While he was living and working at such a pace, Cain’s personal life, not surprisingly, also turned chaotic. In 1942 he divorced Elina, and then after three years of excessive eating and drinking, he married the silent-movie star Aileen Pringle. He separated from Aileen a year later, then married a former opera star, Florence Macbeth, who had been one of the idols of his youth, after meeting her quite by chance at a Hollywood cocktail party.
He and Florence were ecstatically happy together, and in his newfound tranquility Cain made one of the most critical decisions of his life. One day in 1947, he said to Florence: “Either I’m going to wind up as a picture writer or I’m going back to novels and amount to something.” Florence, who did not like Hollywood, voted for a return to the novels, and so, after he had completed The Moth, the Cains left Hollywood and headed East in 1948. They went to Hyattsville, Maryland, because Cain wanted to be near the Library of Congress, where he planned to research a Civil War trilogy. This project, however, proved the most exasperating, difficult task Cain ever undertook, and it was fifteen years before Mignon, the resulting novel, was eventually published — and then it was condemned by the critics and never became a best-seller.
By the early 1950s it had become painfully obvious that Cain was not going to be able to support himself while trying to “amount to something as a writer.” From time to time he wrote to H. N. Swanson, his new Hollywood agent, asking him to watch out for something in the studios, but nothing turned up. Finally, one day, he mentioned that it might be time to return to Hollywood, and Florence said: “It’s not there... the Hollywood we knew does not exist any more.”
Cain agreed and they decided to stay in Hyattsville, a decision he regretted for the rest of his life. “California is a neck of the woods everyone is fascinated with,” he said. “It was EI Dorado. You can put it in your book, ‘It was nothing but a wayside filling station — like millions of others in California,’ and that’s O.K. Any piece of California, no matter how drab, prosaic or dull, is California just the same, the land of Golden Promise. I don’t know anyone who is holding his breath over Prince Georges County, Maryland.”
Cain was right: Maryland was not his milieu. From 1953 until 1977, when he died at the age of eighty-five, Cain wrote nine novels set in Maryland, only three of which were published — Galatea, The Magician’s Wife, and The Institute. He also wrote Mignon, which was set in Louisiana, and Rainbow’s End, set in the mountains of eastern Ohio. And none of them achieved the impact or the sales of his California stories. But he kept writing to the end, never wavering from the decision he made “out of the blue,” while sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park in 1914. Late in his life he wrote an unpublished novel called The Cocktail Waitress and occasional non-fiction pieces for the Washington Post, and he was working on his memoirs when he died. To the end he retained his zest for writing: “It excites me and possesses me. I have no sense of it possessing me any less today than it did fifty years ago.”
Cain also felt that those who can write must write, and for him the most important thing in writing was the story. “[Stories] ought to be about personal relations rather than broad issues,” he said. He had a horror of becoming a writer with a message; and oddly enough, considering his reputation as an author who dealt with murder, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution, and incest, he maintained that his storytelling model was always Alice in Wonderland, a favorite which he professed to have read once a year throughout his life. “I... remind myself, it is about a girl who followed a white rabbit down his hole — about as unpretentious an idea as could be imagined. It is, so far as I see now, devoid of any significance and lesson to be imparted, or wisdom — those pitfalls for every writer. Whenever I feel an impulse to be important, I remind myself of Alice.”
— ROY HOOPES
Sketches and Dialogues
In 1924 Cain began writing for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. His first contributions were typical magazine essays, but right from the beginning he showed an unusual talent for capturing the speech and dialects of the average man. For example: In his first piece — “The Labor Leader,” which appeared in the February 1924 Mercury — Cain compared the labor leader with the businessman and said that just as the businessman had come to the point where everything was “a proposition,” the labor leader had reached the point where everything was “a matter.”
This Matter you speak of, now, I don’t want to be quoted in it, see? but if there’s anything going in I want it to go in like it is, the truth about it, I mean, and not no pack of damn lies like the papers generally prints. What I say, now, don’t put it in like it come from me, because I don’t know nothing about it, except what I read in the papers, not being notified in no official way, see? Besides, it’s a matter which you might say is going to have a question of jurisdiction to it, and I don’t want to have nobody make no charges against me for interference in no matter which it ain’t strickly a point where I got authority. But, I can give you a idea about it and you can fix it up so them that reads the paper can figger out their own conclusion on how we stand in the matter.
With his talent for dialogue, Cain eventually suggested to Mencken that he be allowed to do his iconoclastic, satiric pieces entirely in dialogue, and the Mercury editor agreed. The result was a series beginning in the April 1925 Mercury lampooning various aspects of town and local government. The pieces were essentially little one-act plays and attracted considerable attention in the literary world, establishing Cain as a humorist and master of American dialect, both rural and urban. He continued to write these dialogues until he had amassed enough for a book, Our Government, published in 1930. Two of them, “The Hero” and “Theological Interlude,” are included here. The first was included in Our Government under the title “Town Government: The Commissioners”; the second, he intended to include because he felt the book needed some sort of offbeat piece “to wash it up,” but then decided that religion has very little to do with American government and dropped it. Another, “The Governor,” was included in Katharine and E. B. White’s Subtreasury of American Humor, which pleased Cain immensely. “The piece,” he wrote Katharine White, “is one of the few things I have ever written that I have real affection for.”