James Cain: The Butterfly

I owe no debt, beyond the pleasure his books have given me, to Mr. Ernest Hemingway, though if I did I think I should admit it, as I have admitted various other debts, mainly in the realm of theory, that were real and important, and still are. Just what it is I am supposed to have got from him I have never quite made out, though I am sure it can hardly be in the realm of content, for it would be hard to imagine two men, in this respect, more dissimilar. He writes of God’s eternal mayhem against Man, a theme he works into great, classic cathedrals, but one I should be helpless to make use of. I, so far as I can sense the pattern of my mind, write of the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination. Of course, the wish must really have terror in it; just wanting a drink wouldn’t quite be enough. I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this, rather than violence, sex, or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation, that gives them the drive so often noted. Their appeal is first to the mind, and the reader is carried along as much by his own realization that the characters cannot have this particular wish and survive, and his curiosity to see what happens to them, as by the effect on him of incident, dialogue, or character. Thus, if I do any glancing, it is toward Pandora, the first woman, a conceit that pleases me, somehow, and often helps my thinking.

Nor do I see any similarity in manner, beyond the circumstance that each of us has an excellent ear, and each of us shudders at the least hint of the highfalutin, the pompous, or the literary. We have people talk as they do talk, and as some of them are of a low station in life, no doubt they often say things in a similar way. But here again the systems are different. He uses four-letter words (this is, those dealing with bodily function); I have never written one. We each pass up a great deal of what our ear brings us, particularly as to pronunciation, which I never indicate, unless the character is a foreigner and I have to give his dialect, or a simplified version of it, else have him pale and colorless. We are quite exact about the conventions we offer the reader, and accept Mark Twain’s dictum that it must be made clear, in first-personal narrative, whether the character is writing or talking, all small points being adjusted to conform. We each cut down points being adjusted to conform. We each cut down to a minimum the he-saids and she-replied-laughinglys , though I carry this somewhat further than he does, for I use the minimum number it is possible to use and be clear, as a rule permitting myself only a he-said to begin a patch of dialogue, with no others in between. For, when I started my Postman Always Rings Twice, he says and she says seemed to be Chambers’s limit in this direction, which looked a bit monotonous. And then I thought: Well, why all this saying? With quotes around it, would they be gargling it? And so, if I may make a plea to my fellow fiction-writers, I should like to say: It is about time this convention, this dreary flub-dub that lies within the talent of any magazine secretary, was dropped overboard and forgotten. If Jake is to warn Harold, “an ominous glint appearing in his eye,” it would be a great deal smoother and more entertaining to the reader, though I grant you nothing like so easy, to slip a little, not too much of course, but just the right subtle amount, of ominous glint in the speech.

I grant, of course, that even such resemblances between Mr. Hemingway and myself do make for a certain leanness in each of us, as a result of all this skinning out of literary blubber, and might be taken, by those accustomed to thinking in terms of schools, as evidence I had in some part walked in his footsteps. Unfortunately for this theory, however, although I didn’t write my first novel until 1933, when he was ten years on his way as a novelist, I am actually six years and twenty-one days older than he is, and had done a mountain of writing, in newspapers and magazines, including dialogue sketches, short stories, and one performed play, before he appeared on the scene at all. My short story Pastorale , which you are probably encountering in current reprint, was written in 1927, though I first read him when Men Without Women appeared in 1928. Yet the style is pretty much my style today. Before leaving the subject, I may say that although for convenience of expression I have thrown what appears to be a very chummy “we” around his neck, I intend no familiarity and claim no equality. This, as I well know, is a Matterhorn of literature, while my small morality tale is at best a foothill. But small though it be, it is as good as I know how to make it, and I take some satisfaction in the fact that it is made well enough to reap some of the rewards mainly reserved for the small fable: It translates, so that it is known all over the world; its point is easily remembered, so that it passes easily from mouth to mouth and so lives on from year to year; I don’t lack for at least as much recognition as I deserve, which is a fortunate situation to be in. But it does strike me as a very odd notion that in setting out to make it good I would do the one thing certain to make it bad.

