Mark Saha's Blog - Posts Tagged "fiction"
Books that mattered to me …
If I had to pick one novel that most impressed me it has to be War and Peace, though it takes some work to appreciate it. What I admired most was the breadth of human experience about which he wrote so intimately and well. Tolstoy served in the Crimean War and used that experience to write like Hemingway, bringing a sense of absolute realty to the combat portions. (Hemingway in boasting of writers he had beat, grudgingly admitted “I didn’t beat the Russians.”) Those who read accounts of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia will know the snapshots in Tolstoy’s story are not random but taken from specific actual events in the chronology. But he wrote with equal ability of family; a personal favorite moment is young Natasha attending the opera in Moscow at sixteen. She is so dazzled that she shakes with excitement and flushes with embarrassment but, Tolstoy writes, is unaware it is those very qualities that wins the hearts of Muscovites and make her the talk of the evening. We see her grow from a mischievous and intelligent child into an adult mother with thoroughly conventional views, which is a little sad. But it is this distance between war and peace and his ability to write of each with insight that impressed me.
I liked Scott Fitzgerald’s prose but notice (or imagine I do) how his experience in Hollywood affected it. His early works (e.g., “The Offshore Pirate”) seem to me a poet boldly writing in prose. The movies made him into more of an empiricist, telling the story in more conventional terms of what we see and what people say. “Tender is the Night” frustrates me because it might have been his best work, but is clearly marred by his drinking and struggle with Zelda’s breakdown. There is a Hollywood screenwriter who claims he actually wrote small portions of it, when Scott called him over in the middle of the night to try to make sense of passages which had become hopelessly confused. Scott’s “Basil and Josephine” stories won my heart shamelessly, and “The Pat Hobby Stories” are quite insightful about Hollywood under the studio system.
Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” deeply affected me in undergraduate days as a study of how little we control when, how, and with whom we fall in love. I was disappointed by his attempt to depict young Philip as intellectual by having him study philosophy. It seemed obvious to me Maugham had merely consulted a few standard philosophy texts to extract “famous quotes” by “great philosophers”; there is nothing critical or original in Philip’s grappling with the subject to suggest his understanding is more than rote and superficial. Looking back, it was probably unfair of me to find this so annoying in a book that otherwise taught me much about life.
Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841) hugely influenced me in college, and persuaded me there is nothing so fantastic that someone somewhere will not believe it. In addition to the spectacular lunacies such as witchcraft and the Crusades, he explores mundane silliness like “the politics of hair and beard” and slang expressions that come and go in the cities -- in his day, “quoz” and “there he goes with his eye out.” This book is public domain so finding an unabridged copy can be a challenge. Many editions are edited to include only financial hysterias as a cautionary tale for investors, but do not warn the buyer of substantial omissions.
William Lecky’s “Rise of Rationalism in Europe” (1865) is a more scholarly companion to Mackay. Lecky concludes that once a hysteria takes off on a rip (e.g., the witch mania), it is immune to reason, but eventually burns out when people simply lose interest. He points out that abundant evidence for existence of witches has never been disproven -- authority of scripture, eye-witness accounts, signed confessions, transcripts of court testimony, etc. Today, Lecky writes, people simply no longer think such evidence worth considering.
Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy” influenced me because he does not simply treat the views of various philosophers in the abstract, but places each in his own time to expose ulterior motives that influenced his thinking. This originated as a series of lectures for art students at the Barnes Institute, and reads more like lectures in its presentation than material laid out for a book.
I liked Scott Fitzgerald’s prose but notice (or imagine I do) how his experience in Hollywood affected it. His early works (e.g., “The Offshore Pirate”) seem to me a poet boldly writing in prose. The movies made him into more of an empiricist, telling the story in more conventional terms of what we see and what people say. “Tender is the Night” frustrates me because it might have been his best work, but is clearly marred by his drinking and struggle with Zelda’s breakdown. There is a Hollywood screenwriter who claims he actually wrote small portions of it, when Scott called him over in the middle of the night to try to make sense of passages which had become hopelessly confused. Scott’s “Basil and Josephine” stories won my heart shamelessly, and “The Pat Hobby Stories” are quite insightful about Hollywood under the studio system.
Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” deeply affected me in undergraduate days as a study of how little we control when, how, and with whom we fall in love. I was disappointed by his attempt to depict young Philip as intellectual by having him study philosophy. It seemed obvious to me Maugham had merely consulted a few standard philosophy texts to extract “famous quotes” by “great philosophers”; there is nothing critical or original in Philip’s grappling with the subject to suggest his understanding is more than rote and superficial. Looking back, it was probably unfair of me to find this so annoying in a book that otherwise taught me much about life.
Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841) hugely influenced me in college, and persuaded me there is nothing so fantastic that someone somewhere will not believe it. In addition to the spectacular lunacies such as witchcraft and the Crusades, he explores mundane silliness like “the politics of hair and beard” and slang expressions that come and go in the cities -- in his day, “quoz” and “there he goes with his eye out.” This book is public domain so finding an unabridged copy can be a challenge. Many editions are edited to include only financial hysterias as a cautionary tale for investors, but do not warn the buyer of substantial omissions.
William Lecky’s “Rise of Rationalism in Europe” (1865) is a more scholarly companion to Mackay. Lecky concludes that once a hysteria takes off on a rip (e.g., the witch mania), it is immune to reason, but eventually burns out when people simply lose interest. He points out that abundant evidence for existence of witches has never been disproven -- authority of scripture, eye-witness accounts, signed confessions, transcripts of court testimony, etc. Today, Lecky writes, people simply no longer think such evidence worth considering.
Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy” influenced me because he does not simply treat the views of various philosophers in the abstract, but places each in his own time to expose ulterior motives that influenced his thinking. This originated as a series of lectures for art students at the Barnes Institute, and reads more like lectures in its presentation than material laid out for a book.
Right and Wrong in Fiction
Goodreads has a somewhat peculiar policy, in that they allow an author to rate and review his own book. For a while I resisted this for what seemed to me sound ethical reasons. First, it felt blatantly wrong to boost the ratings of your own book by voting for it. And second, I’ve always felt a story has failed somehow if its author has to explain it. Any work that aspires to artistic merit is a statement that speaks for itself. The public is entitled to think of it whatever they will, because the author has had his say, and it is now their turn. He should not be entitled to further elaborate or defend himself.
Nonetheless, the weakness of human flesh being what it is, I eventually succumbed to temptation. So here is my review:
LOST HORSES – 5 stars
I notice in retrospect that my narrator’s voice in these tales advocates nothing, takes no sides, and passes no judgment upon the characters.
That’s not to say I don’t care, because I know these people extremely well, or like to think I do, and certainly have my opinions about them. But what I think doesn’t matter here, because my purpose was to recreate them artistically, hopefully well enough that the reader is left with something to ponder, and will want to pass his own judgment.
The same goes for issues like horse slaughter. “Wide River” raises some of the moral conundrums of that economic paradox, which is what I wanted to do. But rather than tell readers what they “ought” to think, I simply raise awareness of the issue in passing, during the course of what is essentially a coming of age story.
“Why Men Cheat in August” is likely inspired in part by Eric Rohmer’s French comedy Pauline at the Beach (1983), a depiction of how differently young people and supposedly mature adults see the same world.
“Whiskey Creek” is a stark depiction of the power of alcohol to destroy the moral fabric of a human being. It advocates neither the “disease” nor the “moral failing” theory of alcoholism, yet exploits that dichotomy to play a little trick on the reader. We first see Gus as a reprobate bereft of redeeming qualities, likely causing most to despise and dismiss him as unworthy of a story. Then he is unjustly deprived of his beloved Misty, and we feel whipsawed by an unexpected rush of compassion. The reader is left to work out what is to be made of this conundrum.
