Mark Saha's Blog - Posts Tagged "classics"
Tobacco Road – A Review
My impression from some Goodreads reviewers is that Tobacco Road has drifted so far out of context over the passing years that contemporary readers scarcely know what to make of it. One called the book an argument for Eugenics, while another says Caldwell is racist, and others speculate whether tobacco roads even existed.
Starting with the last of these, Caldwell writes (Chapter VII):
“The road on which Jeeter lived was the original tobacco road his grandfather had made. It was about fifteen miles long, and … ended on the bluffs at the river. The road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed […] Sometimes the casks had been pushed by gangs of negroes to the river steamboats, other times they were pulled by teams of mules … thousands of hogsheads had been rolled along the crest of the ridge and they had made a smooth firm road. There were scores of tobacco roads on western side of the Savannah Valley … Any one walking cross-county would find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike.”
Crop rotation was not understood back then, and the soil soon became depleted of nutrients needed to grow tobacco. Cotton was substituted, but after a few years the yield was again so poor that farmers struggled to survive. Caldwell was the son of a rural Presbyterian minister, and as a boy had traveled with his father, riding a cotton wagon loaded with food which they distributed to the unfortunates who lived along tobacco roads in the early part of the 20th century. The bitter poverty and human destitution he saw left an indelible impression.
His break as a writer came when short stories published in small literary journals caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott recommended him to famed Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins who worked with major authors like Hemingway and Thomas Wolf; (Scott’s letter to Perkins is in Fitzgerald’s collected letters). Perkins invited Caldwell to submit to Scribner’s Magazine. After publishing a few stories, and issuing a hardcopy story collection, he asked for a novel – and got Tobacco Road.
Perkins believed the book had merit but warned he would have to fight for its publication. Scribners had a profitable textbook division, and feared the novel would trigger a boycott of their textbooks in Southern schools. Tobacco Road had an initial sale of only about two thousand copies, and the reader response postcards inserted in each copy by Scribners were not encouraging. Then a Broadway play based on it began to set records, and readers returning to the source novel found, as Perkins had, literary merit.
The suggestion by one reviewer here that Caldwell advocated Eugenics is not credible; it’s apparently in reference to a 2007 paper by academic Ashley Craig Lancaster (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218198). Eugenics advocates believed not just the physically defective but also the morally degenerate could be eliminated by selective breeding. Ms. Lancaster seems to imagine, based only on her reading of the text, that Caldwell’s intention was to dramatize the need for such selective breeding. But there is no obvious genetic defect in the Lester family tree. Jeeter’s grandfather owned a great tobacco plantation, and his father inherited half of it. The depletion of the sandy soil made it useless for growing tobacco and increasingly unprofitable for cotton. Debts had forced Jeeter to surrender ownership of the land on which he now struggles to survive as a tenant farmer.
But Jeeter is not lacking in moral ambition:
“The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had the usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground … he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case someone did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano.”
Caldwell always said the theme of his books was “the effects of poverty on the human spirit.” He was sympathetic to the socialists and communists of his day and states bluntly in these pages (Chapter VII): “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”
Instead we see Jeeter exploited by the capitalist system:
“Once he had secured a two-hundred-dollar loan […] on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that too […] When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and the mule, too.”
Even less credible than Eugenics is another reviewer’s claim that Caldwell was racist. His novel “Trouble in July” (1940) is a study of the economic and social forces behind racial violence in the rural South, while “Place Called Estherville” (1949) looks at the same forces in an urban environment. Ray McIver, a Black playwright, actor, teacher, and personal friend to Caldwell, in 1982 edited a collection of Caldwell race themed stories as “The Black & White Stories of Erskine Caldwell.”
Caldwell believed in his youth that education was the cure for racism. He gave up on that hope in later years, and became convinced that intermarriage was the only cure, and said he was always encouraged when he saw an interracial couple.
Caldwell traveled the United States by automobile in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, and published his observations as “Some American People” (1935). He toured the Deep South with photographer Margaret-Bourke White in 1936 and they produced the picture-and-text collaboration “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937). Bourke-White’s autobiography “Portrait of Myself” (1963) has an insightful chapter on her marriage to Caldwell along with some fascinating photographs.
George Snell, in his literary history “The Shapers of American Fiction – 1798-1947” writes:
“Emerging as a salient figure with extraordinary rapidity in the early ‘30s, Erskine Caldwell no doubt owed his popularity partly to fortuitous circumstances. Here was a writer concerned with the problems that engrossed all minds in those days of economic depression, and able to deal with such problems artistically; that is, in terms of human reactions. He could not only treat social issues artistically but extract what there could be of humor from them, a prodigious feat, it had seemed, since most of the fiction then current was solemn or hortatory or militant; a belly laugh was a prized rarity. He loomed on the scene quickly, portentously, and in the five years, 1931 through 1935, published seven books that established his reputation.
“Seemingly out of nowhere, with scarcely any observable apprenticeship, here was a major American writer pouring out in book after book a skillful, original kind of art and interpreting a phase of life that only Faulkner had previously investigated. If some readers saw a resemblance between the macabre humor in “As I Lay Dying” and that of some stories in “We Are The Living” (1933), it was only incidental, and the purport of the stories was positive, a call to an aroused social awareness, in a way and toward an end that no Faulkner story ever had.”
