Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (75 page)

Faust finally managed to enlist in the US army in 1918. While stationed in Virginia he began writing
The Untamed
, his first full-length Western. It was a success
and set ‘Max Brand’ on what was to be his main line of literary work. For the first time in his life he was making real money. In 1920, the Fausts (there were now three children) settled in New York state, with enough land for him to breed the savage white bull terriers he particularly liked. But in 1921, aged twenty-nine, Faust suffered a heart attack and was informed by his physicians that he was living on borrowed time. But sick as he was, ‘Max Brand’ continued to write furiously. He had formed what was to be a long association with Street & Smith’s
Western Story Magazine
and would eventually produce 306 titles for this firm, at a nickel a word.

Max Brand (‘the Jewish cowboy,’ as he mockingly called his alter ego) came to dominate the Western category in its glory years, holding a middle ground between Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, who came a decade later. All three writers have a strong grasp of what might be called innocent clichés of the genre – the saloon brawl, the tomboy cow-girl, the doxy with the heart of gold, the shoot-out, bunkhouse comedy, etc. Brand’s zestful tone is evident from such titles as
Flaming Irons, The Galloping Broncos, Outlaw Breed, Singing Guns
.

During his most productive decades, Brand produced on average a novel every three weeks under a score of authorial names and imprints. At his peak he earned up to $100,000 a year. In 1925, disgusted with Prohibition, he and his family moved to Florence, Italy, where he spent most of the interwar years in a palatial villa, living with great extravagance ‘like a medieval prince’. By the mid-1930s Brand had graduated from the ‘pulps’ to the up-market ‘slicks’, a cross-over which no other writer in his genre managed. He was now cheek by jowl with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In 1938 Brand moved his family to Hollywood where he wrote scripts for the major studios at a salary of $1,500 a week. Here he made the acquaintance of such distinguished contemporaries as Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley and worked alongside William Faulkner on the script of
The Charles de Gaulle Story
. In 1944 Brand persuaded
Harper’s Magazine
to assign him (aged fifty-two, with a chronically bad heart) as a front-line war reporter. He was terribly wounded by enemy shellfire in May 1944. Gallantly he instructed medics to attend to younger casualties first. He had had his time – and died shortly thereafter.

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated and turned out to grass.

When, on 11 November 1938, Pearl S. Buck heard on the radio that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she ejaculated: ‘I don’t believe it.’ A natural enough response – except that, as Hilary Spurling records, she said it in Chinese. Pearl Comfort Buck was raised in two cultures which had ‘nothing in common except their subordination of women’. She started writing late – needing first to break out of marital bondage and lose her Christian faith. Once begun, she clocked up thirty-eight novels. If she had published thirty-seven, and the missing one was
The Good Earth
, there would have been no Nobel. Pearl Buck would have been like Edna Ferber (with whom she was often confused) – one of fiction’s once-great forgettables.

It is an indication of Buck’s unworldliness that her first intention was to call her novel ‘Wang Lung’, the name of
The Good Earth
’s peasant hero. Wang loses his smallholding, meanwhile China is rent into pieces by famine, revolution, civil disorder – and, not least, unwanted American missionaries. Wang, at his lowest, works as a rickshaw boy and barge-puller. He rises – thanks largely to the efforts of his wife, O-lan – to become a prosperous landowner (and the owner, also, of concubines more to his taste than worn-out O-lan). Buck’s publisher, however, discreetly pointed out that ‘wang’ was urban slang for – well, you know, even if Mrs Buck didn’t. The published title was taken from Ecclesiastes.

It is conventional to dismiss Buck’s Nobel Prize as a sympathy gesture to China – in the wake of the horrific rape of Nanking (where much of
The Good Earth
(1931) is set). Rape is a recurrent event in Buck’s fiction, as it was in her China. It was routine in the regular riots, political uprisings and, less publicly, in marriage. Buck was haunted by the fact that gang-rapists would often not stop, even after the woman was dead. She witnessed the victims of such atrocities; she also witnessed feral dogs devouring the carcasses of unwanted girl babies. Buck recalls, as a primal moment, herself as a five-year-old regarding the three-inch ‘golden lily’ foot of her ‘amah’ (nanny): ‘a lump of mashed bone and livid discoloured flesh made from heel and toes forced together under the instep, leaving only the big toe intact.’ Little Pearl’s own feet, the amah thought, were like ‘rice flails’ and her blonde curls ‘inhuman’.

Pearl’s father was born dirt-poor in West Virginia. By heroic self-improvement and self-denial, Absalom Sydenstricker qualified as a Presbyterian minister – his faith was fanatical. Two centuries earlier, Pearl laconically remarked, he would have burned witches. Absalom joined the American ‘missionary invasion’ of China in
1880. It was necessary to have a helpmate, so he chose a wife, Caroline Stulting, as he might have chosen a mule. (What
she
needed was a wife, Pearl would jest in her later, frantically busy, life.) The children Caroline bore either died or lived to be regarded by their father as ‘accidents which had befallen him’. Pearl’s mother died, worn out, hating her husband, hating Christ and – above all – hating China. On that, and only that, mother and daughter disagreed.

The American attitude to China – with its ‘heathen’ quarter of the world’s souls – was one of grand contempt. They were, declared Theodore Roosevelt, ‘an immoral, degraded and worthless race’. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and not repealed until 1943 (Buck lobbied against it furiously). She became a woman in China. She finished her education at an American college where she was regarded as ‘a freak who could speak Chinese’. For her part, she thought white Americans smelled – a ‘rank odour, not quite a stink’.

