Hillbilly Peyton Place

CERTAIN WOMEN (249 pp.)--Erskine Caldwell--Little, Brown ($3.75).

This book represents Erskine (Tobacco Road) Caldwell's annual defense of a title that is indisputably his--America's No. 1 cracker-barrel pornographer. Caldwell has rarely overindulged in four-letter words; he is simply a master of what might be called dirty-situation comedy. Since about 40 million hard-a nd soft-cover copies of his 34 books have been snapped up by U.S. and foreign readers (God's Little Acre tops the list with more than 8,000,000 copies sold), the reader can only conclude that to leer is human.

Set in a hillbilly Peyton Place called Claremore, Certain Women offers armchair Peeping Toms seven separate women to leer at. Vicki is a reformed prostitute, happily married to a filling-station owner named Jeff. Unfortunately, Jeff has to spend every other night at the filling station, so that when one of Vicki's pistol-packing admirers comes around looking for his "special baby," there is no one to protect her new-found honor. Louellen is an erstwhile tomboy who has budded into overnight femininity, but none of the local boys will give her a tumble until a traveling salesman plays hide-and-seek with her among the whispering pines.

Selma, a schoolteacher, is almost 30 and so hungry for a husband that she breaks the boardinghouse rules and is caught reading the funnies to mousy Mr. Ingham--in Mr. Ingham's bed. But before Selma can say "I do," the landlady, who is 25 years mate-hungrier than the schoolteacher, baits her own sex lines and reels in the poor bachelor. And so it goes. Though his bawdy and sole theme is sex, Author Caldwell tells his tales with an easy colloquial style and the born storyteller's gift of making the reader want to know what happens next.

As befits one of the most widely read authors in the U.S., Erskine Caldwell, 53, lives handsomely and high. Perched on a sheer-sloped San Francisco peak, his rented modernistic house is on the second-highest street in town. To get in the mood for his methodical 9-to-5 workday, Caldwell simply pulls down the shades to shut out the magnificent view. In the evenings Caldwell and his fourth wife dine out, often at Trader Henri's, a favored hangout of the beard-and-sandal Bohemian set. Says Caldwell: "I don't go for the atmosphere, I go for the hard liquor."

A country minister's son, Georgia-born Erskine Caldwell never lived on Tobacco Road, but the road was close enough never to be a joke, dirty or otherwise, to him. He feels that this most celebrated of his books is as true to life in the backwashes of the rural South today as when he wrote it ("The rich are richer, the poor poorer"). Caldwell rarely reads. He argues that asking a writer if he has read any good books by other authors is "like asking a doctor if he's taken any good medicines lately." The father of four (the youngest is twelve), Caldwell will publish a children's book this fall, Molly Cottontail.

Despite Certain Women, Caldwell says he is "no authority" on his chosen subject, is willing to sum up his views on women with a well-known epigram that he attributes to his grandfather: "The happy man is the one who has three women in his life--his mother, wife and mistress."

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