Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  As he leaned back to pant from this exertion, a voice called from outside: “Mr. Hayes? Are you there, Mr. Hayes?”

  “Yeah,” he quavered. “I’m here.”

  “You all right, Mr. Hayes? Police talking.”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” he said. “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “How about that tiger, sir?”

  “Tiger’s fine too.”

  “Then open the window, please. We got a rifle—”

  But at that, from half-stupor, Greg came to life with a rush. Lurching to his knees, he flung open the window, seeing for the first time the lights of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, to say nothing of a throng of people that was rapidly becoming a mob. But disregarding all that, he yelled: “Lay off with that gun! Don’t shoot into this room!”

  “Mr. Hayes, it’s the city police!”

  “I don’t care, I said lay off! You keep away till I tell you to come! Is Mr. Biedermann there?”

  “Here! Here, Mr. Hayes. Right here!”

  “I got your tiger tied up.”

  “You—what?”

  “I say I got him tied!”

  “Are you kidding, are you nuts?”

  “I’m not kidding, and if I’m nuts I still got him tied! Get some men, get some rope, get a pole, but make it quick! He’s dying. I had to choke him, but he might still be saved—if you cut out the talk and step on it!”

  “Hold everything, Mr. Hayes!”

  At this point, he heard Rita call, and reassured her with a shout. Then he foundered to the closet to put a robe on. Now, it strikes him as ironical that he could have saved himself all along by ducking in there in the first place and shutting himself in. “But what you didn’t think of in time doesn’t do you much good later.” As soon as his bloody garb was covered, the door of the room burst open, and the police were there, with Mr. Biedermann, a trainer, a keeper, a dozen circus roustabouts, and a swarm of press photographers. He took charge himself, urging Mr. Biedermann, “Tie him up—get hitches over his feet, then slip your pole through—and out with him, to his cage. Soon as he’s in there I’ll do what I can to save him.” It was done quicker than he thought possible—the keeper winding the rope on, Mr. Biedermann slipping the pole through, one of those used on the tent, and grabbing a pillow case, which he slipped over the lolling head, to protect the men who, with quick, half-running strides, hustled their burden out, to a cage that had been backed up to the yard by hand. They flung the tiger in, and Mr. Biedermann threw off the ropes and snatched off the pillow case.

  Then Greg, still having had no chance to explain what had happened, climbed in the cage alone. On the floor was a piece of bone, the remnants of a knuckle, lovingly licked to the size of a tennis ball. He seized it, jammed it between the jaws, well back so they couldn’t close. Then, grabbing the tongue with one hand and pulling it out, he shoved the other hand down the rough throat and began pulling out plastic. He got several pieces, threw them aside. Then at last he touched what he wanted: the first piece he had used, that had popped down the great gullet. Pulling slowly, as carefully as a surgeon, taking no chance on breaking it, he drew it out, a limp, sticky twist that glittered in the glare of headlights. He waited, put his hand on the quivering flank, and when it lifted, and a gagging, sad moan told of a breath entering the lungs, he patted the head, and climbed out.

  As Mr. Biedermann reached for his hand and the keeper banged the door shut, Rita gathered him in her arms. But the two little girls screamed at what he looked like.

  It so happened, when his hospital term was finished, that he came out a national celebrity, with TV hungry to present him, along with the tiger, whose name, it turned out, was Rajah. So the two of them appeared. The emcee did most of the talking, with Greg saying: “Yeah, that’s how it happened, sure did.” But then Rajah put in his two cents’ worth. At first, recognizing Greg, and doing obeisance to his conqueror, he slunk back in his cage and cowered. Then Greg, leaning to the bars, stuck his nose out. Rajah, after staring, jumped out and stuck his nose out. When the two noses touched, it was a tremendous kick for the ten million kids who were watching, and also a kick for Greg. “It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it,” he reflects, “to save the life of a friend? But then when he thanks you for it, that’s really something. I’ve heard of that pal’s handshake, but that kiss through the bars, that big wet nose touching my nose, meant just as much to me—maybe more.”

