

Perhaps this is fitting. Caldwell was a regular literary Vesuvius, spewing out more than one hundred short stories, twenty novels, and ten works of nonfiction, but his flashes of literary talent were few and far between. He was, moveover, a pure-tee scoundrel: an egotist, a liar, a cheat, a coward, a tightwad, a poseur, an opportunist, and (when it suited him) a fellow-traveling propagandist. Miller says Caldwell's typical male character -- Jeeter Lester, say, or Ty Ty Walden -- is ``shiftless, conscienceless, incorrigibly lecherous, and possessed of a childlike innocence that blinds him to the ramifications of even his most hideous behavior,'' and much the same could be said of Caldwell.

So why this biography? Not just to show that Caldwell had an unhappy childhood (that's no excuse unless you live in California and have a high-priced lawyer). Not to argue that he was actually a great writer. But there is an interesting study here in the sociology of literary reputation. Why was the young Caldwell so overpraised? And why are his modest but undeniable accomplishments now so ignored?

Miller ably recounts the facts of Caldwell's youth (what cheap psychologizing he can't resist is mostly in end-notes, often misnumbered), but his story really begins when this Georgia boy, only child of a socially conscious Protestant minister and a refined, Virginia-bred schoolteacher, burst on the literary scene with two shocking novels about depraved Southern rural families: Tobacco Road in 1932 and God's Little Acre the next year, starring Jeeter and Ty Ty, respectively.

When one Southern lady summarized modern Southern literature as ``On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister,'' she surely had Caldwell in mind: in his story ``Kneel to the Rising Sun'' a character is eaten by hogs. Many Southerners responded predictably to Caldwell's obvious dislike for the South, even though it was nothing special (he didn't like New England or California either). ``Understand this you SON-OF-A-BITCH,'' one anonymous letter warned. ``Write and talk fast, for when the time comes only the one you doubt will be able to save you.'' (Caldwell overcame his left-wing prejudices long enough to ask the FBI to investigate that one.) Some ``progressive'' Southerners were also predictable. A Raleigh newspaperman called God's Little Acre ``one of the finest studies of the Southern poor white that has ever come into our literature,'' and a Richmond reviewer saw Tobacco Road as a ``compelling argument for diversified farming.''

Caldwell himself believed that he was crusading for social justice and sexual liberation, and he bitterly resented reviewers who saw him in the tradition of eye-gouging antebellum Southern humor (``tall yarns,'' one wrote, spun with ``a sunny humor''). He claimed to be a ``proletarian writer,'' and in 1932 even endorsed the Communist ticket in the presidential election. Impressed by Caldwell's exaggerated working-class credentials, the literary Left tried hard to believe him when he said that the Lesters were merely ``a Georgia family . . . starving of malnutrition and pellagra because the absentee landlord has stopped giving them credit for food and seed.'' The New Republic applauded him for documenting ``the scant hopes and the ineluctable vassalage of these poor whites.'' But there was a problem: as a reviewer in the Daily Worker observed, Caldwell's characters are so disgusting that they ``lose the power to compel either pity or indignation.''

All these varied reactions make some sort of sense. What's harder to understand is the extravagant praise of such literati as Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley, and Ezra Pound. Caldwell was compared to Twain, Dickens, and Balzac; soon he would be ranked with Faulkner and Wolfe as a leading figure in the Southern renaissance, with Steinbeck as a chronicler of the rural poor, with Hemingway as a stylistic innovator. Overpraised or not, God's Little Acre would mark the high point of Caldwell's literary reputation.

This wasn't immediately obvious. Caldwell turned for a while to documentary journalism, reporting on the American poor and our heroic Soviet allies, often working with the glamorous photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who became his second wife (of four). Meanwhile, work in Hollywood (which he despised), the stage adaptation of Tobacco Road (which set Broadway records), and the new market for paperback books (six million copies of God's Little Acre sold in five years) were making Caldwell a rich man.