Birthday: Erskine Caldwell said he was not so much a writer as a listener. The tale he told shocked a nation.

Erskine Preston Caldwell (1903-1987)
Author

Reviewing the author’s works for Slate in 2006, critic Dwight Garner declared,

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, published in 1932, is a greasy hairball of a novel—one of the sickest and most lurid books to have emerged from the literature of the American South. It's about as nutritious as a plate of pork cracklings. You're going to feel a little ill when you get up from this table.

Even The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which tends to put a happy face on things, found it hard to dress up Caldwell’s literary preoccupations: “political demagoguery, racial injustice, orgiastic religion, cultural sterility, and social irresponsibility.”

He was the son of a progressive Presbyterian minister who spent his career in one dirt-poor town after another, and what he saw and heard filled him with an incandescent rage he expressed in a massive literary output spanning six decades: 25 novels; twelve nonfiction books, 150 short stories. He sold over eighty million copies in 43 languages; Saul Bellow promoted Caldwell for the Nobel Prize. William Faulkner thought Erskine Caldwell one of the five best American novelists, period.

Caldwell bounced around three colleges and universities, never collecting a degree but taking some courses he found useful, and meeting his first wife at the University of Virginia. He found outlets for stories and essays in little magazines; some made their way to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who passed them on the Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Scribner’s.

Impressed, Perkins signed Caldwell on as a Scribner’s author. He turned out work with a vengeance: The Bastard in 1929, American Earth in 1931; Tobacco Road in 1932; God’s Little Acre in 1933. His portrays of lynchings and poor whites born, living and dying with no chance of improvement, won strong reviews and sales- except in the South. There he was denounced as a Communist, a betrayer of his people, and a pervert nine ways from Sunday. Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, was particularly hard on her fellow Georgian, noting that in her great work, “there is not a single sadist or degenerate.”

Up North his books shocked the easily shockable. While on a book tour for Tobacco Road, Caldwell was arrested and prosecuted for obscenity by The New York Literary Society; Caldwell countersued for malicious prosecution and false arrest, and won.

In 1936 and ‘37, Caldwell toured the South with the photographer Margaret Bourke-White; their Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-style book, You Have Seen Their Faces, did well, and proved such an intense experience that Caldwell divorced his wife to marry Bourke-White. They did better as a writing team than as a couple, and divorced three years later.

Caldwell continued to turn out work that ground the last nerve of Southerners, though his 1942 collection of short stories, Georgia Boy was a picaresque romp through the lives of an eccentric farm family reminiscent of Faulkner’s The Reivers. 

Not one to stay unmarried, Caldwell wed a college student in 1942; their tumultuous relationship lasted twelve years and proved a drag on his work- and its quality. But by then Caldwell was making money faster than he could spend it. Tobacco Road was turned into a Broadway play that ran nearly eight years; after a stint as a war correspondent in the Soviet Union, he went to Hollywood and spent five lucrative if boring years turning out scripts for a short film series called “Crime Does Not Pay” and propaganda pictures like Mission to Moscow. In a 1982 Paris Review conversation, he said it was all hackwork, and he did it purely for the money: “The longer you stay, the more they pay you.” When he felt he had enough, in 1950, he quit and never looked back.

By then the paperback boom was sweeping America, and Caldwell signed lucrative deals for reprints of his 1930s works. New American Library tarted them up with lurid covers promising sex and depravity, and while they made Caldwell a new fortune in the 1950s, it diminished his reputation a “serious” writer, as did film adaptations that went for yuks at the expense of his yokels.

He married for a fourth time in 1957, and that time it took. They stayed married for thirty years and Virginian became his editor and collaborator. They traveled extensively, gathering material for books on what they saw; he continued to critique the South for its racism and use of religious fervor to oppose social progress. He edited a 28-volume series on the regions of the country, American Folkways. 

He published a book of poetry in his younger days. Sending some verses to Louis Untermeyer, one of the mandarins of mid-century American literature, he got back a letter congratulating him for having gotten that out of his system and wishing him well in more productive work. Decades later, Untermeyer, “knowing you’re out of poetry,” approached Caldwell for a children’s story for an anthology; Caldwell ended up producing a book’s worth.

Caldwell insisted he cared nothing for fame, or the approval of others; he maintained a nostalgic warmth for the South even as his hometown library banned his books for decades. He tended to shun the company of other writers; finding all they could talk about was their work. He said he cared little for plots; he started with an interesting character and let the character tell him what was going to happen next. Late in life he succeeded Lillian Hellman in the American Academy of Arts & Letters. 

Dwight Garner summed up Caldwell this way:

So, why did Tobacco Road find a place on the Modern Library's list of the Best 100 Novels in the English Language—at No. 91, between Midnight's Children and Ironweed? The reasons have nothing to do with the blinkered cultural stereotypes Caldwell locked into cement and everything to do with the fact that few novels have as much stripped-down force and inspire as much terror and pity. The force comes from that fact that Caldwell's id—his naked obsessions with sex, class, and violence—cuts the surface of every page like a dorsal fin. You can't stop turning the pages, because you want to see how much further your jaw can drop. The terror and pity arise from the fact that, as ham-fisted and exploitative as his attempts could be, Caldwell really did want to bring Americans some news: news about how the worst-off of the rural poor really lived. 

...You can trace the intensity of Caldwell's vision in Tobacco Road right up through the undervalued and largely out-of-print novels of Harry Crews, and even through those of—though it is mildly heretical to say this—Cormac McCarthy. Without Tobacco Road, it's almost impossible to imagine the arrival of Hee-Haw and The Beverly Hillbillies, not to mention Deliverance.

Caldwell’s work tailed off in the 1970s though by 1982 he told The Paris Review he thought he was getting a second wind up. He died in Arizona in 1987, shortly after finishing his autobiography. Virginia buried him with her family in Ashland, Oregon; Moreland, Georgia restored his birthplace, moved it to the courthouse square, and turned it into a museum.


#HenryBemisBooks  #LiteraryBirthdays #Erskine Caldwell
www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com