Dingy Storyteller

THREE OF A KIND--James M. Cain--Knopf ($2.50).

It is popularly supposed that people go right on reading the thrillers of James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Serenade) through five-alarm fires and the sudden inheritance of large blocks of stock. This is very nearly true. Cain's appeal is partly sheer narrative skill--and partly the fact that he is one of the world's most vivid tellers of dingy stories.

His latest exhibition consists of three long short tales--hissing with suspense and detonating in surprise endings--on a guaranteed, all-weather theme: what happens (lust at first sight) when a middle-aging U.S. male with a lively libido and no intellect meets a female with curves and no inhibitions. All three stories have the rancid air of authenticity which Cain obtains by screwing down his competent microscope on a drop of that social seepage which discharges daily into U.S. tabloids and criminal courts. And as in any drop of ditch water, the action in Cain's tales is of infusorial violence.

Least violent is Career in C Major, which is intentional opera bouffe. Its hero is Leonard Borland, a big-time contractor stalled by the Depression. He is the henpecked husband of an awesome socialite with a nasty disposition and a maniacal ambition to be a singer. Leonard is also an undiscovered baritone of great power. One day a concupiscent soprano, the season's sensation, sights and seduces him. Sample: "We stayed that way a minute, breathing into each other's faces, looking into each other's eyes. Then she mumbled: 'Damn you, you'll kiss first.' 'I will like hell' She put her arms around me, tightened. Then she kissed me, and I kissed back. 'You were slow enough.' 'I was wondering what you wanted.' 'I wanted you, you big gorilla. Ever since you came in there this morning. . . .' " She discovers Leonard's baritone. And Leonard discovers what a terrible singer his wife is.

The Embezzler and Double Indemnity are stern moral warnings that it is easier to embezzle money than to put it back, to murder husbands than to collect their accident insurance. Both tales are also remarkable examples of the art with which Cain makes unfamiliar readers feel at home in such worlds as banking and insurance, the skill with which he uses business routines to build suspense.

In The Embezzler a bank teller goes to the hospital for an operation on his duodenum. His wife gentles the vice president into letting her take over her husband's job, then draws him into helping her replace $9,000 her husband has stolen. The consequences include the locking of a man in the bank vault, a California spider and a running gun fight. In Double Indemnity a quiet California housewife (with "a shape to set a man nuts") persuades an insurance salesman to collaborate on her husband's murder. And so on--with readers hanging on Cain's hypnotic typewriter.

Undemocratic America

BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN--Carey McWilliams--Little, Brown ($3).

"We have not one, but two, American traditions: the generous, liberal, and democratic tradition; and the narrow, bigoted, and authoritarian tradition. The existence of the latter can be largely explained in terms of our long-standing neglect of colored minorities. . . ."

This neglect, with its harmful effects upon both American character and prestige, is the theme of Brothers Under the Skin. Author Carey McWilliams is a former California Commissioner of Immigration & Housing. His description of the U.S. treatment of minorities is blunt; so are his suggested solutions. His ideas stem from years of preoccupation with the history of minority peoples, professional familiarity with Negro homes and segregated quarters, and a long career of opposition to those who see colored poverty and degradation as inevitable. McWilliams' earlier books on labor and agriculture (Ill Fares the Land, Factories in the Field) brought a small storm down on their author's head; Brothers is likely to whistle up another.

McWilliams supplies old and new information in his survey of U.S. treatment of some 17,000,000 minority peoples:

The Indian, he says, far from becoming extinct, is "our most rapidly growing minority." Indians in the U.S. and Alaska number 394,280, are increasing at the rate of "1% a year compared with 0.7% for the whole population." "It was with the Indian that our patterns of 'color reaction' and 'color behavior' were first conditioned" and became so set that Americans rarely consider that "a large part of [our] race psychology" derives from their ancestors' experiences with Indians on the ever-shifting frontier.

"Fear and anxiety," says McWilliams, led even the most religious Puritans to "feel no compunction when they saw Indian women being clubbed to death and Indian babies being dashed against trees." This anxious attitude changed to indifference after the Indians were conquered; by 1880 most of them had been relegated to reservations, in the belief that "it was cheaper 'to feed than to fight them.' " Under the Dawes Act (1887) arrangements were made for every Indian to obtain eventually a piece of reservation land.

