Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405130071
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAVID L. LANGFORD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MORELAND, GA. LENGTH: Long
The town square in this community of 360-something is a sunny patch of grass with a park bench, a flag pole, one lonely sapling and a little white frame house some folks liken to the devil's workshop.
Or ``God's Little Acre.''
For this old house is the birthplace of Erskine Caldwell, the writer as much despised by some Southerners as the Yankee general William Tecumseh Sherman who pillaged middle Georgia in his notorious March to the Sea in the Civil War.
Caldwell, in such novels as ``Tobacco Road'' (1932) and ``God's Little Acre'' (1933), wrote about the underbelly of Dixie, about Depression-era lowlife, the comic antics of snuff-dipping, turnip-munching, dimwitted sharecroppers, rednecks, lint heads and barefooted white trash trollops who would barter their bodies for a bowl of butter beans.
He was branded a pornographer by some, hailed as a social philosopher and reformer by others.
``God's Little Acre,'' a runaway best seller, was banned in Boston for its profanity and sexually explicit language, and the Georgia Literary Commission recommended that anyone caught reading it should be sent to jail.
A New York magistrate, however, deemed the novel literature.
``All of which,'' Caldwell once wrote, ``gives me an involuntary urge to vomit profusely.''
But Caldwell's novels, plus volumes of short stories and nonfiction pieces, sold more than 80 million books, making him one of America's best-selling authors of all time.
He was also one of the most prolific. Caldwell, who died of lung cancer in 1987, wrote 63 books that were translated into more than 40 languages.
And now, after years of virtual obscurity, there is a revival of interest in Caldwell and his writings, with academic studies just completed or in the works, and plans for reissuing many of his books.
That fails to impress a lot of folks here in Coweta County, where Caldwell was born in 1903, the son of an itinerant preacher who was pastor of the Associated Reform Presbyterian Church in the White Oak community, some three or four miles outside of town.
A brouhaha erupted in 1990 when the five-room house where Caldwell was born, called the The Little Manse, was moved from White Oak and planted smack dab in the middle of Moreland as a museum of his memorabilia. That raised a lot of hackles, rendered havoc in the Moreland Historical Society.
At a town meeting last summer on whether to use tax money to help operate the Caldwell shrine, the town split right down the middle.
``Neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, is what we've come down to,'' said Bill Myatt, who runs an antique store on the town square.
Not so with efforts to establish a memorial to another Moreland native son, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution humor columnist Lewis Grizzard who died March 20. He wrote lovingly of Moreland as a haven of boyhood innocence.
``I don't even like to mention Lewis's name and Erskine Caldwell in the same breath,'' says Maxine Estes, who was Grizzard's neighbor and Sunday school teacher at the Moreland Methodist Church, and is a member of the committee to establish the Lewis Grizzard Memorial Fund and a museum in his honor at the town-owned Old Mill Building.
``I asked one woman down in White Oak why they didn't keep the Caldwell house and preserve it, and she said, `We were so glad to get it out of our community we didn't know what to do. He's a shame and a disgrace to our church.' That's the way they feel about it.''
Winston Skinner, 34, a Presbyterian minister like Caldwell's father and an editor of The Newnan Times-Herald in the neighboring county seat, heads the Caldwell museum operating committee.
``We Southerners feel more comfortable thinking our ancestors were descended from `Gone With the Wind' types and not `Tobacco Road' types, but if everybody looked, they would likely find both in their past,'' Skinner says.
This local furor comes at a time when no fewer than five books on the life and works of Caldwell have either recently been published or are about to be.
Several publishing houses are reprinting many of his books, including the University of Georgia Press, which plans to reissue 10 titles.
This summer the Book-of-the-Month Club plans to feature ``Tobacco Road'' and the Quality Paperback Book Club is issuing a new edition of that book, plus ``God's Little Acre.''
Easton Press recently published facsimile first edition copies of ``God's Little Acre'' and ``Tobacco Road.''
The Louisiana State University Press is reissuing ``Poor Fool,'' first published in 1930, this fall.
Caldwell was one of the first writers to cash in on the paperback boom after World War II, sales no doubt stimulated by the sexy covers, and he did a stint as a Hollywood screenwriter.
The stage adaption of ``Tobacco Road'' opened on Broadway in 1933 and ran for more than seven years, a record at the time. The book also was made into a movie, as were ``God's Little Acre'' and ``Claudelle Inglish.''
