T.S. StriblingRezensionen

This is the last book in The Vaiden Trilogy. Stribling gives us an unflinching view of the deep south, both in its stateliness and brutality, starting prior to the Civil War and ending when the Great Depression starts. Prepared to be uncomfortable with the reality of the South during that time. It is a great trilogy to read, in spite of its no-holds-barred look at both the people living during that time. The second book in this series, The Store, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1933.
"White educated Southerners are completely cut off from black educated Southerners by the inherited attitudes of master and slave, and the one really does not know that the other exists. So now the Reverend Catlin looked at the heavy black man who used correct and moving if rather florid English with a feeling of surprise and grotesqueness as if a bootblack should begin discussing the quantum theory."

Reprint of a classic set of stories set in various Caribbean islands --Curacao, Haiti, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad. The first four are more of less conventional mysteries; the last one takes a turn to horror which unfortunately ends the career of the .detective, Henry Poggiolii, professor of psychology at Ohio State University. I enjoy the exotic atmosphere of the first four but dislike the last.

T. S. Stribling (1881-1965) was an American short story writer and novelist, born and raised in Tennessee. He drew on life experiences in the American South for the foundation of his Pulitzer Prize winning literary work. Stribling started writing fiction at an early age selling his first short story for five dollars when he was twelve. He continued writing short stories that were published in pulp magazines like American Boy, Argosy, and Adventure. In 1917, he expanded one of his short stories into his first novel, Cruise of the Dry Dock.

This first novel was the beginning of Stribling's interest in writing longer works with more character development and more important themes than his short stories. In Cruise of the Dry Dock, the backgrounds, personalities, and behaviors of two characters are described in detail. Leonard Madden is an American in his 20's fresh out of college living on limited funds, and Caradoc Smith is British in his early 30s a carefree traveler financially supported by his wealthy family. The story begins in London just before WWI where the two young men sign on as crew on a large dry dock (big enough to overhaul ocean liners) that is being towed by a tug boat up the coast of England to its permanent location. It is clear to Madden right from the beginning that Smith is a drinker, taking swigs of alcohol from a flask as the two wait for a dory to take them to their quarters on the dry dock. Madden is slightly upset when Smith offers him a cap full of liquor as they wait to board the dry dock.

At first, all is well as the tug pulls the unwieldy dry dock up the coast of England. Madden and Smith spend their days working with the rest of the crew painting the huge metal sides of the dry dock. But, as days go by, Smith reveals himself as an alcoholic who has difficulty reporting for duty, suffering debilitating hangovers. Madden and the crew dislike the British never-do-well leading to insults and a fistfight. Smith does well defending himself against words and fists and Madden learns he studied and boxed while attending Oxford University.

A major storm envelops the tug and dry dock separating the two vessels. The dry dock is pushed by the storm and drifts in the currents out of the shipping lanes of the Atlantic Ocean. The story involves the survival of the dry dock crew as they drift helplessly for weeks in the isolated seas far from land. Adventures ensue including, discovering an abandoned sailing vessel, entanglement in a vast area of Sargasso (seaweed), involvement in a naval battle between the British and German navies, and a experiencing the personal and social devastation for the crew brought on by alcohol abuse and alcoholism.

The importance of Cruise of the Dry Dock is that, in addition to publishing his short stories, T. S. Stribling had financial success publishing a novel in the pulp magazine market. He was able to support himself as a writer and move on to his major works of fiction, the Vaiden Trilogy (The Store, The Forge, and The Unfinished Cathedral) published in the early 1930's. The Trilogy follows the Vaiden family as they live through the difficult years of Civil War Reconstruction in Florence, Alabama. The Store was the most famous novel that earned Stribling a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1933. William Faulkner stated he was influenced by the Vaiden Trilogy, and had the three novels on his bookshelf when he wrote Absalom, Absalom.

Writing for the "pulps" provided good early training for many writers who would have later success in literature. I recommend Stribling's first novel for readers who want to see how important it is for some writers (including Stephen King) to develop techniques for telling a high action stories that appeal to many readers, and can help them improve writing skills leading to more important work later in their careers. The Kindle version of The Cruise of the Dry Dock is free at Amazon.

