SOURCE: "Caldwell's Stories: common Reader Response, Analysis and Appreciation at Home and Abroad," in Pembroke Magazine, No. 11, 1979, pp. 51-8.

[Comsa is a Romanian writer, educator, and critic specializing in American literature. In the essay below, Comsa surveys the critical response to Caldwell's stories, declaring: "With few exceptions, judgements passed on Caldwell [have been] onesided, sectarian, subservient to fashion as well as blind to his art, his range and significance. " The critic then calls for a reappraisal of all Caldwell's work, particularly his short stones.]

Erskine Caldwell has over one hundred and fifty short stories to his credit. More than any of the great American prose writers of his generation. That in this field his production outnumbers that of his colleagues is not surprising, for in Caldwell's rating the short story was always uncommonly high, and his faith in its function and virtues was infinitely stronger than theirs.

"I don't think there is anything to compare with the short story," Caldwell declared in an interview granted to carvel Collins and published by The Atlantic Monthly back in [July] 1958. "I think it's the best form of writing there is . . . I think you can tell as much in a story as you can in a novel, but it's more difficult to do. It's hard to accomplish a good story because you have to concentrate it so much. So I like the discipline of it."

The acceptance of this discipline is obvious in the whole body of his creation; not only in his short stories, but in all his novels, in his non-fiction writings as well as in the picture-texts.

One of Caldwell's translators, the Russian literary critic Ivan Kashkin, who in 1956 authored the introduction to a comprehensive anthology of his writings, asked himself whether Caldwell's novels were actually novels and his answer was this: "They certainly are neither short stories nor novels, but simply a special type of longer stories."

This view is largely borne out by the episodic quality of Caldwell's novels which seems to suggest that they were formed in the author's mind as story situations and later welded into novels.

The first to discern the quality of Caldwell's short stories were the editors of transition, a Paris based "international magazine for creative experiment." By printing "Midsummer Passion" early in 1929, which soon after was included in The New American caravan for the same year, they launched Caldwell on the road to notoriety. At home other little magazines, like The Quarter, Pagany, and Hound and Horn, followed suit. Then, two of Caldwell's short stories—"The Mating of Marjorie" and "A Very late Spring"—were accepted for publication in an important literary journal, Scribner's Magazine, where they appeared in the June issue of 1930.

'There's something about them that appeals strongly to me," Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner's and Sons, told Caldwell. "There's a good feeling about them. It's something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work" [cited by Caldwell in call It Experience, 1966].

American Earth, the first volume of short stories by Erskine Caldwell, was issued by Scribner's sometime in April 1931.

Neither his vast subsequent output in the field of the novel and non-fiction writing, nor his work for the screen deflected Caldwell from the short story.

His productions were not slow to gain expert appreciation. One of his earliest short stories, "Dorothy," got into O'Brien's Best Short Stories of 1931. Another, "country Full of Swedes," later to be included in We Are the living (1933), won the Yale Review's award for fiction in 1933. Sundry other stories were picked for the 1932, 1934 and 1935 issues of O'Brien's yearly collections of best short stories, and for the O. Henry Memorial Award Stories of 1934.

Prominent among those who noticed Caldwell's first volumes of short stories was the poet Horace Gregory. "Like all writers of the first rank," Gregory wrote, "he has an instinct for converting a casual episode into a symbol that carries a profound meaning."

In a perceptive analysis, Kenneth Burke, the author of A Grammar of Motives, focussed attention on some specific features of Caldwell's art. "By an astounding trick of oversimplification," Burke pointed out [in The New Republic LXXXII, No. 1062, April 10, 1935], "Caldwell puts people into complex situations while making them act with the scant, crude tropisms of an insect—and the result is cunning, where lawrence, by a varient of the same pattern, is as unwieldy as an elephant in his use of vulgar words for romantic Love making." At the same time, sensing the great complexity of Caldwell's narrative prose, he ascribed its growing popularity to many factors besides realism. "In his tomfoolery," said Burke, "he comes closer to the Dadaists; when his grotesqueness is serious, he is a Superrealist. We might compromise by calling him over all a Symbolist (if by Symbolist we mean a writer whose work serves most readily as a case history for the psychologist and whose plots are more intelligible when interpreted as dreams)."

Side by side with such comments there was vocal unfavourable criticism based on the false idea that Caldwell's reputation lowed himself in describing sexual experience.

Caldwell's writings—already published in Great Britain—soon crossed the language barrier and landed on the continent in 1936. God's little Acre in French, and American Earth in Russian, were his first books to appear in other languages.

Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the translator in French of God's little Acre and later of We Are the living, made these remarks in an essay published in a leading Paris literary monthly: "The terseness, the swift pace and the bitter taste of Caldwell's narratives bring to mind Maupassant, while their humor evokes the verve of Rabelais tempered by Dean Swift's cynicism and by Twain's earthy spirit."

A second edition of American Earth in Russian was printed in 1937, and other translations in book form as well as in periodicals followed. In the same year came a Czech version of God's little Acre, and a French version of We Are the living. Translations of Tobacco Road and of selections from Kneel to the Rising Sun appeared in the Soviet Union in 1938.

To the Italian audience Caldwell was introduced by Elio Vittorini, who wrote an appreciative presentation in 1938 and included a short story ("August Afternoon") and an excerpt from Journeyman in the very well balanced anthology of American narrative he edited in the war years.

The staging by Albert camus of Tobacco Road as early as 1938; cesare Pavese's bid, in a letter dated July 4, 1940, to translate God's little Acre in Italian ("I would be happy to face Caldwell whom I like and who fascinates me"); and Andre Gide's remark, in one of his Interviews Imaginaires, in the Paris le Figaro in 1942, "I laugh, I admit, when I read Journeyman or God's little Acre but I laugh on the wrong side of my mouth," are illustrative of Caldwell's impact on perceptive European writers during this period.

For certain reasons, very likely unrelated to the preferences and standards of continental writers or audiences, at this point American publishers began to stake more heavily on Caldwell's writings. In addition to new novels and new collections of stories and to reprints of previous hardcover editions of his books, seven anthologies of short stories were launched. Moreover a twenty five cent reprint of God's little Acre sold over five million copies within four years (1946-1950).

This avalanche of Caldwell books spurred the critics to look more closely at Caldwell. A spate of new assessments and interpretations, generally appreciative, signed by such distinguished literary authorities as Malcolm Cowley, Joseph Warren Beach, W.M. Frohock, Alfred Kazin, and Henry Seidel Canby, came forth in books and periodicals.

In his well known work American Fiction 1920-1940 (1941), Joseph Warren Beach placed Caldwell on top of the list of eight fiction writers he considered the most notable of the period.

Concentrating on Caldwell's short stories for à selection he introduced [Stories by Erskine Caldwell, 1944], Henry Seidel Canby made these remarks:

Caldwell's chief stock of emotion is pity .. . In all his narratives the rage of the writer is tempered by his pity for the victims . . . His art is definitely an art of understatement—understatement I mean of the deep issues of the story through overstatement and repetition often of the humours, the absurdities and the eccentricities of his characters . . .

Following WW II and, more particularly, during the years of the cold War, Caldwell elicited hostile and even defamatory comment from many academic critics while receiving silent treatment from others, and was confronted with competition from new generation writers and dead great authors. In the fifties, when full length estimates were devoted to most of his contemporaries, and significant essays on their writing were collected, Caldwell was neglected.

Despite this cold shouldering, his fiction fared no worse. It continued to enjoy the growing favor of readers at home and abroad.

"For every American who has read a novel by Elizabeth Roberts or Eudora Welty," Willard Thorp angrily noted [in his American Writing in the Twentieth century, 1960], "there are ten thousand who read Erskine Caldwell."

In fact, Caldwell had become the most successful fiction writer in American publishing history. In the U.S. the new generation enjoyed his books even better than the previous one.

By 1965, Where the Girls Were Different (1948) reached an inland circulation of over five hundred thousand, and Georgia Boy (1943) was approaching the two million mark. Tobacco Road (1932) was up at four million copies in 1960, and God's little Acre (1933), which had passed the five million threshold in 1950, sold another nine million copies by 1965, attaining a circulation of fourteen million copies.

Overseas translations kept appearing year in and year out. According to the Index Translationum, a yearly UNESCO publication, in 1961 there were sixteen new translations in ten countries (against only ten in seven countries in 1951), and the latest issue of this publication, which covers the year 1973, reports seventeen translations in twelve countries.

By the end of 1973 Caldwell's books had been translated into fifty languages, their aggregate circulation around the world reaching a staggering eighty million copies.

Abroad, in many countries, more than one volume of short stories were translated. In Romania, for instance, between 1945 and the present day, in addition to an unknown number of short stories printed in periodicals, there were ten Caldwell translations in book form, totalling approximately two hundred thousand copies, among these five short story selections with a circulation of a hundred and forty thousand.

The staying power of Caldwell's writings and the dimensions of the response they elicited failed to impress unfriendly critics at home. Referring to the way in which Caldwell was dealt with during this period, Robert Cantwell ventured to believe that "a reason for the first impact of his books, and for the subsequent decline in his critical standing, is more directly related to something within the intellectual world itself [The Georgia Review XI, No. 3, Fall, 1957].

