December 17: Erskine
Caldwell was born on this day in 1903 in rural Georgia. The son of a
Presbyterian minister, Caldwell often accompanied his father as he spread his
Social Gospel among the farmers and blue collar workers of the American South.
Both Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Caldwell's two
most famous novels, combine generational poverty and fundamentalist, though
often bent, religion. In the excerpt below, from the end of God's Little Acre, the patriarch Ty Ty is
trying to explain that his gold-digging obsession is based on more than money:
It ain't so important that I get money out of God's little
acre to give to the church and the preacher, it's just the fact that I set it
up in His name. All you boys seem to think about is what you can see and
touch—that ain't living. It's the things you can feel inside of you—that's what
living is made for. True, as you say, God ain't got a penny of money out of
that piece of ground, but it's the fact that I set God's little acre aside out
there that matters.
But it was the sex and Caldwell's skill as a "master of
rural ribaldry" which made God's
Little Acre an all-time bestseller, and which drew the wrath of censors and
fellow southerners. Margaret Mitchell complained that Caldwell (and Faulkner)
had cartooned their home, "betraying the South for Yankee dollars."
Perhaps because he had written both his hit novels while living in Maine,
Caldwell determined to prove that he had not imagined his portrait of
sharecropper poverty. During the middle years of the Great Depression he toured
the South with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, documenting sharecropper
poverty; when their collaborative photo-essay You Have Seen Their Faces was published in 1937 (three years before
Walker Evans and James Agee published Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men), it, too, was a bestseller.
Caldwell's autobiography describes Maine winters devoted to
the wood-stove and writing, nourished by dwindling supplies of potatoes and preserves.
Perhaps imagining the heat and passions of home-state Georgia kept him warm:
"Upstairs in my unheated workroom I wore a navy watch cap pulled down over
the ears, a sweater, a leather jerkin, and a padded storm coat while seated at
my typewriter. …The only sign of life would sometimes be seen on clear days
under pale blue skies when an antlered moose tramped laboriously through the
deep snowdrifts."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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