Litterbury

“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.  I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep.  I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool.  Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off.  I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out.  They gave me a cigarette, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.”

* * *

My curiosity with the Great Recession (The New Great Depression) has had me sifting through my personal libraries looking for content to see how a different generation framed it’s own dire economic straits.  I don’t necessarily have as much to pull from as I had assumed, but I managed to pick out a few little things of interest.

While I do own a copy of Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, I’ve yet to read it, so what is assumed to be the great novel of the depression era isn’t really up for a literary debate over here; yet.

I also picked through a whole bunch of my classic crime and noir novels, but was surprised to realize how few in my collection were actually written during the depression period, or, for that matter, seemingly relevant to it even if they were.  Also, what qualifies as a depression era book to begin with? Mood and atmosphere? Specific financial worries clearly stated and implied? Or bleak landscapes complete with tumbleweeds set as a backdrop?

Published in 1934, The Postman Always Rings Twice is set during the Great Depression, but it’s not stated, per se, and I’m not sure that it’s even the context that it’s author, James M. Cain, would want it to be objectified under.  Still, when looked at it from that vantage point, it makes an already compelling book just that much more so.  And why so compelling? Need I even go into the story…

Frank Chambers is broke and out of work; he’s been grifting and bumming rides, and thumbing his way up and down one highway to the next.  “That was when I hit this Twin Oaks Tavern,” Frank says.

“It was nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California.  There was a lunchroom part, and over that the house part, where they lived, and off to one side a filling station, and out back a half dozen shacks that they called an auto court.  I blew in there in a hurry and began looking down the road.  When the Greek showed, I asked if a guy had been by in a Cadillac.  He was to pick me up here, I said, and we were to have lunch.  Not today, said the Greek.  He layed a place at one of the tables and asked me what I was going to have.  I said orange juice, corn flakes, fried eggs and bacon, enchilada, flapjacks, and coffee.  Pretty soon he came out with the orange juice and the corn flakes.”

Frank takes up a job with the Greek, a Mr. Nick Papadakis, and the proprietor of Twin Oaks, and it doesn’t take Chambers long to notice that the Greek has got a beautiful young wife, named Cora.

Soon begins a tale of an illicit affair where Frank and Cora realize that her husband is looking a little inconvenient, and since divorce is naturally not a consideration in this case, as it always is in these cases, they devise a scheme to bump him off and pursue a more successful life with each other.  Things don’t go according to plan (naturally), but even when things don’t go according to plan they don’t occur within expectations, as one calamitous thing happens after another.

* * *

“He never did anything to me.  He’s all right.”

“The hell he’s all right.  He stinks, I tell you.  He’s greasy and he stinks.  And do you think I’m going to let you wear a smock, with Service Auto Parts printed on the back, Thank-U Call Again, while he has four suits and a dozen silk shirts? Isn’t that business half mine? Don’t I cook? Don’t I cook good? Don’t you do your part?”

“You talk like it was all right.”

“Who’s going to know if it’s all right or not, but you and me?”

“You and me.”

“That’s it, Frank.  That’s all that matters, isn’t it? Not you and me and the road, or anything else but you and me.”

“You must be a hell cat, though.  You couldn’t make me feel like this if you weren’t.”

“That’s what we’re going to do.  Kiss me, Frank.  On the mouth.”

* * *

The roman noir is distinctly an American concept and product; it’s the story of the failed promise of the American Dream, and the darker undercurrent of the mainstream American belly that ‘they’ never wanted ‘you’ to read about.  It’s birth is tough to pin down, but the book Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, by Geoffrey O’Brien, includes a comprehensive checklist for majors and minors in the noir cycle; his list begins in 1929 and goes all the way to 1960.

And then there is the excellent release from the Library of America, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s, and edited by Robert Polito.  There is a companion (American Noir of the 1950s), but I’ve yet to read all of the included pieces, and it’s the first volume that actually includes Cain’s Postman.

Typically, and unfairly regarded as merely ‘pulp’ work, the written noir canon has captured some of the best American writing ever published, though for all the combined efforts not every entry would be a masterpiece, but an excellent writer like Cain would contribute many phenomenal works, including the very famous Double Indemnity.

