The sheer inanity of so much fiction today sends us necessarily to the past, and not always to Balzac and Trollope.  If we are looking for something readable and American and modern, then this gathering is just the thing.  Indeed, for sheer readability (if not for the finest quality), James M. Cain is hard to beat when he is on a roll, as he unquestionably was in his three most famous novels.

Eyeballing them today requires a bit of cultural context, and, by that, I mean more than understanding that, when Cain was writing, moral fables were not necessarily construed in an inverted manner.  Born in Annapolis in 1892, Cain was a veteran of World War I, that watershed that separated the old culture from the new “disillusioned” tone.  Cain’s hard-boiled manner was a political statement, as was Hemingway’s.  I also mean that we would need to know that Cain was a sophisticated, educated man, the son of a college president and a professor himself, as well as the managing editor of the New Yorker in 1931, before, as a journalist, he relocated to the West Coast and was hired on as a Hollywood hack.  Cain’s Hollywood career was not much, but what he wrote otherwise in California was something else.  This volume contains the best of it, with one possible exception.

The imaginative extension of journalistic experience set him up for his most striking creations, for both The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) were inspired by the Snyder-Gray murder case, notorious in New York in 1927-28.  The phrases that became his titles were derived from the coverage of the trial and transferred in Cain’s imagination to California.  The confessional nature of both of these narratives is striking, particularly in view of what was later developed from the first of them.

Before Postman had completely hit the cycle—as a hardbound; paperback; Broadway play; and a 1946 Hollywood movie starring John Garfield, Lana Turner, and Cecil Kellaway—it had already made a notable impact in Europe (and that is a lot to say about an American novel).  The first adaptation of Postman was French (Le Dernier Tournant, Chenal, 1939), though Visconti’s Italian version (Ossessione, 1942) is better known today.  Even better known today from 1942 is L’Etranger by Albert Camus, also modeled on Cain’s utterly American Postman.  The existentialist sense of absurdity and doom, denying traditional values as well as Frank and Cora’s love and Frank’s concluding request for prayers, seemed at home on the North African littoral, which is not so far removed from California.  James M. Cain did more than entertain the masses; he touched a nerve with artists and intellectuals in a way that united the worlds of low and high culture.  He continues to do so today, and not only as the object of academic or literary discourse, as the present volume indicates.  He has cast a long shadow on the world of popular culture, as we know from the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981): an attempt at a reconstruction as a costume movie that has the dubious distinction, as these rehashes go, of being the one in which the postman rings once.  Nevertheless, we can see that, for Cain, who inspired at least four films in three countries and one major literary response with his first novel, le facteur sonnait toujours beaucoup de fois.

Double Indemnity had a very different fate as a property, for Raymond Chandler’s and Billy Wilder’s screenplay (1944) was actually a decided improvement on the novel.  The impact of Double Indemnity has been diffuse but powerful, as in Body Heat (1981), as well as in several other neo-noirs in which the lustful male victim is deceived by the femme fatale.  When Kathleen Turner intones, “You’re stupid.  I like that in a man,” we know we are in the land of Cain.  The original Phyllis of Cain’s imagination, who prepares for death “with her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks,” is a femme fatale right out of Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony.  Today, that type is broadly regarded as a feminist role model, so Kathleen Turner gets away with everything.

Mildred Pierce (1941) is different—extended, focused on a woman’s struggles, and written in the third person.  Cain found strength in surprise when his previous narrators said and did things that were surprises to themselves.  Mildred Pierce, it seems, surprises her creator and, therefore, the reader.  If her book reads like a house afire, that may be because the book has no idea where she is going, anymore than she does.  Again and improbably, the 1945 film, adapted by Ranald McDougall and directed by Michael Curtiz, is actually superior to the book from which it was derived.

Robert Polito, who wrote the Introduction to this collection, has chosen to include five of Cain’s early stories, and I am glad I read them.  They are interesting works, as we see Cain practicing writing and rehearsing motifs, but they do not have the lift of his best works.  I would have preferred to see, rather than the five stories, the whole of Serenade (1937), an outrageous concoction and one close to the heart of its creator, who had an abiding obsession with singing that is here made fully explicit.  Joyce Carole Oates, of all people, once wrote a stirring response to it.

As it is, however, this is certainly a volume that challenges us to find its equal today in terms of sheer basic appeal.  Cain’s open secret was, and is, to make you want to know what happens next and then, in unvarnished language, to surprise you.  This is, needless to say, rather the opposite of the strategy practiced by so many today, which is to make you not want to know what doesn’t happen next and then, in flowery language, not to surprise you.  James M. Cain can still hook his readers—indeed, he may alienate them from their families.  Even now, such readers are likely to say to intrusive relatives, “Can’t you see I’m reading?”  I like that in a book.

 

[The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories, by James M. Cain (New York: Everyman’s Library) 594 pp., $23.00]