“My goal from the beginning,” states Caldwell, “was to be a writer of fiction that revealed . . . the inner spirit of men and women as they responded to the joys of life and reacted to the sorrows of existence.” The conclusion, however, of what he sought to achieve “with all my might” is an unwillingness to “relive my life for the purpose of rectifying the mistakes and attempt to correct the errors I have made along the way.”
What Caldwell did along the way was to become generally recognized by the mid-1960’s as the best-selling author of all time. Novelist, photojournalist, foreign correspondent, screenwriter, writer of short stories and children’s books, Caldwell authored over 50 books. His efforts made him wealthy and notorious. His indictment of socioeconomic conditions in America earned him the hatred of anticommunists. Westbrook Pegler, on the other hand, credited Caldwell with earning 22 citations by the House Un-American Activities Committee—even more than Margaret Bourke-White, one of the four wives Caldwell accumulated along the way.
Caldwell’s early life was spent primarily in backwater communities in the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Georgia. Raised to think independently and never required to attend church, he developed contempt for the religious enthusiasm that flourished among his neighbors “with all the unbounded vigor of an untrampled kudzu vine.” Caldwell entered a public school for the first time as a seventh grader in Atoka, Tennessee.
A year and a half later (1918) the Caldwells moved to Wrens, Georgia. An adolescent entrepreneur, Caldwell became a blueing salesman. Grit distributor, shoe delivery boy, scrap rubber salesman, rabbit trapper-hide salesman, and chauffeur for the Millington, Tennessee YMCA. “Prone to be far more interested in the activities of people in daily life than . . . the slow and tedious prospect of acquiring a textbook education,” Caldwell further busied himself as a printer’s devil, scorekeeper for the semipro baseball team, stringer for the Augusta Chronicle, and driver for a village physician.
From Wrens, Caldwell went to Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. Unable to stomach the forced piety, Caldwell spent much of his time on freight trains, traveling. Bolstered by an “invigorating feeling of relief to know that I was finally escaping from a fanatic connection that might have made a subdued captive of me to the end of my days,” he summarily escaped Erskine in his second year by taking a passenger train to New Orleans. Short-lived jobs as a deck hand, racetrack stable boy, and magazine salesman finally earned him some jail time for vagrancy in Bogalusa, Louisiana. He may well have spent his life there, except for a letter home. When Caldwell arrived back, his father, with no hint of recrimination, “came up to me and smiled and shook hands without a trace of displeasure . . . I can recall only one thing that was said as we walked along . . . ‘What did you think of Louisiana, son . . . It’s a much different kind of world, isn’t it?'”
Benefiting from a United Daughters of the Confederacy scholarship, Caldwell went to the University of Virginia that fall. There he developed an interest in English, economics, and sociology, as the “basic elements necessary for the achievement of reality in interpretive and imaginative storytelling.” Two years later he was off to Philadelphia for the summer session as a student at the Wharton School and to work as a night-shift counterman at a fast-food cubbyhole, and bodyguard for a Chinese student.
Returning to Virginia for the spring semester, Caldwell met Helen Lannigan, a graduate student. In March 1925, they were married. When his UDC scholarship and dollar-a-night job as a poolroom attendant proved insufficient, Caldwell boarded an Atlanta-bound train, leaving “behind forever my car and my university.” After holding a $20-a-week job as a reporter on the Atlanta Journal, Erskine Caldwell went to live rent-free in a Maine woods house owned by Helen’s parents. Here, ably assisted by Helen, he set himself to become a selling writer.
His first books attracted little attention. Then came Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). Tobacco Road portrayed Georgia dirt farmers like Jeeter Lester, to whom “the smell of that raw earth turning over behind the plow” was in the blood. As an expose of mental and moral anemia among people of scant hope, “who ignore the civilization that contains them as completely as the civilization ignores them,” (as The Nation put it), Tobacco Road created an uproar that made Caldwell simultaneously famous and infamous, allowing him to live in luxury in midtown New York. Poverty, Helen, and the Maine woods were soon left behind.
By the late 1930’s, Broadway and touring company productions of Tobacco Road were drawing the attention of censors in city after city and were bringing Caldwell thousands of dollars weekly. With its publication in paperback (1946) and the sales of his other books, Caldwell was on the way to becoming “America’s best-selling author.”
God’s Little Acre was evaluated by a contemporary reviewer for the Chicago Daily as “an off-color story skillfully combined with an enlarged comic strip.” He added that what Faulkner implied, Caldwell recorded—the barren farm, the shut mill, the brutal imagery of poor whites ensconced in ignorance and sordid surroundings. By the early 1960’s God’s Little Acre had exceeded the sales of Gone With the Wind by over a million copies. Along with Tobacco Road, it continues to be Caldwell’s primary claim to literary fame.
