The Baby in the Icebox: And Other Short Fiction Read online

  The success of “The Baby in the Icebox” convinced Cain that he was now ready for his novel about the California drifter who conspires with the wife of a gas station owner to murder her husband. In endless discussions with his friend, screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, Cain hit on an approach to the story. Lawrence had mentioned a curious fact about the famous Snyder-Gray murder case (which had dominated the newspapers in 1927): When Ruth Snyder had sent Judd Gray, her lover, off to Syracuse the night she murdered her husband, she had given Gray a bottle of wine—and later, when the police lab analyzed it, they discovered enough arsenic there to kill a regiment. When Lawrence told him this, Cain said: “Well, that jells this idea I’ve had for such a story; a couple of jerks who discover that a 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 and live on the same earth. They turn against each other, as Judd and Ruth did.”

  So Cain started his novel with an opening sentence that would eventually be quoted over and over again in college writing courses: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The novel, of course, was The Postman Always Rings Twice, and the young man thrown off the truck was Frank Chambers (played by John Garfield in the 1946 MGM production of Postman and by Jack Nicholson in the more recent Lorimar version). And when the little 188-page book came out in 1934, it created a sensation that is difficult to comprehend today, when almost every other big novel seems to make news, with a six- or seven-figure sale to paperbacks and a rich contract for TV or movie rights. In 1934 that kind of success for a book was scarcely known. In fact, Postman was probably the first of the big fiction successes in American publishing, the first novel to hit for “the grand slam,” meaning a hardcover best-seller, paperback best-seller, syndication, play, and movie. It scored more than once in all media, and still it goes on and on, selling today both in a Knopf hardcover edition called Cain X 3 and in a Vintage paperback.

  If there was one single review that started Postman on the way to its dizzying success, it was Franklin P. Adams’s in the New York Herald Tribune. Adams was positively ecstatic in his praise, calling it the “most engrossing, unlaydownable book that I have any memory of.” And that was just a starter. Whereas the New York Times review (as did many to follow) quoted the now-famous first sentence of Postman, Adams said: “I once thought the first chapter of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge was the greatest first chapter in English fiction.” But now he thought Postman’s first chapter might be literature’s greatest, and to back up his case, he reprinted the entire chapter in his review.

  Other critics were equally enthusiastic. Gertrude Atherton, a popular novelist, was shocked at the story but recognized the book’s power nevertheless. “There are several disgusting themes and the characters are scum,” she wrote, “but that book is a work of art. So beautifully is it built, so superb is its economy of word and incident, so authentic its characters and so exquisite the irony of its finish, it is a joy to any writer who respects his art.”

  Postman started slow in this country and then “took a standing broad jump,” as Cain put it, onto the best-seller lists, and it stayed there for weeks. MGM, carried away by all the excitement over the novel, bought it for $25,000, knowing full well it would be difficult to produce a script the Hays Office would approve and, in fact, it was twelve years before the studio finally filmed Postman.

  With Postman, Cain had produced that rarest of literary achievements—a best-seller widely acclaimed by the critics. As a result, he was immediately in demand everywhere: Knopf wanted him to write another novel; MGM hired him to work on a film to star Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald (which was never completed); a Broadway producer wanted him to do a play based on Postman; and magazine editors were clamoring for Cain short stories and, especially, serials, having noted that Postman’s compactness and periodic plot twists made it ideal for six- or eight-part installment stories, a genre very popular in the 1930s.

