Career in C Major: And Other Fiction Read online

  Cain’s coverage of the trial was featured prominently by The Sun, not only in first-page stories but in several feature pieces for the editorial page. One of these gives us our first revealing glimpse of Cain’s sardonic twist of mind in the early 1920s. It was titled “Hunting the Radical” and is reprinted below.

  Hunting the Radical

  Ever since the war times we have had a prodigious pother about radicalism. The radicals were going to sell us out to the Germans; the radicals were going to sell us out to Russia; the radicals were going to have a revolution and put the White House to the torch. The newspaper writers devoted unlimited space to them; a real spectre haunted many other estimable persons. One gathered that the duty of all patriotic citizens was to scotch the head of the monster ’neath the heel of the Americanization movement.

  The discussion still goes on unabated, and I summarize the main points brought forward as follows:

  If the radicals ever get in control of the American Federation of Labor, then good night!—the country has gone to pot.

  The radical preaches a doctrine of hate and class consciousness, whereas our Government is founded on the principle of fair play and equal opportunity to all.

  The radical proposes to accomplish his ends by violence, whereas our Government is founded on the principle of respect for the law and the will of the majority.

  These, I believe, are the main points alleged against the radicals.

  The subject, I confess, has interested me since it was first broached. I am naturally superstitious, being easily frightened by ghost stories, and possibly that accounts for it. Anyhow, I read with rapt attention all the newspaper print about it; I have gone so far as to read up on the past history of it. I have read biographies of Lauvelle, Bakunin, Proudhon and Lenin; I have even read Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. Reading about the Chicago bomb outrage back in the eighties afforded me a memorable thrill; the I.W.W. is my special meat.

  As a result of my researches, I got the impression that the radical was a person adept at plots too devious for the ordinary mind to comprehend; that he was steeped in philosophy that was a triple distillate of Marx, Proudhon and Lenin; that he was a secret agent of the Moscow regime, and if we didn’t watch him, would have a Soviet in the Capitol at Washington before we knew it. I think this was the common impression.

  Well, as I say, the subject fascinates me. So I set out to hunt the radical in his lair; I wanted to see the beast, stroke his fur and hear him purr. I had been impressed by Henry M. Hyde’s statement, in an article last summer, that the West Virginia mine fields were infested with Reds, so off to West Virginia I went and got me a job in a union mine, where, according to the best information, I could hardly move without stepping on the toe of a radical.

  And, praise God, I found him! I had hardly stowed my dunnage in the miners’ boarding house before I began hearing about him. I give you a brief digest of some of the things I heard:

  A foreman: “Oh, we get along with our men all right. You see, there’s not generally any trouble between a coal company and his men: It’s only when these radicals get them stirred up that we have trouble.”

  An operator: “The main trouble we have is with this radical element. Our men, most of them, are good men—steady, good workers, never give any trouble. But you know how it is: when some of these radicals get up on their ear about something, then’s when we have our hands full.”

  A miner: “Tell you how it is: this here’s a good comp’ny, best comp’ny I ever work for. An’ they’s good men in this mine, good men’s ’yever see; they don’t have to have no foreman over’m to git the work out of ’m. But when these yere dam radicals gits started, ’ats when we have what you call trouble. Seems like ther’s always an element that want’s t’ start sum’m. You know how it is.”

  A miner’s wife: “It’s jes’ like I tell my husban’. You men don’t never have no trouble ontil you start listenin’ to some of them radicals, we calls ’m.”

  And so forth. I had several radicals pointed out to me: rowdy-looking fellows, certainly. I even screwed up my courage to talk to them; they offered me carbide for my lamp and cigarettes. I declined, of course.

  But this point gradually became apparent to me: that these radicals seemed to be a different breed from those I had read so much about in the newspapers. I cleverly interrogated one, without revealing my design, and found he had never heard of Russia. I found out that nobody in the whole camp had ever heard of the numerous self-anointed apostles of the labor movement—the “Cause”—who get out the magazines in New York. I questioned other certified radicals and found they had no theories concerning government whatever and didn’t know what a Soviet was. Hold on, I thought, there’s something wrong here.