Caldwell was anything but a proponent of a pastoral, conservative, religious South. He had seen enough abominable living conditions and desperation to be obsequious to the South’s agricultural satraps. And he had no underlying philosophic ideal to anchor his observations within an Agrarian renascence. Viewing the world as a mine for his short stories and novels, he described the landless, ill, poverty-stricken Southerners of the bare hovels on Tobacco Road as
pathetic people, most of them being illiterate and in ill-health for the length of their days, who existed in timeless agony without hope on earth but clinging to the belief that their pains and hunger would miraculously disappear when they were born again as so glibly promised by every passing evangelist. Their tragic lot was to have come into the world before the conscience of their fellow men rose to provide assistance and welfare for the unfortunate. I often recalled my father’s way of expressing compassion for their predicament when he would say “those people are as Godforsaken as a toad in a post hole.”
Caldwell’s characterizations, as he puts it in With All My Might, “were not imitations of life but interpretations . . . more real than life itself in order for it to be believable . . . True realism, then, was not the reality of life but a forceful illusion of it.” Having no desire to change the world, Caldwell says, “nevertheless I was motivated by the urge to write about the economic and social plight of the disadvantaged in such a way that readers would be moved to react with sympathy and eventual assistance for creatures of a subhuman world.”
Some of the Southerners who saw in the Southern ethos and Agrarian social organization a hope for a future more in alignment with the Jeffersonian than the Leviathan state thought Caldwell’s portraits of Southern rural life “shone and stank like a dead mackerel in the moonlight.” To John Donald Wade, such fiction was a massproduced commodity, whose ribald characters were developed more for commercial utility than social criticism. To Donald Davidson, such mercenary pandering was circumscribed by the evaluation that “Sweet Are the Uses of Degeneracy.” However, in Caldwell’s view, to whatever extent the American Dream held substance beyond snuff and religion, it fell short for the masses of the Southern underclass.
Trouble in July (1940), Georgia Boy (1943), A House in the Uplands (1946), The Sure Hand of God (1947), and This Very Earth (1948), bolstered by paperback sales, each sold over a million copies. By the end of the 1940’s Caldwell’s laurels included designation by Publishers Weekly as “America’s most censored author.” A Lamp for Nightfall, written between Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre but not published until 1952, was intended to accomplish for the rural Northeast what Tobacco Road had done for Georgia. It was regarded by critics as a compilation of grotesque incidents and transparent sex and violence. Warren Beck characterized Claudelle English (1959) as a superficial repackaging of earlier themes and utterly “without sociological or psychological depth.” Certain Women (1957) was so replete with crude plots and caricatures of allegedly Southern heroines that one reviewer wondered why only the South must suffer their presence. J.C. Pine, reviewing Miss Mama Aimee (1967), opined that Caldwell’s novels consistently showed an ambivalent tendency toward both low comedy and high tragedy, adding that, in the absence of either, Caldwell settled for nothing.
Scott McDonald, writing in Dictionary of American Biography (1981), evaluates Caldwell’s impact on American letters as being as powerful as Hemingway’s. Even so, the question may be raised whether Caldwell is a regional writer dealing with explicitly Southern themes, or whether his writing merely happened to have a Southern setting. According to the Southern Literary Culture bibliography, Caldwell has been the subject of eight master’s theses and four doctoral dissertations. While William Faulkner and his characters, plot, presentation, and location fill academic journals, neither Caldwell nor his work are subjects for academic career specialization. Robert Hazel, commenting in Southern Renascence (1953), highlighted the contrast between Faulkner and Caldwell. Caldwell created a world of forces reflecting “an immediate sociological [sic] concern” in narrative advanced by the plain speech of its characters, rather than by the poetic resonance of good prose that is indispensable to what is identified as Southern literature. Caldwell, Hazel concludes, though not a Southern writer in the sense of Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe, may nevertheless be credited with reportage from “a country not [otherwise] heard from.” With All My Might may tell readers more about Caldwell than they care to know, at least in terms of his discovery of the “irresistible lure of the female sex.” Avoiding the mantras of the Christian religion like a plague, and wholly free of any fundamentalist septicemia, Caldwell lived fast, but long. Fortunately, the focus in With All My Might on the adult Caldwell is on him as a writer. With his talent and proclivities, it is perhaps fortunate that Caldwell was an agnostic. I shudder to think what he may have accomplished had he gone to Bible school, or decided to carve out a career in religious charlatanry.
[With All My Might, by Erskine Caldwell (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd) 382 pp., $19.95]
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