Erskine Caldwell

 

One of the stories at the heart of Tobacco Road -- Erskine Caldwell's critical review of the American south -- involves the purchase of a new car. In each chapter, the car is damaged: first the bumper is hit, then the interior ripped, then the brakes shot. This continues until the car is seriously dented, not days after its purchase. The point Caldwell seems to be making is: at least the thing still runs.

Like most other material objects in Tobacco Road, this car -- this is glimmer of hope, of ascension -- is subject to immediate decay: and there is nothing, it seems, to reverse it. 

Tobacco Road is not a subtle book: Caldwell's shows through dialogue; he indicts through characters. The Lester family -- of poor white Georgians -- are equal parts racist and religious. What's more, they are hopeless: there is no sense of growth or progress here; there's not even a sense of impending tragedy. Instead, Caldwell casts a vision of stasis, of lives expired before the action begins.  

The sense I have from a few reviews is that Tobacco Road was seen by some as reductionist, as an unbalanced assault of southern living. To an extent, that is true: Caldwell does not explore racial relations, for instance; nor does he touch on a social system in which having more than ten children is considered acceptable. The result is a book which assumes assumes certain truths -- around race, or education -- but which does not consider theirs contours, their geneses.

One theme which Caldwell does scrutinize, however, is the land, and the faded dream of agricultural subsistence. Jeeter Lester -- the father figure of Tobacco Road -- is ruined in part because of his insistence on cotton production, on working what might rightly be labelled The Land. This dream, Caldwell argues, has passed: Jeeter can find no credit, no mule, and no seed. He searches for it, but is frustrated at every turn. What he encounters, in the end, is not only an economic system set against him: what he confronts are the limits of his own intellectual capabilities.  

I can't remember a book quite like Tobacco Road: a book so insistent, so focused. There's no escaping Caldwell's indictment of the American south. And yet, it's as a result of this insistence that I experienced an element of doubt, of suspicion. This is a heated novel motivated by a singular focus: to lay bare the ruin of rural white populations across the American south. But what is a novel without redemption? If characters do not progress or evolve, there is no prospect of recovery. And without that, a novel is transformed into a portrait, a sketch. That, ultimately, is what Caldwell has constructed: a vision in black and white, a drawing at the end of the day.