At the Yesteryear Book Shop in Atlanta, partners Frank Walsh and Polly Fraser read Caldwell in school and were not taught his stories were pornographic. They recently put out a catalog of vintage Caldwell books and were amazed at the response. An inscribed first edition of ``Tobacco Road'' from Scribner's sold for $1,500.
``There definitely seems to be a lot of interest out there,'' Walsh says.
Why this renewed interest in an author who reached his peak decades ago? Ask Daniel B. Miller, who holds a doctorate from Harvard and has a biography of Caldwell coming out from Knopf in January.
``What jumped out at me was that he had been so incredibly popular, actually the world's best-selling author at one point,'' Miller says. ``Yet there had been no full-scale biographical treatment of him. Not to mention the fact that he had sort of disappeared. No one knew who he was, even though he had almost won the Nobel Prize. He had been ranked right up there with Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck.''
Wayne Mixon agrees. He's a professor at Mercer College in Macon, Ga., who just completed an ``intellectual biography'' of Caldwell for the University Press of Virginia.
``He was a highly significant writer and I don't think he's gotten near the attention he deserves,'' Mixon says. ``The academic neglect for all those years is really deplorable.''
Karvey L. Klevar, a professor of anthropology at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, spent 10 years working on ``Erskine Caldwell: A Biography,'' which was published last year by the University of Tennessee Press.
Though he had his detractors, Caldwell had his admirers.
William Faulkner, according to the National Review, at one point ranked Caldwell among America's five best contemporary novelists, along with Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos - and himself.
Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, was one of about 300 people who wrote accolades to Caldwell's widow, Virginia Caldwell Hibbs, who has since remarried and lives in Medford, Ore.
``I thought your husband should have had the Nobel Prize,'' he said. ``A great many readers would have rejoiced at such a prize.''
Stanley W. Lindbergh, editor of The Georgia Review, said in his book, ``The Legacy of Erskine Caldwell,'' that Caldwell early on was labeled a ``social reformer.''
``His stories dramatized so many social, economic, and racial injustices that a number of readers came to view Caldwell as a spokesman for the inarticulate, and the unrepresented,'' Lindbergh said.
Caldwell objected. ``I'm a writer, not a reformer,'' he told interviewers. ``I've always considered myself essentially an observer, a bystander.''
Erskine Preston Caldwell was born Dec. 17, 1903, on what he described as ``an isolated farm deep in the piney woods in the red clay hills of Coweta County in middle Georgia.'' But his father's job kept him on the move, and Caldwell spent much of his youth in neighboring states - the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia and Florida - before the family returned to Georgia and settled down in Wrens, near Augusta, when he was 15.
In Wrens, Caldwell recalls in his autobiography, ``With All My Might,'' ``The impoverished people from the sand hills and tobacco roads, hungry and ragged, were frequently in town begging from house to house for handouts of food and clothing and a little money with which to buy cure-all medicines. There always seemed to be one or more feebly crying, sickly looking babes-in-arms among the begging families.''
He accompanied his father on pastoral visits to the sick and poor and took a job as a carriage driver for a local doctor making his rounds.
``The doctor tended to the needs of a great many black people, as well as whites of the sort some people call `rednecks' or `poor white trash,'" Caldwell recalls. ``When you read `Tobacco Road' and the other books, they're the ones you meet.''
Caldwell picked cotton, worked as a stagehand and had a brief career as a professional football player. He attended several colleges without getting a degree.
In 1925, after marrying Helen Lannigan of Charlottesville, Va., he took a job as a cub reporter for The Atlanta Journal, working on a staff that also included Margaret Mitchell, who later would write ``Gone With the Wind.''
His first novel, ``The Bastard,'' was published by Heron Press in 1929 and two years later his first collection of stories, ``American Earth,'' was published by Scribner's, where the influential Max Perkins was editor.
After divorcing his first wife, Caldwell in 1939 married the famous Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he had collaborated on a book about the South titled, ``You Have Seen Their Faces.''
This writer-photographer team traveled extensively at home and abroad and also collaborated on books about prewar Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. They reported on the Spanish Civil War.
Caldwell divorced Bourke-White in 1942 and married June Johnson. That marriage ended in 1956 and he subsequently married the artist Virginia Moffet Fletcher, who had illustrated many of his books. That union lasted the last 30 years of his life.
Caldwell in 1984 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Earlier France had honored him as a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and he had received Poland's Order of Cultural Merit.
But Caldwell's esteem in the literary world cut no ice with the young man working the counter at the Nifty Foods convenience store and filling station on the edge of Moreland the day of Lewis Grizzard's funeral.
``Erskine who? The Caldwell house? Never heard of it. I'm from Newnan.''
by CNB