Anyone who has ever spent much time where the untutored sons of these States forgather—as, for instance, in the army—must have heard, for hours on end, reminiscences poured forth in floods of anecdote—incidents pointed and pointless, significant and insignificant. In such story-telling is to be found the true popular or vulgar oral literature of America, the germ, the unformed beginning of narrative. The complaint is often made that this country has no folk tales; and while the complaint is mistaken, inasmuch as America is rich in folk tales, it is true they are local and generally have a look of quaint relics of a vanished age. But the endless stories which men tell each other of their own lives—into these taken in the mass, though each is individual in origin, the whole characteristic life of America is digested and distilled.

With such stories our politer letters have never condescended to have much traffic, perhaps for the excellent reason that most of our literary men, being somewhat orchidlike of nature, have seldom been where these recitals take place. Picaresque, proletarian, peasant America, though the most interesting as well as the largest part of the nation, has appeared in literature but little, and then as if viewed de haut en bas—almost never has it appeared in the terms of its own chosen mode of expression, the reminiscent anecdote.

Mr. Erskine Caldwell's collection of stories, American Earth, is closer to this kind of narrative than any other book I know. To be sure, his field is limited—his first dozen sketches and incidents are entitled "Far South," his second twelve "Farthest East"—and he is so good a writer that the flavor of locality is strong in his work; but there is nothing necessarily local about the genre which he has chosen. It could be used equally well for all other parts of the Union.

While presumably one must not suppose that Mr. Caldwell's stories are autobiographical, it is as if he were telling offhand of things that had happened to him or that he had run into—insignificant in themselves perhaps, but somehow, though one could not say why, memorable. Always he is, or pretends to be, the unsophisticated raconteur. Character, emotion, significance, are secondary, at most implied; plot is nonexistent; he deals in sheer incident, the primal germ plasm of narrative. Of the many contemporary efforts to get back, in revolt against the overelaborate and artificial productions of recent art, to some unexhausted original rootstock, Mr. Caldwell's is one of the most successful.

Mr. Caldwell goes back even farther than the folk for his fresh start; he reverts to boyhood. Much of his best work shows that bright, wide-eyed innocent fascination with everything dirty, nasty, horrible or gruesome which is one of the strangest and most unfailing traits of small boys. Even Mr. Caldwell's treatment of sex seems somehow preadolescent. His writing has a fresh, direct immediacy of juvenility which is extremely rare—and since his folk, even his adults, are the sort who stay juvenile all their lives, there is no incongruity.

One reason undoubtedly for his success is that, as the jacket of his book tells us, he has had a varied and extensive career among the people of whom—and like whom—he speaks. Not only, however, has Mr. Caldwell picked cotton in Tennessee, served as night cook in the Union Station at Wilkes-Barre, and reported for The Atlanta Journal; he has lately published his stories in Pagany, This Quarter, Transition and other such periodicals. And as his biography indicates the source of his strength, so do these names suggest his weakness, or at least the dangers which beset him. These occult magazines, priding themselves on making no compromise with common humanity, these purveyors of caviar, are insidious poison for Mr. Caldwell.

Since this is his first book—with the exception of The Bastard, which was privately printed—one expects the unevenness and uncertainty which one finds; the serious peril is not his occasional fumbling, but his too frequent affectation. His naïveté too often is plainly a self-conscious pose. He is not free from preciosity—and of all kinds of stories, preciosity is most fatal to his kind. In part, this quality springs from a too devoted imitation of Sherwood Anderson; in part from a deference, perhaps, to the journals which have printed Mr. Caldwell's stories but with which, one suspects and hopes, Mr. Caldwell has little really in common. Especially are these effects evident in the third part of American Earth, which contains only one long piece consisting of numerous tiny disconnected bits of fact and phantasy—a type of thing which seems, now at least, not to be the writer's forte.

Mr. Caldwell's unmistakable ability, his out-of-the ordinary and interesting talent, and his very remarkable achievement justify us in having great hopes of him. Let us pray, however, that he may be delivered from the highbrows.

