Career in C Major and Other Fiction

Probably no one was more surprised at the worldwide reaction to The Postman Always Rings Twice when it was published in 1934 than its author, James M. Cain. His little novel rocked readers and critics as they had never been rocked before. Cain had described Postman simply as being about “a couple of jerks who discover that murder, though dreadful enough morally, can be a love story, too, but then wake up to discover that once they’ve pulled the thing off, no two people can share this terrible secret.” It was his favorite theme, which he had already developed in his 1928 short story “Pastorale” and would use again in his 1936 Liberty magazine serial, Double Indemnity. Cain, who was 42 when Postman was published, thought the book might sell a few thousand copies, if he was lucky, and maybe he would have another idea for a novel.

But Postman was that rare achievement — a literary success that was also a best-seller which kept on selling and selling around the world and down through the years. It was also bought immediately by Hollywood (although MGM would have to wait 10 years before liberalized censorship laws would permit a filmable script) and made into a Broadway play (by Cain), and it became one of the first big paperback best-sellers.

Suddenly, James M. Cain, the former “human interest” writer for Walter Lippmann’s New York World editorial page, who specialized in little pieces about food, music, sports, holidays, and domestic problems, the iconoclast who had written satiric dialogues for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, the disenchanted New Yorker editor and failed Hollywood screenwriter who had most recently been writing humorous short stories and articles for magazines, was now the nation’s preeminent “tough guy” writer. As The New York Times book reviewer said, James M. Cain “made Hemingway look like a lexicographer.” He also defied anyone to put the book down after reading its “remarkable” first sentence, which would soon be widely quoted in reviews, literary essays, and writing classes: “They threw me off the haytruck about noon...” Franklin P. Adams, with even more enthusiasm, said in his review: “Cain’s style... is better than most of Hemingway’s... I can’t detect a stylistic flaw in it.” Most of the other critics, at home and abroad, agreed: “This is strong man’s meat,” said Herschel Brickell in his syndicated book review, “and not for those who mind blood and raw lust.” In London, James Agate wrote: “One day last week the postman slipped into my letter box a slim package containing a little volume of fewer than 200 pages... a major work... The book shakes the mind a little as the mind is shaken by Macbeth.” And Gilbert Seldes said: “It’s a long time since I have heard so many people of so many different tastes say that a book is ‘great.’”

Great, shocking, and incredibly fast-paced was the almost universal reaction to Postman. And from those first reviews on through 17 other novels and numerous short stories and magazine serials written before he died in 1977, Cain tried to live down his label as a “tough guy.” And it was not just the fact that Cain knew he was not, personally, a tough guy; he was much closer to Sean O’Faolain’s description when the Irish author referred to Cain’s “normal tough-guy heart-of-a-baby self.” What really concerned Cain was his literary reputation as “hard-boiled.” When Alfred A. Knopf, understandably trying to capitalize on the impact of Postman, promoted him as a “tough guy writer,” Cain complained: “I wish you would stop advertising me as tough. I protested to the New York critics about their labelling me as hard-boiled, for being tough is the last thing in the world I think about, and it’s not doing me any good to have such a thing stamped on me. Actually I am shooting for something different and plugging me as one of the tough young men merely muddles things up.”

Knopf agreed to stop the advertising, but wrote Cain: “I suspect that every other review of every other hard-boiled book that may be published in the next three years will drag you and the Postman into it.”

Knopf was right and Cain (with the help of Double Indemnity, which features adultery and premeditated murder, and Serenade, which features a shocking murder and a perhaps even more shocking love scene in front of an altar in a Catholic church in Mexico) quickly emerged as the personification of the tough guy writers in the 1930s. In 1941, Edmund Wilson, in his famous essay “The Boys in the Backroom,” nominated Cain as the best of the writers he called “the poets of the tabloid murder,” and Cain’s reputation was now firmly established. By 1947, Cain felt it was time to do something about it. In the Preface to his little novel The Butterfly (which also featured a murder and incest) Cain tried to put to rest forever the tough guy label. “I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise,” he wrote, “and I believe those so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics and have little correspondence in reality.” Writing a book, he continued, “is a genital process and all of its stages are intra-abdominal; it is sealed off in such fashion that outside ‘influences’ are almost impossible. Schools don’t help the novelist, but they do help the critics; using as mucilage the simplifications that the school hypothesis affords him, he can paste labels wherever convenience is served by pasting labels, and although I have read less than 20 pages of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in my whole life, Mr. Clifton Fadiman can refer to my hammet-and-tongs style and make things easy for himself.”

