We have come to think, through the blithe dichotomy of some old Greek, of tragedy and comedy as two absolute moods. The reviewers of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road called it a novel of terse tragic power; and these same gentry hailed its very similar successor, God's little Acre, as the work of a leading American humorist. We now have the advantage of glimpsing, however briefly, the varied aspects of Caldwell's genius. It is only in this volume of short stories [We Are the living] that we see that his work is not to be labeled comedy or tragedy, or even short story or novel. We feel that Caldwell is constantly and purposefully denying us the formal satisfaction to which we are accustomed. His stories, like organic life, have no beginning and no end. They contain within themselves the actuality of mere living—the living of the defeated and all but disinherited Maine farmer and Georgia share-cropper. In one story, "After-image," Caldwell says:

The words are a jumble. The sounds they make are sometimes loud, sometimes soft. None of them is of any im-portance whatever. Only feeling matters. It is of that which has been told. I have been telling of feeling, of the quiver of her heart against my heart.

This story is simply the jumbled impression of a man who hears a weary girl confess how her husband had deserted her and how his family had taken their child away from her and how she was powerless to get it back.

She had been standing beside me, her hands on the rail, looking out across the Sound. . . . One moment I was standing beside her, and the next moment she was gone. A thing like that can be an occurrence, an event, a tragedy, or merely the final act of living. I don't know what this was; but she was gone.

That is Caldwell's answer to the question of his wooing the tragic or the comic muse. The titles of his two collections of stories, American Earth and We Are the living, reveal his awareness of the nativity and immediacy of his work. He finds his material in the States between which he divides his residence, Maine and Georgia; and his characters are his contemporaries. A boy's prank, a homecoming, a moment of sexual excitation, a drunken spree are enough to induce a verbal snapshot. And the snapshots come along without the literary tags of humor and pathos.

In Caldwell's very actual world, his people are driven by sexual and economic urges which are only inhibited by puritanism and farm mortgages. His characters, like animals long accustomed to a cage, lead debilitated and incompetent existences, and most of the stories are prompted by a last rebellion or by the climax of an emotional or an economic suicide. They are tragic when the progress toward death is rapid and inevitable; and they are comic when the end is far away and the predicament not too close to our own. But we need not use these words at all.

"The People's Choice," in which a newly elected deacon celebrates so well that he disgraces himself, is a hilarious example of a run-down mainspring of life; "The Grass Fire," on the other hand, is its tragic counterpart. Between these poles are "Country Full of Swedes" and "Picking Cotton." Of course, the Waiden family and their futile digging for gold (in God's little Acre) is Caldwell's best picture of economic self-annihilation. In the shorter form he is more frequently concerned with the defeat or deflection of the sex urge. "Meddlesome Jack," for instance, is an uproarious variation on this theme; it is a simple anecdote about the sleep-dispersing bray of a jackass. "The Medicine Man" is the almost farcical story of the seduction of a moral hypocrite by the village spinster. In others, such as "Mama's little Girl," the point of tragedy is nearer, and the long process of self-destruction only echoed in its results.

For completeness we must add that there are two stories which simply describe fatal accidents; one or two. "Warm River" and "The Empty Room," which are wrung out of conventional tear-jerking situations; one or two which are merely droll; and finally some written long ago which we hope are only youthful indiscretions. As a whole, Caldwell's stories are as indigenous to the American soil as a corncob pipe or a Ford car. We like his novels better, but we cannot deny—and this is high praise—the claim of his people that they are the living.