The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 21, 2024

Byblos: Reading crime novels for the first time on the approach of 60–a noir experience of its own–is a form of language immersion like those programs they offer at Bennington College, where you can learn Arabic or Italian in a very short time. It’s a time-traveling cultural experience back to the years when being offensive, racist, sexist, gratuitously violent was the formula for better sales. Giving offense and gratuitous violence have survived, but the offense is generic now: lots of cussing in all sorts of permutations, but for god’s sake don’t offend the woke. James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is considered a classic of the genre, if not a groundbreaking book, from 1934, though it’s really a kinder, gentler remake of Zola’s Therese Raquin, as awful (and impossible to put down) a book as Zola ever wrote: it’s the story of two young lovers who conspire to kill one of the two’s sickly, gluey husbands, bu can’t get past the psychological payback for their act. In Postman Cora and Frank Chambers conspire to kill Nick Papadakis, Cora’s husband, and manage to pull it off, but the consequences on them both are spiral of spites and spikes. There is the fabulous opening line: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” and those two opening pages that grab you by the nape and rub you nose in filthy, guilty pleasures: “Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” I mean, come on! Then the racism: “I’m just as white as you are,” she tells him, protesting being mistaken for a “Mex” (in that scene written about here a couple of days ago, in connection with John McCain’s racism). She’s just as crude about her husband’s progeny: “I can’t have no greasy Greek child.” Or the “one thing about a Mexican. He’s slow but he’s honest.” Then the kind of sexism that would make Updike trill, as when Cora describes herself adoringly to Frank as “Just your dumb baby,” then tells him more earnestly, “Next time I try to act smart, will you hang one on my jaw?” and three times in the course of the novel–the under-the-mattress Portnoy of its day–begs him,  “Bite me! Bite me!” (not in the modern derisive sense) or “Rip me! Rip me!” (he does) and in case you forgot, 40 pages later, “Rip me, Frank. Rip me like you did that night.” He rips: “She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.” Apparently the first movie versions left out all the racism and the rips, American sensibilities being what they were not, but a later version–maybe the one with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange–did not, though every movie version decided to make Cora a dumb blond, which, ironically, is the last thing she is, though the poet Joseph Brodsky’s description of a writer he once met in Venice may apply, in Cain style: “She was the kind that keeps married men’s dreams wet.” The postman, one is to suppose, is a vengeful Old Testament sort of god, ringing twice, biting and ripping and laughing.

—P.T.

 

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It’s human beings and human beings alone whom we must fear, always. (“C’est des hommes et d’eux seulement qu’il faut avoir peur, toujours.”) 

–From Louis Ferdinand Celine, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932).

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