Cain also tried once and for all to discourage the Hemingway comparisons: “I owe no debt,” he wrote, “beyond the pleasure his books have given me, to Mr. Ernest Hemingway,” and he goes on to document the fact that his style was established in the mountain of newspaper and magazine writing he did for The Baltimore Sun, The New York World, and The American Mercury long before Hemingway appeared on the scene.

But the tough guy legend persisted and was finally cemented forever by David Madden, who, in the late 1960s, included Cain in his anthology of literary essays, The Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, and wrote his own valuable literary study James M. Cain, in which he described him as the “Twenty Minute Egg of the Hard Boiled School.” Cain was still alive, of course, when Madden was developing his tough guy studies and protested mildly — although he and Madden eventually became good friends and Cain helped him with the biographical aspects of his study.

So Cain passed into history in 1977 firmly labeled as perhaps the most eminent of the tough guy, hard-boiled school of writers, and I do not intend to argue otherwise. But I will state, for the record, that Cain did not start out that way. And it might all have turned out otherwise — if, for example, Postman had been seen by the critics and readers more as Cain saw it: the story of a couple of jerks who were cursed with “the wish that came true,” which Cain said was what most of his novels were about. Frank Chambers finally won the girl he lusted after and Cora achieved respectability with her restaurant. But they could not afford the price they had to pay. And it is good to remember what Wilson also said, that Postman, although it included “brilliant moments of insight,” also had elements of “unconscious burlesque” and was “always in danger of becoming unintentionally funny.”

This was also true of Double Indemnity and Serenade, and the question is: Just how unintentional was Cain’s predilection for comedy, burlesque, and humor? If you go back to the beginning of his career, almost 20 years before Postman was published, and search for his roots as a writer, you will find that Cain really began as a satirist and humorist who, at the same time, was always conscious of the tragedy forever lurking on the fringes of our lives.

When Cain graduated from Washington College at the age of 17, he had no intention of making a career of writing. He did, however, write his first published work there — a tongue-in-cheek prediction of what his college classmates might be doing 15 years in the future. It was titled “Prophecy” and is reprinted below.

Prophecy

This little piece is written in a competent short-story format and an intriguing, sardonic style. Its prophecies, at least in two cases, were quite good: Mary Clough, his girlfriend and later first wife, did go on to get her Ph.D.; and the narrator, James M. Cain, was almost run over by an automobile in New York, but was saved by his boss, an editor named Walter Lippmann. Cain never did learn what actually happened to most of his classmates, a fact which he immortalized in one of the two light verses he wrote 20 years later for The New Yorker.

Cain made his decision to be a writer while sitting on a park bench in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, in 1914. He went back to Chestertown, took a job teaching English in the prep school at the college, and spent his spare time writing short stories, which came back from the magazines as fast as they were sent out. Unfortunately, these unpublished stories were not saved, so there is no evidence to show how the 23-year-old Cain was developing as a writer. Discouraged, he went up to Baltimore and took a job as a reporter, first for The American and then The Sun. But this career was aborted by World War I and the year and a half he spent in France with the American Expeditionary Force.

He returned to his old job on The Sun in 1920, and now we begin to see young Cain developing as a very talented and sardonic writer with an excellent eye — and ear — for the human comedy as well as tragedy. His first major assignment was to cover the trial of William Blizzard, a young West Virginia coal miner who had been charged with treason. Blizzard had led a band of 600 coal miners against the “deputies” hired by the coal miners to resist the efforts of the unions to organize the miners. In carrying out their orders, the deputies attacked and killed some of the miners, and Blizzard’s mob was essentially responding to the brutalities of the deputies. Cain did not think this amounted to treason, and he also thought the miners were being falsely labeled as “radical” and “revolutionaries” by the establishment press. His viewpoint came out in his reporting, which not only was accurate, fair, and objective but also underscored the comic-opera nature of the war between the miners and the coal company deputies.