Call me old fashioned, but I like to use the omniscient third person voice with no point of view and without prejudice so that a reader is left with something to grapple with personally. That goes against the grain of much contemporary genre fiction in which we expect the author to leave no doubt about what we are supposed to think or how we ought to feel. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the pleasures of sincere genre fiction as much as anyone. But it is good to remember an author has a lot more choices than that; see, e.g., Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
I’m not a calculating writer and didn’t do any of these things deliberately. The book just came out this way. Looking back, I guess it must have seemed to me the best way to write these stories.
If anyone wants to kick the above literary comments around further, I’m open to discussion on my author’s page.
Nonetheless, the weakness of human flesh being what it is, I eventually succumbed to temptation. So here is my review:
LOST HORSES – 5 stars
I notice in retrospect that my narrator’s voice in these tales advocates nothing, takes no sides, and passes no judgment upon the characters.
That’s not to say I don’t care, because I know these people extremely well, or like to think I do, and certainly have my opinions about them. But what I think doesn’t matter here, because my purpose was to recreate them artistically, hopefully well enough that the reader is left with something to ponder, and will want to pass his own judgment.
The same goes for issues like horse slaughter. “Wide River” raises some of the moral conundrums of that economic paradox, which is what I wanted to do. But rather than tell readers what they “ought” to think, I simply raise awareness of the issue in passing, during the course of what is essentially a coming of age story.
“Why Men Cheat in August” is likely inspired in part by Eric Rohmer’s French comedy Pauline at the Beach (1983), a depiction of how differently young people and supposedly mature adults see the same world.
“Whiskey Creek” is a stark depiction of the power of alcohol to destroy the moral fabric of a human being. It advocates neither the “disease” nor the “moral failing” theory of alcoholism, yet exploits that dichotomy to play a little trick on the reader. We first see Gus as a reprobate bereft of redeeming qualities, likely causing most to despise and dismiss him as unworthy of a story. Then he is unjustly deprived of his beloved Misty, and we feel whipsawed by an unexpected rush of compassion. The reader is left to work out what is to be made of this conundrum.
Call me old fashioned, but I like to use the omniscient third person voice with no point of view and without prejudice so that a reader is left with something to grapple with personally. That goes against the grain of much contemporary genre fiction in which we expect the author to leave no doubt about what we are supposed to think or how we ought to feel. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the pleasures of sincere genre fiction as much as anyone. But it is good to remember an author has a lot more choices than that; see, e.g., Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
I’m not a calculating writer and didn’t do any of these things deliberately. The book just came out this way. Looking back, I guess it must have seemed to me the best way to write these stories.
If anyone wants to kick the above literary comments around further, I’m open to discussion on my author’s page.
Opening Lines and Voice in Fiction
Compare The Great Gatsby with The Catcher in the Rye for an example of two novels with strikingly different but distinctive voices. It occurred to me the voice of each has probably contributed much to its endurance as a literary classic.
These thoughts came to mind after reading some comments by Stephen King which I pass along for anyone interested. (This is my good deed for today.)
Stephen King on Openings and Voices:
… for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. … People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.
With really good books, a powerful sense of voice is established in the first line. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse?
We've all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation, because right away you engage the reader's interest. This is what we call a "hook," and it's true, to a point. This sentence from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice certainly plunges you into a specific time and place, just as something is happening:
“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”
Of course, it's a little do-or-die here for the writer. A really bad first line can convince me not to buy a book -- because, god, I've got plenty of books already -- and an unappealing style in the first moments is reason enough to scurry off.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...
These thoughts came to mind after reading some comments by Stephen King which I pass along for anyone interested. (This is my good deed for today.)
Stephen King on Openings and Voices:
… for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. … People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.
With really good books, a powerful sense of voice is established in the first line. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse?
We've all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation, because right away you engage the reader's interest. This is what we call a "hook," and it's true, to a point. This sentence from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice certainly plunges you into a specific time and place, just as something is happening:
“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”
Of course, it's a little do-or-die here for the writer. A really bad first line can convince me not to buy a book -- because, god, I've got plenty of books already -- and an unappealing style in the first moments is reason enough to scurry off.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...
