Thu 24 Feb 2022
JAMES M. CAIN – Serenade. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1937. US Paperback editions include: Penguin Books #621, 1947; Signet 1153, 1954; Bantam S-3864, 1968; Vintage, 1978. Film: Warner Brothers, 1956, with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine.
First person narrative of a self-hating, closeted, gay opera singer. He falls in love with a rich gay conductor in Europe but feels so guilty about his homosexuality he has a nervous breakdown and can no longer sing worth a damn.
He runs away.
Relegated to the worst opera circuit in the world, in Acapulco, he quits and finds himself with his last three pesos, drunk, in a slummy bar.
A really hot prostitute walks in and fawns on a local hero bullfighter.
The gay opera guy feels something in his libido awaken in the presence of the prostitute.
So he gives the bullfighter the staredown. The bullfighter comes up to him and asks what his problem is. Mr. Closet says: let’s gamble for the girl. They do. Mr. Closet loses a fixed lottery game.
The prostitute drops him her address, and he looks her up.
He gets drunk with her at her little whorehouse, and it looks like things are going swell, when he sings her a gay serenade.
She senses the homosexual tendencies in his castrato, and cuts him off (figuratively–not Bobbit-like), and he trudges on home.
A week later she wins a little lottery money and seeks him out—thinking a gay dude would be the perfect pimp for a whorehouse she wants to start up in Mexico City with her ‘seed money’.
En route to Mexico city in a little red convertible ford they hit a massive thunderstorm. The roads flood. There’s nowhere to go. They come to a church. The church door is locked. So he rams the car thru the locked church doors and they wait out the storm.
They’re soaked so they take off their clothes.
Aroused by her naked figure praying at the alter asking forgiveness, he rapes her.
Enraptured by his hetero rapist cajones, he turns to the window and sings opera with a depth, vigor and confidence he’d never known. His voice was back and better than ever.
For some reason, the whore now loves him. He’s shown her he’s a ‘real man’ or something.
He takes her back to the States with him, and becomes a huge Hollywood star. Then he leaves Hollywood and becomes a huge opera star with the Met.
Then disaster strikes as his old beau, the rich gay conductor, tracks him down, stalks him, pulls him back into his orbit.
Things come to head when the old beau calls immigration on the prostitute. She waves her cape like a toreador, and she sticks him like a bull.
Things get pretty crazy from there as our protagonist can’t quit her. He finds himself falling for another man. He can’t believe it–‘I’m not one of those….am I?’. He feels that she’s his only hope to save him from his own gay lust.
But the warrant’s out for her, murder one. He can’t let her get the chair.
He’s gotten so famous he can no longer sing, lest he risk the whore whose musk summons hetero urges to his lust.
As ridiculous as it all sounds, the book is really great. Mexico is palpably rendered. And Cain really knows opera. The dialogue is as good as anything Cain ever wrote. Which says a lot. Since Cain is as good as any hardboiled writer. And for me, that means he’s as good as anybody. Ever.
So if you can let go of the bizarre self-hating gay machismo of a bygone era, and accept the fact that bizarre self-hating gay machismo is and was a real thing, as worthy of acknowledgement as dinosaurs, dead stars and moonbeams, then have yourself a treat and check it out. It’s really good.
Previously reviewed here by Max Allen Collins. The film panned here by David Vineyard.
February 24th, 2022 at 11:29 pm
I’ve read this and still have it among my souvenirs, but did not get anything out of it, at least not along the lines you have. Of course, I changed the title to Sombrero in my mind and imagined Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carillo as Pancho and Cisco. Oh, and it was filmed as Serenade with Mario Lanza, Joan Fontaine, Vincent Price, with Anthony Man directing. It did not kill everyone’s career, but no one had far to go.
February 24th, 2022 at 11:30 pm
Of course that should be Mann but maybe not?
February 25th, 2022 at 7:58 am
I don’t recall any of that in the movie!
February 25th, 2022 at 8:16 am
Not so much hard-boiled; more a hundred-year-old egg.
Presumably the film’s plot had to be drastically altered to meet Hollywood’s sensibilities in 1956. Was Joan Fontaine the film’s equivalent to a Mexican prostitute? It sounds unlikely.
February 25th, 2022 at 11:27 am
Sarita Montiel did the honors.
February 25th, 2022 at 12:47 pm
You couldn’t write an opening to your review more effective at turning me away from a book. Ugh.
February 25th, 2022 at 1:53 pm
Wasn’t aware of this title either, myself.
I don’t have any reaction to the anachronisms in the plot. Such turmoil still transpires in the world today.
Example:
https://tinyurl.com/y7dmrafo
But the impulses of all these characters toward each other sounds over-contrived. Were such high-strung, ‘ricochet’ motivations convincing to readers even in 1937?
Also the repeated ‘device’ of the lottery. H’ummm.
But (as the reviewer reminds us) it is James M. Cain. I’d believe at face-value that he succeeded.
February 25th, 2022 at 10:23 pm
Despite the genre connection it really isn’t a genre novel, but more mainstream if you can be that strange and be mainstream.
I admit I think it is Cain’s masterpiece, a dark brilliant dive into Hemingwayesque machismo combined with Cain’s twisted damaged human beings living on the thin edge of respectability and unable to keep from plunging into the abyss.
One note for anyone reading Cain more deeply it’s notable that he uses the same shark metaphor here that he does in DOUBLE INDEMINTY (the book and not the movie).
We won’t go into the sacrificial iguana.
Opera also shows up in Cain’s much lighter themed CAREER IN C MAJOR.
Quite a few of his themes are present in SERENADE including the destructive nature of sex, any sex of any kind.
In truth what makes SERENADE a masterpiece is that it is completely over the top in all categories from its Freudian plot run wild among Jungian symbolism to its archetypical characters.
That dreamlike quality also harkens back to DOUBLE INDEMNITY.
To me Cain has always been less a pulp writer than a mainstream one. I never really think he fit as part of that hard-boiled trinity with Chandler and Hammett. Certainly, his sensibility is noir, and the subject of much of his work falls into the pulp category, but as a writer I think like Horace McCoy his voice is more mainstream, not better, but closer to mainstream writing despite the hard-boiled tropes.
February 26th, 2022 at 2:46 pm
I enjoyed this review. SERENADE was the second Cain novel I read, after THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, and I have to admit I liked it because, as David says, it’s so over the top. Cain is one of those writers I always intend to read, but I’ve only managed four or five of his novels in the past 40 years, so I doubt if I’ll ever get through all of them. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read, though.
February 27th, 2022 at 8:58 pm
It strikes me that if Harry Stephen Keeler had been able to write he might have written something like SERENADE, a sort of waking dream of a novel with that same quality of being unable to escape from the nightmare.
It’s logic isn’t the logic of reality but of a vivid Technicolor dream.
February 27th, 2022 at 9:09 pm
Touch of Evil directed by Douglas Sirk.