The Butterfly

Preface

This story goes back to 1922, when I was much under the spell of the Big Sandy country and anxious to make it the locale of a novel that would deal with its mine wars and utilize its “beautiful bleak ugliness,” as I called it at the time, as setting. I went down there, worked in its mines, studied, trudged, and crammed, but when I came back was unequal to the novel; indeed, it was another ten years before it entered my mind again that I might be able to write a novel, for I had at least learned it is no easy trick, despite a large body of opinion to the contrary. But then I did write a novel, and the earlier idea began recurring to me — not the part about labor, for reflection had long since convinced me that this theme, though it constantly attracts a certain type of intellectual, is really dead seed for a novelist — but the rocky, wooded countryside itself, together with the clear, cool creeks that purl through it, and its gentle, charming inhabitants, whose little hamlets quite often look as they must have looked in the time of Daniel Boone. And then one day, in California, I encountered a family from Kentucky, running a roadside sandwich place. Certain reticences about a charming little boy they had led me to suspect he was the reason for the hegira from Harlan County, and the idea for a story began to take shape in my mind. The peculiarities of a birthmark possessed by one branch of my family helped quite a lot, and presently I had something fairly definite: a girl’s disgrace, in a mountain village, which causes a family to make the grand trek to California, this trek being the main theme of the tale; the bitter, brooding unhappiness of all of them over California, with its bright, chirpy optimism, its sunshine, its up-to-date hustle; finally, a blazing afternoon, when the boy who started it all blows in, orders an egg malt, and finds himself staring into the murderous eyes of the girl’s father.

Quite pleased with this fable, I drove to Huntington early in 1939, and cruised up and down both forks of the old familiar river, stopping at the old familiar places, picking up miners, visiting friends, noting changes, bringing myself down to date. Back in the West, I started to write, and the thing began to grow. And then Mr. Steinbeck published his Grapes of Wrath. Giving the project up was a wrench, but I had to, or thought I did, and presently was at work on something else. Bit by bit, traces of the abandoned book began appearing in other books: a beach restaurant in Mildred Pierce, divers recovering a body in Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, a tortured soul, in Past All Dishonor, cornered and doomed, writing his apologia before his destiny catches up with him — though that had appeared in previous books, as it is occasionally forced on me by my first-personal method of narration.

But last summer, while Past All Dishonor was in the hands of the various experts who had to O.K. it before I could send it to the publisher, and I was having an interlude where all I could do was gnaw my fingernails, I happened to tell The Butterfly to a friend, who listened, reflected for a time, then looked at me peculiarly and said: “Now I understand the reason incest never gets written about, or almost never.”

“Which is?”

“Because it’s there, not in fact very often, but in spirit. Fathers are in love with their daughters. It’s like what you said in Serenade, about there being five per cent of a homo in every man, no matter how masculine he imagines himself to be. But if a father happens to be also a writer and cooks up a story about incest, he’s in mortal terror he’ll be so convincing about it all his friends will tumble to the truth. You, though, you haven’t any children, and I personally think you’re a fool to give this book up.”

“After the Jo ad family trip if I had a Tyler family trip I’d never live it down.”

“Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think that Tyler family trip is just dull, and all that California stuff so phony you’d throw it out yourself after you’d worked on it awhile — a wonderful, hot conflict between your description of the look in their eyes and your description of the scenery. That story is the story of a man’s love for his own daughter, and the more it stays right up that mountain creek where it belongs and where you can believe it, the more it’s going to be good. And look what you’re throwing away for the damned California sunlight. That abandoned mine you told me about just makes my hair stand on end, and it’s absolutely in harmony with that fellow’s disintegration. What does California give you that compares with it? California’s wholesome, and maybe it’s O.K., but not for this. You go to it, and pretty soon you’ll have a book.”

So I started to work and it began to come, slowly at first, but presently at a better rate. I had to suspend for the Past All Dishonor changes, but soon was back on it, and at last, after the usual interminable rewrite, it was done. Re-reading it, now the final proofs are in, I like it better than I usually like my work, and yet I have an impulse to account for it; for most people associate me with the West, and forget, or possibly don’t know, that I had a newspaper career of some length in the East before I came to California. Also, the many fictions published about me recently bring me to the realization I must relax the positivist attitude I carried over from newspaper work and be less reticent about myself. In an editorial room we like the positive article, not the negative; we hate rebuttals, and even when compelled to make corrections as to fact, commonly do so as briefly as possible. Thus, when false though possibly plausible assumptions began to be printed about me, I let them pass, for as a polemist I had acquired a fairly thick hide, and the capacity to let small things bounce off it without getting unduly concerned. But when these assumptions are repeated and I still don’t deny them, I have only myself to blame if they become accepted as fact, and if elaborate deductions, some of them not so negligible, begin to be made from them. This may be an appropriate place, then, to discuss some of them, and perhaps get them discarded in favor of the truth.

