Cloud Nine

Afterword

In 1948, James M. Cain, at 56, was, without any doubt, the most famous author in the country: he had just published two best selling novels, Past All Dishonor and The Butterfly; paperback editions of his earlier bestsellers (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Serenade and Mildred Pierce) were still selling hundreds of thousands of copies every year, and no wonder: his themes included adultery, murder, prostitution, latent homosexuality and incest. Despite this, Paramount, Warner Bros, and MGM had finally succeeded in producing scripts that passed the Hays Office for three big movies based on Cain’s novels which revived, enhanced or gave new directions to the careers of nearly a dozen actors and actresses: “Double Indemnity,” 1944 (Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson), “Mildred Pierce,” 1945 (Joan Crawford, who won an Academy Award for her performance as Mildred, Zachary Scott, Jack Carson, Eve Arden and Ann Blyth), and “The Postman,” 1946 (Lana Turner, John Garfield and Hume Cronyn). In addition, he had spent most of 1947 in a running battle with both the New York Literary Establishment and the Hollywood Studios, attempting to establish his controversial American Authors Authority, which would have created a national writers’ union. And in 1948, he had been involved in the Screen writers Guild’s successful efforts to remove the Communists from their entrenched position in the Guild. His name, of course, constantly turned up in the Hollywood and national gossip columns, in part because of his literary notoriety but also because of a messy divorce from his second wife, Elina Tysencka, marriage to the ex-silent movie star Aileen Pringle, a divorce from her a year later and then marriage to the former opera star Florence Macbeth. He also consumed his share of alcohol, but the big movies based on his novels had made him “hot,” as Cain put it, in Hollywood, and, after an otherwise unsuccessful scriptwriting career, he could still command $2,500 a week when he took an assignment to work on a film.

Then, abruptly, Cain left Hollywood, “for no apparent reason,” as Harlan Ellison wrote in his Introduction to Hard Cain, a collection of Cain’s short novels. And to this day, veteran Hollywood hands still ask: whatever happened to James M. Cain? He was an ex-New York newspaperman and failed screenwriter who had come out of obscurity in 1934 with the publication of The Postman, and now, suddenly, he faded into obscurity again. Why?

What happened to James M. Cain after he reached the pinnacle of fame in 1948 is rooted in the two most important things in Cain’s life — a novel and a woman. The novel was written after World War II, when suddenly Cain discovered that editors and studio heads were no longer interested in the typical Cain stories of lust, murder and corruption, which tended to paint America in unflattering colors at a time when the desired hues were red, white and blue. Frustrated and irritated, Cain decided to try a period novel, and the result was his story of a young ex-Confederate spy who falls in love with, and is loved by, a Virginia City prostitute who can, for $10, be had by any man in town — except our hero. Past All Dishonor was Cain’s biggest hardcover success, selling 55,000 copies and bringing him praise from the critics, who applauded his fictional approach to American history. At a time when Gone With the Wind was the model for historical fiction, many people encouraged Cain to write more stories about the Old South and the West; “the period needs the sort of realistic treatment you can give it,” one writer told him. His old friend from the World, the historian Alan Nevins, also chimed in, urging him to write a historical war novel. “You have all the gifts and you could be both fascinating and convincing,” Nevins wrote Cain.

Cain had always been something of a Civil War buff, and his success with Past All Dishonor — and the financial success of Gone With the Wind, which had only recently been made into one of Hollywood’s most celebrated movies — started Cain thinking about his own approach to the Civil War, not just a novel, but a trilogy of novels. It would be about a subject Margaret Mitchell had avoided — the cotton industry, or just how Rhett Butler made his money. But the story would be told, of course, James M. Cain style, “a romantic tale, full of skullduggeries involving large sums of money,” he wrote his publisher. Cain had started researching his novels, but it quickly became apparent that he would have to go South and eventually to the Library of Congress to finish his research.

