Another exile, raising literary Cain with a California sun that suited his plot to go native

James M. Cain was one of those respectable writers who came out to Hollywood in the 1930s, for large sums of money, to write for the movies.

Though they took the money, most of them felt ill-used by their employers; they thought their talent was being corrupted by trashy films, and that their souls were wasting away in a cultural desert.

Most of them felt that they had betrayed their art, and they tried to atone by writing pieces for Eastern magazines to verify the intelligentsia’s view of Los Angeles as a blight on the map.

Cain wrote one called “Paradise” for Henry L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Mencken himself had already visited the wasteland and wrote that “the whole place stank of orange blossoms.”

That might well have been the theme of Cain’s “Paradise.”

It is reprinted, in its entirety, in the May issue of Los Angeles magazine, and it is amusing to see how Cain managed to reconcile the obvious appeal of the place with his embarrassment at being here.

What seemed to bother him the most, ironically, was its No. 1 asset--the sunshine. Just as Mencken had found the smell of orange blossoms offensive, Cain is overwhelmed by the sunshine.

“The main thing to remember is the sunlight, and the immense expanse of sky and earth that it illuminates. It sucks the color out of everything that it touches, takes the green out of leaves and the sap out of twigs, makes human beings seem small and of no importance. . . . The sunlight gives everything the unmoving quality of things seen in a desert. . . . “

I’ve had that feeling of the sun being too bright, of washing out all color. Usually, though, it happens on a day when the light is refracted by moisture in the air, sometimes smog. It can also happen when you have a bad hangover, or when your glasses are smudged. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cain’s glasses were smudged.

He didn’t think much of our ocean, either:

“On one side you can put an ocean, a placid, oily-looking ocean that laps the sand with no sign of life in it except an occasional seal squirming through the swells, and almost no color.”

I doubt that Cain spent a lot of time looking at the Pacific Ocean. A lot of newcomers, knowing that Pacific means peaceful, assume that this ocean is always calm. On the contrary, the shore can be very rough indeed, and so can its offshore channels, as surfers and boaters know, and homeowners along Malibu; as for its having no life, surely even in Cain’s day the big waves were polka-dotted with surfers, as they are today; and as for its having no color, the ocean’s color depends on the sky, and on a clear day, of which we have a few, the Pacific is as blue as the Mediterranean.

Cain’s criticism of our ocean reminds me of the story of the two ladies from Iowa, here for their first look at the Pacific. As they stood on the Palisades at Santa Monica, one said to the other: “Why, that’s not so big!”

Cain makes what he admits is an unfair comparison between Los Angeles and Paris. It isn’t the great cultural advantages of Paris he misses, he says--the opera, the symphony, the art shows--he can find all those in Los Angeles. He misses the street life, the charm, the food.

“Well, it is what this place lacks. You can drive for miles and the one thing you can be sure of is that you are not going to be rewarded by so much as one little scrap, one little unexpected, one hint of charm. . . . “

I’ll admit that Los Angeles must have been a culinary desert to one used to the restaurants of New York and Paris in the 1930s. He especially missed the seafood, which he described with great yearning. “Brother, God hath laid a curse on this Pacific Ocean and decreed that nothing that comes out of it shall be fit to eat. . . . You can go from Santa Barbara to the border, and you will not strike one place where you can get a really distinguished meal. . . . “

Now, of course, the jet airplane brings us oysters and lobsters fresh from the East Coast, and there are dozens of good restaurants in Los Angeles; perhaps hundreds.

Did he find anything to like?

Yes, indeed. He thought we were the friendliest people in the country. Probably because we were all exiles, though we are not hospitable, because we have no roots.

We spoke better English than he had heard spoken anywhere else; it was simple, educated English, uncorrupted by regional inflections.

And the schools here, he found, were the best in the country. “Our two children did terribly in the East, whereas here they do fine. They like school, learn their lessons, take an interest in what the school does. . . . Also they are treated with the utmost consideration, not only by their teachers, but by their colleagues in bondage. . . . “

In the long run, like so many of his colleagues in misery, Cain was seduced:

“I personally . . . am not going to walk out on the show. One thing (Los Angeles) is going to be, within the twelvemonth, is the wine center of the New World. I guess you think I’m going to walk out on that, do you?

“No, I stay. The climate suits me fine.”

They almost always stay. That’s why so many first-class malicious essays are written about Los Angeles. The authors have to excuse themselves for living here.