What captures and defines a noir is tough to describe, as the rules aren’t necessarily rigid and each writer’s style could vary significantly from one offering to the next, but The Postman Always Rings Twice is one of the most fully realized, and therefore comprehensive noir works available.  It’s the base narrative of the American ‘everyman’ and how he was done wrong, lured into crimes he didn’t anticipate, thrown off-balance for carnal desires he never knew he had.  Moments of violence are quickly traded and, often, equated with scenes of sex, but the literal action taking place is often just a subterfuge for the mental deterioration and unravelling of the poor character left struggling at the story’s center.

The psychological undercurrents in noir are not accidental, either, as the entire genre functions as both honest and literal male perspective, as well as commodified parody, and, additionally, as thrilling potboiler to satisfy the longings of the average, perhaps, desk-bound joe.  The multi-tasking noir book was essentially the fears and longings of the straight, white male, and told his story of newfound suspicion for Uncle Sam, and his quiet appreciation for the little guy ’sticking it to the man.’  Even the popular construct of the femme-fatale was less of an easy mechanic to fold in available sex, but instead spoke to the fearful and fretting anxiety of man’s specific place as the societal breadwinner, and offered explanation to the ever increasing presence of the working class woman.

In short, it’s reactionary: every nice white boy grows up to be a nice successful white man.  The American male is heterosexually ‘normal,’ will settle down with the wife and kids and just might even get the gold watch for showing up to work.  His president would never send him off to get hurt in a war, and he’s casually heroic just when he’s mowing the lawn.  The Great Depression would hit well before the suburbs would take on national importance (motivated by both government interests and matters of social vanity), but by 1934 the American Dream was frayed, because if the first World War had been at one time unthinkable, then the economic ravages of the depression must have seemed wholly unconscionable.

That’s why Cain’s Postman takes on such a new sheen when not framed as just a thrillingly bleak novel about adultery and murder, but when looked upon as a product and even a relic from the depression era.  So what if Cora made a mistake and didn’t marry the right guy? Or the fact that the right guy is someone who isn’t necessarily her husband, and why should Frank care one way or the other? That ‘can-do!’ American spirit has taught us that we can all reinvent ourselves without consequence if our collective goal is to better ourselves off for future good and use; that the final and giddy swipe for the brass ring is worth shooting for even if the aspirations are a tad lofty to start.  Even when Frank and Cora talk about the importance of just being together, there’s still the added sell of trying to have it all, and having it all does not include starting from the ground up with scratch when there is a perfectly good diner and auto yard in the Twin Oaks.

To see such morally bankrupt characters plot away is almost laughably obscene, but the great perverse thrill is that, frankly, it makes perfectly logical sense.  After all, what’s a little sex and murder when the moral high ground is simply pursuit of the American Dream? It’s the story of deserving to have it all because it’s your right by birth as an American, and whatever debt you’ve accumulated along the way is of little consequence or responsibility when you were just doing what you were told to do in the first place.  It’s the book’s brilliant title that warns, however, that fate, much like death, is sure to knock again, and that debt accumulated never fully goes unsettled.

* * *

My voice sounded queer, like it was coming out of a tin phonograph.

“And this you don’t know how you got.”

I hauled off and hit her in the eye as hard as I could.  She went down.  She was right down there at my feet, her eyes shining, her breasts trembling, drawn up in tight points, and pointing right up at me.  She was down there, and the breath was roaring in the back of my throat like I was some kind of a animal, and my tongue was all swelled up in my mouth, and blood pounding in it.

“Yes! Yes, Frank, yes!”

Next thing I knew, I was down there with her, and we were staring in each other’s eyes, and locked in each other’s arms, and straining to get closer.  Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference.  I had to have her, if I hung for it.

I had her.

* * *

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain, 1934

Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks And The Masters Of Noir, by Geoffrey O’Brien; original copyright by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981; expanded edition published by Da Capo Press, 1997.

(A photo taken of a still from the Tay Garnett directed film starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, both pictured.  The film version didn’t come out until 1946, as Hollywood couldn’t figure out how to tone down the raw sexuality from Cain’s novel; the Italians, however, would film an unauthorized version, entitled ‘Ossessione,’ in 1943.)