Cain’s coverage of the trial was featured prominently by The Sun, not only in first-page stories but in several feature pieces for the editorial page. One of these gives us our first revealing glimpse of Cain’s sardonic twist of mind in the early 1920s. It was titled “Hunting the Radical” and is reprinted below.

Hunting the Radical

Ever since the war times we have had a prodigious pother about radicalism. The radicals were going to sell us out to the Germans; the radicals were going to sell us out to Russia; the radicals were going to have a revolution and put the White House to the torch. The newspaper writers devoted unlimited space to them; a real spectre haunted many other estimable persons. One gathered that the duty of all patriotic citizens was to scotch the head of the monster ’neath the heel of the Americanization movement.

The discussion still goes on unabated, and I summarize the main points brought forward as follows:

These, I believe, are the main points alleged against the radicals.

The subject, I confess, has interested me since it was first broached. I am naturally superstitious, being easily frightened by ghost stories, and possibly that accounts for it. Anyhow, I read with rapt attention all the newspaper print about it; I have gone so far as to read up on the past history of it. I have read biographies of Lauvelle, Bakunin, Proudhon and Lenin; I have even read Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. Reading about the Chicago bomb outrage back in the eighties afforded me a memorable thrill; the I.W.W. is my special meat.

As a result of my researches, I got the impression that the radical was a person adept at plots too devious for the ordinary mind to comprehend; that he was steeped in philosophy that was a triple distillate of Marx, Proudhon and Lenin; that he was a secret agent of the Moscow regime, and if we didn’t watch him, would have a Soviet in the Capitol at Washington before we knew it. I think this was the common impression.

Well, as I say, the subject fascinates me. So I set out to hunt the radical in his lair; I wanted to see the beast, stroke his fur and hear him purr. I had been impressed by Henry M. Hyde’s statement, in an article last summer, that the West Virginia mine fields were infested with Reds, so off to West Virginia I went and got me a job in a union mine, where, according to the best information, I could hardly move without stepping on the toe of a radical.

And, praise God, I found him! I had hardly stowed my dunnage in the miners’ boarding house before I began hearing about him. I give you a brief digest of some of the things I heard:

A foreman: “Oh, we get along with our men all right. You see, there’s not generally any trouble between a coal company and his men: It’s only when these radicals get them stirred up that we have trouble.”

An operator: “The main trouble we have is with this radical element. Our men, most of them, are good men — steady, good workers, never give any trouble. But you know how it is: when some of these radicals get up on their ear about something, then’s when we have our hands full.”

A miner: “Tell you how it is: this here’s a good comp’ny, best comp’ny I ever work for. An’ they’s good men in this mine, good men’s ’yever see; they don’t have to have no foreman over’m to git the work out of ’m. But when these yere dam radicals gits started, ’ats when we have what you call trouble. Seems like ther’s always an element that want’s t’ start sum’m. You know how it is.”

A miner’s wife: “It’s jes’ like I tell my husban’. You men don’t never have no trouble ontil you start listenin’ to some of them radicals, we calls ’m.”

And so forth. I had several radicals pointed out to me: rowdy-looking fellows, certainly. I even screwed up my courage to talk to them; they offered me carbide for my lamp and cigarettes. I declined, of course.

But this point gradually became apparent to me: that these radicals seemed to be a different breed from those I had read so much about in the newspapers. I cleverly interrogated one, without revealing my design, and found he had never heard of Russia. I found out that nobody in the whole camp had ever heard of the numerous self-anointed apostles of the labor movement — the “Cause” — who get out the magazines in New York. I questioned other certified radicals and found they had no theories concerning government whatever and didn’t know what a Soviet was. Hold on, I thought, there’s something wrong here.

So I went to an operator friend and I explained to him my difficulty. I told him I thought what he meant by radical were two different things. “Tell me,” I said, “precisely what do you imply by radical?”

“Oh, that’s a new word we have,” he said. “I don’t remember just how we got to calling them that. I mean a trouble-maker; a fellow that wants to run things — a bully, I guess you would call him.”

