Cain had always been something of a Civil War buff, and his success with Past All Dishonor — and the financial success of Gone With the Wind, which had only recently been made into one of Hollywood’s most celebrated movies — started Cain thinking about his own approach to the Civil War, not just a novel, but a trilogy of novels. It would be about a subject Margaret Mitchell had avoided — the cotton industry, or just how Rhett Butler made his money. But the story would be told, of course, James M. Cain style, “a romantic tale, full of skullduggeries involving large sums of money,” he wrote his publisher. Cain had started researching his novels, but it quickly became apparent that he would have to go South and eventually to the Library of Congress to finish his research.
The other factor in Cain’s decision to leave Hollywood was Florence Macbeth, the opera star who had been one of the divinities of his youth but whom he had never met before he was introduced to her at a Hollywood cocktail party. Cain had just separated from Aileen Pringle, and Florence was a widow who had not been in good health since the death of her husband a few years earlier. Both were middle-aged and lonely; “two cuckoos nesting in autumn,” was Florence’s description of the middle-aged lovers. Soon they were married, and naturally Cain discussed his urge to leave screenwriling and work on more serious books. “Either I’m going to wind up a picture writer or I’m going to get back to novels and amount to something,” he told Florence. Florence, who did not like California, encouraged him to concentrate on his novels, which helped him arrive at the most important decision of his life: to shift from a newspaperman and screenwriter who also wrote novels, to “a plain 100 per cent novelist.”
To pursue this goal, Cain and Florence uprooted and left California to go back East to research his story of the Civil War. They traveled for a while in the South, with Cain visiting libraries and newspapers where he took endless notes on his 3x5 cards. They finally settled in Hyattsville in Prince Georges County, Maryland (the setting of Cloud Nine), on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., where Cain wahted to continue his Civil War research in the Library of Congress. And it was a decision Cain regretted the rest of his life. California, Cain said, was “El Dorado, the Land of the Golden Promise. But I don’t know anyone who is holding his breath over Prince Georges County.”
Cain had originally planned a three-part saga of the Civil War, and “it must have been a saga,” he wrote one editor, “because it sagged all over the place.” Now he decided to focus on one book, and he wrote three drafts, “each one worse than the other,” he said. “It just lay there in pieces and I did not know why.” Cain was nearly sixty when he finished his Civil War research, and they began to have second thoughts about staying in Hyattsville. He wrote one friend that the move to Maryland had been a “God-awful wrench” and that neither of them accepted “this dreadful little state.” At the same time, he wrote H. N. Swanson, his Hollywood agent, that one thing was certain: “In this neck of the woods... I don’t fit in at all.” He also asked Swanson if he would watch out for a job. But he heard nothing from Swanson.
So Cain settled down to work on his Civil War novel, and by 1952 he told his sister that he had written enough on the Civil War to fill ten normal books and that he had “been tempted more than once to call this one off and start another.” But he also thought this was “a frightening thing to do” because any writer who does it is “an ex-writer” — and that was the one thing James M. Cain feared the most.
Meanwhile, his financial situation began to deteriorate as his savings account dwindled and the paperback royalties he had counted on to support his “serious” writing began to dry up. So he shifted to the contemporary scene and began the first of a series of novels set in Southern Maryland, hoping to recapture the magic he had discovered in Southern California. The first effort was called Galatea, which publisher Alfred A. Knopf liked but insisted he re-write, which took Cain much longer than he thought it would because he began to have real trouble at the typewriter — sluggish memory, fumbling for names, typos, twisted letters, confusion, inability to “unkink a story,” and, worst of all, not caring “whether guy got doll or not.” He finally finished Galatea, and when it came out in 1953 the critics were unmerciful, giving Cain, the master of the clearest, leanest literary style in America, the unkindest cut of alclass="underline" his prose was dull and confusing. Saul Pett, in an AP review, said he had read all 242 pages in Galatea sometimes two and three times and “I still don’t know quite what Cain is talking about.” The book was a literary and commercial failure, although it did sell to paperback.
Cain was now fully aware that his writing powers were dwindling, and the resulting depression was not helped by the fact that even Manhunt magazine rejected him, turning down three stories because they were fuzzy in style and confusing. The editor — a Cain admirer — was worried about the author. So was the author. Undaunted, Cain went back to his Civil War novel, which he now called Mignon, that tragically took him three more years to finish. “God deliver me from a period book,” he wrote William Kashland at Knopf. “But I know no way to finish them but to finish them” — and he did. In 1957, he finally sent it off to Knopf, only to receive the most crushing blow of his life: Knopf rejected it, encouraging him to re-write. This took him, believe it or not, another three years.
When Knopf rejected Mignon in 1957, Cain was 66, Florence’s health was declining and his income was starting down again. Then, one bright spot: in the spring of 1959, he read about cholesterol in a Newsweek article. His doctor put him on a no-eggs, no-butter, no-fat diet, and within 48 hours he said he felt like his old self again. But he could still not hide the fact that he was growing old. “My God, he had aged so terribly,” said a friend who had last seen him in California. A Hollywood radio station wrote, requesting an interview for a program it called “Living Legends.” And after a lunch with Marquis Childs, who was writing an introduction to a book about Cain’s old friend and boss on the World, Walter Lippmann (celebrating his seventieth birthday), Childs wrote: “The World was a constellation of men, witty, brilliant, sometimes even searching and profound. Their names, Rollin Kirby, Heywood Broun, Arthur Krock, James M. Cain, Franklin P. Adams, and many others, evoke a time that today seems more distant than the stone age.”
Cain did not feel that he was a relic from the stone age or a living legend, but he could not deny that he was bogged down in the Civil War. With his new diet, however, he felt good at the typewriter again, writing Katherine White at the New Yorker that he was “getting more brains” than he had had in a long time. Now the writing went better, and he finished Mignon at the end of 1960. Then, another crushing blow: Knopf turned it down again! But this time Cain would not re-write it. Instead, he instructed his agent to find another publisher, which he did. Richard Baron at Dial bought it and assigned Jim Silberman as the editor. When it was finally scheduled for publication (in 1962), Cain wrote friends that he would soon be in the money, “on sugar hill.”