Mr. Nation: That there sounds pretty good to me. That there is the thing to do.
Mrs. Nation: I ain’t wanted to believe it of her nohow... ’Cause I loved it so, about her having been to... to Heaven... and all... And she told it so sweet... And when she puts them songs in and all... It was so beautiful.
Mr. Barlow: Why sure, I swear, I been setting here tonight, thinking to myself it’s just about the beautifulest thing I ever hear tell of in my life. I wish one of my daughters could of done it, and could pick a banjer and all...
Mr. Nation: Now Laura, ain’t no use crying. What you crying about?
Mr. Barlow: Hal, looks like to me the thing for you to do is to take Laura in and put her to bed. And I don’t know but I’m ready to turn in myself if you two think you’re all straightened out now. ’Cause I got to catch that early train down from Greenwood...
(They rise, Mr. Barlow stretching and winding his watch, Mrs. Nation sniffling, and Mr. Nation awkwardly guiding her into the house.)
Mr. Nation: Come on, now, Laura... Why, sure she was up in Heaven!.. Couldn’t of been nowheres else... Why sure... Stands to reason...
Short Stories
Cain’s first published short story — “Pastorale” — was written for H. L. Mencken while Cain was still working on the New York World, and it grew out of a profile of William Gilbert Patten that Cain did for the Saturday Evening Post. Patten, who wrote under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish, created the fictional hero Frank Merriwell, and Cain was probably drawn to him because they both started their careers in the same manner — trying to sell short stories to magazines. During their interview, Patten told Cain a story about a couple of western roughnecks who committed a gruesome crime. Patten’s point in telling the story was to illustrate a friend’s fiendish sense of humor, but to Patten’s horror Cain took the anecdote as truly hilarious and, furthermore, asked Patten if he could use it someday in a piece of fiction. Patten said he did not mind, and Cain thought about it for several months before shifting the story to his favorite locale and telling it in the first person, through the eyes of an Eastern Shore roughneck. He called it “Pastorale,” a deceptively benign title for its grisly doings, and submitted it to Mencken, who published it in the March 1928 Mercury. It is a very funny tale, told in the Ring Lardner manner, and David Madden, author of the only full-length literary study of Cain, considers it Cain’s best short story. It was also an extremely important event in Cain’s evolution as a writer of fiction. In the first place, he now found that he could tell a story in some manner other than dialogue or one-act plays by writing in the first person, preferably the voice of some “low-life character,” as his mother called the type. “The only way I can keep on the track at all,” he said, trying to explain this idiosyncrasy, “is to pretend to be somebody else — to put it in dialect and thus get it told. If I try to do it in my own language I find that I have none. A style that seems to be personal enough for ordinary gassing refuses to get going for an imaginary narrative. So long as I merely report what people might have said under certain circumstances, I am all right; but the moment I have to step in myself, and try to create the impression that what happened to those people really matters, then I am sunk. I flounder about, not knowing whether I should skip to the scene at the church or pile in a little more of the talk at the post office. The reason is... I don’t care what happened. It doesn’t matter to me. Narratively, I do not exist, I have no impulse to hold an audience.”
In “Pastorale,” Cain not only managed to make his narrator care what happened, enabling the story to move, he also found his favorite theme: Although two people may get away with committing a crime, they cannot live with it.
“Pastorale” was also important to Cain as a demonstration that his style was in no way influenced by or copied from Ernest Hemingway, as some critics charged. “Pastorale” was written in late 1927, and by then Cain’s narrative technique and ear for dialogue — which in a few years would constitute one of the most widely discussed and imitated literary styles in the country — were clearly established. His realistic, colloquial dialogue had gradually emerged from the pieces he had been writing for Mencken since 1924; and the technique he used in most of his novels, themselves written in the first person, originated more or less with “Pastorale.” He says — and there is no reason not to believe him — that he did not read Hemingway until Men Without Women appeared in 1928, and he was tremendously impressed. But what surprised him was “an echo I found in it, of something I couldn’t place.” Then he remembered the voice: It was Roxy Stimson, the divorced wife of Jess Smith, a lackey of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, one of the key figures in the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1924 Roxy testified at the Senate Hearings on Teapot Dome and her manner of speech, as Cain recalled, “burst on the country like a July Fourth rocket.” Her tale, describing Smith’s slow deterioration as he was caught up in the scandal and his own foolish speculations in the stock market, electrified the country, especially the literary world, for which Roxy briefly became the object of a cult. “She could come popping out with some bromide,” Cain said, “a cornball expression that should have been pure hush puppy, and somehow transform it, the way Dvořak transformed folk music, so it stayed in your ear as a classic.”
Roxy’s testimony was carried in full in the New York Times, and Cain assumed it reached Paris, where he was certain Hemingway had absorbed it. He became convinced that his theory was correct when he finally read “Fifty Grand” and noted the similarity in its plot, especially in an incident described by Roxy Stimson, prior to Jess Smith’s suicide. As for Roxy’s influence on Cain’s style: “She taught me respect for the cliche. I’d say she influenced me plenty,” he said.
The good response to “Pastorale” encouraged Cain to write another short story, this one based on an experience in France on the night of September 26, 1918, during the opening of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Again, Cain elected to tell the story in the first-person narration of an Eastern Shore rube, although the incident actually happened to him and he could just as easily have told it in his own near-perfect diction. “The Taking of Montfaucon” also appeared in the Mercury and was reprinted in 1929 and 1942 in the Infantry Journal, which said, “[It] has never been excelled as an accurate description of conditions in the war and few stories of any aspect of the war will stand beside it.”
After “Montfaucon,” Cain worked exclusively on dialogues to round out his book Our Government, then moved to California, where, for the first year or so, he tried to establish himself as a screenwriter. When Paramount let him go — after six months of unsuccessful scriptwriting efforts — he decided to resume his fiction. His first story ideas grew out of the automobile trips around Southern California he and his wife, Elina, used to take, sometimes with the two kids. One place they liked to stop was the Goebels Lion Farm on the road to Ventura. Cain had a lifelong fascination with cats — especially big ones. His feelings for them bordered on fanaticism: “I find it impossible,” he said, “to believe in a life after death, and if you don’t accept that, the Christian theology goes up in smoke... To me, God is life, and if no immortal soul figures in, then all must be included in the concept. So animals to me take on a mystic meaning, more perhaps than they do to most people.” Cain wrote editorials and several short stories about tigers; he wrote Hearst columns about panthers; and late in life he wrote an unpublished novel about a little girl who is given a tiger cub, which she raises as a pet.