I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics, and have little correspondence in reality anywhere else. Young writers often imitate some older writer that they fancy, as for example I did when I used to exchange with my brother You Know Me Al letters, except that instead of baseball players we had the sergeants of 1918. We gave wonderful imitations of Lardner, and some traces of them, for any who care to look, can be seen in my book Our Government, the first sketch of which was written for the American Mercury in 1924. Yet if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It 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 critic; 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 twenty pages of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in my whole life, Mr. Clifton Fadiman can refer to my hammett-and-tongs style and make things easy for himself. If then, I may make a plea on behalf of all writers of fiction, I say to these strange surrogates for God, with their illusion of “critical judgment” and their conviction of the definitive verity of their wackiest brainstorm: You’re really being a little naive, you know. We don’t do it that way. We don’t say to ourselves that some lucky fellow did it a certain way, so we’ll do it that way too, and cut in on the sugar. We have to do it our own way, each for himself, or there isn’t any sugar.

I owe no debt, beyond the pleasure his books have given me, to Mr. Ernest Hemingway, though if I did I think I should admit it, as I have admitted various other debts, mainly in the realm of theory, that were real and important, and still are. Just what it is I am supposed to have got from him I have never quite made out, though I am sure it can hardly be in the realm of content, for it would be hard to imagine two men, in this respect, more dissimilar. He writes of God’s eternal mayhem against Man, a theme he works into great, classic cathedrals, but one I should be helpless to make use of. I, so far as I can sense the pattern of my mind, write of the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination. Of course, the wish must really have terror in it; just wanting a drink wouldn’t quite be enough. I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this, rather than violence, sex, or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation, that gives them the drive so often noted. Their appeal is first to the mind, and the reader is carried along as much by his own realization that the characters cannot have this particular wish and survive, and his curiosity to see what happens to them, as by the effect on him of incident, dialogue, or character. Thus, if I do any glancing, it is toward Pandora, the first woman, a conceit that pleases me, somehow, and often helps my thinking.

Nor do I see any similarity in manner, beyond the circumstance that each of us has an excellent ear, and each of us shudders at the least hint of the highfalutin, the pompous, or the literary. We have people talk as they do talk, and as some of them are of a low station in life, no doubt they often say things in a similar way. But here again the systems are different. He uses four-letter words (this is, those dealing with bodily function); I have never written one. We each pass up a great deal of what our ear brings us, particularly as to pronunciation, which I never indicate, unless the character is a foreigner and I have to give his dialect, or a simplified version of it, else have him pale and colorless. We are quite exact about the conventions we offer the reader, and accept Mark Twain’s dictum that it must be made clear, in first-personal narrative, whether the character is writing or talking, all small points being adjusted to conform. We each cut down points being adjusted to conform. We each cut down to a minimum the he-saids and she-replied-laughinglys, though I carry this somewhat further than he does, for I use the minimum number it is possible to use and be clear, as a rule permitting myself only a he-said to begin a patch of dialogue, with no others in between. For, when I started my Postman Always Rings Twice, he says and she says seemed to be Chambers’s limit in this direction, which looked a bit monotonous. And then I thought: Well, why all this saying? With quotes around it, would they be gargling it? And so, if I may make a plea to my fellow fiction-writers, I should like to say: It is about time this convention, this dreary flub-dub that lies within the talent of any magazine secretary, was dropped overboard and forgotten. If Jake is to warn Harold, “an ominous glint appearing in his eye,” it would be a great deal smoother and more entertaining to the reader, though I grant you nothing like so easy, to slip a little, not too much of course, but just the right subtle amount, of ominous glint in the speech.

I grant, of course, that even such resemblances between Mr. Hemingway and myself do make for a certain leanness in each of us, as a result of all this skinning out of literary blubber, and might be taken, by those accustomed to thinking in terms of schools, as evidence I had in some part walked in his footsteps. Unfortunately for this theory, however, although I didn’t write my first novel until 1933, when he was ten years on his way as a novelist, I am actually six years and twenty-one days older than he is, and had done a mountain of writing, in newspapers and magazines, including dialogue sketches, short stories, and one performed play, before he appeared on the scene at all. My short story Pastorale, which you are probably encountering in current reprint, was written in 1927, though I first read him when Men Without Women appeared in 1928. Yet the style is pretty much my style today. Before leaving the subject, I may say that although for convenience of expression I have thrown what appears to be a very chummy “we” around his neck, I intend no familiarity and claim no equality. This, as I well know, is a Matterhorn of literature, while my small morality tale is at best a foothill. But small though it be, it is as good as I know how to make it, and I take some satisfaction in the fact that it is made well enough to reap some of the rewards mainly reserved for the small fable: It translates, so that it is known all over the world; its point is easily remembered, so that it passes easily from mouth to mouth and so lives on from year to year; I don’t lack for at least as much recognition as I deserve, which is a fortunate situation to be in. But it does strike me as a very odd notion that in setting out to make it good I would do the one thing certain to make it bad.