544. The Forge by T.S. Stribling (read 8 June 1958) This is the prequel to the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1933, so I read it since I felt I should before I read The Store.

The Forge is book 1 in the 3 part Vaiden series. The books begin at the start of the Civil War and follow one Southern family through reconstruction.

The second in the series, The Store, won the Pulitzer in 1933, so I decided to read the entire series.

The Forge was very successful at creating this family and depicting their lives. The pace was quick, in fact in the 500 or so pages of this first book, we went all the way through a family owning slaves, signing up to fight in the Civil War, losing half of their family in the battles, losing the war, losing their slaves and eventually losing all of their money. They went from being a prominent and well respected family to having nothing and being shamed into town.

There is a definite agenda of the author, to both show this family in a sympathetic life and to make a statement against the way they lived. I found him to be extremely successful at this as well.

It's a little strange reviewing this book now, as I finished it and immediately began the second book. So it basically feels like I'm still in the middle of it. I was torn rating it, because it's something I've really enjoyed and become somewhat lost in, yet it isn't necessarily something I'd recommend to someone either.

The Store is the 2nd book in the T.S. Stribling Vaiden series. I've already reviewed the first book, The Forge, and most everything I have to say about this book was summed up in that review. The rating has been raised, as a result of the fact that I'm currently about 1,500 pages into the series and am nowhere near ready for it to be over. That's saying something.

One thing that was different in this book was that there was a new fat character, and apparently her entirely personality was that of 'fat'. Seriously, he actually wrote :

"I don't know," she called back flabbily, "I might want something to eat."

How exactly does a person speak 'flabbily'?

I am sad to finish this trilogy, as I've enjoyed my time with the Vaidens over the past few weeks.

The trilogy began before the Civil War and continued through to the first post-reconstruction generation. Watching the South fall, rise, and fall again, all through the perspective of one family, was interesting. I felt Stribling did an excellent job of creating this world and I will miss it.

T. S. Stribling was born in Clifton, Tennessee in 1887, and Birthright (1822) was his first excursion into serious novel writing territory. It's the story of the mixed-race Peter Siner, who, following a Harvard education, travels back south to encounter a huge culture shock; not only does he meet racial prejudice by the whites back in Hooker's Bend, but in the black area - Niggertown - he finds the blacks complicit in this prejudice:

'This constant implication among Niggertown inhabitants that Niggertown and all it held was worthless, mean, unhuman depressed Peter. The mulatto knew the real trouble with Niggertown was it had adopted the white village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.'

Siner has lofty visions of healing the rift between black and white in the South, of, er, making a stand against the movement of (often more gifted) blacks to the North, but in the end the book is pessimistic about these notions, and Siner leaves Tennessee, with his octoroon bride, for work in Chicago. Black readers were unhappy with the book's conclusion, and Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Faucet, for instance, claimed that the white Stribling greatly contributed to her becoming a novelist; Nella Larsen and Walter White were similarly disturbed by Birthright. Nevertheless, in 'The Myth of Objectivity in T. S. Stribling's Birthright and Unfinished Cathedral' (1933) - the latter of which was the final part of the 'Vaiden trilogy', Hyeyum Chung states that several critics have claimed that Stribling was 'at the vanguard of the Southern Literary Renaissance'.*

T. S. Stribling is generally considered to have written all of his significant work in the 1920s and 1930s.

* In Southern Quarterly (October, 2002).

http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/

Miltiades Vaidan is the main character in this post-Civil War southern, racist setting. Milt is not a sympathetic character in his aspirations for wealth, he never achieves those goals and is more instrumental in the death and destruction of other people's fortunes and lives. The Store is the 2nd installment of a trilogy which may explain why it ends rather abruptly. It is a dark story. I wish there were more reviews and discussions available on this novel.

545. The Store by T. S. Stribling (read 14 June 1958) (Pulitzer fiction prize for 1933) I read this because it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for 1933.