Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  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”* 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

  With the documents finally fitted into a stout clasp envelope, addressed to “The Hon. Secretary of Labor, Washington, D.C.,” I made my way to the registry window of the City Hall branch of the Post Office, and confronted Mr. A. T. Murray. Mr. Murray and I are old friends, or at any rate we have seen quite a lot of each other, as I often have to register things.

  “Will you lend me the sealing wax?” I said.

  “The Department,” he answered, “don’t furnish sealing wax any more.”

  “They used to furnish it,” I said.

  “They used to furnish it,” he said, “but they don’t furnish it any more.”

  This was annoying, for as I say it was a clasp envelope and I knew of old that you can’t register a thing like that, which anybody can open.

  “Where’s the nearest place I can buy sealing wax?” I said.

  “There’s a stationery store on Nassau Street,” said Mr. Murray.

  To Nassau Street I trudged; it was beginning to rain, and that didn’t improve my opinion of the Post Office Department of the United States Government. On my way I got to thinking about it: I made up my mind that this kind of thing had to stop. I would write a piece about it, an indignant letter to the Herald Tribune, and say: “How about this, Mr. Brown?” Mr. Brown, in case you haven’t heard, is Postmaster General of the United States—Mr. Walter F. Brown of Ohio. I computed roughly the cost of sealing wax, bought wholesale; I planned how to balance this trifling cost against the inconvenience to citizens who are forced to walk down to Nassau Street in the rain.

  Nassau Street, it turned out, was full of stationery stores, but the first five didn’t handle sealing wax. “No demand,” said one salesman briefly.

  “How about people that have things to register,” I inquired sarcastically, “and who, by reason of the fact that the Post Office Department doesn’t furnish sealing wax any more, must trudge down to Nassau Street?”

  “By me, buddy,” he said. “Them people don’t come in this store.”

  Finally I found a store that handled sealing wax. It was the best sealing wax I ever saw: it had a wick running down the middle, like a candle, and all you had to do was light the wick and let the wax drop down on the envelope. This did away with the old fumbling with matches. On my way back I determined to give a free reading notice in the letter to the manufacturers of this sealing wax: Davids Brothers, of 213 Centre Street. You see I was going to compare the brilliant originality of Davids Brothers with the dull stupidity of the Post Office Department. (“Is this the vaunted efficiency o
f the Hoover Administration, Mr. Brown?”) Then a really brilliant idea hit me: I would demand that sealing-wax machines, exactly like chewing-gum machines, be installed in all Post Offices.

  In this frame of mind, I entered the registry room again, lighted the wick, made three thick puddles of sealing wax on the envelope, and grimly confronted Mr. Murray.

  “We can’t take that,” said Mr. Murray. “You got to have mucilage under that flap.”

  I opened my mouth to roar very loud: “And I suppose I’ve got to go down to Nassau Street for a bottle of mucilage now, have I?” But I noticed that Mr. Murray was pushing a bottle of mucilage at me. I took it, went back to the table, put mucilage under the flap, and then went back to Mr. Murray. I would wait, I thought, until he got through with the formalities of registry before telling him what I thought of a government that furnished mucilage but did not furnish sealing wax.

  Mr. Murray stamped the envelope with his usual care, turned it over, looked at it thoughtfully. Then, as he handed out the receipt, he leaned toward me.

  “Now get this,” he said. “Get this straight, so you’ll know how to do in the future. The sealing wax on a thing like this is not essential. But the mucilage is.”

  (The New Yorker, May 2, 1931)

  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.

  *For the series of articles Cain did for Mencken and The Mercury in the 1920s, see 60 Years of Journalism by James M. Cain, which I edited for the Popular Press (1985).

  * “Pastorale” is included in The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction by James M. Cain, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981; Penguin, 1984.

  1. DIALOGUES

  Introduction

  THE DIALOGUES WHICH CAIN began writing for Mencken and The American Mercury in 1925 were cast in the form of one-act plays and lampooned various aspects of our federal, state, and local governments. He wrote these devastating satires for five years, by which time he had accumulated almost enough for a book. So, encouraged by Alfred A. Knopf, Cain wrote a few more to include in a little volume of satire titled Our Government, published by Knopf in 1930.

  If Our Government had been the kind of success Knopf, Mencken, and several of the critics thought it should have been, James M. Cain might today be best known primarily as a satiric writer of comic dialogues. Mencken, especially, never understood why Our Government did not “create a sensation … there was capital stuff in it.”

  To emphasize the satire, Cain wrote a pretentious tongue-in-cheek Preface to Our Government in which he suggested that his “studies” of government were the inevitable result of having made the transition into the scientific era. “We live in an age,” he said, “that has abandoned theory, except when theory can be made to serve as working hypothetic, in favor of fact. No longer do we start with cognito, ergo sum as a basis for deducing the principle of the universe; no longer do we believe that the principle of the universe can be deduced, or even stated. We incline to table such profundities as this in favor of things more objective: instead of concluding, by syllogistic processes, that since the patient is insane he must have a devil inside of him, we study his symptoms, trying to find out something about them; instead of indulging in great debates about the fairness of the income tax, we study the minutiae of economic phenomena, accumulating great columns of tables; instead of saying cognito, and letting it go at that, we study ourselves, seeking to find out how we cogitate, if at all. In other words, science has become descriptive.”

  Science, said Cain, would hazard no opinion on the principle of the universe until it knew what the universe was like. And “this little book represents an effort to make a beginning in this direction on behalf of our American government, perhaps the most baffling riddle of all. We have, heaven knows, no dearth of books on the theory of our government, on its functions, its virtues, and its defects. The libraries are full of such books, and the courthouses are even fuller, for every judicial decision is in some degree an analysis of these matters, and many judicial decisions are lengthy. But there is no book, so far as I know, which sets out to paint a portrait of our government; to depict, without bias or comment, the machine which passes our laws, educates our children, and polices our streets; to show the kind of men who man it, the matters that occupy them, and the nature of their deliberations.”

  His method of approach, he said, was “to select some typical problem of a particular branch of government, usually on the basis of newspaper clippings, and then reconstruct the ma
nner in which it would be dealt with by the typical agents of that branch of government…. While it has its limitations, it was the best method, I believe, with which to achieve complete verisimilitude, which after all was the main desideratum.”

  Some of the reviewers completely missed the satire and were baffled by the contrasting serious tone of the Preface and the comic shenanigans that took place in the book. But most of them caught it, and some were positively ecstatic in their responses: John Carter, in Outlook, called Our Government a remarkably accurate picture of American politics and said, “It has just that touch of Aristophanes which is necessary to act as a preservative and make it as readable and comprehensible five centuries from now.”

  Our Government has long been out of print, but over the years many of the satires have been produced as one-act plays by small theater groups. The dialogues included here are from the “State Government” section of Our Government, and all but two (“Counsel” and “The Judiciary”) originally appeared in The American Mercury. “The Governor” was also included in Katherine and E. B. White’s Subtreasury of American Humor, which always pleased Cain, who wrote Mrs. White in 1941: “The piece is one of the few things I have written that I have real affection for and it means almost more to me than I care to admit to have it in there.”

  The last dialogue included here, “Don’t Monkey with Uncle Sam,” was written for Vanity Fair in 1933 and was an obvious attempt to revive the dialogue form for satirizing the government which had worked so well for Mencken, who left The Mercury in 1933. But it was Cain’s last effort at this type of satire.