The Homeless at Santa Monica Library
It was inevitable, I suppose.
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock that the Los Angeles area is in the midst of a growing and catastrophic homeless crisis. Because I go daily to the Santa Monica Main Library, where I write in a study room, I’ve witnessed an evolving change as a compassionate policy reaches limits.
The library opens at 10 a.m., but if you arrive a little before, you can’t get within fifteen yards of the door. The homeless, many with possessions in several plastic trash bags, lay on the sidewalk waiting to get inside. When the door opens, there is a rush as these homeless occupy pretty much all the available study desks and tables, stack their trash bags on tables and floor, plug in cell phones to recharge, and go to sleep. They are a mixed lot. Many are elderly lost looking women. Several are sinister looking men who wear sunglasses and heavy sweaters with hoods drawn in 80 degree humid weather, and lurk among the shelves. Often there is standing room only in the restrooms.
The Bookmark Café in the courtyard used to open at 8 am. One could buy breakfast there, and eat at an umbrella table alongside the reflection pool. But the homeless with their trash bags occupied all the tables, so patrons had no place to sit, and the café did no business. The Bookmark Café now opens at 10 am like the library.
Santa Monica is among the most compassionate of California cities for the homeless. I have noticed by comparison, in my daily walks, that the Los Angeles Public Library in Venice will not allow me to use their restroom. You have to have an LA library card, and present it at the desk, to get a restroom key.
But over the past several months Santa Monica’s policy has begun to crumble under the sheer staggering proportions of this human tragedy:
The periodicals wing, with its many study desks and tables, is now closed to the public “due to recent incidents of vandalism.” The Santa Monica Collection room and its study desks is also closed to the public for that reason.
Then came yesterday:
When I entered the front door, access to the library was blocked by a table. A little slip of a Japanese woman stood there, with two huge uniformed guards standing behind her for protection. She handed me a flier, and said I had to agree to the rules therein to be admitted.
Here is a sample from the new list of prohibited behaviors in Santa Monica Library:
> Engaging in or threatening physical assault or abuse
> Threatening or harassing other patrons or staff, including but not limited to verbal threats, stalking, offensive staring or touching.
> Displaying a weapon of any type, including firearms, knife, sword, or similar item.
> Brandishing any object (e.g. baseball bat or golf club) in a threatening manner
> Lewd conduct as defined by Penal Code 647a
> Blocking aisles or access to library facilities, furnishings, or equipment
> Sleeping in the library or on library grounds
> Using restrooms for bathing, shaving or washing of hair or clothing
> Placing feet on tables, chairs, or against walls.
> Sitting or lying on the floor
> Using the library while shirtless, barefoot or without shoes.
> Using the library while ones bodily hygiene is so noxious that it prevents others from library use.
> Misusing library property (e.g. using books as a footstool or pillow)
> Bringing any bicycle, shopping cart, or other wheeled devices to carry personal property into the library
> Bringing sleeping bags, tarps, bed rolls, mats, or blankets into the library.
> Using the library while under the influence of alcohol or drugs or other controlled substances.
Clearly, it seems to me, the tragedy of the homeless must not be even on the radar of the government, if things have reached the point that these unfortunates must seek refuge in libraries and public parks intended for other purposes. There are no winners here.
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock that the Los Angeles area is in the midst of a growing and catastrophic homeless crisis. Because I go daily to the Santa Monica Main Library, where I write in a study room, I’ve witnessed an evolving change as a compassionate policy reaches limits.
The library opens at 10 a.m., but if you arrive a little before, you can’t get within fifteen yards of the door. The homeless, many with possessions in several plastic trash bags, lay on the sidewalk waiting to get inside. When the door opens, there is a rush as these homeless occupy pretty much all the available study desks and tables, stack their trash bags on tables and floor, plug in cell phones to recharge, and go to sleep. They are a mixed lot. Many are elderly lost looking women. Several are sinister looking men who wear sunglasses and heavy sweaters with hoods drawn in 80 degree humid weather, and lurk among the shelves. Often there is standing room only in the restrooms.
