James Cain: The Butterfly

This story goes back to 1922, when I was much under the spell of the Big Sandy country and anxious to make it the locale of a novel that would deal with its mine wars and utilize its “beautiful bleak ugliness,” as I called it at the time, as setting. I went down there, worked in its mines, studied, trudged, and crammed, but when I came back was unequal to the novel; indeed, it was another ten years before it entered my mind again that I might be able to write a novel, for I had at least learned it is no easy trick, despite a large body of opinion to the contrary. But then I did write a novel, and the earlier idea began recurring to me — not the part about labor, for reflection had long since convinced me that this theme, though it constantly attracts a certain type of intellectual, is really dead seed for a novelist — but the rocky, wooded countryside itself, together with the clear, cool creeks that purl through it, and its gentle, charming inhabitants, whose little hamlets quite often look as they must have looked in the time of Daniel Boone. And then one day, in California, I encountered a family from Kentucky, running a roadside sandwich place. Certain reticences about a charming little boy they had led me to suspect he was the reason for the hegira from Harlan County, and the idea for a story began to take shape in my mind. The peculiarities of a birthmark possessed by one branch of my family helped quite a lot, and presently I had something fairly definite: a girl’s disgrace, in a mountain village, which causes a family to make the grand trek to California, this trek being the main theme of the tale; the bitter, brooding unhappiness of all of them over California, with its bright, chirpy optimism, its sunshine, its up-to-date hustle; finally, a blazing afternoon, when the boy who started it all blows in, orders an egg malt, and finds himself staring into the murderous eyes of the girl’s father.

Quite pleased with this fable, I drove to Huntington early in 1939, and cruised up and down both forks of the old familiar river, stopping at the old familiar places, picking up miners, visiting friends, noting changes, bringing myself down to date. Back in the West, I started to write, and the thing began to grow. And then Mr. Steinbeck published his Grapes of Wrath . Giving the project up was a wrench, but I had to, or thought I did, and presently was at work on something else. Bit by bit, traces of the abandoned book began appearing in other books: a beach restaurant in Mildred Pierce , divers recovering a body in Love’s Lovely Counterfeit , a tortured soul, in Past All Dishonor , cornered and doomed, writing his apologia before his destiny catches up with him — though that had appeared in previous books, as it is occasionally forced on me by my first-personal method of narration.

But last summer, while Past All Dishonor was in the hands of the various experts who had to O.K. it before I could send it to the publisher, and I was having an interlude where all I could do was gnaw my fingernails, I happened to tell The Butterfly to a friend, who listened, reflected for a time, then looked at me peculiarly and said: “Now I understand the reason incest never gets written about, or almost never.”

“Which is?”

“Because it’s there, not in fact very often, but in spirit. Fathers are in love with their daughters. It’s like what you said in Serenade , about there being five per cent of a homo in every man, no matter how masculine he imagines himself to be. But if a father happens to be also a writer and cooks up a story about incest, he’s in mortal terror he’ll be so convincing about it all his friends will tumble to the truth. You, though, you haven’t any children, and I personally think you’re a fool to give this book up.”

“After the Jo ad family trip if I had a Tyler family trip I’d never live it down.”

“Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think that Tyler family trip is just dull, and all that California stuff so phony you’d throw it out yourself after you’d worked on it awhile — a wonderful, hot conflict between your description of the look in their eyes and your description of the scenery. That story is the story of a man’s love for his own daughter, and the more it stays right up that mountain creek where it belongs and where you can believe it, the more it’s going to be good. And look what you’re throwing away for the damned California sunlight. That abandoned mine you told me about just makes my hair stand on end, and it’s absolutely in harmony with that fellow’s disintegration. What does California give you that compares with it? California’s wholesome, and maybe it’s O.K., but not for this. You go to it, and pretty soon you’ll have a book.”

So I started to work and it began to come, slowly at first, but presently at a better rate. I had to suspend for the Past All Dishonor changes, but soon was back on it, and at last, after the usual interminable rewrite, it was done. Re-reading it, now the final proofs are in, I like it better than I usually like my work, and yet I have an impulse to account for it; for most people associate me with the West, and forget, or possibly don’t know, that I had a newspaper career of some length in the East before I came to California. Also, the many fictions published about me recently bring me to the realization I must relax the positivist attitude I carried over from newspaper work and be less reticent about myself. In an editorial room we like the positive article, not the negative; we hate rebuttals, and even when compelled to make corrections as to fact, commonly do so as briefly as possible. Thus, when false though possibly plausible assumptions began to be printed about me, I let them pass, for as a polemist I had acquired a fairly thick hide, and the capacity to let small things bounce off it without getting unduly concerned. But when these assumptions are repeated and I still don’t deny them, I have only myself to blame if they become accepted as fact, and if elaborate deductions, some of them not so negligible, begin to be made from them. This may be an appropriate place, then, to discuss some of them, and perhaps get them discarded in favor of the truth.

I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics, and have little correspondence in reality anywhere else. Young writers often imitate some older writer that they fancy, as for example I did when I used to exchange with my brother You Know Me Al letters, except that instead of baseball players we had the sergeants of 1918. We gave wonderful imitations of Lardner, and some traces of them, for any who care to look, can be seen in my book Our Government , the first sketch of which was written for the American Mercury in 1924. Yet if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal; it is sealed off in such fashion that outside “influences” are almost impossible. Schools don’t help the novelist, but they do help the critic; using as mucilage the simplifications that the school hypothesis affords him, he can paste labels wherever convenience is served by pasting labels, and although I have read less than twenty pages of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in my whole life, Mr. Clifton Fadiman can refer to my hammett-and-tongs style and make things easy for himself. If then, I may make a plea on behalf of all writers of fiction, I say to these strange surrogates for God, with their illusion of “critical judgment” and their conviction of the definitive verity of their wackiest brainstorm: You’re really being a little naive, you know. We don’t do it that way. We don’t say to ourselves that some lucky fellow did it a certain way, so we’ll do it that way too, and cut in on the sugar. We have to do it our own way, each for himself, or there isn’t any sugar.