Anybody who, at this juncture, would have thought to invite Caldwell to visit Europe, could have offered as an enticement these lines from Franklin's letter to Washington, dated March 5, 1780: "You would, on this side of the Sea, enjoy the Great Reputation you have acquired pure and free from those little Shades that the Jealousy and Envy of a Man's Countrymen and Contemporaries are ever endeavoring to cast over living Merit... For 1,000 Leagues have nearly the same Effect with 1,000 Years. The feeble Voice of those grovelling Passions cannot extend so far either in Time or Distance."

With few exceptions, judgements passed on Caldwell were onesided, sectarian, subservient to fashion as well as blind to his art, his range and significance.

Spiller and Thorp reproached him with "endlessly repeating his early successes in earthy comedy" [Willard Thorp and Robert E. Spiller, "End of an Era," in Literary History of the United States, edited by Spiller et al., 1948]. Henry Steele Commager [in The American Mind, 1958] lumped him together with Faulkner, Farrell, Hemingway and others and indicted the lot in these terms: "It was the reactions of the body rather than the workings of the mind that interested this school most, it confined itself as far as possible to characters with the mentality .. . of subhuman louts. . . ." Frederick J. Hoffman [in The Modern Novel in America, 1951] suggested that "Caldwell, like Steinbeck, has been victimized by a serious intellectual failure." Donald Heiney revived some old accusations: "He presents pornography for its own sake, he is fond of shocking his audiences into attention and he creates human beings devoid of any sense of decency" [Recent American Literature, 1958]. Leon Howard [in Literature and the American Tradition] insinuated that "the Marxian line disciplined him out of all contact with his material and with his readers." John Bradbury gave his verdict a more learned dressing: "Caldwell's flat style, his insensitivity to subtleties of fictional presentation allows him no means to redeem the crude vulgarities he delights to record" [Renaissance in the South, 1963].

In contrast with the mass of impressionistic chatter about Caldwell, there were, at this stage, a few mavericks who explored specific aspects of Caldwell's art or chose to deal with individual works rather than make unwarranted general pronouncements.

Max Lerner [in America as a Civilization, 1957] drew attention to the fact that in Caldwell's writings "the folk material is like a network of underground streams bursting through the landscaped surface," while William Van O'Connor [in The Grotesque: An American Genre, and other Essays, 1962] projected the grotesque strain in Caldwell's fiction in a broader cultural context.

"Our literature," Van O'Connor observed, "is filled with the grotesque more so probably than any western literature. It is a new genre merging tragedy and comedy and seeking seemingly in perverse ways the sublime . . . Perhaps the South has produced more than its share of the grotesque. The writers are easily listed; Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote and Tennesse Williams."

Referring then to Caldwell, in particular, Van O'Connor pointed out that "mixed with Caldwell's condemnation of certain of his villains is a detached delight in the complications of the villainy itself," and underscored the fact that in his writings grotesque is allied to "the comedy and pathos of the misfit."

On the other side of the Atlantic, Paul West, a British literary critic, engaging in a comparatively closer examination of Caldwell's works, [in The Modern Novel, 1963], saw Pa Stroup of Georgia Boy as an embodiment of the kind of detachment Caldwell asks of his readers "so that wit can work through wormwood and humor through error," and finds that "the difference between the Caldwell writing about the folkways of Maine (in 'The Corduroy Pants') and Caldwell writing about the folkways of Georgia (in 'Candy-Man Beechum') is pain." "The pain of realization according to conscience," West maintains, "forces Caldwell into caricature. He fights back at the incredible and the discreditable by creating enormities of his own . . ." On the strength of these observations he draws this conclusion: "It is simpleminded to look at Caldwell for comedy or documentary or mere grotesquerie. He is in each sense of the word fearfully involved in his material and much of it is raw. To read him attentively is to begin to piece together for ourselves a whole mythology of the Old South, the New South, old gentility based on oppression based on obsolete wrath . . ."

Signs of a change in the attitude towards Caldwell's work have emerged during the last decade.

On the academic level, the ice was broken by James Korges' Erskine Caldwell, published in 1969 in the University of Minnesota's well balanced and discriminating pamphlets on American writers, a series which counts among its advisers Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. This compact forty-eight page essay does a remarkable job of surveying Caldwell's vast output and of vindicating his neglected achievement. Although rather unperceptive as regards Caldwell's short story production ("One could make a collection of twenty five stories," he says, "which would reveal his talent and which would be a minor classic of American literature."), Korges' final conclusion is this: "His (i. e. Caldwell's) is a solid achievement that supports the assertion that he is one of the important writers of our time."

