Arts and Letters

Erskine Caldwell was born poor on December 17, 1903, in a tiny three-room manse at a mere crossroads in cotton country in Coweta County, Georgia. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, was an Associate Reformed Presbyterian minister, whose salary was three hundred and fifty dollars a year. His mother, Caroline Bell Caldwell, had been a teacher of English and Latin in seminaries and colleges for girls and young women in the Carolinas and Virginia. His grandfathers were a cotton farmer and a railroad telegrapher.

Reverend Caldwell was frequently moved from parish to parish, in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia. Erskine's mother taught him at home; he begged to be allowed to go to public schools, but she was convinced that she was better qualified than the teachers Erskine would have drawn in rural schools. Through his childhood, she dressed him in bizarre homemade clothes—a long white linen blouse with a loose leather belt, and bloomer-like trousers. She kept him in curly ringlets until her older sister, a registered nurse, on a visit, gave her a sedative to put her to sleep and took Erskine out to have a haircut. When he was thirteen, he showed his parents a twenty-two page "novel" he had written, and they were so shocked by his spelling that they finally decided to send him to school.

In those young years Erskine saw with his own eyes both the degradation and the inner riches of the very poor, both white and black, in the cotton and tobacco South. His most cherished playmate, for whom he yearned, in a way, all his life, was a black friend named Bisco. After Erskine was sixty, he wrote a nostalgic book, In Search of Bisco. While he was still a boy his father, riding his circuits, took Erskine with him as he made pastoral calls in tenant shacks and hovels. The son would never forget witnessing foot-washing services, a clay-eating communion ritual, a coming-through orgy, a snake-handling performance, and emotion-charged glossolalia and unknown-tongue spectacles.

From his youngest years, he fought being poor. As a small boy, he peddled bluing to black washerwomen for ten cents a packet. He scavenged and sold scrap rubber. He substituted illegally for a village postmaster. At thirteen he took a job as driver of a YMCA auto at an army base in Tennessee. At fifteen, he got a night job shoveling cottonseed in an oil mill in Georgia, alongside young blacks who by day were houseboys or yardmen for whites, and whose tales made the job, as he would later write, "a seminar devoted to the theory and practice of male and female aberrant relationships in an American small town." In later years he would be—intermittently with his writing and obviously enriching it—a stockman in a Kresge store, a cotton picker, a cook, a waiter, a taxi driver, a soda jerk, a stonemason, a professional football player, a bodyguard, a stagehand in a burlesque theater, and a hand on a boat running guns to a Central American country in revolt.

When he was sixteen, while his family was living in Wrens, Georgia, he got a job turning the hand press of the local weekly newspaper, the Jefferson Reporter; he was soon allowed to set type by hand, and then to write short news items. And suddenly, with so little to go on, he knew who and what he was. It was no time before he was sending reports of local semi-pro baseball games to the Augusta Chronicle, and then sending general news pieces to that paper and to the Atlanta Constitution, the Savannah News, and the Macon Telegraph.

Caldwell's higher education consisted of entering and dropping out of two colleges. The first was called Erskine College—named, as he himself was, for the founder of his father's sect, one Ebenezer Erskine—in the town of Due West, South Carolina. Later, having run off to Louisiana and having landed in jail for vagrancy, and having dabbled at various jobs, including journalism, he discovered the existence of a long-forgotten scholarship at the University of Virginia for lineal descendants of soldiers in the Confederate Army. Having somehow established a claim to it, he was admitted in spite of his abysmal academic record. There, in the college library, he helped himself to the only true education he thought he needed, first in little magazines, transition, This Quarter, The Prairie Schooner; then in novels, Sister Carrie, In Our Time, Winesburg, Ohio.

When he thought he had learned enough to make a start, he married a graduate student named Helen Lannigan, dropped out again, took a job as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, and wrote short stories in his "spare" time. Three years later, in 1928, he moved with Helen and their two baby sons to a small house in Maine, where he planted vegetables, chopped firewood, and wrote short stories. Winter came and they had almost nothing to live on. He had arranged to review books for the Charlotte Observer and the Houston Post. The person who had set this up for him sent scores and scores of review copies, which he sold to a bookstore in Portland for twenty-five cents each. The family nearly starved; they ate potatoes and rutabagas he had grown the previous summer, and scant groceries bought with the money from reviews and the sale of the books. He wrote in an unheated upstairs room wearing a navy watch cap pulled down over his ears, a sweater, a leather jerkin, and a padded storm coat, and with a woolen blanket wrapped around his legs.

He had collected several shoeboxes full of rejection slips when, at last, transition accepted "Midsummer Passion," a story which has since had many lives in anthologies. Alas, transition paid nothing. But Maxwell Perkins, then editing Scribner's Magazine, saw the story and wrote him. Caldwell sent Perkins a story a day for a week. Perkins rejected them all, so Caldwell slowed down and sent him two stories a week until, finally, Perkins accepted two. He told Caldwell he would pay "two-fifty" for both of them. Caldwell said, "Two-fifty? I don't know. I thought I'd receive a little more than that." Perkins offered three-fifty. "I guess that'll be all right," Caldwell said. "I'd thought I'd get a little more than three dollars and a half, though, for both of them." "Oh, no!" Perkins said. "I must have given you the wrong impression, Caldwell. I meant three hundred and fifty dollars."

