WITH ALL MY MIGHT
Erskine Caldwell
Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1987
332 pp., $19.95
Once wildly popular, Erskine Caldwell's novels are today consigned to the disappearing five-and-dime or the dim corridors of used bookstores, where for a quarter you can still pick up a paperback edition of Trouble in July or Certain Women. If Caldwell's only distinction was that he was once hailed by Time magazine as "the world's leading best-selling novelist," or that he wrote fifty-five books which together sold 80 million copies in forty-four languages, then this neglect might not be so surprising. Best-selling novelists are often forgotten. But Caldwell was considered a literary writer, discovered by Maxwell Perkins and widely praised in the 1930s, along with Faulkner and Steinbeck, as a heavyweight American writer.
Caldwell's 'New American'
Caldwell, who died this past spring at the age of eighty-four, was, remember, the writer who introduced "tobacco road" to the world, immortalizing it in 1932 as the title of his first full-fledged novel. Since then "tobacco road" has become a virtual synonym for poverty, grim destitution, and even depravity among the poor of the Deep South. With Tobacco Road and the novels that followed, Caldwell introduced a "new American" to the literary world and the nation in general. Caldwell's new American was not heroic or morally uplifting; he was poor, hungry, illiterate, ugly, inarticulate, lecherous, bigoted, and lazy. He was a victim both of circumstance and his own inertia. He could no more find a politician to represent him than buy a train ticket for Maine or California. He was stuck where he was, and that was the once-fertile cotton fields of the Deep South where he worked as a sharecropper or tenant farmer, trying to eke an existence from long-depleted land that was owned by another man, standing by helplessly while his sons and daughters fled the beloved but unyielding earth for jobs as millhands and prostitutes that awaited them in the city.
He was Jeeter Lester, dirty and goatish, selling his daughter for a sack of turnips. He was Ty Ty Walden, feeble patriarch of God's Little Acre, digging in vain for gold in ravished land. He was countless farmers, lawmakers, landlords, and preachers, characters black and white, whom Caldwell introduced to the nation's readers, provoking simultaneous cries of admiration, pain, and laughter - and, before long, accusations of "liar," "traitor," and "pornographer."
Caldwell's American shocked not only this country, but the world. As one French critic put it, his countrymen were "astonished to discover hungry people in the United States." But this was the America of the Depression, and plenty of people were hungry. Caldwell wrote about them in a manner that was at once sympathetic, outraged, sickening, and even hysterically funny. Critics groped for ways to categorize him: Before long his style had been compared with Hemingway's, his humor to Mark Twain's, his pessimism to Maupassant's, his realism to Dickens' and Zola's, his peasants to Goya's, and his bawdiness to Chaucer's and Rabelais's.
For a while he could do little wrong. He was reviewed and anthologized. His novels were picked up by
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