  (Esquire, September 1961)

  3. THE LIGHT NOVEL

  Introduction

  IT WAS A GLOOMY January 1, 1937. Cain was sitting in his study on Beiden Drive, feeling down and pondering how he could be so famous and broke and not be able to write. He kept thinking about Walter Lippmann’s remark that when he reached a state when he could not write, he wrote—anything! Then Cain heard his own voice telling him: “How you write ’em is write ’em.” The next day he started a story intended as a magazine serial and, with luck, a sale to the movies.

  At this point in his life, he was intensely preoccupied with singing and music, two loves that dated back to his childhood. His mother was an accomplished vocalist who gave up a promising career to marry a Yale man she was in love with. For a brief time when he was around 20, Cain flirted with the idea of becoming an opera singer. But after a summer of music lessons and discouraged by his mother (who did not think he had either the voice or the temperament to sing grand opera), he decided against a musical career. But he never gave up his love of music or singing. And music—like sex and food—was part of the creative mix that produced Cain’s novels.

  Cain’s writing on music started early, when he was working for The Baltimore Sun. One of his first bylined pieces appeared on the op-ed page in 1922 and deplored the then current boom in America for Gilbert and Sullivan. Cain charged in, attacking English music in general and Gilbert and Sullivan comedies in particular, advising the songwriters around the country who were imitating the British musical comedy team to try something exciting—like jazz. Music was also one of his favorite subjects when he was Walter Lippmann’s human interest writer on the editorial page of The New York World, as well as when he wrote his syndicated column for the Hearst papers in the early 1930s.

  In the mid-1930s, after Postman was published, the Cains moved from Burbank back into Hollywood and a large, attractive home on Beiden Drive. One of his Hollywood friends was Henry Meyers, a playwright who had worked on the scripts for “Million Dollar Legs” and “Destry Rides Again.” Meyers, like Cain, was a music enthusiast who could sight-read and play almost anything on the piano. One night, Cain and Meyers were talking about music and deploring the fact that people did not play instruments or sing in their homes as they used to do before the radio and phonograph began to dominate family life. But they decided human nature had not changed and that, given a chance, people would step forward and, if nothing else, display their exhibitionism. They decided to organize musical evenings, mostly devoted to serious music, every Friday night at Cain’s house, and it was during this period that he started on a story his agent could sell to a magazine as a serial.

  The theme was one that he hoped he could someday turn into a major work—which he eventually did in his novel Mildred Pierce—the story of a woman whose husband walks out on her, leaving her to raise the children. The story began to take shape: a woman, a successful buyer in a department store, is married to one of those nice guys who cannot make a success of anything, though she loves him and is decent about his deficiencies. Then, by accident, he finds he has a voice and actually goes out and has a fling with an operatic career. Now his wife is unhappy; his failure endeared him to her, but she cannot stand his success.

  Cain mulled it over and decided it did not work. So he made the woman a singer with a career thwarted by domestic considerations. But he did not like that, either. Then he thought: Why not make her a singer and a bitch? He did, and the story took off. He called it “Two Can Sing,” wrote it in 28 days, and sold it almost immediately to 20th Century-Fox for $
8000. But then, oddly enough, it did not sell to Liberty, which had been crying for anything as a follow-up to Double Indemnity—anything, it seemed, except a “comic adventure,” as Cain called the story when it appeared six years later in hardcover under the title Career in C Major. It created a mild sensation when it appeared in American, and the editor wrote Cain, saying it was “the most popular short novel we have ever published,” and pleaded with him to do another. Cain also liked “Two Can Sing,” because, as he wrote Mencken, “it is merely a pleasant tale with no murders in it.”

  But even without the murder, like Postman, it was eventually made into two major movies—the first, entitled Wife, Husband and Friend, had a cast which ensured success: Warner Baxter, Loretta Young, Binnie Barnes, Caesar Romero, Eugene Pallette, and Edward J. Bromberg. Then, in 1949, 20th Century-Fox made a new version, entitled Everybody Does It, which had an equally good cast—Paul Douglas, Linda Darnell, Celeste Holm, and Charles Coburn—and received rave reviews as the comedy of the year. Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times, said the movie was a “historic milestone” for Hollywood because it was the first starring role for Paul Douglas, who until then, was best known for his supporting role in “Letter to Three Wives.”

