given to understand his homosexuality had flattened. Then the basis of the man’s successful new career asserts itself as the very destruction of that career. The man learns, after his singing voice reveals his identity and the law then finds and kills his fugitive woman, that his love for the woman was the real meaning of his life.

Love for a woman whom a man mistakenly assumes to be his daughter is the nexus of the tragedy in The Butterfly. Here the true love is incestuous, although to himself the man does not acknowledge it as such. His love increases in direct proportion to the strengthening of the unadmitted assumption that she is his daughter.

A virtual companionpiece to The Butterfly is The Moth (1948), in which a man’s love for a twelve-year-old girl is as true as it is conventionally exceptionable. The Moth antedates Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) by seven years. Oddly, Nabokov’s comic novel about a middle-aged man in love with a twelve-year-old girl ends unhappily, while Cain’s novel is one of the few to which he gave a happy ending.

The happy ending is not Cain’s specialty. His murder mysteries, Sinful Woman (1947) and Jealous Woman (1950), end happily and are both among Cain’s least effective accomplishments. Sinful Woman is representative of another of Cain’s infrequent devices, third-person narration. Mildred Pierce and Love’s Lovely Counterfeit carry the device creditably, but the same cannot be said of either Sinful Woman or The Magician’s Wife (1965). Departures from the techniques of The Postman Always Rings Twice were, except in the composition of Mildred Pierce, not felicitous for Cain. He is essentially a master of the short, brisk, unsentimental, first-person narrative tragedy of people pulled to destruction by the inevitable consequences of their fulfilled material wishes, which at first obscure and then either delay or preclude the experience of their true subjective wishes.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

First published: 1934

Type of work: Novel

Adulterous lovers who get away with murder cannot escape their fate.

The Postman Always Rings Twice was Cain’s first novel and came to stand as his finest work of fiction. It is both classical Cain, with its hard-boiled, first-person narrative of a wrenching love triangle, wish fulfillment, and retribution, and classical in its tragic theme and episodic structure. A very attractive young woman, Cora, is unhappily married to Nick Papadakis, the proprietor of a restaurant. A drifter, Frank Chambers, falls in love with Cora, hires on as Nick’s employee, and enjoys Cora’s requital of his love. The adulterers successfully conspire to murder Nick, thereby gaining his restaurant business and their own life together. Much of their planning materializes through fortuitous as well as engineered accidents.

It is also an accident that finally destroys both of them, Cora as accident victim and Frank as the victim of circumstances. Having been acquitted of contriving the accident that was supposed to have taken the life of Nick Papadakis, a charge of which he was actually guilty, Frank is now ironically convicted of contriving the accident that killed Cora, despite his innocence. The structure, like that of Greek tragedy and classical literature in general, is symmetrical: Cora and Frank are denied free union by societal and economic restrictions, Cora and Frank achieve free union through their crime, Cora and Frank are destroyed precisely in the context of their achievement of free union. The symmetry is that of separation-union-separation.

Cain’s special skill is in presenting a story with the immediacy and relevance of a news item. Stories, historical or otherwise, that did not speak to his own time defeated his interest. He insisted in a Hearst newspaper column for November 11, 1933, that he could not sustain his interest in certain regarded contemporary novels—among them Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)—because “they bear no relation . . . to the times in which I live.” He believed that “the destiny, the national purpose of the deal” had to be there before a writer could have anything to say; the destiny of the American Dream antecedes The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The “they” who throw Frank Chambers off the hay truck also give him a cigarette. He is then given a job by Nick, a businessman whose financial security Frank would like to have, but without the attendant responsibilities; he would also like to possess Cora. Frank does not understand that Nick and Cora are extensions of the “they,” reversing the process of gift giving—Nick tendering a job, Cora her body—and causing him to be thrown. The classical symmetry appears as thrown-gift-gifts-thrown.

Behind or beneath Frank’s wish for money and sex is his true wish, unrecognized until too late, for love. The establishment, moreover, as the repository of superficial wishes, always defeats the individual whom it ostensibly accommodates. The last paragraph of the novel begins with “Here they come.” (These are also the very last words of Past All Dishonor.) The “they” of the novel’s beginning have, at the novel’s ending, become Frank’s executioners. Cain makes use of appropriate names in The Postman Always Rings Twice: “Nick” and “Cora” are both Greek names, and their characters embody the money and sex that Frank Chambers, whose name is not Greek, wishes to have. Frank’s error is much the same as that of the Trojans who refused to share Laocoön’s apprehension about Greeks bearing gifts.

Double Indemnity

First published: 1936

Type of work: Novel

A woman and her lover murder the woman’s husband for insurance money, after which their mutual desire culminates in a death wish.

Double Indemnity was written by Cain in approximately two months; it appeared initially in Liberty magazine as an eight-part serial. It was, as Cain himself admitted, practically a rewriting of The Postman Always Rings Twice. In both novels, a man, obsessed with desire for a married woman and tempted by the prospect of easy money, contrives under the woman’s encouragement a scheme to murder the husband and profit from the murder. In each novel the effect of the successful criminal enterprise is the self-destruction of the principals in tandem with their ultimate realization of their true love for each other.

