Mon 1 Jan 2024
ERSKINE CALDWELL – Poor Fool. Rariora Press, hardcover, 1930 (limited edition of 1000 copies; illustrations by Alexander Couard). Novel Selections #52, digest paperback, 1953. Louisiana State University Press, softcover, 1994.
Before Caldwell learned to weave the absurd humor of the dispossessed into the rural noirs of Tobacco Road and God’s Litt;e Acre, he wrote a couple of diabolically dark grotesques: The Bastard and Poor Fool.
Poor Fool is the story of washed-up boxer Blondy Niles. We first find Blondy lying in a gutter, picked up by a prostitute named Louise, who wants to save him and make him her very own. Louise became a prostitute because she was so god-damned lonely. It seemed like a way around it. Plus you got paid. Mostly.
Salty Banks is a boxing promoter. He’s got a contender, Knockout Harris. He figures he can make a quick bundle letting a hasbeen like Blondy knock out Knockout, then schedule a second match where Knockout wins. He promises Blondy $10,000 he never intends to pay.
Blondy takes the deal, and it goes down like the Titanic.
Meanwhile, Louise gets murdered and Blondy ends up working at an abortion motel, 15 women at a time on the 3rd floor, hacked by a hack, one or two women dying a day, their bodies sold for $5.00 a piece by the greedy landlady and ‘nurse’, Mrs. Boxx.
Mrs. Boxx has a castrated husband who carries a pouch with three marbles in it where his manhood used to be. Mr. Boxx spends his days in visitation with the dead. His ex-wife is in the cemetery:
“I’ve got a private way of getting down there where she is. You know, there are a lot of them down there, men and women. They have a good time too. They have dug out a big room down there and connected up all the coffins with halls. They sleep in the coffins and then walk around visiting each other and meeting in a big room to talk and sing. They have dances sometimes too. They have a good time down there, you can bet your boots! You know, the men and women down there carry on just like they do up here….Oh, I had a good time. A damn good time. I went to see my wife and she took me in her coffin and we stayed there an hour or so. Say, you know, I bought my wife a fine coffin. I didn’t think so much about it when I got it, but yesterday when I saw it I was real proud of myself for getting her such a nice and fancy one. It’s all padded and lined with soft white silk cloth and fixed up nice. She’s crazy about it, too. And say, you should see the men down there…they are the funniest looking people you ever saw. All of them wear coats with no backs to them and a lot of them have pants with only the top part.”
Mrs. Boxx decides to castrate Blondy too, to make him nice and docile. Blondy’s having none of it, and is rescued by the Boxxes’ daughter Dorothy. They run away together.
Blondy decides it’s time to get paid his $10 grand by Salty. He hears thru the grapevine that it was Salty who murdered Blondy’s girl Louise because she was wise to Salty’s ways. So Blondy decides it’s curtains for Salty, and gets himself a gun.
And then the showdown.
——
Both this novel and The Bastard (as well as Bodies Are Dust by PJ Wolfson) are the blackest of noirs, nary a sliver of light shines thru. No redemption, and pretty much no dramatic arc. Just quick descent from bad to worse. From worse to worst.
It’s not really any fun. On the other hand, one has to appreciate the artistic integrity of a work whose very darkness damns it to instant obscurity. Aborted to the darkness from whence it came.
January 2nd, 2024 at 3:34 pm
I gather that Blondy can’t ever kill a rat properly. God, what a grim book.
January 2nd, 2024 at 4:33 pm
From http://authorscalendar.info/caldwell.htm :
“It has been argued that the The Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930) show hints of disturbed state of mind. Caldwell once explained that he tried to “create a different world,” he “had to imagine – I was not photographing life.” (Conversations with Erskine Caldwell, edited by Edwin T. Arnold, 1988)”
I have been trying, without success, to learn more about the publishing history of POOR FOOL. All I have found is that it was published as a limited, numbered (and illustrated) edition by a small press I’ve never heard of, and of course Caldwell was only beginning to build his reputation as a writer.
But by the end of the forties he had published more copies of his books (primarily TOBACCO ROAD and GOD’S LITTLE ACRE) than any other writer in the US. They must must have sold over a million of each of those two in paperback.
January 2nd, 2024 at 4:45 pm
Depressing, however, it made me want to read it.
