Making It New: 1900–1945 509theaters, and precinct station backrooms, all inhabited by drifters, loners, the victims
and the corrupt. In his first and most notable novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
(1935), for instance, the narrator is a man awaiting his own execution. He tells the
story of how he came to kill his marathon dance partner, at her insistence. “They
shoot horses, don’t they?” he remembers her saying to him, in order to persuade
him. She feels like an animal for which the world has no use, no place or vocation.
The only logical next step, then, is a swift and efficient death.
At the core of these hardboiled or noir novels is a myth of success with no social
world to sustain it. That is especially true of the fiction of one hardboiled writer in
particular, James M. Cain (1892–1977), who for a while, in the 1930s and 1940s, was
the most notorious writer in the United States. Cain started his career by writing
editorials for the New York Wo r l d under the supervision of the critic and commentator
Walter Lippman (1889–1974). He then became magazine editor of The New Yorker.
In 1934 he published his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice. It tells the
story of Cora Papadakis and a drifter, Frank Chambers, lovers who murder Cora’s
wealthy husband for his money, making it look like an accident. Cora then dies in a
car crash, and ironically Frank is convicted of her murder when it was in fact an
accident. Other novels followed, notably Double Indemnity (1936), in which again
an unmarried man and a married woman plan and execute the husband’s “accidental”
death, this time for the insurance money. They established Cain as a master of what
became known as hardboiled eroticism: with sex, presented with a frankness unusual
for the time, seen as a primary motive, the instinct driving people to escape from
their mean, petty, sometimes impoverished lives. However, Cain himself insisted
that he made “no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim.” “I merely try
to write as the character would write,” he said, “and I never forget that the average
man ... has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent.”
In this sense, his work, like that of McCoy, Goodis, Woolrich, and others, is a version
of the American demotic tradition in literature. In prose rhythms that imitate those
of ordinary American speech, an idiom that is as hard and elemental as the everyday
vernacular of the street, he shows “the average man” and woman caught up in the
dullness of their lives and dreams of leaving: destroyed by the very passions –
adultery, incest, hatred, greed, lust, or whatever – that, however perversely, they see
as their avenues of escape.Humorous writing
Far removed from the cold eye that many hardboiled novelists like Cain cast on
American society were the more affectionate, even accepting perspectives of
contemporary humorists. “The humorous story is American,” Mark Twain declared,
explaining that what he meant by this was that American writers had devised and
perfected the kind of storytelling humor that depended on how something was said
rather than what was said. True or not, Twain himself was capable of corrosive satire:
humor that went beyond the wry pleasure of recognition to sardonic, even bitter
exposure of social and moral corruption. Few humorists between the two world warsGGray_c04.indd 509ray_c 04 .indd 509 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM