THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606100188
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 79 lines
The woman's face presses accusingly from the photograph as if to move beyond the medium, smack into the personal space of the observer. Her sunburnt skin is as wind-scored and age-seamed as a dry riverbed. There is at once accusation and regret in eyes that stare out unflinchingly over the caption emblazoned beneath:
``I've done the best I knew how all my life, but it didn't amount to much in the end.''
Portrait of a poor farm wife in Locket, Ga., 1937. The picture, appearing in scholar Wayne Mixon's critical and cultural biography, The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South (University Press of Virginia: 213 pp., $27.50), was taken by photographer Margaret Bourke-White. The caption came from the notebook of Caldwell, the intense writer who traveled with her to record a dark diary of the Depression South, You Have Seen Their Faces.
Bourke-White gained entry into the lives of these rural people through the empathetic rapport that Caldwell supplied.
``Erskine would be hanging over the back fence, and the farmer would be leaning on his rake, the two engaged in what I suppose could be called a conversation - that is, either Erskine or the farmer made one remark every 15 minutes,'' she wrote. ``Despite the frugal use of words, the process seemed productive of understanding on both sides.''
Caldwell cared.
The establishment recoiled.
As the Atlanta Georgian newspaper typically protested, ``Why pick out the South, when you can find want and poverty rampant in the slums of big Northern, Eastern and Western cities?''
Because it was in the South, and so was Caldwell. He was a witness. His mission was to provide these stricken faces with a distressed and distressing voice.
Don't look away, Dixieland, it said.
It still does.
Mixon, a history professor at Georgia's Mercer University, brings a too-long neglected author and his enduring material back into the literary limelight.
Some may be surprised to learn that Saul Bellow once suggested Caldwell (1903-1987) deserved the Nobel Prize. William Faulkner rated Caldwell as one of the five best writers of his time, alongside (naturally) himself, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he learned a lot from Caldwell.
So did the establishment South, but the difference is that it didn't want to.
It was much easier to dismiss disturbing books about the rural Southern poor, like Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), as trash about trash.
The lurid covers of paperback editions of these books in the late '40s added fuel to the fire. Caldwell collaborated. In the summer of 1948, en route to a talk for aspiring writers at the University of Kansas, the writer showed up as star of the grand opening of the 25th super drugstore in the Katz chain. He autographed hundreds of books and posed for pix with employees and customers.
The Southern literati regarded these popular shenanigans as vulgar and reprehensible.
Today Norman Mailer shows up at Crown Books in McLean, Va., along with Colin Powell and Las Vegas illusionists Seigfried and Roy.
Showmanship aside, Georgia-born Caldwell was an authentic Presbyterian PK (preacher's kid) whose anger at the hypocritical torpor of the white church and the brutal injustice of the post-Civil War world still speaks compellingly of his time and our own. Though some of the formerly daring sex now seems only dumb, the genuine rage at social and racial inequities remains as sere as the reproachful gaze of a Locket farm wife or the opening for ``Savannah River Payday'' (1930):
``The breeze that had been coming up the river since early that morning shifted to the east and the full stench of sun-rotted mule flesh settled over the swamp. The July sun blazed over the earth and shriveled the grass and weeds until they were as dry as crisp autumn leaves. A cloud of dense black smoke blew over from the other side of the river when somebody threw an armful of fat pine on the fire under the moonshine still.''
So much for the Sunny South, said the native son. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. by CNB