The Bookmark Café in the courtyard used to open at 8 am. One could buy breakfast there, and eat at an umbrella table alongside the reflection pool. But the homeless with their trash bags occupied all the tables, so patrons had no place to sit, and the café did no business. The Bookmark Café now opens at 10 am like the library.
Santa Monica is among the most compassionate of California cities for the homeless. I have noticed by comparison, in my daily walks, that the Los Angeles Public Library in Venice will not allow me to use their restroom. You have to have an LA library card, and present it at the desk, to get a restroom key.
But over the past several months Santa Monica’s policy has begun to crumble under the sheer staggering proportions of this human tragedy:
The periodicals wing, with its many study desks and tables, is now closed to the public “due to recent incidents of vandalism.” The Santa Monica Collection room and its study desks is also closed to the public for that reason.
Then came yesterday:
When I entered the front door, access to the library was blocked by a table. A little slip of a Japanese woman stood there, with two huge uniformed guards standing behind her for protection. She handed me a flier, and said I had to agree to the rules therein to be admitted.
Here is a sample from the new list of prohibited behaviors in Santa Monica Library:
> Engaging in or threatening physical assault or abuse
> Threatening or harassing other patrons or staff, including but not limited to verbal threats, stalking, offensive staring or touching.
> Displaying a weapon of any type, including firearms, knife, sword, or similar item.
> Brandishing any object (e.g. baseball bat or golf club) in a threatening manner
> Lewd conduct as defined by Penal Code 647a
> Blocking aisles or access to library facilities, furnishings, or equipment
> Sleeping in the library or on library grounds
> Using restrooms for bathing, shaving or washing of hair or clothing
> Placing feet on tables, chairs, or against walls.
> Sitting or lying on the floor
> Using the library while shirtless, barefoot or without shoes.
> Using the library while ones bodily hygiene is so noxious that it prevents others from library use.
> Misusing library property (e.g. using books as a footstool or pillow)
> Bringing any bicycle, shopping cart, or other wheeled devices to carry personal property into the library
> Bringing sleeping bags, tarps, bed rolls, mats, or blankets into the library.
> Using the library while under the influence of alcohol or drugs or other controlled substances.
Clearly, it seems to me, the tragedy of the homeless must not be even on the radar of the government, if things have reached the point that these unfortunates must seek refuge in libraries and public parks intended for other purposes. There are no winners here.
Santa Monica Daily Press reviews Lost Horses
A neighbor passed along a copy of my Lost Horses to columnist Jack Neworth of the Santa Monica Daily Press.
https://www.smdp.com/laughing-matters...
https://www.smdp.com/laughing-matters...
Lost Horses Giveaway
For anyone interested, I’m offering 10 signed copies of Lost Horses on a Goodreads Giveaway that runs Nov 10 – Dec 10 2019.
You can enter here --
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
You can enter here --
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Tobacco Road – A Review
My impression from some Goodreads reviewers is that Tobacco Road has drifted so far out of context over the passing years that contemporary readers scarcely know what to make of it. One called the book an argument for Eugenics, while another says Caldwell is racist, and others speculate whether tobacco roads even existed.
Starting with the last of these, Caldwell writes (Chapter VII):
“The road on which Jeeter lived was the original tobacco road his grandfather had made. It was about fifteen miles long, and … ended on the bluffs at the river. The road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed […] Sometimes the casks had been pushed by gangs of negroes to the river steamboats, other times they were pulled by teams of mules … thousands of hogsheads had been rolled along the crest of the ridge and they had made a smooth firm road. There were scores of tobacco roads on western side of the Savannah Valley … Any one walking cross-county would find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike.”
