Rednecks & Vinegar Sippers

MEN AND WOMEN (313 pp.)--Erskine Caldwell--Little, Brown ($5.25).

The ability to sell heavily in drugstores adds weight to an aspirin manufacturer's reputation, but not to a writer's. Probably for this reason, Erskine Caldwell seldom makes the lists of Meaningful Authors. Some 47 million Caldwell reprints (Certain Women, Claudelle Inglish) have been sold, most of them a salty but honestly written sort of gallus humor. But their covers--and occasionally, some of their contents--are aimed at the skin trade. Consequently, the author is too often ignored by readers who have passed the stage of handing thumb-indexed copies of God's Little Acre around high school study halls. The present collection of rural yarning is a useful reminder that Caldwell, 57, is one of the best short-story tellers in the U.S.

Bert's Pants. Caldwell's special quality is a wonderful ease; he evokes humor or horror without bravura or its opposite, the smug underplaying that leaves the reader, at the end of so many short stories, disappointedly clutching a glazed lump of irony in the form of a souvenir ashtray. Caldwell gives away no pottery. In a leisurely way, yet wasting no time with scene-setting, he lays out his dialogue and his few spare sentences of narration. The characters take shape quickly as the story forms. At the end, amazingly often, what the reader takes away is not a mood, or a morsel of truth, or a flash of humor, but the whole story--characters, moods, truths and lies. This is so not only because the stories could be retold as good anecdotes, but because the author is a master illusionist who can create, as Hemingway did, an impression of absolute reality from the sparsest of materials.

The settings are clay-road South and rockfield state of Maine. The best of the Maine pieces is The Corduroy Pants. Bert Fellows has sold his farm for $1,200 to Abe Mitchell, whom he has known all his life. But two weeks after the sale, Bert remembers that he has left his other pair of pants in the farmhouse attic. He asks Abe to let him fetch the pants, but Abe, although the pants are too big for him, will not let go of the windfall.

As Caldwell tells it in his appealingly basic English: "Bert went back down the road, wondering how he was going to get along without his other pair of pants. By the time Bert reached his house he was good and mad. In the first place, he did not like the way Abe Mitchell had ordered him away from his old farm, but most of all he missed his other pair of corduroys. And by bedtime he could not sit still. He walked around the kitchen mumbling to himself and trying to think of some way by which he could get his trousers away from Abe. "Crusty-faced Democrats never were no good,' he mumbled to himself." Bert gets his pants back at the end of a story which, in the telling, is somehow a quick-sketch portrait, but never a caricature, of the two old vinegar sippers.

Candy-Man. The most memorable of the Southern stories are harsher. There is Candy-Man Beechum, the epitaph to a huge Negro mule skinner's quirky heroism. Loping happily along to visit his Saturday-night girl, Candy-Man is shot down by a deputy, just because the deputy feels like it. Candy-Man says that the deputy shouldn't have done that. The deputy says to shut up or he will pull out his gun again and hurry Candy-Man along. "If that's the way it's to be," the dying man says back to him, "then make way for Candy-Man Beechum, because here I come."

The best of the lot is the much anthologized Kneel to the Rising Sun, a grim and eloquent expression of disgust that ends with another dead Negro. One of the things the author says, without raising his voice, is that men will wince at the torture of a dog and then join a shotgun mob. It is not a story that can be read calmly, but it is written calmly and well.

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