In America, Pearl Sydenstricker found a husband. John Lossing Buck was another missionary and the couple returned to China in 1917, where Lossing laboured to improve peasant farming. They had one child, born mentally retarded in 1921. The birth entailed a hysterectomy, which was devastating, but it meant that, unlike her mother, Pearl escaped the missionary-wife trap. There would be no more children – other than the half-dozen she adopted in the years of her later fame. She took a lover – a poet, nicknamed ‘the Chinese Shelley’. Her husband’s embraces, she confided to a friend, were a ‘violation of all that is best in me’. She took to writing, mainly to pay the expenses of her institutionalised daughter, Carol. She chose fiction because ‘that is what most people read.’ Buck’s first novel,
East Wind: West Wind
(1930) was accepted, after a dozen rejections, by Richard Walsh, who founded his publishing house on her bestsellers. After they had both disposed of their first spouses by divorce, they married. It was a companionable arrangement.

‘Chinahand Buck,’ William Faulkner called her, but after visiting the location of the movie of
The Good Earth
in 1934, Buck never saw China again. In 1972 she vainly tried to accompany President Nixon on his history-making visit, but was coldly rejected for a visa. During the Second World War – when China was America’s ally – Buck’s star rose. But it fell again with the victory of the Communists in the 1940s. Hoover opened a file on her, fattened with her active support for the ‘Negro’ cause in the 1950s. America had ‘lost China’, and needed scapegoats.

Buck invented the word ‘Amerasian’ for the children spawned and abandoned by American troops in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. More practically, she founded an agency to settle them in the US. ‘We’re all half castes,’ she said, ‘if we go back far enough.’ Her good works, in later life, were prodigious. She was, Spurling concludes, a better and more interesting woman than she was a novelist.

James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature.
Raymond Chandler

Cain was born in Annapolis, the son of a college literature professor. The family was devoutly Irish Catholic but Cain claimed to have lost his faith at thirteen – however, the prominence of confession as a device in his fiction suggests some fragments survived. He was educated at Washington College, Maryland, where his father was currently serving as president. Extraordinarily precocious, he was enrolled into higher education at fourteen and graduated at eighteen. He went on to teach at Washington College, while working for his Master’s degree in dramatic arts. At this period Cain contemplated a career as a professional singer, his mother’s profession, but it didn’t work out. Cain supported himself as an odd-jobbing journalist in Baltimore before joining the American expeditionary force in Europe in 1918, where he edited an army newspaper. On discharge Cain returned to newspaper work in New York, rising to the position of managing editor of the
New Yorker
in 1931. At this period he was strongly influenced – stylistically and ideologically – by H. L. Mencken, with whom he drank, womanised and had a good time during the ‘jazz age’, while espousing fashionably left-wing views.

Cain married four times (in 1919, 1927, 1944 and 1947) and was three times divorced. He left an economically depressed New York to work as a Hollywood scriptwriter in 1932. Two years later, at forty-two years old, having been fired by Paramount Studios for drunkenness and with a young family to support, he produced his first novel,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1934). Its hero, Frank Chambers, is a drifter and a jailbird – no-good. The setting, vividly portrayed, is Depression-era California. It would be unsurprising to see the Joads’ wheezing Hudson 6 roll by. Frank finds himself at a small roadside café and gas station, the Twin Oaks Tavern, about twenty miles outside LA. He bums a meal, intending to leave without paying the naive Greek owner, Nick Papadakis. Then he sees Nick’s wife, Cora. Steamy sex,
murder and treachery follow. The novel is remarkable for the violence of the love-making (‘I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth’). It was this that so appalled Raymond Chandler – whose Philip Marlowe always has his pants virtuously zipped. Frank’s narrative takes the form of a death-row confession and ends, bleakly, ‘Here they come.’ The gas chamber awaits.

The Postman Always Rings Twice
was hailed as a masterpiece of the newly fashionable ‘hardboiled’ genre and established Cain as the leading rival of his fellow Baltimoreian, Dashiell Hammett. ‘I tried to write as people talk,’ he said in explanation of his distinctively spare style. The Cain style was much admired, particularly in his so-called ‘California novels’, and is cited as an influence on writers as far afield as Camus (specifically
L’Étranger
–
The Outsider
) and David Mamet.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
was twice adapted for the screen, but even more influential on the evolution of the crime
noir
movie was Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Cain’s novella
Double Indemnity
(1943), on whose script Raymond Chandler collaborated (very queasily). As adapted for the film, Walter Neff, the narrator hero, is an insurance agent who falls for a client, Phyllis Dietrichson, and, like Frank Chambers, conspires with her to murder the luckless Mr Dietrichson. If the crime can be staged so as to look like an accident, they will collect ‘double indemnity’ – twice the payoff. It ends bloodily, with a dying Walter dictating a confession into his firm’s dictaphone. As successful, on both page and screen, was the melodrama about murder, pie-making, incest and unhappy motherhood,
Mildred Pierce
(1941). Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her performance in the 1946 screen adaptation.

These three works represent Cain’s major contributions to literature and film. Of his dozen or so other works, only
Serenade
(1937), the story of a homosexual singer, holds up at all well, although the subsequent film made from it is dire. Although he moved away – ill-advisedly, his admirers think – from the hardboiled scenarios and sharp-edged vernacular dialogue of his early stories, Cain remained fascinated with what he called the ‘love rack’ – tortured romance scenarios and fatal women.

His late-life efforts to write a higher kind of fiction were poorly received. But the camera always loved James M. Cain, and no less than nine of his novels were adapted into film – with the exception of the three above, forgettably. He always resented the millions the studios were making from his work and attempted, unsuccessfully, to mobilise his fellow screenwriters into a guild in the early 1940s. He drank too much, ulcerated his stomach, and got by – very comfortably – on paperback revenues and film rights. He returned to his native Maryland in 1947, living there, comfortably but furiously, until his death at a great age.