Crop rotation was not understood back then, and the soil soon became depleted of nutrients needed to grow tobacco. Cotton was substituted, but after a few years the yield was again so poor that farmers struggled to survive. Caldwell was the son of a rural Presbyterian minister, and as a boy had traveled with his father, riding a cotton wagon loaded with food which they distributed to the unfortunates who lived along tobacco roads in the early part of the 20th century. The bitter poverty and human destitution he saw left an indelible impression.
His break as a writer came when short stories published in small literary journals caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott recommended him to famed Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins who worked with major authors like Hemingway and Thomas Wolf; (Scott’s letter to Perkins is in Fitzgerald’s collected letters). Perkins invited Caldwell to submit to Scribner’s Magazine. After publishing a few stories, and issuing a hardcopy story collection, he asked for a novel – and got Tobacco Road.
Perkins believed the book had merit but warned he would have to fight for its publication. Scribners had a profitable textbook division, and feared the novel would trigger a boycott of their textbooks in Southern schools. Tobacco Road had an initial sale of only about two thousand copies, and the reader response postcards inserted in each copy by Scribners were not encouraging. Then a Broadway play based on it began to set records, and readers returning to the source novel found, as Perkins had, literary merit.
The suggestion by one reviewer here that Caldwell advocated Eugenics is not credible; it’s apparently in reference to a 2007 paper by academic Ashley Craig Lancaster (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218198). Eugenics advocates believed not just the physically defective but also the morally degenerate could be eliminated by selective breeding. Ms. Lancaster seems to imagine, based only on her reading of the text, that Caldwell’s intention was to dramatize the need for such selective breeding. But there is no obvious genetic defect in the Lester family tree. Jeeter’s grandfather owned a great tobacco plantation, and his father inherited half of it. The depletion of the sandy soil made it useless for growing tobacco and increasingly unprofitable for cotton. Debts had forced Jeeter to surrender ownership of the land on which he now struggles to survive as a tenant farmer.
But Jeeter is not lacking in moral ambition:
“The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had the usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground … he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case someone did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano.”
Caldwell always said the theme of his books was “the effects of poverty on the human spirit.” He was sympathetic to the socialists and communists of his day and states bluntly in these pages (Chapter VII): “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”
Instead we see Jeeter exploited by the capitalist system:
“Once he had secured a two-hundred-dollar loan […] on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that too […] When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and the mule, too.”
Even less credible than Eugenics is another reviewer’s claim that Caldwell was racist. His novel “Trouble in July” (1940) is a study of the economic and social forces behind racial violence in the rural South, while “Place Called Estherville” (1949) looks at the same forces in an urban environment. Ray McIver, a Black playwright, actor, teacher, and personal friend to Caldwell, in 1982 edited a collection of Caldwell race themed stories as “The Black & White Stories of Erskine Caldwell.”
Caldwell believed in his youth that education was the cure for racism. He gave up on that hope in later years, and became convinced that intermarriage was the only cure, and said he was always encouraged when he saw an interracial couple.
Caldwell traveled the United States by automobile in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, and published his observations as “Some American People” (1935). He toured the Deep South with photographer Margaret-Bourke White in 1936 and they produced the picture-and-text collaboration “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937). Bourke-White’s autobiography “Portrait of Myself” (1963) has an insightful chapter on her marriage to Caldwell along with some fascinating photographs.
George Snell, in his literary history “The Shapers of American Fiction – 1798-1947” writes:
“Emerging as a salient figure with extraordinary rapidity in the early ‘30s, Erskine Caldwell no doubt owed his popularity partly to fortuitous circumstances. Here was a writer concerned with the problems that engrossed all minds in those days of economic depression, and able to deal with such problems artistically; that is, in terms of human reactions. He could not only treat social issues artistically but extract what there could be of humor from them, a prodigious feat, it had seemed, since most of the fiction then current was solemn or hortatory or militant; a belly laugh was a prized rarity. He loomed on the scene quickly, portentously, and in the five years, 1931 through 1935, published seven books that established his reputation.
