Books: Filter-Tip Tobacco Road

AROUND ABOUT AMERICA by Erskine Caldwell with illustrations by Virginia M. Caldwell. 224 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.50.

Erskine Caldwell and Second Wife Margaret Bourke-White collaborated in 1940 on a book called Say! Is This the U.S.A.? (“This America is a jungle of men living in the extremes of good and bad, heat and cold, wealth and poverty . . .”) Now, working with a new wife and a new title, Caldwell has turned in almost the same text (“Dynamic. Depressing. Open-all-night. Closed-for-the-season. Everybody welcome. White only. Colored entrance. Bloated with wealth and despairing in poverty. Aggressive and reactionary.”). But the 1964-model Caldwell & Company seems much milder, and the result of the collaboration is a sort of filter-tip Tobacco Road.

Caldwell and Wife Virginia traveled 25,000 miles in airplanes and rented cars. Mrs. Caldwell’s drawings are of high school yearbook caliber, and Caldwell’s interviewees are a strangely faceless lot, given to some of the most doubtful quotes outside the fine print of a New Yorker filler. A folksy old lady called Aunt Martha, of Riverhead, Long Island, moans over “this creeping menace of real estate, these acres and acres of housing colonies, shopping centers, garish neon lights blazing all night long, and every other kind of desecration of beautiful Long Island.” At nearly every stop across the country, Caldwell parks his rent-a-soapbox and rips off a little speech. In Birmingham the subject is integration, and the speech takes the form of a catechism (Q. “Will desegregation and integration produce a mulatto social system in the United States?” A. “Probably.”). In Nacogdoches, Texas, he sounds off on writers’ conferences with some not-so-new things to say about the fringe literati who attend them.

Along the dreary road of social awareness are comfort stations offering comic relief to the weary. At WHER, an all-girl radio station in Memphis, there is an advertising saleswoman whose ashtray bears the well-worn lettering: “Long Time No He.” In Welch, W. Va., there is a motel operator whose sideline is painting Fundamentalist road signs; his masterpiece reads:

WHERE WILL YOU BE IN ETERNITY?

WHERE WILL YOU BE TONIGHT?

WHY NOT AT THE SHADY GLEN MOTEL?

Caldwell should stick to his fictional white trash. They are more interesting.