666 Congress Street, and the Road to Tobacco Road

The year was 1929, the year of the Stock Market Crash, the year that would mark the beginning of the Great Depression. It would also be the year that a young couple would open a bookstore in Longfellow Square in Portland. They had come to Portland from Mount Vernon (Maine) with “a great many books.” This young married couple was Mr. and Mrs. Erskine Caldwell, and it was here—at 666 Congress Street, across the street from Joe’s Smoke Shop and beside Video Express, the Longfellow Square barbershop, and the new headquarters of Maine Arts, Inc.—writing furiously during the next 24 dark months, that Caldwell would surprise the world with his “stark, remorseless, unsympathetic, and brilliant” novel Tobacco Road.

In fact, bookselling legend Francis O’Brien, who in 1940 would open a store at this same location, was fond of telling historians and customers alike, “I’m sure he must have worked on the early drafts here, while he was running the bookstore and sometimes sleeping downstairs.”

Of course, the 26-year-old Caldwell, who had already worked as a “cotton picker, stage hand, and professional football player” in his native Georgia as well as a reporter, would go on to become a World War II war correspondent for Life magazine in Russia, husband of photographer Margaret Bourke-White (he married four times), and author of 55 books.

But why did he surface here in Portland in 1929?

“One of the principle reasons for favoring the state of Maine as a suitable place to live for several years was that I felt the need to go as far away as possible in order to gain a revealing perspective of the scenes and circumstances of life in the South,” he has written.

But there’s also a romantic tradition that he came up here because he was on the run from the law.

Edgy, quick-witted, and shy, “a very private man,” according to his son D. Caldwell, a geology professor at Boston University, the young Caldwell (born in Moreland, Georgia, in 1903) wanted, more than anything, to write novels and to make his way as a writer. But he also needed money to support his growing family, so he rented the vacant storefront at 666 (then labeled 668) Congress Street at Longfellow Square, “The purpose of this being, as Helen has proposed, to stock a book shop with our more than three thousand review copies to sell at the retail cover price of two dollars arid the two-fifty and upwards.”

You see, during their courtship and during the early years of their marriage, Caldwell worked as a freelance book reviewer for a few small Southern publications. As these copies piled up in their Mount Vernon home, something had to be done and the answer was the Longfellow Book Shop. Caldwell traveled out to the West Coast and back during this period (1929-1931) leaving Helen to run the shop.

The book shop was not very successful, but the creative bycatch (from 1929-1933 four of Caldwell’s books—The Bastard, Poor Fool, American Earth, and Tobacco Road—would be published in succession), was very successful indeed.

Still, the money didn’t flood in all at once. In his autobiography, With All My Might, he writes, “My income from writing being as scanty as it was, and nonexistent in intervals, I was unable to provide means to keep the Longfellow Square Book Shop from closing its doors.”

Truth be told, the inevitable failure of the business was hastened by the actions of the Portland Police Department and the Cumberland County attorney. Acting on a complaint of obscenity made by a citizen, the police chief ordered that sales of The Bastard be prohibited immediately and that “all copies of the book are to be shipped out of the state of Maine within 48 hours.” There is some question if this was actually done, as copies of it were found in the State of Maine shortly after. But in any event, Caldwell was furious and even railed against the Portland Police Department in a broadside he published privately.

To no avail: “In addition to being unable to provide money to keep the book shop in business, neither did I have the means to pay an attorney to attempt to have the charge of obscenity dismissed or defended in court.”

There is more than a bit of irony in the fact that today the location of Caldwell’s book shop houses an adult movie business that off and on continues to attract the notice of the Portland Police Department.

“That would have tickled my father,” Prof. D. Caldwell says on the telephone upon learning this.

Although Caldwell’s bookshop did not last long, it made its mark on Portland history by raising questions about First Amendment rights, long before it became a political issue on the national level.

Erskine and Helen Caldwell were divorced in the fall of 1938. Although she remarried and remained in Maine, where she is buried at Mount Vernon, Erskine returned very few times to the state that saw the early flowering of his talent and reputation. The family, however, still maintains a presence in the state of Maine. Today, his grandson David lives at “Greentrees,” the family home in Mount Vernon.

Erskine’s widow, Virginia Caldwell Hibbs, tells us Greentrees is “a big, old summer house where Erskine and Helen were living when they opened the bookstore in Portland. Greentrees had never been winterized in any way, and they were dependent on the fireplaces for heat in the miserable, cold winter months and although they were nearly frozen at times the house still was warm enough to attract field mice…dozens of mice! Erskine once commented to me that the large collection of review books was developing an unpleasant, mousy smell and moving them to the bookstore was their salvation, not only from general deterioration but to save them from the hungry mice, who were beginning to nibble at the comers of the books.”

Apart from that, “he didn’t speak much of the past. He’d say ‘put the lid down and lets go on.'”