“Seemingly out of nowhere, with scarcely any observable apprenticeship, here was a major American writer pouring out in book after book a skillful, original kind of art and interpreting a phase of life that only Faulkner had previously investigated. If some readers saw a resemblance between the macabre humor in “As I Lay Dying” and that of some stories in “We Are The Living” (1933), it was only incidental, and the purport of the stories was positive, a call to an aroused social awareness, in a way and toward an end that no Faulkner story ever had.”
Starting with the last of these, Caldwell writes (Chapter VII):
“The road on which Jeeter lived was the original tobacco road his grandfather had made. It was about fifteen miles long, and … ended on the bluffs at the river. The road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed […] Sometimes the casks had been pushed by gangs of negroes to the river steamboats, other times they were pulled by teams of mules … thousands of hogsheads had been rolled along the crest of the ridge and they had made a smooth firm road. There were scores of tobacco roads on western side of the Savannah Valley … Any one walking cross-county would find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike.”
Crop rotation was not understood back then, and the soil soon became depleted of nutrients needed to grow tobacco. Cotton was substituted, but after a few years the yield was again so poor that farmers struggled to survive. Caldwell was the son of a rural Presbyterian minister, and as a boy had traveled with his father, riding a cotton wagon loaded with food which they distributed to the unfortunates who lived along tobacco roads in the early part of the 20th century. The bitter poverty and human destitution he saw left an indelible impression.
His break as a writer came when short stories published in small literary journals caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott recommended him to famed Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins who worked with major authors like Hemingway and Thomas Wolf; (Scott’s letter to Perkins is in Fitzgerald’s collected letters). Perkins invited Caldwell to submit to Scribner’s Magazine. After publishing a few stories, and issuing a hardcopy story collection, he asked for a novel – and got Tobacco Road.
Perkins believed the book had merit but warned he would have to fight for its publication. Scribners had a profitable textbook division, and feared the novel would trigger a boycott of their textbooks in Southern schools. Tobacco Road had an initial sale of only about two thousand copies, and the reader response postcards inserted in each copy by Scribners were not encouraging. Then a Broadway play based on it began to set records, and readers returning to the source novel found, as Perkins had, literary merit.
The suggestion by one reviewer here that Caldwell advocated Eugenics is not credible; it’s apparently in reference to a 2007 paper by academic Ashley Craig Lancaster (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218198). Eugenics advocates believed not just the physically defective but also the morally degenerate could be eliminated by selective breeding. Ms. Lancaster seems to imagine, based only on her reading of the text, that Caldwell’s intention was to dramatize the need for such selective breeding. But there is no obvious genetic defect in the Lester family tree. Jeeter’s grandfather owned a great tobacco plantation, and his father inherited half of it. The depletion of the sandy soil made it useless for growing tobacco and increasingly unprofitable for cotton. Debts had forced Jeeter to surrender ownership of the land on which he now struggles to survive as a tenant farmer.
But Jeeter is not lacking in moral ambition:
“The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had the usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground … he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case someone did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano.”
Caldwell always said the theme of his books was “the effects of poverty on the human spirit.” He was sympathetic to the socialists and communists of his day and states bluntly in these pages (Chapter VII): “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”
Instead we see Jeeter exploited by the capitalist system:
“Once he had secured a two-hundred-dollar loan […] on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that too […] When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and the mule, too.”
Even less credible than Eugenics is another reviewer’s claim that Caldwell was racist. His novel “Trouble in July” (1940) is a study of the economic and social forces behind racial violence in the rural South, while “Place Called Estherville” (1949) looks at the same forces in an urban environment. Ray McIver, a Black playwright, actor, teacher, and personal friend to Caldwell, in 1982 edited a collection of Caldwell race themed stories as “The Black & White Stories of Erskine Caldwell.”
Caldwell believed in his youth that education was the cure for racism. He gave up on that hope in later years, and became convinced that intermarriage was the only cure, and said he was always encouraged when he saw an interracial couple.