Except personally, with many engaged in it, I am not particularly close to the picture business, and have not been particularly successful in it. True, several of my stories have made legendary successes when adapted for films, and when I choose I can usually obtain employment at reasonably good wages. I have learned a great deal from pictures, mainly technical things. Yet in the four years or more than I have actually spent on picture lots, I have accumulated but three fractional script credits. Picture people like to have me working for them, they find me useful in solving difficult problems in their stories, they usually feel I earned my pay. But they don’t do my scripts. My novels, yes, after other writers have worked them over. But not the copy I turn out in their employ; apparently it hasn’t the right flavor. Why, I don’t know and they don’t, for as I have indicated, many of them are friends, and we discuss the riddle freely. Moving pictures simply do not excite me intellectually, or aesthetically, or in whatever way one has to get excited to put exciting stuff on paper. I know their technique as exhaustively as anybody knows it, I study it, but I don’t feel it. Nor have I ever, with one exception, written a novel with them in mind, or with any expectation of pleasing them. The exception was Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, which I thought, and still think, is a slick plot for a movie, and I executed it well enough. It didn’t sell and is still for sale, if you happen to want a good novel, only slightly marked down. All my other novels had censor trouble, and I knew they would have censor trouble while I was writing them, yet I never toned one of them down, or made the least change to court the studios’ favor. In Past All Dishonor, for at least four versions, the girl was not of the oldest profession; she was the niece of the lady who ran the brothel, and for four versions the story laid an egg. I then had to admit to myself that it had point only when she was a straight piece of trade goods. Putting the red light over the door, I knew, would cost me a picture sale, and so far it has; it is in there just the same, and it made all the difference in the world with the book.

To have it asserted, then, by Eastern critics, that I had been “eaten alive by pictures,” as one of them put it; that I had done all my research in projection rooms, and that this story was simply the preliminary design for a movie, was a most startling experience. It was said there were anachronisms in the speech, though none were specified, and that there were various other faults, due to the inadequacy of my researches. Well, I do my researches as other novelists do, so far as I know their habits: wherever I have to do them, in field or library or newspaper file, to get what I need for my story. In the case of Past All Dishonor, I did them in the Huntington, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Reno, and Virginia City libraries; in the Official Record of the War of the Rebellion, as published by the War Department, I having a set of my own, and in various directories, histories, newspapers, and diaries of the 1860’s. For accuracy of speech I read hundreds of pages from the stenographic reports of witnesses before committees of Congress at the time, and as an additional check I re-read the writings of U.S. Grant, not the Memoirs, whose authenticity in spots is open to doubt, but his letters, and especially the long report in Part 1 of Vol. XXXIV of the Official Record, which was unquestionably written by him, in early middle age, less than two years after the time of my book. This is a sort of check, to make sure the terse, short-cadenced style I had in mind for Roger Duval had justification in the writings of the time. Grant, of course, seems as modern as Eisenhower; indeed, on the basis of all this reading, I concluded that any notion the I860’s were noted for peculiarities of speech, or that quaint dialogue, such as some of these critics seemed to think indicated, should be used, was simply silly. Those people talked as we talk now. Some words they used differently. They said planished where we would say burnished; they said recruit where we say recuperate; they amused the enemy, where we would divert him. In general, however, they spoke in a wholly modern way, and I thought it would be delightful for a modern reader to have the lights turned up on a world he possibly had no idea had ever existed. That my integrity would be doubted, that it would be assumed that I got all this from picture sets, I confess astonished me. The Western reviewers, some of them specialists in the Nevada of the silver boom, were most respectful to my labors, as well as enthusiastic about the results; they got the point of what I was trying to do, and several of them called special attention to the circumstances that here at last were miners who actually mined, instead of standing around as extras in a saloon scene, and not only mined, but had a grievous lot of trouble about it, and formed unions, and ate, drank, and slept as miners did eat, drink, and sleep at that time and in that place. I was completely bewildered, I must confess, at the pat statement of the New York critics, but I can’t let them pass uncorrected, which is the reason I ask your indulgence for this visit to the words-of-one-syllable department.

To revert, then, to Jess Tyler, the Big Sandy, and the mine: The river empties into the Ohio not far from Huntington, W. Va., and a few miles from its mouth divides into two forks: the Levisa, which flows through eastern Kentucky, and the Tug, which, with the Big Sandy itself, forms the boundary between Kentucky and West Virginia. To the towns I have given fictitious names, but they are really fictitious, a blend of characteristics, in so far as their characteristics are deemed of interest, from both sides of the river. Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weight 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance hauling concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.

JAMES M. CAIN

Los Angeles, Calif.

August 6, 1946