“Then you don’t have in mind especially a secret agent of the Russian Government,” I said, “or a Socialist, or a Communist and a Syndicalist, or an I.W.W. You merely mean a fellow that hasn’t anything better to do than stir up friction and dissatisfaction with anything from the foreman to the way the track is laid in his room, is that it?”

“You’ve got it,” he said. “Hell, no; we don’t have many of those Socialists or funny ones up here. I heard there was a pair of I.W.W.’s up here during the war; they said the Department of Justice was watching them — but I never saw them.”

I interviewed my miner friends all over again; I traveled over a considerable portion of the mine field and checked up on this point everywhere I went. And everybody, from operator to miner, gave me the same definition of radical: a bully, a trouble-maker, a fellow who did a lot of talking: our same old friend, in brief, that was going to lick the teacher ’way back in school days. A person we have had with us always. But never a word about Bakunin, Marx, Lenin or Moscow.

Words, I confess, could not express my disappointment. Here the newspapers had been talking for five years about one kind of beast, and come to find out, they were simply mixed up on their terminology; it was an entirely different kind of beast that went by that name. They had been calling a rabbit by the name of a wildcat, and that was what the whole noise was about.

My grief, as I say, was intense. But I shall not linger with myself. I want to step down the voltage of the West Virginia discussion into plain language a Marylander can understand.

Returning to Baltimore, I told a lady my story. She is a lady who was reared on a large Eastern Shore farm.

“Certainly,” she said, “I get the picture. Over home my father and all the other farmers used to say they never had any trouble with their help until some big-mouth nigger came along. That’s what they used to call them — ‘big-mouth nigger.’ Everything would be going along fine, hands all contented, everybody happy, until maybe we would need an extra man and get a big-mouth nigger. Then, just like that, everything would go wrong. The hands wouldn’t work, and, first thing you know, here they would come and all want ‘Sa’d’y aft’noon off,’ or a horse to drive on Sunday. It’s the same old thing.”

This, then, is the picture, translated into plain Eastern Shore of Maryland talk. I am now ready to make certain substitutions in my equations, that is, in the admonitions concerning radicals, and get the following reductio ad absurdum:

Now by the shiny bald pate of Eugene V. Debs is this what kept Palmer pacing the floor, with drawn and haggard face, that fateful May 1, when the bombs didn’t go off? Is this the “Under-Man”? — he who “remains, multiplies, bides his time. And now and then his time comes. When a civilization falters beneath its own weight and by the decay of its human foundations; when its structure is shaken by the storms of war, dissension or calamity; then the long-repressed springs of atavistic revolt gather themselves together for the spring.” (I quote from “The Revolt Against Civilization,” by the Very Hon. Lothrop Stoddard, K.K.K.)

So this is revolution. O tempora, O morons!

(The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 3, 1923)

Cain’s West Virginia reporting led to his first national magazine articles (in The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation) as well as his first attempt to write a novel, which ended in discouragement and a conviction that he could not write fiction. His Blizzard trial reporting also caught the eye of H. L. Mencken, who worked on The Sun and was about to launch his new magazine, The American Mercury. Soon Cain was writing for The Mercury, and his early, iconoclastic articles written for Mencken continued to display the sardonic tone and style he had developed on The Sun.[1]

Then, in 1924, after being discharged from a TB sanitarium, he took a job writing editorials for Walter Lippmann on The New York World, and the next stage in the literary evolution took place: James M. Cain gradually emerged on The World as a humorist and human interest writer. He had hoped to be hired by Lippmann as an op-ed page editor, but Lippmann, forewarned by Mencken and Arthur Krock (who introduced Cain to Lippmann) that Cain was developing as a writer of exceptional ability, had other ideas. What Cain did not know when he went to see Lippmann was that Maxwell Anderson, who contributed the human interest pieces to Lippmann’s editorial page, was resigning, due to the success of his play What Price Glory? which was running on Broadway. Lippmann asked Cain to try his hand at some editorials, and Cain wrote two — one on a congressman who purposely had himself indicted for making home beer with a recipe he had gleaned from a government publication, and another inquiring why editorial writers always came out against the man-eating shark and for motherhood. “Leave us never forget,” Cain said, “the man-eating shark is viviparous — it brings forth its young alive. It’s kind to its young and it’s been doing it over 10 million years before the human race was ever heard of. The man-eating shark was the first mother and, in a very real sense, the man-eating shark is motherhood.”

