The Postman always rings true

10 April 2012

For most people the title of James M Cain's novel evokes one image from the 1981 film version: Jack Nicholson, Jessica Lange and a kitchen table in one of the most explicit sex scenes in mainstream movie history. The passion is there in the book, raw and abrasive, but The Postman Always Rings Twice is about so much more than sex and violence.

On publication, in 1934, the novel was banned in Canada and Boston. It soon gathered a reputation for being raw, hard-hitting and gritty, many regarding it as the pinnacle of the "hard-boiled" school of writing.

Cain claimed not to have made any conscious effort to be tough, but to write as the characters would talk: "I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent." His major literary influence, he insisted, was a bricklayer named Ike.

The story is a simple one: a drifter, Frank Chambers, turns up at the roadside café of Greek immigrant Nick Papadakis and his American wife, Cora. His arrival has a devastating effect on the couple's lives as Frank and Cora embark on a visceral affair that leads to murder, double-crossing and unethical courtroom dealings.

The novel is short, just over 100 pages, and rattles along like a runaway train. There's genuine power in the writing, a brutal, authentic simplicity to the dialogue and a captivating vitality to the story as it hurtled relentlessly towards its heart-breaking conclusion.

The world is vividly drawn: Depression-era California on the empty highways fringing Los Angeles. The characters are complex low-lifes, vicious and uncompromising, desperate and cunning, yet, by the end of the book, sympathetic, because they are so fragile and so human.

The short, sharp scenes give the book its punch and breathless pace, a structure that works well on film. (Cain's Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce have also made successful movies.) But as a theatre piece, a less frantic pace gives the audience a chance to get to know the world and the characters before being launched headlong into the gathering nightmare of the story.

The films (the first version, in 1946, starred Lana Turner and John Garfield) also focus almost exclusively on the central relationships, leaving out much of the crucial middle section of Cain's book where, following Nick's murder, Frank and Cora are railroaded through the legal system.

It's this section that is the most potent and political in the book, aspects that I wanted to bring to the stage. It is a world where no one cares whether people are guilty or innocent, only that the result of a case is beneficial to the arbiters of "justice and the American Way", those arbiters working hand in hand with insurance companies.

As the District Attorney says to Frank: "This is the last murder you'll have a hand in for some time, but if you ever try another, leave insurance companies out of it. They'll spend five times as much as we will on a case. They've got detectives five times as good as any I'd be able to hire and they know their stuff from A to izzard. It means money to them. That's where you and she made your big mistake."

This is a legal system that Cain knew well from his days as a police reporter and an area where he expressed a genuine world view: the legal system is not there for the little people.

Nothing has really changed. Money is still God, insurance companies still run a kind of legalised robbery and corrupt officials and miscarriages of justice are two-a-penny.

The fact that Frank and Cora are plainly guilty and still manage to escape the noose is all part of the delicate irony of the book. The real-life story on which it is based - a New York trial in the Twenties - did not end in the same way.

Ruth Snyder, dissatisfied with her marriage to magazine editor Albert Snyder, began an affair with a younger man, a salesman called Judd Gray. Soon she was thinking about ways of getting rid of Albert, and, without his knowing, took out a $50,000 life insurance policy with a double-indemnity clause in case of death.

She told the postman to deliver the payment coupons only to her and to ring the doorbell twice as a signal. Cain adopted the phrase for his title and, with "double indemnity", it became a euphemism for sexual duplicity.

Ruth persuaded her lover to help murder her husband; Judd attacked Albert in his bedroom, wacking him with a sash weight, chloroforming him and then strangling him with picture wire.

He then tied up Ruth, to make it look good, and she told police that she and her husband had been robbed. Unfortunately the "stolen" jewellery was found under her mattress and a bloody pillowcase, the blood-stained sash weight, a cheque made out to Gray and a tie clip with Gray's initials on were also found in the house.

After the police told Ruth, falsely, that Judd had confessed, she also confessed. They continued to blame each other until they both went to the electric chair in 1928.

Cain uses this story as the basis of a tale about the desperation of ordinary lives. People trapped by poverty, in a world where genuine joy and passion are sporadic and brief.

This is the dark side of the American Dream, where the chance of fame and fortune is dangled temptingly in people's faces, and where these same people are given no tools with which to attain them. The only person who has the tools and is working his way towards it is the Greek immigrant, Nick.

Intolerance towards the rising tide of immigrants in Depression-ravaged America in the Thirties is another strong element in the book, and, if we look at recent Conservative policies, one which chimes directly with us today. Nick engenders resentment and envy in people because he is an immigrant who has his own business and is married to an American woman.

Cain doesn't demonise or patronise the character: he creates a man who is endearing and repulsive, generous and arrogant, a man who is justly proud of all he has achieved. It's also no mean feat on the part of the author that, after Nick's shocking murder, we still end up rooting for his killers.

The story is simple enough, but its resonances are far reaching. The Postman Always Rings Twice touches on many contemporary themes. The widening gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots". The American Dream, re-planted over here and growing fast, a dream that tells us that money is everything but which leads directly to moral turpitude, disappointment and desperation.

As James M Cain said: "I write of the wish that comes true, for some reason, a terrifying concept." But it's that wish, that hope that life could and should be better, that makes The Postman Always Rings Twice a universal story. Written in 1934, it's very much a story for our times.

The Postman Always Rings Twice previews at the Playhouse Theatre (0870 0606631) from 24 May.

MORE ABOUT

Canada

The Postman always rings true

Read More