  But the real milestone was that Career in C Major firmly established Cain as a novelist capable of comic writing. And I think there is little doubt that he would have preferred to be remembered as a comic rather than tough guy novelist. “I am probably the most mis-read, mis-reviewed and mis-understood novelist now writing,” Cain said in his Introduction to Three of a Kind, the 1941 Knopf collection that included Career in C Major. And the misunderstanding, he always maintained, concerned his tough guy label. His first two successful novels—Postman and Double Indemnity—both concerned premeditated murder, which, in addition to his celebrated lean, sparse writing style, helped establish him as a tough guy writer. But, as Cain went to great pains to explain, the murder was incidental to the love story he was trying to tell. It was meant to serve for what his mentor, Hollywood screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, called “the love rack.” Cain always felt that perhaps Dorothy Parker made the most perceptive comment about Postman when, one night at dinner, she said: “To me it’s a love story and that’s all it is.”

  Career in C Major is also a love story, in which the love rack is music rather than murder. And considering how genuinely and intentionally comic it is, we are reminded again of Edmund Wilson’s remark that Postman was “always in danger of becoming unintentionally funny.”

  After reading Career in C Major and Cain’s light fiction, you cannot help but wonder whether the comic scenes in Postman were really unintentional.

  Career in C Major

  1

  ALL THIS, THAT I’M going to tell you, started several years ago. You may have forgotten how things were then, but I won’t forget it so soon, and sometimes I think I’ll never forget it. I’m a contractor, junior partner in the Craig-Borland Engineering Company, and in my business there was nothing going on. In your business, I think there was a little going on, anyway enough to pay the office help provided they would take a ten per cent cut and forget about the Christmas bonus. But in my business, nothing. We sat for three years with our feet on our desks reading magazines, and after the secretaries left we filled in for a while by answering the telephone. Then we didn’t even do that, because the phone didn’t ring any more. We just sat there, and switched from the monthlies to the weeklies, because they came out oftener.

  It got so bad that when Craig, my partner, came into the office one day with a comical story about a guy that wanted a concrete chicken coop built, somewhere out in Connecticut, that we looked at each other shifty-eyed for a minute, and then without saying a word we put on our hats and walked over to Grand Central to take the train. We wanted that coop so bad we could hardly wait to talk to him. We built it on a cost-plus basis, and I don’t think there’s another one like it in the world. It’s insulated concrete, with electric heat control, automatic sewage disposal, accommodations for 5,000 birds, and all for $3,000, of which our share was $300, minus expenses. But it was something to do, something to do. After the coop was built, Craig dug in at his farm up-state, and that left me alone. I want you to remember that, because if I made a fool of myself, I was wide open for that, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. When you get a little fed up with me, just remember those feet, with no spurs to keep them from falling off the desk, because what we had going on wasn’t a war, like now, but a depression.

  It was about four-thirty on a fall afternoon when I decided to call it a day and go home. The office is in a remodeled loft on East 35th Street, with a two-story studio for drafting on the ground level, the offices off from that, and the third floor for storage. We own the whole building and owned it then. The house is on East 84th Street, and it’s a house, not an apartment. I got it on a deal that covered a couple of apartment houses and a store. It’s mine, and was mine then, with nothing owing on it. I decided to walk, and marched along, up Park and over, and it was around five-thirty when I got home. But I had forgotten it was Wednesday, Doris’s afternoon at home. I could hear them in there as soon as I opened the door, and I let out a damn under my breath, but there was nothing to do but brush my hair back and go in. It was the usual mob: a couple of Doris’s cousins, three women from the Social Center, a woman just back from Russia, a couple of women that have boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, and half a dozen husbands and sons. They were all Social Register, all so cultured that even their eyeballs were lavender, all rich, and all 100% nitwits. They were the special kind of nitwits you meet in New York and nowhere else, and they might fool you if you didn’t know them, but they’re nitwits just the same. Me, I’m Social Register too, but I wasn’t until I married Doris, and I’m a traitor to the kind that took me in. Give me somebody like Craig, that’s a farmer from Reubenville, that never even heard of the Social Register, that wouldn’t know culture if he met it on the street, but is an A1 engineer just the same, and has designed a couple of bridges that have plenty of beauty, if that’s what they’re talking about. These friends of Doris’s, they’ve been everywhere, they’ve read everything, they know everybody, and I guess now and then they even do a little good, anyway when they shove money back of something that really needs help. But I don’t like them, and they don’t like me.