Starting with the last of these, Caldwell writes (Chapter VII):
“The road on which Jeeter lived was the original tobacco road his grandfather had made. It was about fifteen miles long, and … ended on the bluffs at the river. The road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed […] Sometimes the casks had been pushed by gangs of negroes to the river steamboats, other times they were pulled by teams of mules … thousands of hogsheads had been rolled along the crest of the ridge and they had made a smooth firm road. There were scores of tobacco roads on western side of the Savannah Valley … Any one walking cross-county would find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike.”
Crop rotation was not understood back then, and the soil soon became depleted of nutrients needed to grow tobacco. Cotton was substituted, but after a few years the yield was again so poor that farmers struggled to survive. Caldwell was the son of a rural Presbyterian minister, and as a boy had traveled with his father, riding a cotton wagon loaded with food which they distributed to the unfortunates who lived along tobacco roads in the early part of the 20th century. The bitter poverty and human destitution he saw left an indelible impression.
His break as a writer came when short stories published in small literary journals caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott recommended him to famed Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins who worked with major authors like Hemingway and Thomas Wolf; (Scott’s letter to Perkins is in Fitzgerald’s collected letters). Perkins invited Caldwell to submit to Scribner’s Magazine. After publishing a few stories, and issuing a hardcopy story collection, he asked for a novel – and got Tobacco Road.
Perkins believed the book had merit but warned he would have to fight for its publication. Scribners had a profitable textbook division, and feared the novel would trigger a boycott of their textbooks in Southern schools. Tobacco Road had an initial sale of only about two thousand copies, and the reader response postcards inserted in each copy by Scribners were not encouraging. Then a Broadway play based on it began to set records, and readers returning to the source novel found, as Perkins had, literary merit.
The suggestion by one reviewer here that Caldwell advocated Eugenics is not credible; it’s apparently in reference to a 2007 paper by academic Ashley Craig Lancaster (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218198). Eugenics advocates believed not just the physically defective but also the morally degenerate could be eliminated by selective breeding. Ms. Lancaster seems to imagine, based only on her reading of the text, that Caldwell’s intention was to dramatize the need for such selective breeding. But there is no obvious genetic defect in the Lester family tree. Jeeter’s grandfather owned a great tobacco plantation, and his father inherited half of it. The depletion of the sandy soil made it useless for growing tobacco and increasingly unprofitable for cotton. Debts had forced Jeeter to surrender ownership of the land on which he now struggles to survive as a tenant farmer.
But Jeeter is not lacking in moral ambition:
“The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had the usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground … he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case someone did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano.”
Caldwell always said the theme of his books was “the effects of poverty on the human spirit.” He was sympathetic to the socialists and communists of his day and states bluntly in these pages (Chapter VII): “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”
Instead we see Jeeter exploited by the capitalist system:
“Once he had secured a two-hundred-dollar loan […] on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that too […] When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and the mule, too.”
Even less credible than Eugenics is another reviewer’s claim that Caldwell was racist. His novel “Trouble in July” (1940) is a study of the economic and social forces behind racial violence in the rural South, while “Place Called Estherville” (1949) looks at the same forces in an urban environment. Ray McIver, a Black playwright, actor, teacher, and personal friend to Caldwell, in 1982 edited a collection of Caldwell race themed stories as “The Black & White Stories of Erskine Caldwell.”
Caldwell believed in his youth that education was the cure for racism. He gave up on that hope in later years, and became convinced that intermarriage was the only cure, and said he was always encouraged when he saw an interracial couple.
Caldwell traveled the United States by automobile in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, and published his observations as “Some American People” (1935). He toured the Deep South with photographer Margaret-Bourke White in 1936 and they produced the picture-and-text collaboration “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937). Bourke-White’s autobiography “Portrait of Myself” (1963) has an insightful chapter on her marriage to Caldwell along with some fascinating photographs.
George Snell, in his literary history “The Shapers of American Fiction – 1798-1947” writes:
“Emerging as a salient figure with extraordinary rapidity in the early ‘30s, Erskine Caldwell no doubt owed his popularity partly to fortuitous circumstances. Here was a writer concerned with the problems that engrossed all minds in those days of economic depression, and able to deal with such problems artistically; that is, in terms of human reactions. He could not only treat social issues artistically but extract what there could be of humor from them, a prodigious feat, it had seemed, since most of the fiction then current was solemn or hortatory or militant; a belly laugh was a prized rarity. He loomed on the scene quickly, portentously, and in the five years, 1931 through 1935, published seven books that established his reputation.
“Seemingly out of nowhere, with scarcely any observable apprenticeship, here was a major American writer pouring out in book after book a skillful, original kind of art and interpreting a phase of life that only Faulkner had previously investigated. If some readers saw a resemblance between the macabre humor in “As I Lay Dying” and that of some stories in “We Are The Living” (1933), it was only incidental, and the purport of the stories was positive, a call to an aroused social awareness, in a way and toward an end that no Faulkner story ever had.”