The other factor in Cain’s decision to leave Hollywood was Florence Macbeth, the opera star who had been one of the divinities of his youth but whom he had never met before he was introduced to her at a Hollywood cocktail party. Cain had just separated from Aileen Pringle, and Florence was a widow who had not been in good health since the death of her husband a few years earlier. Both were middle-aged and lonely; “two cuckoos nesting in autumn,” was Florence’s description of the middle-aged lovers. Soon they were married, and naturally Cain discussed his urge to leave screenwriling and work on more serious books. “Either I’m going to wind up a picture writer or I’m going to get back to novels and amount to something,” he told Florence. Florence, who did not like California, encouraged him to concentrate on his novels, which helped him arrive at the most important decision of his life: to shift from a newspaperman and screenwriter who also wrote novels, to “a plain 100 per cent novelist.”

To pursue this goal, Cain and Florence uprooted and left California to go back East to research his story of the Civil War. They traveled for a while in the South, with Cain visiting libraries and newspapers where he took endless notes on his 3x5 cards. They finally settled in Hyattsville in Prince Georges County, Maryland (the setting of Cloud Nine), on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., where Cain wahted to continue his Civil War research in the Library of Congress. And it was a decision Cain regretted the rest of his life. California, Cain said, was “El Dorado, the Land of the Golden Promise. But I don’t know anyone who is holding his breath over Prince Georges County.”

Cain had originally planned a three-part saga of the Civil War, and “it must have been a saga,” he wrote one editor, “because it sagged all over the place.” Now he decided to focus on one book, and he wrote three drafts, “each one worse than the other,” he said. “It just lay there in pieces and I did not know why.” Cain was nearly sixty when he finished his Civil War research, and they began to have second thoughts about staying in Hyattsville. He wrote one friend that the move to Maryland had been a “God-awful wrench” and that neither of them accepted “this dreadful little state.” At the same time, he wrote H. N. Swanson, his Hollywood agent, that one thing was certain: “In this neck of the woods... I don’t fit in at all.” He also asked Swanson if he would watch out for a job. But he heard nothing from Swanson.

So Cain settled down to work on his Civil War novel, and by 1952 he told his sister that he had written enough on the Civil War to fill ten normal books and that he had “been tempted more than once to call this one off and start another.” But he also thought this was “a frightening thing to do” because any writer who does it is “an ex-writer” — and that was the one thing James M. Cain feared the most.

Meanwhile, his financial situation began to deteriorate as his savings account dwindled and the paperback royalties he had counted on to support his “serious” writing began to dry up. So he shifted to the contemporary scene and began the first of a series of novels set in Southern Maryland, hoping to recapture the magic he had discovered in Southern California. The first effort was called Galatea, which publisher Alfred A. Knopf liked but insisted he re-write, which took Cain much longer than he thought it would because he began to have real trouble at the typewriter — sluggish memory, fumbling for names, typos, twisted letters, confusion, inability to “unkink a story,” and, worst of all, not caring “whether guy got doll or not.” He finally finished Galatea, and when it came out in 1953 the critics were unmerciful, giving Cain, the master of the clearest, leanest literary style in America, the unkindest cut of all: his prose was dull and confusing. Saul Pett, in an AP review, said he had read all 242 pages in Galatea sometimes two and three times and “I still don’t know quite what Cain is talking about.” The book was a literary and commercial failure, although it did sell to paperback.

Cain was now fully aware that his writing powers were dwindling, and the resulting depression was not helped by the fact that even Manhunt magazine rejected him, turning down three stories because they were fuzzy in style and confusing. The editor — a Cain admirer — was worried about the author. So was the author. Undaunted, Cain went back to his Civil War novel, which he now called Mignon, that tragically took him three more years to finish. “God deliver me from a period book,” he wrote William Kashland at Knopf. “But I know no way to finish them but to finish them” — and he did. In 1957, he finally sent it off to Knopf, only to receive the most crushing blow of his life: Knopf rejected it, encouraging him to re-write. This took him, believe it or not, another three years.

