James M. Cain Short Fiction Analysis
James M. Cain’s characters are ordinary people—capable of decency, passion, and crime—caught up in situations from which they seem incapable of extricating themselves. Cain valued the commonplace person and prided himself on writing the way people talk. In order to write accurately about the vagrants in The Moth (1948), for example, he visited the missions in Los Angeles where tramps gathered and interviewed many of them. He keeps up a relentless pace in his stories with a minimum of description and with blunt, brisk, and fast-paced dialogue.
Lack of exposition, typical of Cain’s narrative style, also helps maintain the momentum. The reader is immediately confronted with an action in the present; in only one of Cain’s twelve novels is there any flashback to explain the protagonist’s background. What mattered to Cain’s readers was not his characters’ appearance. Cain’s editors usually had to ask him to be more explicit about what his people looked like; the most he ever gave them was a movie-star approximation: “Like Clark Gable [or some other movie star]—fill it in yourself.” What mattered to Cain was a character’s “presence” as expressed in action. It was probably this virile approach to storytelling that endeared him to the French existentialists and the postwar Italians, who favored such a style.
“Brush Fire”
The opening scene of “Brush Fire” depicts a group of men wielding shovels against a forest fire, coughing from the smoke and cursing. They have come up from the railroad yards on the promise of money to be made; they have been fed a ration of stew in army mess kits, outfitted in denims and shoes, and taken by truckloads from Los Angeles to the hills to fight this brush fire. We do not learn the protagonist’s name until well into the story when the CCC man calls out the roll; we never learn the name of his girlfriend. The one introspective moment in the story expresses the protagonist’s regret at leaving her:They parted—she to slip into the crowd unobtrusively; he to get his mess kit, for the supper line was already formed. As he watched the blue dress flit between the tents and disappear, a gulp came into his throat; it seemed to him that this girl he had held in his arms, whose name he hadn’t even thought to inquire, was almost the sweetest human being he had ever met in his life.
By the end of the story he has committed murder for the sake of this nameless girl, and the man he kills in the evening is the same man whose life he had saved in the morning. The reporters who have covered both events are struck with the inherent ironies, but the protagonist, who moves unthinkingly from blind impulse, is unaware of ironies; such abstractions are foreign to him.
Cain keeps the story moving by not stopping to examine motivations; he simply carries the reader along in the rushing momentum of the story. The third shift is summoned for roll call and told to turn over their shovels to the fourth shift that is arriving. They assemble with singed hair, smoke-seared lungs, and burned feet. At the same moment that we learn the protagonist’s name, we learn the antagonist’s also.As each name was called there was a loud “Yo” so when his name, Paul Larkin, was called, he yelled “Yo” too. Then the foreman was calling a name and becoming annoyed because there was no answer. “Ike Pendleton! Ike Pendleton!”
Instantly Larkin races up the slope toward the fire where “a cloud of smoke doubled him back.” He retreats, sucks in a...
(This entire section contains 1105 words.)
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lungful of air, then charges to where a body lay face down. The action is tersely rendered in taut, lean prose. “He tried to lift, but his lungful of air was spent: he had to breathe or die. He expelled it, inhaled, screamed at the pain of the smoke in his throat.”
Critics complain that Cain’s characters are so elemental that they seem stripped down to an animal vitality; in fact, it is precisely to this quality that Pendleton’s survival is attributed. “He fought to his feet, reeled around with the hard, terrible vitality of some kind of animal.” The men are fed and paid fifty cents an hour, and then the visitors, newspaper reporters, and photographers arrive. When they ask if there were any casualties, someone remembers that a man, whose name no one can remember, has been rescued. Paul is interviewed and has his picture taken as a crowd gathers. A girl, kicking a pebble, says, “Well, ain’t that something to be getting his picture in the paper?” They talk, he buys her an ice-cream cone, they go for a walk, they embrace, and he brings her back to the camp without ever having exchanged names.
Later he sees Ike Pendleton, with doubled fists, cursing her, and the girl, backing away, crying. The explanation of the conflict is given by an anonymous choric figure. Cain claims that this technique of communicating information through dialogue—a mode of narration which effaces the narrator—which Ernest Hemingway is usually credited as having invented, was his invention; he says that he arrived at this method of minimal exposition independently, before he had ever read any Hemingway. Its effectiveness can be judged by the shock with which the reader realizes that the girl is Mrs. Pendleton.
The fight accelerates; Paul intervenes and tension mounts toward the inevitable conclusion. That Cain can convince the reader that such an improbable event could seem inevitable is a mark of his storytelling skill. The reader is not given time to think about it as these characters act out their basest, most primitive impulses.He lunged at Ike with his fist—missed. Ike struck with the knife. He fended with his left arm, felt the steel cut in. With his other hand he struck, and Ike staggered back. There was a pile of shovels beside him, almost tripping him up. He grabbed one, swung, smashed it down on Ike’s head. Ike went down. He stood there, waiting for Ike to get up, with that terrible vitality he had shown this morning. Ike didn’t move.
This, then, is the meaning of death, that the animal motions cease, and this is the end of the story whose meaning is embodied in its action without any philosophic implications, without any cultural pretensions, a brutal depiction of sexual and aggressive drives in men too crude to sublimate them and too hungry to repress them.
