My mother hated Erskine Caldwell. Well…actually, she hated Tobacco Road, his best- known novel. I wonder if anyone ever reads Caldwell’s books today? Tobacco Road likely remains the best- known novel about the 20th century south. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway were early fans of this work. Scribner’ Sons, a major literary press of the 1930s published Caldwell’s earliest and best fiction, including two blockbusters: Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. Caldwell, according to Dan B. Miller in his biography, Erskine Caldwell; The Journey from Tobacco Road, makes the case that Caldwell was the first American literary writer to turn out a “blockbuster.”
When cheap paperbacks became the latest rage during the Depression and World War II, he sold more than 30,000,000 books. Millions of American GI’s read these books, in part attracted by the seductive (and objectified) women who graced the covers, promising sexually explicit content. But Caldwell’s success came at a price. He lost his standing –at least among fellow literary types- when he became “king of the paperbacks” Success bred resentment among fellow practitioners, most of whom were both contentious and competitive.
Hollywood fanned the flames of Caldwell’s success by turning both novels into torrid films peopled by degenerate southern rednecks, standing Margaret Mitchell’s chronicle of the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, on its head and showing the “underside” of the story of the South. Set around Augusta, Georgia, the stories are peopled with sharecroppers and cotton mill workers.
My mother hated Tobacco Road—and Caldwell by association. Not that she would ever admit to reading the book But, she grew up only a few miles from the Caldwell home near Wrens. The book was bad enough (by reputation), but the lurid covers and movie posters only reinforced the indignation that many southerners felt over Caldwell’s portrayal of their neighbors. In her eyes, this made him a traitor to the South, one willing to say the worst about his fellow Georgians and depict them at their worst.
Miller has written a biography, and he does not delve too deeply into the history and sociology of the interwar South. He has accomplished a huge task (there are over seventy linear feet of Caldwell material at the Dartmouth College Library alone). Mercifully sticking to this work as a biographer, Miller spares us the tedium of literary criticism, often focusing instead on the business and politics of book publishing in Caldwell’s day and on Caldwell’s tortured relationships, especially with his first wife, Helen, whose careful suggestions, proofreading and typing made it possible for the young Caldwell to get anything into the hands of publishers. Some readers will be glad that Miller makes little effort to psychoanalyze Caldwell, avoiding the shoals on which many biographies have foundered. I congratulate him for his restraint.
The most irritating part of Caldwell’s success for my mother was that both Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre made it onto the silver screen. Here, Caldwell’s characters educated a whole generation of northerners to believe that such degeneracy was commonplace and even typical of the South. This of course also suggests that even northerners are not so sophisticated as southerner’s imagine (or, as much as northerner’s may assume). But the image stuck.
Much of what Caldwell wrote was social satire, intended to deflate the social pretentions of small-town matriarchs whose lives centered around the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the mainline denominational evangelical churches.
Miller reminds us that Caldwell’s upbringing was almost unique for the time and place. He was the son of well-educated parents. His father was a graduate of Erskine College as was his mother. As the preacher’s son and as the son of a mother from an academic family, Caldwell viewed his father’s flock and the people of Wrens from the perspective of an outsider, and as a highly critical adolescent. His father’s selfless devotion to the lowest on the social ladder and his careful explanations to Erskine of how poverty and lack of education had circumscribed rural southerners’ thoughts and opportunities provided Erskine with the insight and experience to write with exacting, if painful accuracy.
Arguably, few remember Caldwell’s books at all, apart from literature professors and devotees of southern fiction. But it was not only Caldwell’s novels that made Caldwell mainstream. It was the tremendous popularity of the Broadway play based on Tobacco Road that made his name a household word and made him wealthy. Only loosely following the plot, the play is a sendup of all things vulgar and stupid about the South. Caldwell’s passionate exposure of the plight of southern sharecroppers was transformed on the stage into a hilarious cavalcade. But popular it was, with over three thousand performances making it one of the most successful non-musicals ever to hit Broadway. And it was reproduced by summer stock as well as professional companies across the country-even to southern audiences. The Hollywood movie based on the script for the play wandered even farther into ridicule and away from the social criticism that was the core of the book.
Dan Miller’s biography is a good place to begin understanding the writer and the man, whether you have read Caldwell’s novels or not. The back story is not a pretty one. Caldwell was not a pleasant or even idealistic man. Miller’s Caldwell comes across as having little empathy for those closest to him (except for his father and mother). Where his father was deeply religious and devoted to his congregation, the son seems callous and indifferent toward the characters he creates and the readers he has affected. His coldness toward his first wife, Helen, and their children will leave little room for sympathy in the minds of readers of Miller’s biography.
Why do I recommend this book? It is thorough without moralizing and tells the story of arguably one of the few literary giants to grow up in Georgia. You are thinking perhaps, “What about Margaret Mitchell?” Spot on. In fact, Caldwell and Mitchell knew each other and worked at the same newspaper in Atlanta for a short time. Mitchell’s compassion is out front as she creates her characters based on real-life friends and family. Caldwell’s seems detached by comparison and his characters are often seem driven by madness, desperation and intractable stupidity..
In Mitchell’s great novel our characters are engulfed in the greatest social and political events in American history-the Civil War and Reconstruction. It is not much of a stretch to say the same of Caldwell’s characters in Tobacco Road. But-and this is an important “but”-Caldwell does not first engage us with a more glorious or happier past as prelude to the economic devastation that hit the cotton- belt South life in the 1920’s. In Tobacco Road there is no fantasy world of “moonlight and magnolias” for comparison. There is only grim poverty, ignorance and desolation. Sex is about the only diversion in the stories. Perhaps we should all reread this challenging work, not because we want to be entertained, but because we want to grasp the truth a little better.
Thank you, Joe, for a lecture, for insight. My mother loved his books, in fact I often heard her tell Germans that America had the greatest modern writers, especially women writers.
I have not read either book, and right now I am afraid I am to afraid of the pain therein. Thank you for giving me insight.
Thanks for the review, Joe. I read “Tobacco Road” and, if I remember correctly, “God’s Little Acre,” years ago, probably when I was preparing to teach a course in the Modern South. I don’t believe I’ve seen the movie versions, but, based on your assessment, perhaps I don’t need to.
Joe- Thanks for the interesting commentary on Caldwell. I was charged with the task of interviewing him for my high school newspaper when he visited Fitzgerald as part of a literary symposium in 1986. It was a big deal for a bookish kid like me. I spent about an hour with him, talking one-on-one. Scarcely a year before his death, he seemed to me a bitter old man, dismissive of his critics and never quite forgiving of those who helped tarnish his place in the literary canon. When I asked him about the controversial subject matter in his work, he dismissed that, too, noting that the South only hated him because he told the truth that everyone knew but no one would admit. In retrospect, I believe he may have been right on that point, at least.