These two early efforts at human interest editorial writing were significant because they (1) gave further evidence that Cain possessed a light sardonic touch and (2) revealed his fascination with living creatures other than humans, especially ones that have a special terror for humans (about which more will be said later).

Cain, however, had never written an editorial before, and he did not think his two efforts were very good. When he left Lippmann’s office that first afternoon, he was sure he had failed and went immediately to a bar to meet a friend and decide where he would look for a job next. But that evening he was surprised to see his editorial on the congressman in print. When he went to Lippmann’s office the next morning, the editor was all smiles and asked him whether he had any ideas for editorials that day. Lippmann also said, referring to Cain’s first efforts: “Those are very funny pieces. I was very glad to get them. I didn’t use the piece about the shark — a very funny piece, but I don’t like pieces about the newspaper business itself.”

So Cain was hired as an editorial writer for The New York World and everything went along fine for weeks, with Cain writing his little “japes,” as he called them, and Lippmann seemingly very pleased. But then something went wrong, and there was a distinct change in Lippmann’s response to Cain’s editorials. Without being aware of it, Cain had succumbed to the curse of all editorial writers: the compulsion to shoulder the burdens of the world and lecture his readers. He had, in short, turned serious, and it bothered Lippmann. Cain’s little japes on baseball, music, and the human comedy had now become studious and too-long treatises on such things as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation “Peace Award,” the proposal for a new Department of Air, rewriting the King James Version of the Bible, and the situation in the West Virginia coal mines. He also dabbled in world affairs, which probably annoyed Lippmann even more because he considered himself the resident international expert.

It was Arthur Krock, who also worked on The World, who finally let Cain know what was happening. One day, the two men were having lunch in the World dining room. Krock greeted Cain amiably and asked how things were going, to which Cain mumbled some evasive reply. Krock asked what was wrong, and Cain said: “Oh, I guess things are all right, but I don’t know who I’m kidding. For Christ sake, I can’t write editorials.”

“Nonsense,” Krock said. “You’re doing fine. Lippmann is pleased. But you have to stop getting serious. Keep on writing those funny pieces you started with.” Then Krock cited Maxwell Anderson’s experience. “He’d been doing the light editorials for Walter,” Krock explained, “but instead of sticking to what he did well — the human, sentimental kind of pieces — he was getting serious, and Lippmann was relieved when Anderson quit. Now you’re doing the same thing.” Krock pointed out that Lippmann had Allan Nevins on history, Charles Merz on politics, W. O. Scroggs on economics, John Heaton on state politics, and Lippmann himself on international affairs. “But pleasant, light pieces, with enough intellect in them to spike up the letter column and be worth publishing, are tough to get. That’s what he wants from you.”

“You mean this nonsense I write is worth something?” Cain asked. “They pay you for stuff like that? They actually pay you?”

Cain still could not believe that his lighthearted japes were what Lippmann wanted. But he was getting the message. He went back to his office and wrote that a man convicted of the unlawful practice of medicine handed out cards on which were printed “B.T.H.M.P.S.D.C.” Asked by the judge what the initials meant, the man replied, “Baptist, Truth, Heaven, Master of Political Science, and Doctor of Chiropractic.” Cain thought this was a fine idea and suggested similar sheepskins for bootleggers, brokers, and bandits, with the credentials for the last one reading: “B.S.U.Y.H.Q.O.I.B.Y.O. — Bandit, Stick Up Your Hands Quick Or I’ll Bump You Off.”

Lippmann was happy again, and Cain was given a three-year contract for $125 a week. Now he could go down to Baltimore and tell his mother, “You’ve been proclaiming for years that I don’t have good sense, and events have proved you’re right — but in New York they pay you for it.”

For the next six years Cain wrote editorials, and one amusing example is reprinted below to record the flavor of the writing which Lippmann admired so much.

The American Eagle

Cain’s career as an editorial writer was indeed a significant education for the writing that lay ahead. He learned not only that he liked primarily to write about such things as sex, crime, passion, food, music, and animals, but that these were the subjects the average person preferred to read about.

