Not Quite a Jackpot: Erskine Caldwell's Short Stories

Whatever else may be said of him, Erskine Caldwell was prodigiously productive and wildly popular. Though his best-known works were early -- Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre -- he was the author of several dozen novels, something like a hundred and fifty short stories, and a variety of other works. Attempts to censor at least two of his novels resulted in considerable notoriety and sizable sales. For the next twenty-five years he enjoyed best-seller status with his work widely available in inexpensive trade paperbacks offered in the racks in bus stations and drug stores with cover art and copy promising erotic fiction. The formula worked so well that he sold eventually something like a hundred million books.

He received attention from the start as a regionalist at a time when the American South seemed almost as fertile a field for fiction as the Jewish Lower East Side, and he doubtless benefited from the vogue for the proletarian novel and perhaps from liberal indignation at the attempts to ban his work, yet his critical reputation never approached his enormous sales. Apart from his exceedingly successful career as an author of potboilers, his belief in the eugenics movement and his conviction that many of the “poor white trash” were irredeemably degenerate through some biological devolution eventually alienated many of his progressive supporters.

The weighty volume of stories titled Jackpot, over seven hundred pages, seems at times like a collection of improvisations. The language is simple, direct, and transparent, but not in the exaggerated way associated with Hemingway. Each piece is very short, no longer than it might take a front porch lounger to deliver a bit of neighborhood news, satisfactorily heightened to make an impact.

Some of Caldwell’s stories do sound like just such gossipy anecdotes, a few have the ring of regionalist tales like those of George Washington Harris. Stories like “Meddlesome Jack” and “It Happened Like This,” and “Hamrick’s Polar Bear” sound like anecdotes that might have been current in oral form. As much, though as Caldwell is identified as a close observer of poor and feckless white Southerners, he had little difficulty in switching to similar characters in rural Maine when he lived there.

Caldwell was capable of social realism as protest as well, displayed in stories such as “Slow Death” and “Knife to Cut the Corn Bread With.” He pulls no punches in the depiction of vicious and violent racism as in “The End of Christy Tucker,” “Blue Boy,” and “The Negro in the Well.” A sort of mute, unthinking violence lurks always near the surface of his action, breaking out in stories like “The Growing Season,” “The First Autumn,” and “The Shooting.”

He was, of course, best-known for sexual content, an appeal enhanced by paperback cover art by artists like James Avati and Hans Helweg. A good many of the stories in Jackpot describe the dawn of desire in adolescents who barely understand their feelings as in “The Strawberry Season” or “Indian Summer,” sometimes in a comic vein as in “A Day’s Wooing,” “Snacker,” or “Where the Girls Were Different.” Erotic desire may be mysteriously inexorable as in “Warm River,” “Crown-fire,” or “A Dream,” rudely imperative as in “Midsummer Passion,” or calculating as in “Maud Island.”

These last two stories also illustrate the characteristic mixture of sex and violence typical of an author who presents virtually no examples of real and mutual love. In “Rachel” the theme of adolescent sexuality is combined with excruciating poverty. The narrator glimpses Rachel’s “sinuous beauty” at the moment she begins to die from ingesting rat poison. In “Martha Jean” another indigent young girl is raped, and in “The Lonely Day” Katherine is led to her death by an irresistible siren call of naked frolics.

My copy of Jackpot, the 1943 Sun Dial Press edition, includes brief headnotes for each story in a bluff style presaging the author’s late career in men’s magazines with names like Gent, Cavalier, and Male. While stressing his identity as a writer, these regularly suggest the informal, almost chance character of his compositions and ridicule critics with authentic American anti-intellectual vitriol in terms like “bloated middleman.” Such critics, according to Caldwell, “make a profession of tearing flesh from bone” and, failing to understand a story, they may well ”set out to prove that the author was a jail-bird and a wife-beater.” Oddly, though his career was in fact launched by the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who published and promoted him after he had been recommended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Caldwell in these notes repeatedly ridicules a certain Prof. Perkins, making him the surrogate for all the pointy-headed critics who did not sufficiently praise his work.

Perhaps the truest note of Caldwell’s sensibility is suggested by a story such as “The Automobile that Wouldn’t Run” whose protagonist prefers to avoid work if possible and to sit in an engineless car serenading a lady with his banjo. According to another of his prefatory notes his wise grandfather maintained that “storytelling was a bastard art because it had been created by tellers of tales for the sole purpose of making laziness respectable.” The same sage, he says, rated every story “either a hum-dinger” or else “god-awful.” Substitute a typewriter for a banjo and one might approach Caldwell’s idealized version of himself. This insouciant image of the artist may not be wholly a pose. Once Caldwell learned how to sell his work, he turned out appropriate product in sufficient quantity to support himself. When he says that he does not read his own work the reader may guess that that policy includes eschewing revision.