Next came Black Like It Is—Was by William A. Sutton of Ball State University (1974), a scholarly work discussing Caldwell's treatment of racial themes. It has the merit of being an exhaustive and sympathetic study of the subject which brings to light valuable unedited material, and that of revealing Caldwell's constant efforts at achieving the difficult "feat of criticizing society without necessarily making people aware of what he was trying to do."

Other comprehensive essays about Caldwell were recently authored by Scott MacDonald of Syracuse University, and by Jay Martin of the University of California.

The publishing world, on the other hand, has of late begun to show interest for almost forgotten fiction and non-fiction writings by Caldwell.

The Bastard, of which only a limited number of copies were run in 1929, came out in a new edition in 1974. You Have Seen Their Faces, a picture-text produced in collaboration with Margaret Bourke-White, out of print since 1937, was reissued in 1975, and North of the Danube, another picture-text of the two first published in 1939, appeared early this year.

These recent developments seem to indicate that the defiant author, who always had the courage to go his way regardless of momentary trends, is at last coming into all his rights.

Readers have long ago rendered an unequivocal verdict on his work, and it is "by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices," that "all claim to poetical honours" must be decided [Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets].

What remains to be done by honest and enlightened critics everywhere is to combat and dispel the misinterpretations of the obtuse or malicious, and to start or pursue all the sideline work that is outside the province and beyond the qualifications of the common reader, such as focussing attention on Caldwell's particular slant on the world as well as on his characteristic reading of human values, and revealing the mainsprings of his art.

Naturally, his titles to fame, like those of any other writer, must be determined on the strength of his finest achievements, irrespective of genre or proportions. For several reasons, in the selection of these, Caldwell's own opinions—who constantly strived to be his severest critic—will have to be taken into account just as much as readers' preferences and professional estimates.

Most important among these is the author's repeatedly expressed predilection for the short story in general and his favor for specific productions in particular. In 1940, for instance, he had this to say about "Candy-Man Beechum": "rather than produce a three hundred page novel I prefer writing a story like this one" [Jackpot: The Short Stories of Erskine Caldwell, 1940]. Later on, when introducing the 1952 edition of one of his collections of stories [Kneel to the Rising Sun], he made this statement: "I would not trade this particular book for any novel I have written." And he went on to say: "As a writer, I have always felt that there were many incidents and episodes in life that could be told more effectively and compellingly in the compact space of a short story than could be related in a chapter or portion of a longer and often artificially extended work of fiction." (The full significance of this statement can be grasped only when keeping in mind that, at the time, the list of his published novels comprised no less than fifteen titles, including Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, Trouble in July and Georgia Boy.)

Besides, in all his novels like in those of most masters of the genre, from Cervantes to present day writers, the short story keeps irrepressibly insinuating itself as a smaller unit of structure. A graphic example is Georgia Boy, episodes of which were written and published piecemeal over a period of years.

But a fresh look at all his output, in print as well as in manuscript form, is also imperative. Caldwell has a much larger range than generally assumed. He has written quite a number of masterpieces outside the much discussed realm of race relations or of the comic and the grotesque, and these invite and deserve investigation: penetrating depictions of adolescent awakening, as "The Strawberry Season" and "Indian Summer", vivid silhouettes, which bring to mind the paintings of Grant Wood, of New England people in action, as in "Over the Green Mountains", grim glimpses of life on the fringe of modern industrial cities, as in "Dorothy" or "Slow Death", and prosepoems of unique beauty and emotional force like "The First Autumn."

Close analysis of individual short stories and novels, and of groups of stories and novels interrelated through approach, central themes, characters or technique, is likely to yield some illuminating results. Caldwell's art was defined by Henry Seidel Canby as an art of understatement. Claude Edmonde Magny pointed out [in L'Age du roman americain, 1968] that it aimed to attain the directness and spontaneity of the motion pictures. Careful examination will prove that these are but partial truths, Caldwell's art being a flexible combination of these and many other elements, particularly familiarity with folklore and folkways.

Other worthwhile sideline work could be achieved by gathering and sifting statistical data and palpable evidence on readers response, by preparing analytical surveys of translations, both in book form and in periodicals, by collecting critical essays, as well as by investigating Caldwell's impact on creative writing at home and abroad.

Though condemned to be fragmentary, approximate and subject to the fluctuations of taste and ideals, diligent research and honest practical criticism of this type will serve not only the purpose of demonstrating the quality of Caldwell's work and increase the understanding and appreciation of the same, but also that of realizing and assessing this author's major contribution to modern American and world literature.