Tobacco Road

Tobacco Road was Erskine Caldwell's most highly regarded book; hailed by the likes of William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. A 2006 Slate magazine review (Erskine Caldwell's greasy hairball of a novel. - By Dwight Garner - Slate Magazine) called it "one of the sickest and most lurid books to have emerged from the literature of the American South. It's about as nutritious as a plate of pork cracklings. You're going to feel a little ill when you get up from this table. And I mean all of this, I think, in a good way."

Tobacco Road depicts the Lester family as the "poorest, whitest, trashiest, horniest family in rural Georgia." They are about as lowdown as human beings can get. Lazy, shiftless, and dishonest, violent, and sex-obsessed. In some ways, Tobacco Road is the anti-Gone with the Wind; no magnolias and romantic chivalry in Caldwell's South. It is also an anti-Grapes of Wrath. The Lesters are stuck in the Depression too and about to be kicked off their land, but it's hard to work up any sympathy for them.

Tobacco Road was turned into one of the most successful Broadway plays of all time by Jack Kirkland and later a movie (starring the alluring Gene Tierney as Ellie Mae Lester). The movie recently aired on TCM and is showing on the Fox Movie Channel on March 26, 2010 8:00 am ET and April 14, 2010 7:00 am ET. The movie (directed by John Ford, who also directed Grapes of Wrath) turns the story into a hillbilly comedy.




The Georgia Encyclopedia entry had this to say about the movie:

Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (a Georgia native) attempted to preserve the caustic comedy and social protest of the book and play, but the studio overruled them on central issues, specifically the tragic ending. The result was a sentimental burlesque that Caldwell himself disavowed.

Nevertheless, the movie retains enough of Caldwell's sharp edge to draws the viewer in. The characters created by Caldwell became enduring cultural stereotypes of white Southern hillbillies. And it does provide a window into a time and place not too far over the historical horizon, but nearly unimaginable for many.

Netflix: Tobacco Road

Devils of Loudon

My review of the Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley.

One of the joys of reading is how one subject can lead to a serendipitous find. Having recently come across a brief reference to the early 17th century barking nuns of Loudon I went in search of a more detailed exploration. In Aldous Huxley's book I found all that I sought and much more.

Urbain Grandier, the local parson of Loudon, is a very naughty cleric who partakes much too much of the sensual world. One morsel happens to be the daughter of his best friend. She becomes pregnant with unhappy consequences for many people. Grandier manages in this way of behavior to alienate nearly every important Catholic in Loudon as well as make an enemey of Richelieu.

When Grandier spurns the local prioress, Sister Jeanne, she claims demonic possession at the hand of Grandier as do 2 of her nuns. Grandier may have been guilty of many sins, but demonic possession was not among them. Exorcists are brought in as much too destroy Grandier as to throw out the devils (7 specific ones inhabit Sister Jeanne alone). The exorcists produce devils in 14 more nuns. The public exorcisms provide great entertainment, reviving the local tourist industry, but eventually produce the trial of Grandier, who in due turn is burned at the stake. The story continues when the Jesuit Surin arrives to finally successfully exorcise Sister Jeanne's demons.

Huxley's 1952 work explores the psychological aspects of demonic possession and exorcism, sometimes brilliantly against the backdrop of the madnesses of his own time. Liberal rationalists had "fondly imagined" an end to persecutions of 'heretics'. Instead, as he observes "from our vantage point on the descending road of modern history, we now see that all the evils of religion can flourish without any belief in the supernatural, that convinced materialists are ready to worship their own jerry-built creations as though they were the Absolute, and that self-styled humanists will persecute their adversaries with all the zeal of Inquisitors exterminating the devotees of a personal and transcendent Satan...In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good."

In the last third of the book he explores the nature of Sister Jeanne's possession, the possession of her exorcist Surin, and the manner of her recovery. The modern mind has some difficulty here. Clearly Surin and possibly Jeanne believed in the reality of demonic possessions (it is worth noting that many learned men, including those behind Grandier's fall and most Jesuits did not believe in the authenticity of these possessions). At the same, Jeanne is also play-acting at times as she concedes in her own subsequent writings. They believed in the Devil, they believed in possession, but understood that the Devil could not overcome the will of the possessed. Huxley paints a poignant, if oddly amusing, scene when he describes how Surin ordered Jeanne's devils to discipline themselves - in other words to flagellate Jeanne. Two of the devils lay on the whip with gusto, but Balaam and Isacaaron abhorring pain, would barely swing the whip and yet the possessed Jeanne would scream in agonized suffering.

An absolutlely fascinating read by one of the great minds of the 20th century.

Amazon Permalink

***

I have not seen the movie adaptation but here is a link to a rave review: The Devils.

"Quite possibly the ultimate “nunsploitation” movie, 1971’s THE DEVILS was adapted by the great Ken Russell (director of THE MUSIC LOVERS, TOMMY, THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM and many other unforgettable films) from Aldous Huxley’s THE DEVILS OF LOUDON, about a real incident that occurred in 17^th Century France, and John Whiting’s play THE DEVILS, itself based on the Huxley book."

I didn't really know there was competition for best nunsploitation movie.