Erskine Caldwell is one of those rare men in human experience who have done both what they wanted and what they have thought that they wanted. He thought that he wanted most of all to "go places," to see people in a living experience of the sociology he picked up at the University of Virginia. However, he began his travelling—more accurately described as vagabondage—long before he ever heard of sociology. In childhood and youth he was a resident of six Southern states, and wandered through all of them as an amateur tramp, with a tramp's experience, but the mind of an artist and observer. Then, when his reputation was made, he travelled in a big way as a correspondent, notably in Russia.

But something in him wanted all this time to write. He says he would have preferred to be a working sociologist, which reminds me of Vachel lindsay's passionate desire to be known as an art critic. Yet apparently only the desire to write could neutralize the vagabond in Caldwell, who was always finding his immediate environment too small. And, indeed, as his prefatory notes to the collection of his short stories called Jackpot show, many of these tales were written en route by bus or train from one place to another. The truth is, of course, that these two dominant wants in Caldwell's life are as closely related as ploughing, planting, and harvesting. His stories came out of the soil on which he has lived and over which he has wandered. The inexplicable urge which forces the born writer to symbolize life in words and create the significance which actual experience hides in a confusion of events, has done the rest. Gross experience accurately recorded and stastically explained is sociology; but if a man is an artist, this experience sets his imagination to work, and he is not content until he has drawn out the inner truth which is so much more revealing than the facts. That Caldwell has this peculiar sensitiveness, which is indispensable for fiction, is sufficiently indicated by the record. In fifteen years of writing he has published twenty volumes of short stories, novels, social studies, war correspondence, and travel notes, which have so impressed the contemporary world as to be represented in thirteen nations and twelve languages in addition to his own.

Erskine Caldwell was born in the middle of December, 1903 (the exact date has been lost), in the hill country south of Atlanta, Georgia, eight miles from the nearest post office. His father, a minister in the Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church, and a North Carolinian, was also a wanderer, who moved on from church to church through the South every year or two, on an average salary of $300 a year. At seventeen, the boy left home to go to school in South Carolina, but spent more time riding freights and as blind-baggage than in school, with arrests for vagrancy and rich opportunities to see life in its picaresque aspects. Just how, with this rich but not concentrated education, he got into the University of Virginia, is not clear—there must have been more direction in his wishes than he admits. But he did stay there—more or less—two years, supporting himself by working in a poolroom as helper and bouncer.

He left to become a cub reporter on The Atlanta Journal, which had been his ambition, married and began a family. But he discovered, as so many journalists have done, that newspaper work is not creative writing, and that if to write in a creative way is what you want, journalism is the wrong profession. The only way to write creatively is to write creatively, and forego, at whatever risk, daily news writing. So, with admirable audacity, Erskine Caldwell got as far away from his old environment as possible, perhaps subconsciously feeling the need to get it into perspective. For years he "holed in in Maine," raised potatoes and chopped wood to feed his family, "vowing not to come out until I had got myself published." But in three years—as is recorded in one of his books—he had sold a story (over the telephone) for $350, though he would have willingly taken $50 for it if necessary, and his public career had begun.

I myself regard Caldwell as primarily and essentially a short-story writer. His fame among the masses is due of course to the incredible success of the play, Tobacco Road, written by another, but based on a long short story or nouvelle, as the French call such stories, by Caldwell. But at his most original, most effective, and certainly at his best, Caldwell belongs in the distinguished list of American short-story writers who have made their place in world literature, beginning with Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. And it is as a short-story writer that I shall discuss him. .. . In this career, to an extent surpassing any other American story writer except perhaps Sarah Orne Jewett or William Faulkner, the literal, actual facts of his own country, and thus of his own biography, are vitally important. And in the above-mentioned list of great American short-story writers, Erskine Caldwell is, I should say, the first who has consciously viewed the rich materials of his native experience as sociology, and then turned them into successful art.

Of course, the short story is beautifully adapted to this service. The writer of short stories, if he is gifted in that art, keeps his eye on life until it turns for a moment dramatic, then rebuilds the circumstances and retones the atmosphere to give that moment emphasis. For him, mere action is not necessarily, nor even usually, dramatic; rather it is the revealing word or look or dead which makes action burst into significance. Hence, though his choice of descriptive words or of indicative phrases requires the subtlest and most imaginative discrimination, his technique of construction is—once he has learned it—very simple. All it consists in, is to hold the reader's interest in suspense until the climax is ready, which is not a step in the story but really the story itself, for which all the rest is just a build-up. Note in the stories here included, how true this is of such a tale as "Candy-Man Beechum" or "Saturday Afternoon."