The result, says McWilliams, was tragic. The Indians were used to tribal ownership; once their holdings became individual they fell prey to swindlers and land-grabbers; their cultural and social solidarity fell apart. (This, McWilliams believes, was the intention of the Dawes Act.) Their language was suppressed in schools ("truly nightmarish institutions"), their religious ceremonies discouraged, their arts and crafts allowed to fade away. By 1923 they had declined in numbers "from the pre-Columbian estimate of 850,000 to around 220,000."

In 1924, Indians were at last accepted as "citizens." In the last decade serious efforts have been made to restore their heritage by adding to, and protecting, their holdings, supplying them with capital, fostering their arts and crafts, etc. By restoring their racial dignity as a group, believes McWilliams, the U.S. has helped them to become more a part of the nation as a whole. They require special treatment, since they compose "300 different . . . tribes speaking 250 different dialects." But, at bottom, their problem is that of all colored minorities.

The Negro. After the Civil War no one, says McWilliams, "could ... see a connection" between the old Indian problem and the new Negro problem. War weariness, desire for reconciliation between the North and South, eagerness to capture the white vote in the South, the determination of Northern industrialists to develop Southern industries--these factors led Northerners to accept the dogma that "the South will solve its own problem." The Supreme Court, through several decisions adverse to Negro rights, "opened the door to the South to establish a system of white supremacy . . . effectively tied the hands of Congress." By "a pretense of legality" discrimination against Negroes was enforced by law throughout the South, the Negro disfranchised and segregated. It became fashionable for Northerners to excuse their compromise through "scientific" theories of the Negro's unfitness for suffrage, his inborn racial inferiority.

The Other Minorities. Better off, from a racial standpoint, were the Hawaiians. In their Islands miscegenation was common; even today racial prejudice operates mainly in awarding "preferred positions" in industry to whites. But on the mainland Hawaiians shared in the disastrous spread of color consciousness that was embracing yellow and brown immigrants alike. Shortly before the Boxer Rebellion (1900), when America was "holding China accountable, in the highest degree, for the protection of American life and property in the Orient," the U.S. Congress was progressing "from vinegar to vitriol" in anti-Chinese legislation. Congress denied bail to Chinese in habeas corpus cases, refused to allow Chinese in America to bring their alien wives into the U.S., finally forbade all immigration and naturalization of Chinese. "It is," says McWilliams, ". . . almost incredible that we have a single friend in China today."

The same story, varying in detail but always with the common denominator of race prejudice and sectional pressures, is told by McWilliams in chapters on Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Hindus, Japanese, Koreans. The facts, he is careful to explain, are not only morally shocking, but invidious from a practical point of view. "The South has received only about 6.3% of [war] contracts" largely because its industry will not make proper use of Negro labor. The huge expense required for separate schools, waiting rooms, toilets, schoolbooks, even stepping-boxes for getting on and off trains, McWilliams calls an economic scandal in our industrialized lives.

Still graver, says McWilliams, is the effect of color discrimination on U.S. friends and allies in Asia, the Pacific, South America. "It is unthinkable," said the Manila Times in 1930, protesting a proposed exclusion bill, "that the American flag should fly over the Philippines while the citizens who look to it for defense and support are barred from entering the United States." McWilliams thinks that "there are many evidences of a growing sense of solidarity between American Negroes and the peoples of India." Says McWilliams: the Good Neighbor policy can hardly be taken seriously by South Americans resentful of North American race discrimination. And finally, the U.S. attitude on discrimination becomes "a fulcrum on which the Axis propaganda levers can be placed to exert pressures in multiple directions."