  I went around, though, and shook hands, and didn’t tumble that anything unusual was going on until I saw Lorentz. Lorentz had been her singing teacher before she married me, and he had been in Europe since then, and this was the first I knew he was back. And his name, for some reason, didn’t seem to get mentioned much around our house. You see, Doris is opera-struck, and one of the things that began to make trouble between us within a month of the wedding was the great career she gave up to marry me. I kept telling her I didn’t want her to give up her career, and that she should go on studying. She was only nineteen then, and it certainly looked like she still had her future before her. But she would come back with a lot of stuff about a woman’s first duty being to her home, and when Randolph came, and after him Evelyn, I began to say she had probably been right at that. But that only made it worse. Then I was the one that was blocking her career, and had been all along, and every time we’d get going good, there’d be a lot of stuff about Lorentz, and the way he had raved about her voice, and if she had only listened to him instead of to me, until I got a little sick of it. Then after a while Lorentz wasn’t mentioned any more, and that suited me fine. I had nothing against him, but he always meant trouble, and the less I heard of him the better I liked it.

  I went over and shook hands, and noticed he had got pretty gray since I saw him last. He was five or six years older than I was, about forty I would say, born in this country, but a mixture of Austrian and Italian. He was light, with a little clipped moustache, and about medium height, but his shoulders went back square, and there was something about him that said Europe, not America. I asked him how long he had been back, he said a c
ouple of months, and I said swell. I asked him what he had been doing abroad, he said coaching in the Berlin opera, and I said swell. That seemed to be about all. Next thing I knew I was alone, watching Doris where she was at the table pouring drinks, with her eyes big and dark, and two bright red spots on her cheeks.

  Of course the big excitement was that she was going to sing. So I just took a back seat and made sure I had a place for my glass, so I could put it down quick and clap when she got through. I don’t know what she sang. In those days I didn’t know one song from another. She stood facing us, with a little smile on her face and one elbow on the piano, and looked us over as though we were a whole concert hall full of people, and then she started to sing. But there was one thing that made me feel kind of funny. It was the whisper-whisper rehearsal she had with Lorentz just before she began. They were all sitting around, holding their breaths waiting for her, and there she was on the piano bench with Lorentz, listening to him whisper what she was to do. Once he struck two sharp chords, and she nodded her head. That doesn’t sound like much to be upset about, does it? She was in dead earnest, and no foolishness about it. The whole seven years I had been married to her, I don’t think I ever got one word out of her that wasn’t phoney, and yet with this guy she didn’t even try to put on an act.

  They left about six-thirty, and I mixed another drink so we could have one while we were dressing for a dinner we had to go to. When I got upstairs she was stretched out on the chaise longue in brassiere, pants, stockings, and high-heeled slippers, looking out of the window. That meant trouble. Doris is a Chinese kimono girl, and she always seems to be gathering it around her so you can’t see what’s underneath, except that you can, just a little. But when she’s got the bit in her teeth, the first sign is that she begins to show everything she’s got. She’s got plenty, because a sculptor could cast her in bronze for a perfect thirty-four, and never have to do anything more about it at all. She’s small, but not too small, with dark red hair, green eyes, and a sad, soulful face, with a sad soulful shape to go with it. It’s the kind of shape that makes you want to put your arm around it, but if you do put your arm around it, anyway when she’s parading it around to get you excited, that’s when you made your big mistake. Then she shrinks and shudders, and gets so refined she can’t bear to be touched, and you feel like a heel, and she’s one up on you.