  So I went to an operator friend and I explained to him my difficulty. I told him I thought what he meant by radical were two different things. “Tell me,” I said, “precisely what do you imply by radical?”

  “Oh, that’s a new word we have,” he said. “I don’t remember just how we got to calling them that. I mean a trouble-maker; a fellow that wants to run things—a bully, I guess you would call him.”

  “Then you don’t have in mind especially a secret agent of the Russian Government,” I said, “or a Socialist, or a Communist and a Syndicalist, or an I.W.W. You merely mean a fellow that hasn’t anything better to do than stir up friction and dissatisfaction with anything from the foreman to the way the track is laid in his room, is that it?”

  “You’ve got it,” he said. “Hell, no; we don’t have many of those Socialists or funny ones up here. I heard there was a pair of I.W.W.’s up here during the war; they said the Department of Justice was watching them—but I never saw them.”

  I interviewed my miner friends all over again; I traveled over a considerable portion of the mine field and checked up on this point everywhere I went. And everybody, from operator to miner, gave me the same definition of radical: a bully, a trouble-maker, a fellow who did a lot of talking: our same old friend, in brief, that was going to lick the teacher ’way back in school days. A person we have had with us always. But never a word about Bakunin, Marx, Lenin or Moscow.

  Words, I confess, could not express my disappointment. Here the newspapers had been talking for five years about one kind of beast, and come to find out, they were simply mixed up on their terminology; it was an entirely different kind of beast that went by that name. They had been calling a rabbit by the name of a wildcat, and that was what the whole noise was about.

  My grief, as I say, was intense. But I shall not linger with myself. I want to step down the voltage of the West Virginia discussion into plain language a Marylander can understand.

  Returning to Baltimore, I told a lady my story. She is a lady who was reared on a large Eastern Shore farm.

  “Certainly,” she said, “I get the picture. Over home my father and all the other farmers used to say they never had any trouble with their help until some big-mouth nigger came along. That’s what they used to call them—‘big-mouth nigger.’ Everything would be going along fine, hands all contented, everybody happy, until maybe we would need an extra man and get a big-mouth nigger. Then, just like that, everything would go wrong. The hands wouldn’t work, and, first thing you know, here they would come and all want ‘Sa’d’y aft’noon off,’ or a horse to drive on Sunday. It’s the same old thing.”

  This, then, is the picture, translated into plain Eastern Shore of Maryland talk. I am now ready to make certain substitutions in my equations, that is, in the admonitions concerning radicals, and get the following reductio ad absurdum:

  If the bulldozers ever get in control of the American Federation of Labor, then good night:—the country has gone to pot.

  The trouble-maker preaches a doctrine of hate and class consciousness, whereas our Government is founded on the principle of fair play and equal opportunity to all.

  The “big-mouth” proposes to accomplish his ends by violence, whereas our Government is founde
d on the principle of respect for the law and the will of the majority.

  Now by the shiny bald pate of Eugene V. Debs is this what kept Palmer pacing the floor, with drawn and haggard face, that fateful May 1, when the bombs didn’t go off? Is this the “Under-Man”?—he who “remains, multiplies, bides his time. And now and then his time comes. When a civilization falters beneath its own weight and by the decay of its human foundations; when its structure is shaken by the storms of war, dissension or calamity; then the long-repressed springs of atavistic revolt gather themselves together for the spring.” (I quote from “The Revolt Against Civilization,” by the Very Hon. Lothrop Stoddard, K.K.K.)

  So this is revolution. O tempora, O morons!

