undefinedAuthor James M. Cain and fan, circa 1950s.

 

James M. Cain, best known as the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce, was born in Maryland in 1892. After an army career and early aspirations of becoming a singer, as his mother had been, he was a reporter and journalist for many years in Baltimore and New York. His first story was published in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. When The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared in print in 1934, it became an immediate best-seller. The next year Double Indemnity was equivalently successful, and Cain became known for something more than his early journalism or his Hollywood scripts. Today it is perhaps more through the films of his novels that we remember Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice was filmed with Lana Turner and John Garfield in Hollywood, and later (without authorization) in Italy as the basis of Luschine Visconti's first film Ossessione. Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, with a script by Raymond Chandler, is a classic thriller; Joan Crawford won an Academy Award for the lead role in Mildred Pierce.

Cain died October 31, 1977, in University Park, Maryland, near where he grew up, went to college, and taught. This interview was conducted on January 7, 1977, at his home—a small two-story frame house on a quiet street. The sitting room was furnished simply; an upright piano stood against a wall. Then eighty-five, Cain was gaunt, his voice raspy, but mentally he gave nothing away to his years. He lived alone in Hyattsville. His stationery bore a notice suggesting the reclusive and quiet nature of his last years: to those trying to get in touch with him by phone he had printed on the bottom of each page, “Station to station does it—there's nobody here but me.”

 

INTERVIEWER

So this is where you grew up?

JAMES M. CAIN

I was born in Annapolis. I lived there eleven years and then my father, who had been vice-president and a professor of English at St. John's College, became president of Washington College across the bay, which is still there. It's one of the old ones; George Washington contributed to its endowment. And that's where I went to college. The next four years I had a pretty rough time because I didn't know, nor did anyone else, that I was due to become a writer. I had several jobs that just made no sense. Suddenly I decided to be a singer, sending my mother nuts. She said I had nothing for it. Turned out she was right but she should have kept her flap shut and let me find out for myself. But then one day, just for no reason, I was sitting in Lafayette Park, and I heard my own voice telling me, “You're going to be a writer.” For no reason at all. Just like that. Now there had been signs. One sign nobody paid any attention to was when I was maybe ten years old. My father smoked Turkish Trophy cigarettes. At first he rolled his own, and then he bought ready-mades; each pack was in a black and red box; they were oval cigarettes with coupons in each pack. For seventy of these things you could get a fountain pen. I would send off seventy of these things and got a succession of fountain pens. You know how you filled fountain pens at that time, don't you? You unscrewed them and filled it with an eyedropper. Today, whenever I take out the clinical thermometer to take my temperature, I think of those pens and the eyedroppers. So the succession of fountain pens may have been an omen at the age of ten.

INTERVIEWER

Were there other signs?

CAIN

Well, when I went to Baltimore to work for the gas company, the first of the meaningless jobs I held when I was just out of college, I kept going down to this whorehouse on Saturday nights. I never did go upstairs, though twice I wanted to. One night I met this girl who was awful pretty, and she had pretty legs. I badly wanted to go upstairs with her, but I was afraid because of the disease which I imagined she had. (In Paris during the war I bumped into a girl, and I was horribly lonely, didn't particularly crave her physically, but she approached me, and asked me to spend the night, and I'm glad I didn't because I think she would have had my wallet with everything else.) But during this six months I worked for the gas company, I kept going down to that area around Josephine Street. At one of these places you could buy a bottle of beer for fifty cents. “Small as a whorehouse beer” was an expression then. They'd serve them up in glasses so small that thimbles were twice as big. For that fifty cents you were welcome to do anything, downstairs—get along with the girls, stick around—I was just eighteen years old. I listened a lot downstairs. Upstairs was another matter. I was a potential customer, of course. I guess the things you didn't do . . .

INTERVIEWER

What prompted your move to New York City, away from the Baltimore papers?

CAIN

In 1924, I had met Mencken in Baltimore. He gave me a lot of encouragement and published some pieces of mine in American Mercury. It's funny; people always take him at his own evaluation—an iconoclast, a mocker, a heaver of dead cats into the sanctuary. That's the way he put it one time, and he was certainly all those things. But a man who writes words knows that there comes a point when you have to ask: What's this guy for, what's he in favor of? I don't think Mencken would have lifted a finger to defend the rights of some colored man in Baltimore to get up and make a speech against the white society. But anyway he knew I wanted to work in New York, at the World. Actually, I talked myself into a job there by seeing Arthur Krock. I wanted to get this job on my own cheek; the guy respects you for that. Another thing, you get a much better job on your own cheek than if the guy gives you a job as a favor to whoever wrote the letter. Mencken gave me a letter of introduction which I never presented. But he loused me up. Without my knowing, he wrote Krock with the best intentions in the world, as he just loved me, and that crossed me up because I didn't get the job on my own after all. So Krock took me in to see Walter Lippmann. Lippmann wanted to know what I could do for a job, so I started talking with him. I told him I'd noticed that they didn't seem to have any articles on the editorial page of The New York World. I was just out of the lung house—I'd had tuberculosis—and I had to have a job that wouldn't involve too much walking around. So I suggested a job where I would just sit around and think up articles, ideas. I said I knew articles didn't grow on trees. Surely it was practically a full-time job, thinking up articles for a newspaper. I went on like this, with Lippmann staring at me while I tried to talk myself into a job. I knew I was getting somewhere in a direction altogether different, that he was listening to what I had to say, and though disregarding it, he was meditating. I thought, what the hell is with this guy? He interrupted to ask if I had any specimens of my writing. Writing, I thought, what has writing got to do with it? I was still talking about thinking up articles. Later, when we got to be easy friends, I asked him about this first interview and he said, I began to realize as I listened to you talk, that none of your infinitives were split, all of your pronouns were correct, and that none of your participles dangled. That was true. I talked the way my father had beat into me; he was a shot for style, and that's what got me a job.

INTERVIEWER

Don't you ever speak like your characters?

CAIN

I slip into the Vulgate every once in a while—an affectation I only half-understand. There I am speaking impeccable English and suddenly I lingo it up.

INTERVIEWER

What were your impressions of Lippmann?

CAIN

Nothing startling about him except the difference between the man and his literary style. On paper, Lippmann was always to my eye and ear a bit literary. He was so described when he died—people doubtless thought of him as a small nervous man. He was not small—but a big, stocky guy, very powerful, with thick, strong hands. He wrote in a microscopic hand, so small the printers had to put a glass on it to read it.