Caldwell traveled the United States by automobile in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, and published his observations as “Some American People” (1935). He toured the Deep South with photographer Margaret-Bourke White in 1936 and they produced the picture-and-text collaboration “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937). Bourke-White’s autobiography “Portrait of Myself” (1963) has an insightful chapter on her marriage to Caldwell along with some fascinating photographs.
George Snell, in his literary history “The Shapers of American Fiction – 1798-1947” writes:
“Emerging as a salient figure with extraordinary rapidity in the early ‘30s, Erskine Caldwell no doubt owed his popularity partly to fortuitous circumstances. Here was a writer concerned with the problems that engrossed all minds in those days of economic depression, and able to deal with such problems artistically; that is, in terms of human reactions. He could not only treat social issues artistically but extract what there could be of humor from them, a prodigious feat, it had seemed, since most of the fiction then current was solemn or hortatory or militant; a belly laugh was a prized rarity. He loomed on the scene quickly, portentously, and in the five years, 1931 through 1935, published seven books that established his reputation.
“Seemingly out of nowhere, with scarcely any observable apprenticeship, here was a major American writer pouring out in book after book a skillful, original kind of art and interpreting a phase of life that only Faulkner had previously investigated. If some readers saw a resemblance between the macabre humor in “As I Lay Dying” and that of some stories in “We Are The Living” (1933), it was only incidental, and the purport of the stories was positive, a call to an aroused social awareness, in a way and toward an end that no Faulkner story ever had.”
Wide River Revisited
Here is a recent but not uncommon example of the mischief depicted in my Lost Horses story “Wide River”:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/alabama-ve...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/alabama-ve...
My Santa Monica Writers Group
Write Away is a writing group to which I have belonged for many years, sponsored by the Santa Monica Public Library which occasionally publishes a collection of members’ works.
Ed Seaward is a Canadian novelist who discovered us on a visit to California a few years back, and now winters in Santa Monica for three months of every year to participate in our meetings.
FAIR is his first published novel, released by The Porcupine’s Quill Press in Ontario last month. Set among the 50,000 homeless in Los Angeles County, it is the compelling tale of twenty year old Eyon, a toothless and autistic high school dropout who delivers drugs around the city for a local drug kingpin.
Ed is writing biographical profiles of Write Away members on his blog and started the series with mine. If interested in Ed’s novel or his Write Away bios, paste the link below into your browser.
Obviously my girlfriend is very pleased with him right now. But my younger brother in Texas told me, “Ed makes your life look a lot more interesting than it really was.”
http://www.edseaward.com/
Ed Seaward is a Canadian novelist who discovered us on a visit to California a few years back, and now winters in Santa Monica for three months of every year to participate in our meetings.
FAIR is his first published novel, released by The Porcupine’s Quill Press in Ontario last month. Set among the 50,000 homeless in Los Angeles County, it is the compelling tale of twenty year old Eyon, a toothless and autistic high school dropout who delivers drugs around the city for a local drug kingpin.
Ed is writing biographical profiles of Write Away members on his blog and started the series with mine. If interested in Ed’s novel or his Write Away bios, paste the link below into your browser.
Obviously my girlfriend is very pleased with him right now. But my younger brother in Texas told me, “Ed makes your life look a lot more interesting than it really was.”
http://www.edseaward.com/
EQUUS FILM & ARTS FEST AWARDS
WINNERS OF THE 2021 9th ANNUAL EQUUS FILM & ARTS FEST AWARDS
The WINNIE Awards
The Literary
Equine Fiction Western: Mark Saha – Lady Joe
Equine Fiction Western Runner-Up: Amy Campbell - Breaker: Tales of the Outlaw Mages
Short Stories: Mark Saha - Lost Horses
http://nebula.wsimg.com/c6854b91a3ec2...
The WINNIE Awards
The Literary
Equine Fiction Western: Mark Saha – Lady Joe
Equine Fiction Western Runner-Up: Amy Campbell - Breaker: Tales of the Outlaw Mages
Short Stories: Mark Saha - Lost Horses
http://nebula.wsimg.com/c6854b91a3ec2...