Except personally, with many engaged in it, I am not particularly close to the picture business, and have not been particularly successful in it. True, several of my stories have made legendary successes when adapted for films, and when I choose I can usually obtain employment at reasonably good wages. I have learned a great deal from pictures, mainly technical things. Yet in the four years or more than I have actually spent on picture lots, I have accumulated but three fractional script credits. Picture people like to have me working for them, they find me useful in solving difficult problems in their stories, they usually feel I earned my pay. But they don’t do my scripts. My novels, yes, after other writers have worked them over. But not the copy I turn out in their employ; apparently it hasn’t the right flavor. Why, I don’t know and they don’t, for as I have indicated, many of them are friends, and we discuss the riddle freely. Moving pictures simply do not excite me intellectually, or aesthetically, or in whatever way one has to get excited to put exciting stuff on paper. I know their technique as exhaustively as anybody knows it, I study it, but I don’t feel it. Nor have I ever, with one exception, written a novel with them in mind, or with any expectation of pleasing them. The exception was Love’s Lovely Counterfeit , which I thought, and still think, is a slick plot for a movie, and I executed it well enough. It didn’t sell and is still for sale, if you happen to want a good novel, only slightly marked down. All my other novels had censor trouble, and I knew they would have censor trouble while I was writing them, yet I never toned one of them down, or made the least change to court the studios’ favor. In Past All Dishonor , for at least four versions, the girl was not of the oldest profession; she was the niece of the lady who ran the brothel, and for four versions the story laid an egg. I then had to admit to myself that it had point only when she was a straight piece of trade goods. Putting the red light over the door, I knew, would cost me a picture sale, and so far it has; it is in there just the same, and it made all the difference in the world with the book.

To have it asserted, then, by Eastern critics, that I had been “eaten alive by pictures,” as one of them put it; that I had done all my research in projection rooms, and that this story was simply the preliminary design for a movie, was a most startling experience. It was said there were anachronisms in the speech, though none were specified, and that there were various other faults, due to the inadequacy of my researches. Well, I do my researches as other novelists do, so far as I know their habits: wherever I have to do them, in field or library or newspaper file, to get what I need for my story. In the case of Past All Dishonor , I did them in the Huntington, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Reno, and Virginia City libraries; in the Official Record of the War of the Rebellion , as published by the War Department, I having a set of my own, and in various directories, histories, newspapers, and diaries of the 1860’s. For accuracy of speech I read hundreds of pages from the stenographic reports of witnesses before committees of Congress at the time, and as an additional check I re-read the writings of U.S. Grant, not the Memoirs, whose authenticity in spots is open to doubt, but his letters, and especially the long report in Part 1 of Vol. XXXIV of the Official Record , which was unquestionably written by him, in early middle age, less than two years after the time of my book. This is a sort of check, to make sure the terse, short-cadenced style I had in mind for Roger Duval had justification in the writings of the time. Grant, of course, seems as modern as Eisenhower; indeed, on the basis of all this reading, I concluded that any notion the I860’s were noted for peculiarities of speech, or that quaint dialogue, such as some of these critics seemed to think indicated, should be used, was simply silly. Those people talked as we talk now. Some words they used differently. They said planished where we would say burnished; they said recruit where we say recuperate; they amused the enemy, where we would divert him. In general, however, they spoke in a wholly modern way, and I thought it would be delightful for a modern reader to have the lights turned up on a world he possibly had no idea had ever existed. That my integrity would be doubted, that it would be assumed that I got all this from picture sets, I confess astonished me. The Western reviewers, some of them specialists in the Nevada of the silver boom, were most respectful to my labors, as well as enthusiastic about the results; they got the point of what I was trying to do, and several of them called special attention to the circumstances that here at last were miners who actually mined, instead of standing around as extras in a saloon scene, and not only mined, but had a grievous lot of trouble about it, and formed unions, and ate, drank, and slept as miners did eat, drink, and sleep at that time and in that place. I was completely bewildered, I must confess, at the pat statement of the New York critics, but I can’t let them pass uncorrected, which is the reason I ask your indulgence for this visit to the words-of-one-syllable department.