Although neither title was Cain’s inceptive selection—the original title of The Postman Always Rings Twice was Bar-B-Que, and Double Indemnity was suggested to Cain by James Geller—both include an ironic play on types of dualism. Fatal accidents happen twice, one staged and one actual, in the first novel. In the later novel, there are two double compensations for an accidental death that is actually a murder: The first is the double-indemnity insurance award, and the second is the self-execution decided upon by the two murderers who collected the insurance.

Despite the similarities, the novels remain distinct; each has its special characteristics, and each is a masterwork. The murderers in Double Indemnity are Phyllis Nirdlinger, a very attractive, unhappily married woman, and Walter Huff, an insurance agent who falls in love with Phyllis and whom she uses as the instrument of gaining her ends. Phyllis is more cunning and venomous than Cora Papadakis, and Walter is superior to Frank Chambers in both industry and intelligence. The intricacies of the legal profession inform the plot of the earlier novel, and the complexities of the insurance business inform the plot of Double Indemnity.

The love story in The Postman Always Rings Twice is fashioned against images of purgative swimming (off the seashore) and fertility (Cora is pregnant when the accident takes her life). In Double Indemnity, the love story is cast against images of sterility (hearth fire, the moon, Phyllis’s thinking of herself “as Death”) and culminates in the suicide pact of leaping from a ship into shark-filled waters.

Double Indemnity has other elements that are absent from Cain’s first novel. There is a deep friendship between Huff and a father-figure named Keyes, who is head of the insurance company’s claims department. There is a subplot involving Phyllis’s stepdaughter Lola and Beniamino Sachetti, Lola’s suitor. Huff’s affection for the stepdaughter results in a double love triangle: Phyllis-Huff-Lola and Lola-Sachetti-Huff. These elements add depth to the story without even slightly curtailing its pace. Raymond Chandler, who wrote the screenplay for Double Indemnity, considered the novel, and Cain’s work in general, to be “the offal of literature.” The judgment, although seconded by not a few critics of Cain’s fiction, is rash. In Double Indemnity, Cain manages not only to tell a gripping story in very few words but also to introduce a credible love story and a moving friendship into the lives of its concisely sketched characters. Furthermore, Cain’s theme, materialistic and selfish dreams as leading eventually to an awakening into the reality of human affections, is far from negligible.

Mildred Pierce

First published: 1941

Type of work: Novel

A businesswoman sublimates an erotic need for her unconscionably selfish daughter.

Mildred Pierce is a domestic tragedy in which wife-husband and mother-daughter relationships are perversely confused. Mildred Pierce’s husband, Herbert (or Bert), is not a good provider, and his need in a wife is for maternal solicitude. Mildred is a capable and intelligent woman who suffers an obsession with her daughter, Veda, which she thinks is mother love. Veda is a talented coloratura soprano whose obsession is herself. Bert deserts his family for a woman who is a mother figure. Mildred, thrown upon her own resources, becomes a successful entrepreneur in the restaurant business and finances her daughter’s musical education, which leads to a bright career. When Veda, constantly betraying her mother, finally deserts her, Mildred is crushed, having lost her unconsciously desired love mate. Cain handles the incest motif more subtly, or perhaps more covertly, and decidedly more effectively here than he does in The Butterfly, published six years later. The novel concludes with Mildred and Bert reunited.

The transformation of Mildred from a mother who would be wife to her daughter to a wife who resigns herself to mothering her husband is signaled in two keynote episodes. The first is the one in which Mildred learns that Veda is pregnant. Her immediate reaction is neither maternal protectiveness nor the murderous anger that Bert will feel toward the man responsible, but a fierce “jealousy . . . so overwhelming that Mildred actually was afraid she would vomit.” This response is a betrayed lover’s reaction, not a mother’s. The distraught Mildred asks Veda “if she’d like to sleep with her, ’just for tonight.’” Veda declines, and Mildred spends a wakeful night “with the jealousy gnawing at her.”

The second episode is the conclusion of the novel. Bert says to Mildred “to hell with” Veda, and Mildred, sensing his meaning, manages to swallow her sobs “and draw the knife across an umbilical cord.” The indefinite article is functionally ambiguous, referring both to Veda, whose frustrated lover Mildred ceases to be, and to Bert, whose resigned mother she now becomes.

Mildred Pierce, as a long novel in third-person narration which is not a crime story or thriller, is not standard Cain; its pessimism, however, is standard Cain. Its emphasis upon vacuous materialism in the worlds of business and professional entertainment and its disclosure of affections transmuted by sublimation make it Cain’s most pessimistic work. That it is, at the same time, not bitter or misanthropic in its effect is attributable to the author’s sympathetic understanding of the forces and the emotions that move its characters; in this novel, Cain created his finest characterizations.