At the same time, he was revealing not only in The World but also in The Mercury that he could be a deadly satirist and had a keen ear for dialogue. The satire and burlesque in the iconoclastic profiles of American types that he was writing for The Mercury were obvious. But then, in 1925, he suggested to Mencken that he also try his satire in the form of dialogues or one-act plays. Mencken agreed, and immediately Cain demonstrated not only that he had a gift for dialogue but that the kind of people he liked to satirize were, as he put it, “characters off the top of the pile, plain, average people scarcely worth describing in detail, people everyone knows.”

The success of Cain’s dialogues in The Mercury led to another development in Cain’s career. In 1928, he started writing a byline column for the Sunday “Metropolitan” section of The World, and for the first year or so, it was devoted almost exclusively to sketches and dialogues similar to the ones he was writing for Mencken in The Mercury. However, there was a significant difference. For The World he could not write about “niggers” and burning “stiffs” in a country almshouse, as he was free to do in The Mercury. He had to write about more conventional family life. So he developed a conventional cast of characters who lived on the fictional Bender Street in New York, and for the first year most of his sketches were devoted to these people. Cain was never completely satisfied with this effort and knew instinctively that his sketches and dialogues about New Yorkers did not have the same ring as the words and actions he gave his rural characters.

Nevertheless, his fictional Bender Street gang acquired a significant following; years later, after Postman was published, many readers would recall that the first place they saw the name of James M. Cain was in that “wonderful raucous column for The New York World,” as James McBride recalled in his review of Cain’s 1948 novel, The Moth.

After a year or so, Cain abandoned his Allen’s Alley of Bender Street characters and shifted to other locales. Now he would begin many of his sketches “Down in the Country” and go on to recount some incident or story he recalled about growing up on the Eastern Shore. His World byline columns were not much more than good, commercial journalism. But they were always beautifully crafted and usually revealed the satiric, comic side of Cain.

However, by far the most significant development that took place during Cain’s New York journalism years was the short story he wrote for The Mercury in 1928. It was Cain’s first attempt at conventional fiction since he had tried to write his novel in 1922, and it was significant not only for the impact it had on American literature in 1928 but also as the first glimpse of the James M. Cain who would burst onto the literary scene in 1934. “Pastorale” was without any doubt the clear forerunner of Postman, not only because of its grisly doings centering around Cain’s favorite theme — that two people may get away with a crime, but they can’t live with it — but because it was built on essentially a comic situation.

The basic story for “Pastorale”[2] was given to him by William Gilbert Patton, who wrote the Frank Merriwell books under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish. Cain had profiled Patton for the Saturday Evening Post, and during his interview Patton told him a story about two western roughnecks who had cut off the head of an old man but were distraught when the head rolled around in their wagon as they were driving away from the scene of the crime. Much to Patton’s surprise, Cain thought the story hilarious and asked Patton if he could use it sometime. Patton said yes, and Cain transferred the story to the Eastern Shore and had it happen to a couple of yokels, who, by now, had become Cain’s favorite characters for his dialogues.Briefly, “Pastorale” concerns a young rube named Burbie who returns to his Eastern Shore hometown to find his high school girlfriend, Lida, married to an old man who is presumed to have a fortune hidden in their house. Burbie, with a friend named Hutch, hatches a scheme to kill the old man and steal the money; he then arranges for Lida (who is in on the scheme) to be away for an evening while Burbie and Hutch carry out the grisly crime. But after the two country rubes kill the old man, they find he has only $20 hidden away. So they bury him in a shallow grave down the road from his house, all the while arguing about what they ought to do next — an argument which is intensified by the corn liquor they start drinking on the way back to town. After Burbie and Hutch are high on the liquor, they decide the only way to pay back Lida for giving them the misinformation that led to the death of her husband is to cut the old man’s head off and present it to her as a present. After cutting the old man’s head off with a shovel, they start back to town on a wild, drunken ride. It is a cold, wintry night, and as he gets drunker, Hutch starts yelling and screaming and the old man’s head rolls around in the back of the wagon, just as it had done in Patton’s western story. They finally reach a creek, which has a slight crust of ice on it, and Burbie takes the opportunity to throw the head into the creek, hoping it will break the ice and sink into the water. Instead, it goes sliding across the ice in the moonlight, which panics Hutch, who threatens to kill Burbie. So Burbie leaps out of the wagon and runs away; then he hears a loud crack, like a pistol shot. It is the sound of the wagon sinking into the creek after Hutch had tried to make the horse cross it. The next morning, Hutch is found drowned and the sheriff decides Hutch robbed the old man and killed him. The rest of the story is Cain’s explanation of what happens to Burbie and Lida, who had killed an old man and gotten away with it — just as Frank and Cora would kill Nick in Postman and get away with it.