An opinion that goes against the grain is often more engaging that a reinforcement of the general view of others. I am afraid I can only agree with the critics Caldwell feared. In the best moments as I read his stories, I was reminded of the unsparing though often comic portrayals of small towns in Huckleberry Finn where ignorance thrives and violence is never far off. The racial themes are reminiscent of Faulkner and the erotic ones of Nabokov, but simply mentioning these names emphasizes how far Caldwell fell short of the achievements of the American masters. Nonetheless, he has a place in the history of literature. These stories seem to me, however, less a jackpot than a modest trickling weekly allowance, dependable if never dazzling.

The Verbal Dance of the Blues

This is meant as the personal and theoretical introductory essay to a volume of analyses of blues lyrics. I had thought of using “The Poetry of the Blues” which focuses on W. C. Handy’s story of the genre’s origin in this place, but that has been rewritten to follow “The Verbal Dance of the Blues.” At present eighteen essays offering close readings of blues lyrics as poetry are already posted on this site.


     My familiarity with the blues began in childhood, though my home environment could hardly have been more distant from the country porches where the music was born. I grew up within a few miles of the dark and smoky Chicago barrooms where the leading exponents of electrified blues performed, but in a suburb, separated by race and class and culture from their music. I did have the advantage of a hip older brother who special-ordered 45s by John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Frogman” Henry and 33s by Robert Johnson and Robert Pete Williams at the little village record store. His taste may have surprised the clerks, but he was hardly unique. The folk music vogue was rising and, while some favored concert stylings of Anglo-American ballads or original topical material, I was one among many who found in the Mississippi Delta blues a beauty and a power unavailable elsewhere.
     When I was fifteen a slightly older friend and I drove east, stopping at coffee houses to hear what we could of acoustic blues live. I remember Fritz Richmond before he joined Jim Kweskin at the Gaslight and Skip James singing for a half dozen people at a little place within sight of Harvard Gate where a drunken student kept asking him to play “St. James Infirmary.” Back in Chicago my friends and I located live music venues that would not ask for i.d. such as the Club Alex on Roosevelt Road where Magic Sam led the house band. Now and then the Regal Theatre would host a “big blues extravaganza” featuring a solid lineup of now legendary musicians.
     Later as a student of literature and a writer myself I turned from impressionistic appreciation to critical analysis of the literary devices that allowed this music of the poor and oppressed to attain such sophistication and artistry. These essays arise from a lifetime of listening, but also from knowledge of poetry around the world and through the centuries. Perhaps my readings can make a modest contribution to the recognition of the place of American blues lyrics among the greatest achievements of twentieth century American poetry.
     In poetry as in language itself, complexity does not develop over time; it is present from the start. It is in fact an axiom in linguistics that the most complex grammatically languages, those richest in morphological possibilities, are the unwritten ones. With writing, standardization, and time languages seem to become simpler. Thus English has lost the three genders, the dual forms (meaning neither singular nor plural but two) as well as numerous sounds such as the fricative produced in the back of the throat and vestigially represented by the gh in words like light. Vowel sounds once distinct collapse toward a shwa, and dialectical variations fade.
     In the past folk song, like unwritten languages, was often considered “primitive,” rudimentary, and naïve. For the early advocates of such music the motive was often nationalistic as in the cases of Arnim and Brentano, Burns, and Dvořák. The texts of oral poetry were thought to be not so much the work of individual artists as a collective expression of the people as a whole. In the twentieth century folklorists like John Work, the Lomaxes and Harry Oster generally emphasized sociological rather than artistic implications of the material they collected.
     A more sophisticated view of unwritten songs developed with the understanding of oral literature that came with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry and Lord provided ample proof that each oral text is unique, the work of a specific singer, some gifted poets and others with lesser skills. They demonstrated that the use of conventions and formulaic phrases do not vitiate meaning and, in the use of a master, may increase a poem’s semantic density and subtlety.
     Poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha encouraged the treatment of traditional oral texts as works of art, provocatively suggesting that they share techniques with modern avant-gardists and vastly multiplying the readership of poems recorded by anthropologists most of whom (Dennis Tedlock was an early exception) thought of the contents of their field notebooks as scientific data rather than aesthetic objects.
     Such developments have laid a theoretical base for a literary treatment of the blues songs of the Mississippi Delta, a corpus preserved on commercial recordings as well as by folklorists and appreciated by generations of listeners far from life in the Jim Crow rural South. Expressions of enthusiasm such as “Blues are my religion!” while all very well convey nothing of the artistry of the songs themselves. The highly developed conventions and shared allusive language that links song to song resemble those of Greek epigrams, Troubadour cansos, and Elizabethan sonnets, producing a marvelously expressive verbal medium capable of producing beauty as striking and themes as profound as any poetry in American literature.
     In spite of the rarity of direct social comment in the blues, their vision reflects American racism in DuBoisian “double consciousness,” providing a natural “hip” insight to question and enrich each singer’s descriptions. In this it surely reflects a phenomenon evident as well in jazz and rap and more broadly in the musical prominence of the Gnaoui in the Maghreb who were likewise descended from slaves, as well as the Roma, musicians to all classes of Eastern Europe for centuries, though too often otherwise despised. How else has it come that so many important American writers have been Jews and so many contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arundhati Roy are bicultural?
     Blues songs address the strongest human passion of eros. Many directly confront mortality, sometimes with Christian apologetics, sometimes without the aid of revelation. A good many might be said to be philosophical expressing existential Angst or ebullient joy. Thus the blues lyrics engage with the most ambitious themes of world literature -- love death and god – no less than Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare.
     Though the blues have long had intellectual appreciators who never experienced, they have rarely received the sort of appreciative explication given writers in the accepted canon. Their manipulation of listener expectations through the use of conventions and set phrases means that these lyrics require close as well as appreciative reading.
     I present here close readings of some of the masterpieces of the Delta blues by which I hope to demonstrate the beauty, expressiveness, and efficiency of the form. Behind these interpretations is the dynamo of my love for the music, unchanged since I first heard these recordings as a schoolboy. Marooned as I felt in suburbia, singers like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson opened my vision every bit as much as Homer and Goethe. Several of these essays concern image clusters or points of blues history rather than stanza by stanza explication, but the thrust of my entire project is to make a case for this body of great American poetry.