  So began one of the most unusual literary-cum-Hollywood careers in the country’s history. From 1933 to 1948, when he left Hollywood, James M. Cain wrote more than two dozen short stories (not all of which were published), six magazine serials, seven novels (most of which were best-sellers), and two plays (one of which, Postman, was produced on Broadway, while the other, 7-11, was staged in a summer production in Cohasset, but never reached New York City). At the same time, thirteen movies were made from his stories, including the classic Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson; Mildred Pierce, which won an Academy Award for Joan Crawford in 1945; and the first version of Postman. All of these movies were scripted by other writers while Cain was going from one studio job to another, working his way up from $400 a week to $2,500. From Hollywood alone, he made an estimated $388,000 in those years, approximately one-third of it from the sale of his stories to the studios and two-thirds from salaries earned while working in the studios. Yet in all that studio work, he achieved only three shared credits—for Stand Up and Fight (starring Wallace Beery and Robert Taylor), Gypsy Wildcat (Maria Montez), and Algiers (Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer). Cain’s studio career, by his own estimate, was a total failure. “I wanted the picture money,” he said, trying to explain his Hollywood experience, “and I worked like a dog to get it. I parked my pride, my esthetic convictions, my mind outside on the street, and did everything to be a success in this highly paid trade…[but] even working in a whorehouse, the girl has to like the work a little bit, and I could not like pictures.”

  While he was living and working at such a pace, Cain’s personal life, not surprisingly, also turned chaotic. In 1942 he divorced Elina, and then after three years of excessive eating and drinking, he married the silent-movie star Aileen Pringle. He separated from Aileen a year later, then married a former opera star, Florence Macbeth, who had been one of the idols of his youth, after meeting her quite by chance at a Hollywood cocktail party.

  He and Florence were ecstatically happy together, and in his newfound tranquility Cain made one of the most critical decisions of his life. One day in 1947, he said to Florence: “Either I’m going to wind up as a picture writer or I’m going back to novels and amount to something.” Florence, who did not like Hollywood, voted for a return to the novels, and so, after he had completed The Moth, the Cains left Hollywood and headed East in 1948. They went to Hyattsville, Maryland, because Cain wanted to be near the Library of Congress, where he planned to research a Civil War trilogy. This project, however, proved the most exasperating, difficult task Cain ever undertook, and it was fifteen years before Mignon, the resulting novel, was eventually published—and then it was condemned by the critics and never became a best-seller.

  By the early 1950s it had become painfully obvious that Cain was not going to be able to support himself while trying to “amount to something as a writer.” From time to time he wrote to H. N. Swanson, his new Hollywood agent, asking him to watch out for something in the studios, but nothing turned up. Finally, one day, he mentioned that it might be time to return to Hollywood, and Florence said: “It’s not there…the Hollywood we knew does not exist any more.”

  Cain agreed and they decided to stay in Hyattsville, a decision he regretted for the rest of his life. “California is a neck of the woods everyone is fascinated with,” he said. “It was EI Dorado. You can put it in your book, ‘It was nothing but a wayside filling station—like millions of others in California,’ and that’s O.K. Any piece of California, no matter how drab, prosaic or dull, is California just the same, the land of Golden Promise. I don’t know anyone who is holding his breath over Prince Georges County, Maryland.”

  Cain was right: Maryland was not his milieu. From 1953 until 1977, when he died at the age of eighty-five, Cain wrote nine novels set in Maryland, only three of which were published—Galatea, The Magician’s Wife, and The Institute. He also wrote Mignon, which was set in Louisiana, and Rainbow’s End, set in
the mountains of eastern Ohio. And none of them achieved the impact or the sales of his California stories. But he kept writing to the end, never wavering from the decision he made “out of the blue,” while sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park in 1914. Late in his life he wrote an unpublished novel called The Cocktail Waitress and occasional non-fiction pieces for the Washington Post, and he was working on his memoirs when he died. To the end he retained his zest for writing: “It excites me and possesses me. I have no sense of it possessing me any less today than it did fifty years ago.”

  Cain also felt that those who can write must write, and for him the most important thing in writing was the story. “[Stories] ought to be about personal relations rather than broad issues,” he said. He had a horror of becoming a writer with a message; and oddly enough, considering his reputation as an author who dealt with murder, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution, and incest, he maintained that his storytelling model was always Alice in Wonderland, a favorite which he professed to have read once a year throughout his life. “I…remind myself, it is about a girl who followed a white rabbit down his hole—about as unpretentious an idea as could be imagined. It is, so far as I see now, devoid of any significance and lesson to be imparted, or wisdom—those pitfalls for every writer. Whenever I feel an impulse to be important, I remind myself of Alice.”