  (The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 3, 1923)

  Cain’s West Virginia reporting led to his first national magazine articles (in The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation) as well as his first attempt to write a novel, which ended in discouragement and a conviction that he could not write fiction. His Blizzard trial reporting also caught the eye of H. L. Mencken, who worked on The Sun and was about to launch his new magazine, The American Mercury. Soon Cain was writing for The Mercury, and his early, iconoclastic articles written for Mencken continued to display the sardonic tone and style he had developed on The Sun.*

  Then, in 1924, after being discharged from a TB sanitarium, he took a job writing editorials for Walter Lippmann on The New York World, and the next stage in the literary evolution took place: James M. Cain gradually emerged on The World as a humorist and human interest writer. He had hoped to be hired by Lippmann as an op-ed page editor, but Lippmann, forewarned by Mencken and Arthur Krock (who introduced Cain to Lippmann) that Cain was developing as a writer of exceptional ability, had other ideas. What Cain did not know when he went to see Lippmann was that Maxwell Anderson, who contributed the human interest pieces to Lippmann’s editorial page, was resigning, due to the success of his play What Price Glory? which was running on Broadway. Lippmann asked Cain to try his hand at some editorials, and Cain wrote two—one on a congressman who purposely had himself indicted for making home beer with a recipe he had gleaned from a government publication, and another inquiring why editorial writers always came out against the man-eating shark and for motherhood. “Leave us never forget,” Cain said, “the man-eating shark is viviparous—it brings forth its young alive. It’s kind to its young and it’s been doing it over 10 million years before the human race was ever heard of. The man-eating shark was the first mother and, in a very real sense, the man-eating shark is motherhood.”

  These two early efforts at human interest editorial writing were significant because they (1) gave further evidence that Cain possessed a light sardonic touch and (2) revealed his fascination with living creatures other than humans, especially ones that have a special terror for humans (about which more will be said later).

  Cain, however, had never written an editorial before, and he did not think his two efforts were very good. When he left Lippmann’s office that first afternoon, he was sure he had failed and went immediately to a bar to meet a friend and decide where he would look for a job next. But that evening he was surprised to see his editorial on the congressman in print. When he went to Lippmann’s office the next morning, the editor was all smiles and asked him whether he had any ideas for editorials that day. Lippmann also said, referring to Cain’s first efforts: “Those are very funny pieces. I was very glad to get them. I didn’t use the piece about the shark—a very funny piece, but I don’t like pieces about the newspaper business itself.”

  So Cain was hired as an editorial writer for The New York World and everything went along fine for weeks, with Cain writing his little “japes,” as he called them, and Lippmann seemingly very pleased. But then something went wrong, and there was a distinct change in Lippmann’s response to Cain’s editorials. Without being aware of it, Cain had succumbed to the curse of all editorial writers: the compulsion to shoulder the burdens of the world and lecture his readers. He had, in short, turned serious, and it bothered Lippmann. Cain’s little japes on baseball, music, and the human comedy had now become studious and too-long treatises on such things as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation “Peace Award,” the proposal for a new Department of Air, rewriting the King James Version of the Bible, and the situation in the West Virginia coal mines. He also dabbled in world affairs, which probably annoyed Lippmann even more because he considered himself the resident international expert.

  It was Arthur Krock, who also worked on The World, who finally let Cain know what was happening. One day, the two men were having lunch in the World dining room. Krock greeted Cain amiably and asked how things were going, to which Cain mumbled some evasive reply. Krock asked what was wrong, and Cain said: “Oh, I guess things are all right, but I don’t know who I’m kidding. For Christ sake, I can’t write editorials.”

  “Nonsense,” Krock said. “You’re doing fine. Lippmann is pleased. But you have to stop getting serious. Keep on writing those funny pieces you started with.” Then Krock cited Maxwell Anderson’s experience. “He’d been doing the light editorials for Walter,” Krock explained, “but instead of sticking to what he did well—the human, sentimental kind of pieces—he was getting serious, and Lippmann was relieved when Anderson quit. Now you’re doing the same thing.” Krock pointed out that Lippmann had Allan Nevins on history, Charles Merz on politics, W. O. Scroggs on economics, John Heaton on state politics, and Lippmann himself on international affairs. “But pleasant, light pieces, with enough intellect in them to spike up the letter column and be worth publishing, are tough to get. That’s what he wants from you.”

