If Mignon were just another novel, it would have been considered a success. It received moderately good reviews, sold 15,000 copies and was bought for paperback reprint. But it did not put him on Sugar Hill, one reason being that, unlike his novels of the 1930s and ’40s, Mignon never sold to the movies.
Mignon’s failure after twelve years of work was a monumental landmark in Cain’s life, a crushing defeat that he never did quite understand. “Just a lotta goddamn research,” he said bitterly — and, ironically, very little of the years of research Cain put into Mignon, or any real sense of feel of the Civil War, showed up in the slim little 246-page book. “All that reading and labor,” Cain told a New York Times interviewer, “and a kind of mouse is born.”
But Cain refused to think he was an ex-writer, and by the time Mignon was published in 1962 he was more than a hundred pages into a Maryland version of Mildred Pierce — about a woman buyer for a big Maryland department store “who attempts, through her daughter, to gain the place in the sun she herself has never attained to, an ominous creature.” This new novel went through several re-writes before it was eventually published in 1965 as The Magician’s Wife. And, despite the fact that it contained some of Cain’s best writing and not one confusing, unclear page, it was another literary and commercial failure.
Although Cain would not have conceded it, the thumbs-down The Magician’s Wife received from its critics was the final verdict on his effort to “amount to something,” which had brought him East seventeen years earlier. But the truth is, as far as the only critic he paid any attention to — “Old Man Posterity” — was concerned, Cain had already amounted to quite a bit. He wrote six books that go right on being read and re-read and made into movies. And the ironic twist to his unusual career is that all the stories on which his lasting reputation is based were written before he decided to leave California and become a serious writer.
The failure of The Magician’s Wife, of course, did not keep Cain from his typewriter. Nothing could do that for long. He started a new novel — about a little girl who is given a tiger to raise as a pet — and wrote one friend: “Life isn’t so dull exactly, but it begins to resemble a bowl of cherries that stay green all the time and resemble typewriter keys. Books, with me take longer and longer and no doubt one day will take really long.” But, he wrote another, “I don’t get sick, I don’t fall down, I don’t do much of anything, except get one day older every 24 hours. Every so often, by a process unexplained, I get out a book.”
Cain was now in remarkably good health. But Florence was visibly weakening. And then on the morning of May 5, 1966, Cain tiptoed into Florence’s room and found her dead. “A shock I’ll never forget,” he said.
Now he was alone, 75 years old and just possibly an ex-writer. The future did not look promising. But Cain was ready to face it — at his usual command post, the typewriter. He finally finished his novel about the little girl and her pet tiger, which he called Jinghis Quinn, and was very excited about it because of the recent success of Born Free. But two publishers turned it down, and Cain was a little taken aback; “I thought a law had been passed that when I wrote a book it sold,” he told a friend. Undaunted, he started another one, and he wrote one friend that “Suburbia, where I live, begins to cast its spell... I’m beginning to realize it’s the new frontier.”
But James M. Cain in the Maryland suburbs was, sadly, not the same James M. Cain the literary world knew from California. He had to keep writing, however, or, as he told a friend: “I’m just a has been, a senior citizen waiting for the clock to strike. I don’t mind the clock, but waiting for it and doing nothing else, terrifies me.”
His next novel was about a suburban Maryland real estate developer and a teen-aged girl, and now, in addition to the frontiers of new suburbia, he decided to explore another area unfamiliar to James M. Cain — the happy ending. He had decided that happy endings were tougher, he wrote one friend, and, therefore, a “greater challenge.” The result was Cloud Nine, and you can judge for yourself how well Cain did on his new frontier with a happy ending.
I have taken some space to go into the period of Cain’s life that produced Cloud Nine (which was also rejected by his publisher when he wrote it in the late 1960s), but I thought it was necessary to fully understand the novel. It certainly is quintessential Cain — a “pure novel,” as David Madden says in his study of Cain’s fiction, one which, “more than anything else, moves even the serious reader to almost complete emotional commitment to the traumatic experience Cain renders.”
After Madden said Cain wrote the “pure novel,” Cain wrote him saying if by pure novel he meant one “whose point is developed from the narrative itself, rather than from some commentary on the social theme or morality of the characters, or economic or political aesthetic preachment, if that is what you mean, you hit my objective directly...”
The economic and social preachment which was at the root of Cloud Nine was expressed in a letter to one publisher, suggesting a promotional campaign for the noveclass="underline"
“I’ve lived half my life,” he said, “in the midst of real estate booms-first in California... and now in Southern Maryland... Between climate, the overflow from Washington, D.C., and boom-feeds-upon-boom, it has a veritable madhouse of swank suburbs, jerry-built developments, and high-rise elysiums; of sewage, water, and gas problems; of politics, the good old-fashioned kind; of no-limit, blue-chip games, with millions riding the vote of Mr. Commissioner on some rezoning application. But behind this new, glittering world, I keep seeing the old Southern Maryland, as it was in the early teens, as I lived in it a while, as a young road-builder just out of college. Then it was poor, backward, and still numb from the slave economy that had riled it for hundreds of years, a world of runt corn, scrub tobacco, and tired land; of ox carts, dirt roads, and bucket wells, of saloons, gambling, blood feuds, and dark, clandestine sex. So in this story, I have attempted the counterpoint between the new and the old: the Realtor, bluff, successful, and modern, who nevertheless marries, for the honor of the family, the girl his brother got pregnant; the pretty, gray-haired widow, set in her ways, who clings to the family farm, starving to death on it, and refusing to swim with the tide that would make her rich... and the young girl, passionately idealistic, who nevertheless has in her bloodstream the compulsion that brings on a bloody, brutal finish. If I succeeded I don’t know. I do know the story is there.”
Cloud Nine also contains other essential Cain traits: the necessity to pretend to be someone else when he told his story and the ability to keep the reader turning pages, anxious to find out what happens, but always dreading the ending because of the horror you sensed would be waiting — “the wish that comes true” that Cain said most of his novels were about. But Cloud Nine, as any Cain fan knows, is different from the classic Cain tale: the narrator is not one of “those wonderful, seedy, lousy no-goods that you have always understood,” as one of his friends described the kind of people she was urging him to return to when he was struggling with his novels late in his life; the setting is not California; and the wish that comes true does not contain the terror one expects to find at the end of a Cain story.