  —ROY HOOPES

  Sketches and Dialogues

  IN 1924 CAIN BEGAN writing for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. His first contributions were typical magazine essays, but right from the beginning he showed an unusual talent for capturing the speech and dialects of the average man. For example: In his first piece—“The Labor Leader,” which appeared in the February 1924 Mercury—Cain compared the labor leader with the businessman and said that just as the businessman had come to the point where everything was “a proposition,” the labor leader had reached the point where everything was “a matter.”

  This Matter you speak of, now, I don’t want to be quoted in it, see? but if there’s anything going in I want it to go in like it is, the truth about it, I mean, and not no pack of damn lies like the papers generally prints. What I say, now, don’t put it in like it come from me, because I don’t know nothing about it, except what I read in the papers, not being notified in no official way, see? Besides, it’s a matter which you might say is going to have a question of jurisdiction to it, and I don’t want to have nobody make no charges against me for interference in no matter which it ain’t strickly a point where I got authority. But, I can give you a idea about it and you can fix it up so them that reads the paper can figger out their own conclusion on how we stand in the matter.

  With his talent for dialogue, Cain eventually suggested to Mencken that he be allowed to do his iconoclastic, satiric pieces entirely in dialogue, and the Mercury editor agreed. The result was a series beginning in the April 1925 Mercury lampooning various aspects of town and local government. The pieces were essentially little one-act plays and attracted considerable attention in the literary world, establishing Cain as a humorist and master of American dialect, both rural and urban. He continued to write these dialogues until he had amassed enough for a book, Our Government, published in 1930. Two of them, “The Hero” and “Theological Interlude,” are included here. The first was included in Our Government under the title “Town Government: The Commissioners”; the second, he intended to include because he felt the book needed some sort of offbeat piece “to wash it up,” but then decided that religion has very little to do with American government and dropped it. Another, “The Governor,” was included in Katharine and E. B. White’s Subtreasury of American Humor, which pleased Cain immensely. “The piece,” he wrote Katharine White, “is one of the few things I have ever written that I have real affection for.”

  The dialogues also impressed Phil Goodman, a friend of Mencken’s who produced Broadway plays. Mencken introduced the two men, and Goodman encouraged Cain to write a full play. It was about a modern-day Messiah who comes to the coal mines of West Virginia to save the miners and their families. He called it Crashing the Gates, and it was produced in 1926, a year before Sinclair Lewis’s indictment of the clergy in Elmer Gantry. Clearly, the country was not ready for it. It shocked theatergoers in Stamford and Worcester, many of whom hissed, booed, stomped their feet, and then walked out. Crashing the Gates closed before it reached Broadway, but Cain never lost his urge to write a successful play. It was a dream he never realized.

  Cain was also developing as a writer of short fiction in another outlet—the New York World. In 1928, partly to help meet his alimony payments, Cain started writing a regular column for the Sunday section. It consisted almost entirely of short sketches, as he called them, similar to the longer dialogues he was writing for the Mercury. They were, however, rather tepid versions of his Mercury pieces, given the restrictions of a family newspaper. For his World sketches he could not write about “niggers,” murderers, and burning “stiffs” in a county poorhouse as he did for Mencken; he had to be more conventional. In the first year, his column was devoted entirely to a neighborhood centering around a fictional Bender Street in a city which was obviously New York. The recurring characters included: Mr. Schwartz, proprietor of the Bender Pharmacy; Mr. Fletcher, the popular bootlegger, his wife, and son, Herbert; Mr. Kallen, Grand Exalted Scribe of the Bender Lodge, The Loyal and Royal Order of Bruins; Hans Krumwielde, the director of the lodge’s band, the Bender Red Pants; Police Sergeant Joyce, his daughter, Rose, and son, Benny; Mr. Albright, Bender School history teacher; Winny the Ninny, a friend of Rose’s; and Dolly Dimple, an advice-to-the-lovelorn newspaper columnist who advises Rose on her many problems, most of which are told to “Dear Diary.”