January 2nd, 2024 at 8:23 pm
Caldwell could be funny, but when he tried to be grim, he usually took it too far. There is such a thing for me where too grim and gritty just becomes depressing unless the writing is extraordinary, and at his best I never felt Caldwell was in that category.
January 3rd, 2024 at 4:29 pm
On the back cover of the LSU edition, there is a blurb about Caldwell likening the book to a “diabolical dream”. Unfortunately no intro to this edition and WorldCat, ABE, etc. show no other publications by Rariora Press.
January 3rd, 2024 at 7:53 pm
Thanks, Bill. I suppose a next possible step would be to go through the various biographies of Caldwell and any book-length analyses of his work, of which there appear to be quite a few. That Rariora Press existed to publish only the one book is particularly intriguing.
January 3rd, 2024 at 5:06 pm
It’s also been published in a 1958 3-fer edition w/ Sacrilege of Alan Kent and The Bastard, Signet S1497, ISBN 0451014979. Weirdly the only title on the cover is Sacrilege of Alan Kent, which is an extremely bizarre piece of work. Even more bizarre than The Bastard and Poor Fool. It’s only 32 pages long and it is extremely odd in presentation–consisting solely of numbered, impressionistic terse paragraphs divided into three chapters. It is a kind of an autobiography of Alan Kent–though his name appears nowhere but the title.
I’ll share a few of my favorites here:
“I sat with my mother near the organ on Sunday while my father preached from the pulpit ‘way up above us. When he finished preaching and looked down, every one went up and put his hand in my father’s except my mother and me. My father never shook hands with me until after his sister fell out of the window and cut off her neck on a hoe.”
“A workman in the quarry behind the ridge was blasted hundreds of feet into the air and I ran over to see him. His wife was there and so were his children. She carried home in his dinner-box all of his body she and the children could find. The oldest girl the next morning found a part of his foot and it was interred behind the woodshed that night in a lard pail with the other parts. The next afternoon one of the workmen at the quarry asked my father, ‘Is it true the world is sure enough round?'”
“One night I crawled aboard a coaling tramp and begged a man for a job. He heaved a cask-bung at my head and shouted, ‘Get the hell off here, you God-damn rat!’ Before the tramp and the man got half way across the Atlantic, they went down and no one knows where.”
“A woman fell to the street from eleven stories up. When we ran and lifted her into the ambulance, her body felt like a wheat sack half full of potatoes.”
“I lived four months in the construction camp where we were building a new railroad. Saturday nights after supper a woman came and climbed into the gravel car. One night near the end of summer somebody crushed her head with a spike-hammer and took all her money.”
“A woman in a saloon told me where I could get a job from a man she knew. She said, ‘Just tell him I sent you,’ and I walked thirty miles or more, but when I got there he said, ‘Tell that brindled bitch to feed her own pups because I am through with her,’ and I had to walk all the way back again, and I could not find anything to eat anywhere. I looked for the woman, but I could never find her again.”
“Once the sun was so hot a bird came down and walked beside me in my shadow.”
“An old man was riding a white mule bareback along a dusty road. He fell to the ground dead with age and the mule turned around and came back and stepped on the old man’s chest.”
“When I went away I worked on a farm for a man with short black whiskers. In the fall at butchering time I had to sit on the hogs’ backs and stick a long sharp knife into their throats. Sometimes the hogs would squeal and run so fast I could not get on them. The man gave me an axe and told me to knock them in the head. After they were killed and butchered we took the blood and everything else that was left over and poured it into trenches in the cornfield. In the spring when his wife’s two babies were born dead, I helped him carry them to the cornfield. We dug some new trenches and put everything into them. After a while we plowed the field and planted white corn there.”
“One day I was walking through the swamp and I found the skeleton of a man leaning against a tree. When I tapped the skull with a stick, some lizards came out and forked their scarlet tongues at me and ran back inside. When I tapped the ribs, a chipmunk heard the vibrations and began to sing overhead.”
“I saw a boy who looked as if he might be my son but I did not know what name to call him by.”
Can’t find any info on the thing–but did see that some dude, for his dissertation at North Texas University in 1971, composed an orchestral work to accompany a solo baritone vocalist using this text as his libretto. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1038787/m2/1/high_res_d/1002743801-Hutchison.pdf
January 3rd, 2024 at 7:55 pm
Whew, Tony. Thanks for typing all that in. Very very strange stuff, all the way to the end of some sort of scale to truly unsettling. Creepy.