On the Intrusion of Non-aesthetic Criteria in Value Judgements about Art

For thousands of years most people have believed a proposition that seems to me absurd on its face: the idea that art should inculcate good behavior, that good literature teaches morality, often accompanied by the fear that exposure to bad art can encourage unethical actions. This belief is widespread in spite of the fact that artists have no greater access to truth than others and lack even training in philosophy or religion. Few, I think, would suspect that poets, painters, or professors of literature have any more orderly lives than philistines, yet the idea of the value of art as moral instruction has persisted through the centuries. The fact is that poets are distinguished by their ability to manipulate words, visual artists for their facility with form, composers with patterns of sound, and for nothing else at all. Creativity has no correlation with morality.

It is no surprise that such non-aesthetic criteria are advanced by governments and churches, institutions that know nothing of beauty, but they also appear in critics who should know better. In fact the theoretical association between art and ethics descends from archaic times. Oral cultures transmit their myths and mores through song, drama, sculpture, and story which often embody largely unquestioned “truths” about prudential or god-pleasing behavior. Poetry for such people is the most effective coding of all sorts of knowledge including moral judgements and political theory. Early writers saw teaching people how to behave as one of their most important functions. Plato’s doubts about the moral reliability of poetry led him to advocate censorship (he was blind to the similar unreliability of philosophy). The didactic role of literature was eventually enshrined in a dictum so influential it has been called “the Horatian platitude”: poetry should “teach and delight.” [1] This notion was then maintained by Augustine’s tempered acceptance of poetry as a possible aid toward salvation. Sidney continued the notion that poets work “to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.” Shelley, too, thought “the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue” (though some of his contemporaries would have been skeptical of his right to that description).

This assumption persisted until the age of Romanticism when an exalted view of imagination allowed beauty to displace truth altogether in the old formula. Strengthened by the proponents of “art for art’s sake” in the late Victorian era, by the mid-twentieth century, one of the most prominent critics could flatly declare “Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality is intolerably vulgar.” Many critics would now agree that “Our very idea of art precludes adherence” to the association of poetry with morality. [2] Yet a considerable revanchment has occurred as well, primarily associated with feminism and soi-disant progressivism and associated with the critical schools labeled new historicism, cultural criticism, gender studies, and the like which too often fired with self-righteous indignation employ the crudest instruments of Marxism to reduce art to mere social data. In practice the moral responsibility of art has been extended to the maker as well. An immoral poet has been thought to produce necessarily unworthy work, while, by the same erroneous principle, the virtues of an upright writer may seem to enhance the value of what he writes. The entire framework is repeated in the realm of social, not personal, morality, which is to say politics. An ethically motivated critics would find a defender of slavery, say, sinful and therefore capable of producing only flawed poetry, while a progressive or revolutionary writer is likely to be celebrated.

