The dialogues also impressed Phil Goodman, a friend of Mencken’s who produced Broadway plays. Mencken introduced the two men, and Goodman encouraged Cain to write a full play. It was about a modern-day Messiah who comes to the coal mines of West Virginia to save the miners and their families. He called it Crashing the Gates, and it was produced in 1926, a year before Sinclair Lewis’s indictment of the clergy in Elmer Gantry. Clearly, the country was not ready for it. It shocked theatergoers in Stamford and Worcester, many of whom hissed, booed, stomped their feet, and then walked out. Crashing the Gates closed before it reached Broadway, but Cain never lost his urge to write a successful play. It was a dream he never realized.
Cain was also developing as a writer of short fiction in another outlet — the New York World. In 1928, partly to help meet his alimony payments, Cain started writing a regular column for the Sunday section. It consisted almost entirely of short sketches, as he called them, similar to the longer dialogues he was writing for the Mercury. They were, however, rather tepid versions of his Mercury pieces, given the restrictions of a family newspaper. For his World sketches he could not write about “niggers,” murderers, and burning “stiffs” in a county poorhouse as he did for Mencken; he had to be more conventional. In the first year, his column was devoted entirely to a neighborhood centering around a fictional Bender Street in a city which was obviously New York. The recurring characters included: Mr. Schwartz, proprietor of the Bender Pharmacy; Mr. Fletcher, the popular bootlegger, his wife, and son, Herbert; Mr. Kallen, Grand Exalted Scribe of the Bender Lodge, The Loyal and Royal Order of Bruins; Hans Krumwielde, the director of the lodge’s band, the Bender Red Pants; Police Sergeant Joyce, his daughter, Rose, and son, Benny; Mr. Albright, Bender School history teacher; Winny the Ninny, a friend of Rose’s; and Dolly Dimple, an advice-to-the-lovelorn newspaper columnist who advises Rose on her many problems, most of which are told to “Dear Diary.”
The dialogues centered around such issues as Rose Joyce trying to fatten herself, at Dolly Dimple’s suggestion, with milk shakes, or the problem in the Bender Red Pants caused by the first trombonist not being able to play because he was being fitted for new false teeth. Reading them today, it is hard to imagine that these sketches were written by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Yet the voices are authentic, the dialogue excellent, and each little sketch holds your interest once you get into it.
After a year, Cain, or perhaps someone higher on the World staff, tired of the Bender Street gang. So Cain shifted to other characters and locales, and from 1929 to early 1931, when the World folded, the subjects of his sketches fell into three categories, examples of which are included here: New York and New Yorkers (“The Robbery,” “Vanishing Act,” and “Dreamland”); Eastern Shore rubes and roughnecks, most of which begin “Down in the country...” (“Joy Ride,” “Queen of Love and Beauty,” and “Santa Claus, M.D.”); and fictionalized accounts of personal experiences (“Gold Letters Hand Painted” and “It Breathed”).
These sketches were extremely important to Cain’s development. In the first place, he discovered that he was at his best as a writer when pretending to be someone else, and the person he felt most comfortable imitating was some Eastern Shore rube or mountain roughneck who spoke like one of Ring Lardner’s characters. A perfect example is the sketch “It Breathed,” about something that happened to Cain while he was in France in 1918. Instead of writing it in perfect diction, using the kind of grammar and phrasing that had so impressed Walter Lippmann, Cain pretended the incident had happened to some yokel and wrote the story in the first person in an Eastern Shore dialect.
Cain’s World sketches were widely read around New York and are still being read in writing classes, where teachers use them to illustrate how a story can be told through dialogue alone (see “The Robbery”). The sketches also helped draw attention to Cain when he was still a relatively unknown writer. One day Claude Bowers, a World writer and historian, brought an eminent editor named Robert Linscott, from Houghton Mifflin, to see Cain. Linscott had read Cain’s sketches and wanted him to try a novel. Cain told Linscott of his earlier unsuccessful attempts at longer fiction and said he was not capable of it, but Linscott disagreed and predicted that someday Cain would write a novel — and he expressed the hope that Houghton Mifflin would be its publisher.
However, by 1931, when Cain left New York for Hollywood, he still felt his colloquial first-person approach to storytelling would not stand up in longer fiction. He was also convinced that New York was not his milieu, and that of all the sketches he wrote for the World, the ones about New York and New Yorkers were the least successful. “I’d been gradually coming to the conclusion,” he later said, “that if I was to write anything of the kind I’d been dreaming about for so long, it could not be based in New York... Those killingly funny drivers of New York cabs, the secretaries, bellhops, and clerks behind counters, were completely sterile soil. I drew nothing from them.” On the other hand, he took pride in the country sketches, especially the dialogues he had done for the Mercury. They were, he said, in the “down-home idiom of Anywhere USA — anywhere but New York.” Writing had to have roots — “it can’t wriggle down from the sky, as Alice did, in Wonderland.” And he felt that, just maybe, he would find his roots in the West.
Moving to California in 1931 proved to be the wisest decision James M. Cain ever made. Once in the West, he was ready for more conventional short stories, but he also discovered something that surprised him. The dialogue for which James M. Cain had become famous was essentially written for the printed page. It would not play to the ear, as Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler found out when they were scripting Double Indemnity. This curious fact was perhaps at the root of Cain’s frustrating inability to achieve success as a scriptwriter or playwright.
R.H.
The Robbery
“Good evening.”
“Good evening.”
“I guess we’ve seen each other a couple of times before, haven’t we? Me and my wife, we live downstairs.”
“Yeah, I know who you are. What do you want?”
“Just want to talk to you about something.”
“Well — come in.”
“No. Just close that door behind you and we’ll sit on the steps.”
“All right. That suits me. Now what’s the big idea?”
“Today we was robbed. Somebody come in the apartment, turned the whole place inside out, and got away with some money, and my wife’s jewelry. Three rings and a couple of wrist watches. It’s got her broke up pretty bad. I got her in bed now, but she’s crying and carrying on all the time. I feel right down sorry for her.”
“Well, that’s tough. But what you coming to me about it for?”
“Nothing special. But of course I’m trying to find out who done it, so I thought I would come around and see you. Just to see if you got any idea about it.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s it.”
“Well, I haven’t got no idea.”
“You haven’t? That’s funny.”
“What’s funny about it?”
“Seems like most everybody on the block has an idea about it. I ain’t got in the house yet before about seven people stopped me and told me about it, and all of them had an idea about who done it. Of course, some of them ideas wasn’t much good, but still they was ideas. So you haven’t got no idea?”