A REVIEWER handed a James M. Cain novel to discuss finds himself confronted by several problems, not the least of which is the necessity of squaring with his conscience the fact that he is discussing Mr. Cain at all. What, after all, is one to say about such persistent aridity, such manifest nonsense? Mr. Cain is no novelist: he has, indeed, his first sentence still to write; he has yet to achieve his first valid characterization. For me, at the top of his amazingly overrated form, as in The Postman Always Rings Twice, in Double Indemnity and Serenade, he was, when not downright revolting, obscurely and insistently embarrassing. Not only did he have nothing to say, but he drooled, so to speak, as he said it. It seemed much kinder, really, to take no notice of him, to adopt with him that same fiercely casual, friendly air, assumed, let us say, when visiting two otherwise harmless people who are, however, shamefully addicted to early-morning drunkenness.
Mr. Cain, of course, strongly resists such treatment; he stands, in the first place, by no means alone. He has, moreover, a following described by the publisher’s blurb as “vast”; and, what is perhaps more important than any of this, he is himself convinced of his importance. He writes with the stolid, humorless assurance of the American self-made man. Rather a great deal has been written concerning his breathless staccato “pace,” his terse, corner-of-the-mouth “style,” his significance as a recorder of the seamier side of American life. This is nonsense: Mr. Cain writes fantasies, and fantasies of the most unendurably mawkish and sentimental sort; his pace is simply that of the gangster motion picture; and his style is more pretentious but no more rewarding than that of Terry and the Pirates.
The Moth is Mr. Cain’s most ambitious novel; the publishers advise that it will “surprise and delight” the aforementioned formidable following, a sentiment endorsed by Mr. Cain himself, who shyly confesses a hankering to tell tales of a “wider implication than those that deal exclusively with one man’s relation to one woman”—an ambition which, since I have yet to meet either a man or a woman in Mr. Cain’s pages, seems rather premature.
Apparently the great distinction of The Moth lies in its exhausting and desperate diversity: it involves boy sopranos, oil wells, oil fires, theft, hoboes, the Depression, the inevitable woman (hard and dangerous), and the inevitable husband (dull and well-meaning). The happy ending is economically assured by an appalling and all-too-likely scheme of frozen dinners shipped to housewives all over the country by a plan known, happily, thus far only to Mr. Cain’s hero. The happy ending also involves the culmination of a curious and breathless romance between the hero and an extremely brittle child of twelve, who becomes, at a more seemly age, his wife. This affair, it is worth noting, is not in the least unconvincing; it operates perfectly within Mr. Cain’s framework and sums up for me something intrinsically tawdry and ugly, something very literally nasty, which pervades all of his work.
It occurred to me while reading the earlier and less ambitious Mr. Cain that his ruthless protagonists and their fearful sweethearts were actually descendants of the Rover Boys and that the only thing wrong with them was the fact that they were still reeling from the discovery that they were in possession of visible and functioning sexual organs. It was the impact of this discovery that so hopelessly and murderously disoriented them; they were thenceforth at the mercy of their genitalia, the power of which they were endlessly compelled to prove. Mr. Cain surveys these dull, untidy adolescents with a moist, benevolent fascination, betraying in these novels, the novels in which the tradition and jargon of the American tough guy have been pushed to their furthest limit, the hypocrisy, the horror, and the loneliness from which this tradition sprang.
(1948)