When Knopf rejected Mignon in 1957, Cain was 66, Florence’s health was declining and his income was starting down again. Then, one bright spot: in the spring of 1959, he read about cholesterol in a Newsweek article. His doctor put him on a no-eggs, no-butter, no-fat diet, and within 48 hours he said he felt like his old self again. But he could still not hide the fact that he was growing old. “My God, he had aged so terribly,” said a friend who had last seen him in California. A Hollywood radio station wrote, requesting an interview for a program it called “Living Legends.” And after a lunch with Marquis Childs, who was writing an introduction to a book about Cain’s old friend and boss on the World, Walter Lippmann (celebrating his seventieth birthday), Childs wrote: “The World was a constellation of men, witty, brilliant, sometimes even searching and profound. Their names, Rollin Kirby, Heywood Broun, Arthur Krock, James M. Cain, Franklin P. Adams, and many others, evoke a time that today seems more distant than the stone age.”

Cain did not feel that he was a relic from the stone age or a living legend, but he could not deny that he was bogged down in the Civil War. With his new diet, however, he felt good at the typewriter again, writing Katherine White at the New Yorker that he was “getting more brains” than he had had in a long time. Now the writing went better, and he finished Mignon at the end of 1960. Then, another crushing blow: Knopf turned it down again! But this time Cain would not re-write it. Instead, he instructed his agent to find another publisher, which he did. Richard Baron at Dial bought it and assigned Jim Silberman as the editor. When it was finally scheduled for publication (in 1962), Cain wrote friends that he would soon be in the money, “on sugar hill.”

If Mignon were just another novel, it would have been considered a success. It received moderately good reviews, sold 15,000 copies and was bought for paperback reprint. But it did not put him on Sugar Hill, one reason being that, unlike his novels of the 1930s and ’40s, Mignon never sold to the movies.

Mignon’s failure after twelve years of work was a monumental landmark in Cain’s life, a crushing defeat that he never did quite understand. “Just a lotta goddamn research,” he said bitterly — and, ironically, very little of the years of research Cain put into Mignon, or any real sense of feel of the Civil War, showed up in the slim little 246-page book. “All that reading and labor,” Cain told a New York Times interviewer, “and a kind of mouse is born.”

But Cain refused to think he was an ex-writer, and by the time Mignon was published in 1962 he was more than a hundred pages into a Maryland version of Mildred Pierce — about a woman buyer for a big Maryland department store “who attempts, through her daughter, to gain the place in the sun she herself has never attained to, an ominous creature.” This new novel went through several re-writes before it was eventually published in 1965 as The Magician’s Wife. And, despite the fact that it contained some of Cain’s best writing and not one confusing, unclear page, it was another literary and commercial failure.

Although Cain would not have conceded it, the thumbs-down The Magician’s Wife received from its critics was the final verdict on his effort to “amount to something,” which had brought him East seventeen years earlier. But the truth is, as far as the only critic he paid any attention to — “Old Man Posterity” — was concerned, Cain had already amounted to quite a bit. He wrote six books that go right on being read and re-read and made into movies. And the ironic twist to his unusual career is that all the stories on which his lasting reputation is based were written before he decided to leave California and become a serious writer.

The failure of The Magician’s Wife, of course, did not keep Cain from his typewriter. Nothing could do that for long. He started a new novel — about a little girl who is given a tiger to raise as a pet — and wrote one friend: “Life isn’t so dull exactly, but it begins to resemble a bowl of cherries that stay green all the time and resemble typewriter keys. Books, with me take longer and longer and no doubt one day will take really long.” But, he wrote another, “I don’t get sick, I don’t fall down, I don’t do much of anything, except get one day older every 24 hours. Every so often, by a process unexplained, I get out a book.”

Cain was now in remarkably good health. But Florence was visibly weakening. And then on the morning of May 5, 1966, Cain tiptoed into Florence’s room and found her dead. “A shock I’ll never forget,” he said.

Now he was alone, 75 years old and just possibly an ex-writer. The future did not look promising. But Cain was ready to face it — at his usual command post, the typewriter. He finally finished his novel about the little girl and her pet tiger, which he called Jinghis Quinn, and was very excited about it because of the recent success of Born Free. But two publishers turned it down, and Cain was a little taken aback; “I thought a law had been passed that when I wrote a book it sold,” he told a friend. Undaunted, he started another one, and he wrote one friend that “Suburbia, where I live, begins to cast its spell... I’m beginning to realize it’s the new frontier.”

But James M. Cain in the Maryland suburbs was, sadly, not the same James M. Cain the literary world knew from California. He had to keep writing, however, or, as he told a friend: “I’m just a has been, a senior citizen waiting for the clock to strike. I don’t mind the clock, but waiting for it and doing nothing else, terrifies me.”

His next novel was about a suburban Maryland real estate developer and a teen-aged girl, and now, in addition to the frontiers of new suburbia, he decided to explore another area unfamiliar to James M. Cain — the happy ending. He had decided that happy endings were tougher, he wrote one friend, and, therefore, a “greater challenge.” The result was Cloud Nine, and you can judge for yourself how well Cain did on his new frontier with a happy ending.

I have taken some space to go into the period of Cain’s life that produced Cloud Nine (which was also rejected by his publisher when he wrote it in the late 1960s), but I thought it was necessary to fully understand the novel. It certainly is quintessential Cain — a “pure novel,” as David Madden says in his study of Cain’s fiction, one which, “more than anything else, moves even the serious reader to almost complete emotional commitment to the traumatic experience Cain renders.”

After Madden said Cain wrote the “pure novel,” Cain wrote him saying if by pure novel he meant one “whose point is developed from the narrative itself, rather than from some commentary on the social theme or morality of the characters, or economic or political aesthetic preachment, if that is what you mean, you hit my objective directly...”

The economic and social preachment which was at the root of Cloud Nine was expressed in a letter to one publisher, suggesting a promotional campaign for the novel:

“I’ve lived half my life,” he said, “in the midst of real estate booms-first in California... and now in Southern Maryland... Between climate, the overflow from Washington, D.C., and boom-feeds-upon-boom, it has a veritable madhouse of swank suburbs, jerry-built developments, and high-rise elysiums; of sewage, water, and gas problems; of politics, the good old-fashioned kind; of no-limit, blue-chip games, with millions riding the vote of Mr. Commissioner on some rezoning application. But behind this new, glittering world, I keep seeing the old Southern Maryland, as it was in the early teens, as I lived in it a while, as a young road-builder just out of college. Then it was poor, backward, and still numb from the slave economy that had riled it for hundreds of years, a world of runt corn, scrub tobacco, and tired land; of ox carts, dirt roads, and bucket wells, of saloons, gambling, blood feuds, and dark, clandestine sex. So in this story, I have attempted the counterpoint between the new and the old: the Realtor, bluff, successful, and modern, who nevertheless marries, for the honor of the family, the girl his brother got pregnant; the pretty, gray-haired widow, set in her ways, who clings to the family farm, starving to death on it, and refusing to swim with the tide that would make her rich... and the young girl, passionately idealistic, who nevertheless has in her bloodstream the compulsion that brings on a bloody, brutal finish. If I succeeded I don’t know. I do know the story is there.”

Cloud Nine also contains other essential Cain traits: the necessity to pretend to be someone else when he told his story and the ability to keep the reader turning pages, anxious to find out what happens, but always dreading the ending because of the horror you sensed would be waiting — “the wish that comes true” that Cain said most of his novels were about. But Cloud Nine, as any Cain fan knows, is different from the classic Cain tale: the narrator is not one of “those wonderful, seedy, lousy no-goods that you have always understood,” as one of his friends described the kind of people she was urging him to return to when he was struggling with his novels late in his life; the setting is not California; and the wish that comes true does not contain the terror one expects to find at the end of a Cain story.

No one knew better than James M. Cain that he was never able to find the same spark in the suburbs of Washington and Baltimore that he found in the suburbs of Los Angeles. But the important thing is that he never stopped trying. He did not sit around waiting for the clock to strike. And he thought he had given Cloud Nine “the best lick I had,” as he wrote his agent, and that “it held on suspense and delivered a nice wallop.”

Frankly, the wallop at the end is something less than pure Cain. But the suspense does hold, and the prose reads well, like it was written by a 75-year-old James M. Cain — which it was.

As he said to one critic of his last novels: “I have to write as I write, I can’t young it up.”

Roy Hoopes