Caldwell's Collapse

THIS VERY EARTH (254 pp.)--Erskine Caldwell -- Duel!, Sloan & Pearce ($2.75).

Erskine Caldwell, chronicler of the seamy side of the Southern woes, is the leading bestseller-novelist in the world.* Quarter reprints of his God's Little Acre, Tobacco Road, Trouble in July and others have pushed the sales of his books above 9,000,000 copies. Perhaps some of his appeal is to hunters of the salacious: it is possible to read his novels as if they were extended dirty jokes. But the Caldwell of these early novels and stories had real talent besides.

He wrote in a mode of grotesque comedy rarely found in recent American fiction. With the irresponsible zest of a primitive jokester, he reveled in the high jinks of such moronic subhumans as Jeeter Lester and Darling Jill, whom he twisted into creatures of ribald fantasy far removed from everyday human character.

Caldwell was especially good at mimicking Southern folk rhetoric, its mixture of lecherous filth and vivid images drawn from rural life, its passages of whining literalness relieved by sudden bright patches of corrupt folk poetry. His ability at recording poor white and Negro speech was, in fact, greater than his ability to make creative use of it in the framework of a novel, which is why his best pieces read more advantageously as off-center anecdotes than as realistic narratives.

Scrawny Turkey. Once he gained fame, Author Caldwell abandoned his narrow, though unusual gift. Prompted perhaps by the party-line critics and earnest sociologists who misread his sordid stories as profound exposures of Southern society,* Caldwell undertook to write "seriously." The result was lamentable: each of his recent novels is more inept than its predecessor, and the latest one is as scrawny a literary turkey as has been hatched in 1948.

This Very Earth reads as if it were written by a man under a deep spell, as if Caldwell himself were aware that something was the matter, and simply did not know what to do about it. Its prose has the glassy, elaborately monotonous decor of the language of hypnosis, beneath which the reader can sense the hysteria of someone trying to re-establish communication with the world. In what is obviously a rigorous act of will rather than the product of a freely flowing imagination, Caldwell puts his characters through his standard novelistic paces without once indicating what motivating idea or feeling can possibly be behind them. The reader, no matter how patient, can never find out. Slobbering Sadist. This Very Earth runs its weary preordained course of rape, murder and stupidity without once arousing the slightest emotional response. The dialogue bears no living relationship to the character speaking it, and the characters are all pressed from the same worn Caldwell dies: the lazy, immoral man; the cheap woman who sells herself cheaply; the slobbering sadist who beats his wife. The reader soon gets the uncomfortable feeling that he is watching the uncoordinated performance of a once-talented dancer who still remembers all the steps and postures but has forgotten how to dance.

*Except for thriller-writers like Erie Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. *Caldwell is one of the Soviet Union's favorite U.S. authors. One hundred thousand copies of his short stories were printed by a Russian state publishing house last year. However, Moscow's Literary Gazette recently complained that Caldwell "in his latest works has fallen victim to the baneful influence of anti-popular, decadent ideas."

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