That marked a turning point. Caldwell would never be desperately hard up again. With a boost from Alfred Kreymborg, who with Lewis Mumford and Paul Rosenfeld edited the New American Caravan, and who had liked a story of his, he found a publisher for a short novel he had written, entitled The Bastard. No sooner was it out than it was attacked as obscene; it was ordered shipped out of Maine within forty-eight hours.

Three years and three books later came Tobacco Road, which was even more violently attacked. At first it sold only a few thousand copies, and Caldwell, discouraged, wrote a book with a Maine setting, called A Lamp for Midnight, which wasn't published for twenty years. He had just finished writing God's Little Acre when he was invited by MGM to Hollywood, at what seemed to him the astounding salary of two hundred fifty dollars a week—the first of several stints as a screenwriter that he, like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, West, and others, would undertake over the years. Then Jack Kirkland's stage adaptation of Tobacco Road opened on Broadway and put Caldwell on easy street. It ran seven and a half years and brought him two thousand dollars every week.

And so he was free to do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was to roam and to write. The peripatetic life of his childhood had imprinted him with vagabondage. I have counted twenty-eight homes in which he lived, and there were probably others. He had four wives and many secretaries. After his first nine books (published in six years), his restlessness took him on the road to do a picture-and-text book about American types with the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. He left Helen to marry and work with her, but she turned out to be even more a wanderer than he, and they parted. Soon afterward he met an undergraduate at the University of Arizona named June Johnson, and married her, but it turned out that she hated to travel; they divorced. On New Year's Eve, 1958, he married his then secretary and editorial assistant Virginia Fletcher, and with her he would live, in truth, happily ever after. She was perfectly attuned to his metronomic life: six months each year of writing, six to see the world. She embedded a paradox of serenity in his restlessness.

He roved for the sake of his writing, keeping journals wherever he went. "The need to write fiction," he would report, "had become as demanding as the craving for food when hungry…. I had never known a time … when I was unable to write a short story or a novel for lack of an idea and suitable material." And indeed it came about that in the years between the publication of his fourth book, Tobacco Road, in 1933, and the publication of his fifty-fifth book, With All My Might, in 1987, Erskine Caldwell became the most widely read living author on earth. Up to the time of his death this year, eighty million copies of his books had been sold, in forty languages.

How do we account for such an extraordinary outcome? The easy answer, most frequently given: What he wrote was sexy; it was salacious, pornographic. But that won't wash. In terms of explicit sex, Tobacco Road, read today in comparison, let's say, with Couples, is as mild as a Sunday school picnic. It is true that much of Caldwell's writing has a hot erotic power, but it is delicately delivered, and even in the relatively puritanical '30s, among all the charges of obscenity and pornography brought against his early books in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and elsewhere, only twice were permanent legal bans imposed. The mayor of Chicago succeeded in banning the play of Tobacco Road, and Boston's Watch and Ward Society achieved a ban against God's Little Acre. "I didn't consider that I was doing something that I shouldn't," Caldwell said in a rare interview four years ago. "I just thought it was natural to make a story as compelling as possible."

Was it because of his compassion for the downtrodden of this world—because he was a proletarian novelist, in the best sense, in times of great suffering and change? It is true that when he went to the Soviet Union with Margaret Bourke-White, he was given so many rubles for his Russian royalties that he could afford a luxurious suite at the National Hotel, in the astonishing oval parlor of which there was a grand piano, a bearskin rug, and amorous cupids on the ceiling. But Caldwell disavowed this role and was steadfastly apolitical all his life. "I was not trying to prove anything," he was to say. "I was only trying to tell a story."

He chose the right word to account for his success: his best work is compelling. Its surface is very plain, but, reading it, one has a sensation of diving deep into a vivid dream. At the edge of terror, sweet wishes come close to fulfillment, and then drift tantalizingly away. This is very often the case in his short stories, some of which—such as "Kneel to the Rising Sun," "Candyman Beechum," "Country Full of Swedes"—are classics of narrative power. "By an astounding trick of oversimplification," Kenneth Burke wrote, "Caldwell puts people into complex situations while making them act with the scant, crude tropisms of an insect—and the result is cunning." Crafty, that is to say, balanced on a razor's edge between hilarity and horror. And all is told in a quiet conversational voice, which speaks in the rhythms of truth.

Caldwell kept himself apart, striving for these effects. "The fewer writers you know," he said once, "the easier it is to avoid being caught up in that mishmash of literaryism which to me is a very deadly kind of existence." Faulkner once named him as one of the five best contemporary writers, along with Hemingway, Dos Passos, Wolfe, and himself. An interviewer asked Caldwell if that high ranking pleased him. "I never think in those terms," he said. "I'm just an ordinary writer, I'm nothing special; so I don't have to have that kind of appreciation. I can do without it. All I'm interested in are the books that I've written. I'm just the writer. The books speak for themselves."