Perhaps this is why Mr. Caldwell gets so irritated with the "Professor Perkins" whom he constantly addresses in the paragraph prefaces to the stories he put in Jackpot. "Professor Perkins" is always discussing the construction of the story, whereas there are a dozen possible ways of building most of these Caldwell stories, provided the vital moment, with its implications, is thrown in high relief. If I were "Professor Perkins" and had Erskine Caldwell before my class, I would ask him to retell Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat" in his own fashion, and so prove the point very readily. Mr. Caldwell would have liked to rewrite that story, which, under his hands, would change from high-colored (and excellent) melodrama to a rich and objective narrative, as in his "Martha Jean," with the sentiment concentrated into pity and driven down into the roots of the story, where the careless reader might easily miss it. Caldwell and Harte would tell the same story; that is, the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century writers would each give you a Mary Magdalene revealed, but as the result of very different methods.

Probably Erskine Caldwell's grandfather, whom he constantly quotes, was right. The true story teller is a man who seems to be too lazy to do more than experiment with all kinds of living. Actually the thorough-going livers of life have lazy imaginations. The writer's eager fancy plucks him away from experience as soon as he sees its significance. Then he must choose a symbolic movement and give his energies to turning that into the reality of fiction which is always more real because more complete and self-explanatory than actual happenings. Note Caldwell's famous story called "Country Full of Swedes," which is nothing but a symbol of the disturbing rush of vitality over the unvital, like a comber over a sterile beach. Or the simple tale of "Big Buck," which is essentially a description of exuberant life. Or that most terrible of lynching stories, "Saturday Afternoon," where the horror is not in the lightly stressed lynching, but in the naively callous pleasure of the onlookers who have been saved from a dull afternoon.

Naturally, therefore, a short-story writer is most effective when he writes from deep layers of the subconscious, which every poignant memory stirs into a warmth of emotion. Caldwell's Maine stories, such as his "The Midwinter Guest" and his "Grass Fire". . . are humorous studies of eccentricity—usually of obstinacy or of fear. They are like tall tales or local anecdotes told over the cracker barrel, and they are good.

He can do the same thing with Georgia, as in the "Handsome Brown" and "My Old Man" stories, than which it would be hard to find much more amusing reading. This is the Mark Twain tradition and it is a good one. Indeed in these tales, and others which throb with indignation against a maladjusted world in spite of the horse-play and mock innocence on top, Caldwell is Mark Twain's spiritual heir.

But when Erskine Caldwell comes home to Georgia he soon drops the quip and the crank for something much hotter and sometimes of deadly power. Tobacco Road, by no means as deadly as some of his briefer stories, shows how the artist takes his revenge on life as he remembers it. Jeeter lester and Preacher Bessie have entertained thousands of playgoers—but the play, which Caldwell did not write, leaves out the background of the story and it is this that gives it power. What made the play so successful was probably the humor of primitive sexuality brought out by skillful acting. But in the story itself you see why these lamentable decadents are so much more than comic-strip satire. Shreds and tatters of moral codes still hang about them, and a pathetic confidence that God will make up to them for their misfortunes. But that they are helpless and hopeless victims of their own Love of the land which they have ignorantly, obstinately exploited until it will not support a rat, they never guess. This is the dynamic idea behind the story. The boy Caldwell saw them as he walked along Tobacco Road, laughed at them, probably despised them, then began to wonder. The mature Caldwell keeps the memory of their humor, but now can understand what had happened to them, and so he makes their degeneracy human and significant.

The same, of course, is true of his white-and-Negro stories. The classic tale of a lynching is not to be found in Lillian Smith's recent Strange Fruit, effective as that novel is, but in Caldwell's very brief "Saturday Afternoon"—where the fly-specked butcher that everyone likes is awakened from his nap just in time to go to the lynching; or in the very terrible "Kneel to the Rising Sun." Here is entire objectivity. Every word in these stories describes the scene as the actors saw it. The fury of rage with which the author wrote is carefully concealed: It is for you to feel, and, unless you are as naïve as the actors, of course you do feel it. Not even Hemingway's "The Killers" is a more terrible story than these.

Richer and more humorous are the stories of Negro types. Of these, "Big Buck" is a classic of irrepressible vitality. And "Candy-Man Beechum" is the best of all, for here Negro exuberance is checked when it reaches the limits set by the governing race, and is cut down like a weed. There is no preaching in these stories, but only the most insensitive reader can miss the passionate revolt against a vicious system which holds the Negro down in order that a decaying white culture can keep some self-respect in its ignorance and poverty. If Caldwell's sympathy seems always with the Negro, it is probably because he feels that the Negro has retained more humanity and vitality than his oppressors. He is evicted, beaten, shot, lynched, but it is the decadent white who really has been most deeply scarred by what has happened.