The significance of “Pastorale” is that, despite its theme of murder and guilt, it was essentially a burlesque — not unconscious burlesque, as Wilson says of Postman, but burlesque pure and simple. “Pastorale” was never in danger of becoming unintentionally funny — it was hilarious from the beginning and Cain fully intended it that way.

When The World folded, Cain went to work for Harold Ross on The New Yorker, where he found, to no one’s surprise, that his brand of humor was not The New Yorker’s. His only contribution to The New Yorker, other than two light verses, was the little sketch entitled “Sealing Wax.”

Sealing Wax

Within nine months, Cain had said goodbye to Ross and The New Yorker and New York and was on his way to California and a 17-year career as an unsuccessful screenwriter and enormously successful writer of best-selling controversial novels. But he had learned several important things in New York: He found that he wrote best about man’s essential nature and needs — greed, sex, passion, food, and music — in addition to understanding and sympathizing with his fascination with animals. He also learned that he wrote best when he pretended to be someone else — even the “corporate awfulness” of the newspaper, which he called the anonymous voice of the editorial page. He could write dialogue and tell a story, if he did the same thing he did on the editorial page. “The only way I can keep on track,” he said, “is to pretend to be somebody else — to put it in dialect and thus get it told. If I try to do it in my own language I find I have none... So long as I merely report what people might have said under certain circumstances, I am all right, but the moment I have to step in and be myself... then I’m sunk.”

James M. Cain was nearly 40 years old when he left New York for California, and although the magic spark he needed for his novels would not be ignited until he met the western roughneck, “the boy who is just as elemental inside as his eastern colleagues, but who has been to high school, completes his sentences and uses reasonably good grammar,” he was essentially formed as a writer. What the western characters enabled him to do was write in the first person about everyday people off the top of the pile, in such a way that his prose would not begin to grate after 50 pages and drive the reader mad with all the “ain’ts,” “brungs,” and “fittens,” which naturally came with the first-personal rural dialogue of the Eastern Shore. The Western (Pacific) Shore was different — and perfect for James M. Cain.

But he was still the same Cain of The Mercury dialogues, The World columns, and “Pastorale,” which he proved immediately with his first western short story — “Baby in the Icebox,” written for The Mercury. “Baby” was pure Cain: a couple of rubes involved in a comic situation and some underlying terror furnished by a man-eating tiger.

Then came Postman, which the critics and the public immediately perceived as something new and different — not the same old thing Cain had been writing all along. Although this annoyed Cain, he went along with the gag because it was bringing him, at 42, the fame and fortune which any writer his age would think was long overdue.

By 1936 Cain was firmly labeled a tough guy, and that was the way it would be for the rest of his life, although he continued to write stories and magazine and newspaper articles and columns that can hardly be typed or classified as hard-boiled. Cain always felt that how a writer was judged here and now did not really matter, that “Ol’ Man Posterity” would pin on the final label, no matter what the critics wrote.

It may well be that Old Man Posterity will agree with the critics and that James M. Cain will continue down through the years to be lumped with the tough guys. As I said, I do not intend to try to argue otherwise. However, I do think Posterity ought to know that this tough guy, at least, had another side, which liked food and music and animals and could see the comic, bumbling side of mankind as well as its darker aspects. This book is dedicated to revealing and preserving the human side of one of the preeminent tough guy writers of the 1930s, and I am sure that Cain would not object to my doing this. “I don’t lack for at least as much recognition as I deserve,” he said in his Preface to The Butterfly. But it won’t hurt to try to bring him a little more and for a different kind of writing — especially when reading it is so enjoyable.