T. K. WHIPPLE.

In a year of generally dispiriting fiction, Erskine Caldwell's book of stories is important enough to justify the publication of a dissenting opinion. Not that I disagree with most of Mr. Whipple's admirably phrased review: what he says about the anecdotes that compose more than two-thirds of the volume is acute and unexceptionable; but he adopts a more questionable position in his last three paragraphs, when he takes American Earth as an excuse for attacking the influence of the little magazines.

During the last twelve years, almost every new writer destined to have any influence on the history of American literature has begun by appearing in the little magazines. The statement is more than justified by the facts. Leaving aside The Little Review and Others, which would carry us far into the past; leaving aside Transition and Pagany for an opposite reason: namely, that most of the writers they introduced are still too young to be widely known, one can quickly gather an impressive list of publications and writers. There is The Dial, which brought forward E. E. Cummings, Glenway Wescott, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Madox Roberts—Broom, which published Matthew Josephson and Kay Boyle—The Fugitive, which produced Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren among others—The Transatlantic Review, with Ernest Hemingway and Nathan Asch—The American Caravan (belonging at least in spirit among the little magazines), which first published the work of Erskine Caldwell himself, as well as printing Josephine Herbst, Katherine Anne Porter and others whose names are certain to be widely known. The list could easily be continued: it is enough to say that the primary function of the little magazines is discovering talent, and that they have performed this function successfully, having revealed such new talents as there were to be unearthed.

But the little magazines have a secondary function: that of encouraging experimental writing, which is another term for original writing. Originality is not a virtue mysteriously born into writers: it can be developed in talented people by force of reflection and reworking; it can also be destroyed in them if they write only for publications which demand that everything be done according to formula. The little magazines as a class have encouraged originality in the writers they printed. In so doing they have also encouraged affectation, mannerism and unintelligibility, but this, I think, was also desirable—not because I admire these literary vices for themselves, but because they often lead to admirable qualities. The young writer adopts them as a means toward developing a personal style; in the end he sloughs them off. If he doesn't, he isn't worth lamenting.

Mr. Caldwell is a literary child of the "occult" magazines, a child with eight foster-parents: The American Caravan, Blues, Front, The Hound and Horn, Nativity, Pagany, This Quarter and Transition. By publishing his work, the best and the worst of it, they have encouraged him to develop something original. What I dissent from in Mr. Whipple's review is that he attacks precisely the portion of American Earth in which the author's original qualities are most evident.

I refer, of course, to the "disconnected bits of fact and phantasy" which compose the third section of the book. Here Mr. Caldwell achieves a sort of violent poetry, simple, romantic, arbitrary and effective; it is a mood unique in American prose (though suggested by the poems of Phelps Putnam). His figures of speech are expressed in terms of hyperbolic action. "Once," says Mr. Caldwell, "the sun was so hot a bird came down and walked beside me in my shadow. .. . In the chill frost of winter," he says elsewhere, "I left Memphis and rode on the outside of freight cars all the way to the Atantic. The nights were so cold that my fingers froze around the iron bars and at daybreak each morning I had to bite them away with my teeth." The effect of hunger on the imagination is conveyed by one statement of fact: "A man walked into a restaurant through the front door and ate all he wanted to eat." Approaching death is a picture of buzzards in a field:

There was an old Negro who was almost a hundred years old. When he worked in his cotton patch, the buzzards walked behind him all day and clawed the red earth with their feet and pecked at it with their beaks, and at night they roosted on top of his house and flapped their wings till the sun rose.

I don't mean to imply that the whole third section of the book is on the same high level. There are trite and sentimental passages which move one to personal fury against the author; there is also, as Mr. Whipple says, a good deal of preciousness and affectation. But for figures of speech like those quoted, and for the episodes which surround them, one could forgive any amount of faulty writing. Erskine Caldwell brings a new quality into American fiction: may due credit be given to the little magazines which recognized his talent.

MALCOLM COWLEY.