The Solution. McWilliams' solution is as simple and drastic as a bog-oak shillelagh, as controversial as a Donnybrook Fair. "The nation now possesses," he says, ". . . the will and the physical unity and the power to achieve what it should have achieved 50 years ago--total democracy in the United States." Congress must enact a "new Federal civil-rights statute." It must outlaw the poll tax in Federal elections and "Jim Crowism on all types of interstate carriers." It must pass a "Federal anti-lynching statute." To implement this policy, it must use the bludgeon of hard cash. All Government grants to states and communities, both for war and postwar industries, housing developments, down to "every concern from which the Government purchases so much as a lead pencil," must be made on the "condition of non-discrimination." The teeth in the contract: "In default of compliance, the license can be revoked."

As for the Japanese now in Government custody, we must realize, says McWilliams, that by rooting them out of "Little Tokyos" in three states we have helped to break the influence of the Issei (first generation) on the Nisei (second generation). McWilliams agrees with Milton Eisenhower (former director of the War Relocation Authority) that "from 80% to 85% of the Nisei are loyal to the United States." They must be treated accordingly.

In regard to all colored immigrants, "every vestige of racism should be removed from . . . our naturalization and immigration policies." All Orientals living in the U.S. should be made eligible for naturalization; immigration quotas should be set up for all nationalities "on a basis of absolute equality." The issue must be seen as a worldwide one, for our problem of colored minorities "is merely a reproduction on a miniature scale of a set of similar problems which will be faced by whatever federation of powers ... emerges from this war. . . . These problems are not 'solved' merely by the declaration that 'imperialism' must be banished from the postwar world. By taking the initiative here, we might be in a position to assert real world leadership in relation to these same problems after the war. On the other hand, by continuing an ostrichlike, do-nothing policy at home, we are certainly inviting another Versailles."

The Author. Vigorous, radical Carey McWilliams is 37. A California attorney, he has charged headlong into the knottiest problems of California labor conditions, agriculture, land policy; enraged growers by plumping for collective ownership as the answer to California's farm problems (TIME, April 1, 1940). An organizer of The John Steinbeck Committee (bitter enemy of California's Associated Farmers), McWilliams was appointed (1939) California Commissioner of Immigration and Housing by newly elected Governor Culbert L. Olson. He held the post for four years, campaigned vigorously against Republican Nominee for Governor Earl Warren. When Warren, strongly supported by the Associated Farmers, took office as Governor last January, he called in the press, announced that his first official act would be the dismissal of Commissioner McWilliams. Result: McWilliams is now at work on his most ambitious project--a study of the sociology of religion in the U.S., comparing the growth, present status and possible futures of U.S. churches.

Book Notes

WINTER'S TALES--Isak Dinesen--Random House ($2.50). Eleven simple stories about weird people (Sample: "Of a girl, perverse and perhaps a little mad, who ran after the gypsies and found relief in witnessing a decapitation"), with settings in Scandinavia, Persia, Belgium, Paris, etc. Admirers of Author Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales (TIME, April 9, 1934) will snatch at this; others may find her highly feminine, stylized prose a little overrich. One of the Book-of-the-Month Club's dual selections for June.

THE LIGHTS AROUND THE SHORE--Jerome Weldman--Simon & Schuster ($2.50). Youthful, attractive Aunt Fini had immigrated to New York from Hungary, had worked industriously for six years, hoarding her money, confiding no secrets. When she went back to Europe in the summer of 1939 she was supposed to be going to see her old parents. But Peter, the 15-year-old American nephew who accompanied her, was bewildered by her brusque, preoccupied behavior, soon found there was a man in the story, and learned enough of life to leave adolescence behind him forever. Touching as a study of a growing youth, Lights is Author Weidman's first major break away from the tough, garment-district world of I Can Get It For You Wholesale, What's In It For Me? etc. It lacks the sure, knowledgeable control of those works.

INTRODUCTION To MODERN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE--W. Somerset Maugham--The New Home Library (69c). "A selection of the most readable writing of the last 50 years," Introduction covers a wide range, gives high value at an unusually low price. Along with noted poets (Eliot, Auden, Hardy, Yeats, etc.) are examples from the lesser known (Roy Campbell, James Agee, etc.). The prose writings are also various: Churchill on Dunkirk, stories by Henry James, Eudora Welty, James Thurber, sayings by Logan Pearsall Smith, essays by Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster, letters by John Jay Chapman, etc. Author Maugham steps in from time to time with offhand comments.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.