These days we hear little about people being led astray by licentious literature, but this was the cry of philistines and bluenoses for centuries. Socrates, after all, was executed for corrupting the youth. Those who closed the theaters (not just in the U. K. in 1642, and in the United States at the time of its birth in 1774 and 1778) regularly maintained that attending plays fosters licentious behavior. In recent American culture the same impulse is evident in censorship of Joyce, Henry Miller [3], and Allen Ginsberg.

Sometimes the political and personal are so mingled they can hardly be separated. When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)

More recently, in a development disturbing to progressive aesthetes, those claiming to oppose racism and other oppression have turned against the easier opponent of art. Thus would-be critics in a popular and influential critical edition of Jane Austen’s Emma criticize the author for her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” and for her refusal to admit that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.” [4] Only a singularly obtuse reader would use such irrelevant and anachronistic language to speak of the novel.

Rulers wreak more havoc than obtuse critics, though, when they conflate of art and morality. Apart from its centrality in literary theory until recent times this confusion in its political form has, not surprisingly, been an assumption of authoritarian regimes of all sorts. The very same erroneous standards appeared in the hunt for heretics by the medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church, Nazi condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art, the Stalinist imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932, and fundamentalist Islam’s disapproval of images and music. Each of these represents an attempt by the rulers to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values. Such misguided and reductive judgements take place in somewhat democratic societies as well. Last year San Francisco was asked to remove the WPA murals by Communist painter Victor Arnautoff in George Washington High School with the excuse that they should be replaced by “more positive” images. These pictures were targeted specifically because they did include representation of the genocidal attacks of native people and the viciousness of slavery.

All such critics cannot be condemned as know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.

Should the work of a poet or painter lose stature because its creator beats his wife? No more than one would refuse the attendance of a celebrated surgeon if one found he supported Generalissimo Trump. Clearly a person may excel in one arena of life, in a profession, for example, while misbehaving badly in others. Skill does not excuse a vicious person, but neither does the creator’s immoral behavior invalidate or weaken the work.

Of course, ethics and politics have an important role to play in making human life livable, even sometimes civilized. I by no means discount the importance of morality in evaluating societies and individual character, but these have nothing to do with aesthetic value. Government and non-profit agencies may naturally make social betterment a goal, but they should not then pretend that their decisions are determined by artistic considerations. Without exception, every one of the most recent recipients of NEA grants, announced in January of 2020, was associated with a social group identified as oppressed or underserved. [5] Just as in higher education admissions and hiring, diversity is a worthy goal which might be well-served by affirmative action, but academic or artistic strength must remain the primary criterion for judgement.

In evaluating art, politics and morality are irrelevant, popularity should play no role, nor should historical influence. An author’s colorful notoriety or exemplary propriety should never lead the reader either toward or away from his work. Each poem, song, or picture must earn attention through its beauty, broadly understood as reflecting elements of both form and content. Questions of ethics are most assuredly central to our shared humanity, and there are better and worse systems of government and virtuous and vicious forms of behavior, but that is because our political and social practices impact on our well-being. In general, an immoral person is one who causes suffering to others while a moral one displays benevolence. An exploitative social system likewise increases human pain and a more just one relieves it. These effects are evident in lived experience. In contrast, the effects of art occur in the consciousness of the consumer and the unique reward art may offer is beauty, a quality which would be wholly amoral were it not that some acts are attractive and some repellent. A few words in the air, a curving line, a succession of musical tones, how could these be morally good or bad? A work of art can do no more than to offer amusement and distraction and glimpses of beauty. If a work fails, we will not be so harsh as to call tiresomeness a sin.



1. The Epistula ad Pisonem (or Ars Poetica) repeats the idea in several forms: "Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae" (The poet aims to benefit or delight, or to be both pleasing and serviceable in life at once), "miscuit utile dulci" (a mix of useful and sweet), and "delectando pariterque monendo" (delighting and warning).

2. The first quotation is from Fearful Symmetry A Study of William Blake (p. 121) and the next from Tzvetan Todorov and John Anzalone, “Poetry and Morality,” Salmagundi, No. 111 (Summer 1996).

3. Tropic of Cancer was not legally published in the United States until 1964.

4. See the devastating and detailed critique in James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, p. 63-4. 5. The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.

5.  The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.