  The dialogues centered around such issues as Rose Joyce trying to fatten herself, at Dolly Dimple’s suggestion, with milk shakes, or the problem in the Bender Red Pants caused by the first trombonist not being able to play because he was being fitted for new false teeth. Reading them today, it is hard to imagine that these sketches were written by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Yet the voices are authentic, the dialogue excellent, and each little sketch holds your interest once you get into it.

  After a year, Cain, or perhaps someone higher on the World staff, tired of the Bender Street gang. So Cain shifted to other characters and locales, and from 1929 to early 1931, when the World folded, the subjects of his sketches fell into three categories, examples of which are included here: New York and New Yorkers (“The Robbery,” “Vanishing Act,” and “Dreamland”); Eastern Shore rubes and roughnecks, most of which begin “Down in the country…” (“Joy Ride,” “Queen of Love and Beauty,” and “Santa Claus, M.D.”); and fictionalized accounts of personal experiences (“Gold Letters Hand Painted” and “It Breathed”).

  These sketches were extremely important to Cain’s development. In the first place, he discovered that he was at his best as a writer when pretending to be someone else, and the person he felt most comfortable imitating was some Eastern Shore rube or mountain roughneck who spoke like one of Ring Lardner’s characters. A perfect example is the sketch “It Breathed,” about something that happened to Cain while he was in France in 1918. Instead of writing it in perfect diction, using the kind of grammar and phrasing that had so impressed Walter Lippmann, Cain pretended the incident had happened to some yokel and wrote the story in the first person in an Eastern Shore dialect.

  Cain’s World sketches were widely read around New York and are still being read in writing classes, where teachers use them to illustrate how a story can be told through dialogue alone (see “The Robbery”). The sketches also helped draw attention to Cain when he was still a relatively unknown writer. One day Claude Bowers, a World writer and historian, brought an eminent editor named Robert Linscott, from Houghton Mifflin, to see Cain. Linscott had read Cain’s sketches and wanted him to try a novel. Cain told Linscott of his earlier unsuccessful attempts at longer fiction and said he was not capable of it, but Linscott disagreed and p
redicted that someday Cain would write a novel—and he expressed the hope that Houghton Mifflin would be its publisher.

  However, by 1931, when Cain left New York for Hollywood, he still felt his colloquial first-person approach to storytelling would not stand up in longer fiction. He was also convinced that New York was not his milieu, and that of all the sketches he wrote for the World, the ones about New York and New Yorkers were the least successful. “I’d been gradually coming to the conclusion,” he later said, “that if I was to write anything of the kind I’d been dreaming about for so long, it could not be based in New York…. Those killingly funny drivers of New York cabs, the secretaries, bellhops, and clerks behind counters, were completely sterile soil. I drew nothing from them.” On the other hand, he took pride in the country sketches, especially the dialogues he had done for the Mercury. They were, he said, in the “down-home idiom of Anywhere USA—anywhere but New York.” Writing had to have roots—“it can’t wriggle down from the sky, as Alice did, in Wonderland.” And he felt that, just maybe, he would find his roots in the West.

  Moving to California in 1931 proved to be the wisest decision James M. Cain ever made. Once in the West, he was ready for more conventional short stories, but he also discovered something that surprised him. The dialogue for which James M. Cain had become famous was essentially written for the printed page. It would not play to the ear, as Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler found out when they were scripting Double Indemnity. This curious fact was perhaps at the root of Cain’s frustrating inability to achieve success as a scriptwriter or playwright.