  “You mean this nonsense I write is worth something?” Cain asked. “They pay you for stuff like that? They actually pay you?”

  Cain still could not believe that his lighthearted japes were what Lippmann wanted. But he was getting the message. He went back to his office and wrote that a man convicted of the unlawful practice of medicine handed out cards on which were printed “B.T.H.M.P.S.D.C.” Asked by the judge what the initials meant, the man replied, “Baptist, Truth, Heaven, Master of Political Science, and Doctor of Chiropractic.” Cain thought this was a fine idea and suggested similar sheepskins for bootleggers, brokers, and bandits, with the credentials for the last one reading: “B.S.U.Y.H.Q.O.I.B.Y.O.—Bandit, Stick Up Your Hands Quick Or I’ll Bump You Off.”

  Lippmann was happy again, and Cain was given a three-year contract for $125 a week. Now he could go down to Baltimore and tell his mother, “You’ve been proclaiming for years that I don’t have good sense, and events have proved you’re right—but in New York they pay you for it.”

  For the next six years Cain wrote editorials, and one amusing example is reprinted below to record the flavor of the writing which Lippmann admired so much.

  The American Eagle

  Some time ago we ventured the opinion that much of the hostility to evolution would be allayed if it were discovered that man is descended not from the ape but from the American eagle. “Breathes there the man with soul so dead,” we ask, “that he would not be proud to be descended from the American eagle?” And for this brilliant patriotic fight, we are taken to task by H. B. Bowdish, Secretary-Treasurer of the Audubon Society of New Jersey. In a letter which we published a day or two ago he informs us that the American eagle (although classed as a bird of prey) “seldom kills his quarry, but resorts to robbing the fish-hawk.” Again, he often eats dead fish. Again, Alaska has placed a bounty on his head. Thus, our correspondent concludes, “it is entirely possible that the man’s soul will not have to be so dead that he shall not covet the honor of having descended from such an unfortunate bird.”

  We accept this statement of the case. Having accepted it, we cry once more. “Hurrah for the American eagle!” Does he eat dead fish? Then so do all patriotic Americans! Does he live under a cloud in Alaska? Then shame on Alaska! Does he rob the fish-hawk? Then all honor to him! This shows that he has the real American spirit. When he sees this maraud
er, this predatory devourer of the minnows, the salmon, the speckled trout, and all the other lovely fish which swim in our streams; when he sees this outlaw winging homeward at sundown, helpless prey wriggling in cruel talons—when he sees this outrage, does he shrug his shoulders, like Pilata, and say “This is none of my affair.” He does not. With one great swoop he descends from the blue; with one great swipe he annihilates the foe; with one graceful sweep he gathers up the fish as it falls through the air and bears it to his own proud aerie. And then: Well, as aerie is not an aquarium, you know; it is hardly his fault if the fish dies. And after the fish is dead there is really nothing to do but to eat him. We reiterate our previous stand: the American eagle is a noble fowl, one of which we can all be proud. If this be treason, make the most of it!

  (The New York World, May 13, 1927)

  Cain’s career as an editorial writer was indeed a significant education for the writing that lay ahead. He learned not only that he liked primarily to write about such things as sex, crime, passion, food, music, and animals, but that these were the subjects the average person preferred to read about.

  At the same time, he was revealing not only in The World but also in The Mercury that he could be a deadly satirist and had a keen ear for dialogue. The satire and burlesque in the iconoclastic profiles of American types that he was writing for The Mercury were obvious. But then, in 1925, he suggested to Mencken that he also try his satire in the form of dialogues or one-act plays. Mencken agreed, and immediately Cain demonstrated not only that he had a gift for dialogue but that the kind of people he liked to satirize were, as he put it, “characters off the top of the pile, plain, average people scarcely worth describing in detail, people everyone knows.”