This sociologist's understanding of ultimate causes explains the tolerance that enables Caldwell to present his scenes so objectively. There is a false idea that his popular reputation depends upon the freedom he allows himself in describing sexual experience. Read these stories carefully and you will see that this is not really true. Sex spices his stories certainly, but never makes them. Sex, like keeping the Negroes down, is the release from the dull and futureless life of the Georgia whites, who Love their very Lovable sunshine and piney woods, but never seem to be able to get beyond the most elementary efforts to stay fed and clothed. Sex is the one pure joy and adventure left in a starved environment. This sex element in such an excellent story as "Maud Island" is as pagan as in Naomi Micheson's Greek stories. The women (after youth) still keep up the reprobation that makes amorousness an adventure, but in general this sex experience comes from a primitive instinct which seldom rises to Love, and is respected even by husbands and fathers whom it injures. It is vulgar in the true sense of that word. Some of Caldwell's most effective stories, such as "Man and Woman," and "Martha Jean," are made from blind, unanalyzed lifts of this primitive instinct into something more civilized.

Probably—though you would never guess it from his flippant prefaces—Caldwell's chief stock of emotion is pity. In the perfectly delightful stories in Georgia Boy, this pity does not have to be exercised. The Old Man of these stories is just as worthless as the poor whites of the grimmer stories, and could be just as ruthless if his Negro or his neighbor interfered with his peculiar way of life. But in these stories he is in the sun, and does not have to be cruel in order to keep his meal ticket.

Shift from such stories into the shadow and see how the emphasis changes. Read "Kneel to the Rising Sun," the ruthless story of the starved share-cropper whose father is gnawed to death by the boss's hogs. He has so little of a man in him that his loyalty to the plantation (which is all he has left of his morale) will not let him protest, forces him to help the lynchers catch his Negro friend who has dared to tell the boss what he thinks of his inhumanity. Or the story of the sadist who collected the tails of his tenants' dogs. Or "The End of Christy Tucker." In all these narratives, the rage of the writer is tempered and suppressed by his pity for the victims—these Negroes and poor white trash who do not know what is wrong or how to escape it.

The white brutes who are the villains in such stories as these are, with a few exceptions, not creatures of pure evil. They are the same easy-living, land-Loving individuals as in "My Old Man," except that the decline of their economic culture has hurt them more psychologically because they have more to lose. Instead of greed, which is the inevitable reaction in a homogeneous community such as one might find in France, their humor and humanity have degenerated into suppressed fear, unacknowledged cowardice, and open and callous cruelty.

Mr. Caldwell has a very good time bantering the critics in his little prefaces in the volume Jackpot. He thinks, and rightly, that they know too much about the alleged rules of writing and too little about life and the art that springs freshly from it. He may think I am taking him too seriously in the remarks above, but that I doubt. He is well aware that many of his stories are only clever anecdotes; yet his eagerness to get in a punch at his reviewers before their gloves are on, shows that not only does he take his own art hard, but fears and expects it will be misunderstood. In this (and in other ways) he is like Chekhov, who wrote with such regard for the seeming trivialities of life, that he was often thought to be only a photographic realist. Mr. Caldwell's art is definitely an art of understatement—understatement, I mean, of the deep issues of the story, though overstatement and repetition often of the humors, the absurdities, and the eccentricities of his characters. He is not a naturalist, like Dreiser or Zola, in spite of his sociological basis; he is not a realist, if being a realist means to let life speak for itself without focus upon some inner significance; he is certainly not a romanticist, except about the land, where, indeed, his characters often speak in pure idealistic romance which gives their author great satisfaction. No one of these critical terms seems of much use in describing Mr. Caldwell's work, unless negatively. He will not be pigeon-holed easily by literary historians.

I should prefer to characterize him finally by a comparison with a very great artist indeed. The little corner of Georgia with which his mind is obsessed is, in some respects at least, like the misgoverned, decadent, economically backward Spain where Goya painted. In its minor way, Caldwell's Georgia presents individuals as racy in their decay as Goya's Spaniards, and also a community as regardless and as truly ignorant of what had happened to it as was Spain in its collapse after greatness. I do not wish to push the comparison further, except to suggest that Caldwell, like Goya, paints what he sees, and feels with evident intensity, yet never sentimentalizes or falsifies the scene by letting his artist's consciousness leak into his words. The decadence, the economic degradation, the pathology of racial or class conflict are for you to feel if you can. The poor white starving on his sand hills, or the Spanish peasant caught in factional warfare, sees no controllable causes, but only the devil in action, or the wicked rich oppressing him, or sins of his youth now remembered by an avenging God.

But let us drop comparisons, and say simply, that the best of these short stories are symbols of an American experience of quite frightening significance, of which the actors are entirely unaware. And that, being unaware, they can be and are utterly themselves—which means as trivial or worthless or amusing or callously inhuman, as most of us are when food is scarce and the satisfactions of vanity hard to find. Whether this be realism or not, it is certainly a powerful way in which to present reality. And for many a reader the sand hills, and eroded cotton fields, the tottering houses, the easy acceptance and hearty laughter of the middle South, will be most vividly remembered in Erskine Caldwell's interpretation. He has made that country particularly human, by giving the life there a worldwide human significance.