Books: Cracked Crackers

GOD’S LITTLE ACRE—Erskine Caldwell —Viking ($2.50).

Though no disturbance was reported last week at Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery, by rights Anthony Comstock should have been spinning like a teetotum in his grave. Viking Press issued the kind of book that was like a call of boots & saddles to the old vice crusader. Erskine Caldwell is a newcomer to the Viking list, a young author of the leftwing, hard-boiled school of U. S. fiction. Queer mixtures of Rabelaisian spade-calling, bell laughter and poetic proletarianism, God’s Little Acre luridly illustrates two present-day intelligentsiac trends: towards unashamed sensuality, against capitalistic industry. It also underlines a recent tendency of U. S. publishers: to go as near the limits of censorship as possible.

“There was a mean trick played on us somewhere. God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people.” says Patriarch Ty Ty, in a kind of final apology for the outrageous behavior of his children. Old Ty Ty was a Georgia cracker whose dusty little farm lay fallow while he and all his family dug in it for gold. Sometimes their faith wavered, but never Ty Ty’s. Fifteen years he had been digging. When he heard that an albino was supposed to be a good divining-rod he went and roped one. After digging-hours his children and children-in-law found plenty of trouble to keep themselves busy. Darling Jill was most promiscuous: she seduced her brother-in-law Will and the albino, between whiles teased her potbellied suitor Pluto nearly frantic. Will and Buck’s quarrel over Buck’s wife, Griselda. was settled when company police shot Will as a labor agitator. Buck soothed his itching trigger-finger when another brother came after Griselda; then he went up the hill to shoot himself. As soon as the excitement was over Ty Ty went on digging for gold.