Opera, Queerness, and the Hard-Boiled Style in James M

“An adventure in music I’ll never forget”: Opera, Queerness, and the Hard-Boiled Style in James M. Cain’s Serenade Robert Rose Dalhousie University he singing man occupies an unusual position in Depression-era TAmerica. An iconic figure who stands at a key juncture in the formation of American masculinity, the man who sings also marks a pivotal site of its destabilization. The act of singing undermines conventional understand- ings of maleness in its dominant American form: to burst into song is to contradict the ethos of the strong and silent man, a figure epitomized by such figures as the cowboy, the gangster, or the hard-boiled detective. And yet, the same period (the 1930s) that sees the formation of some of these classic American characters also finds a competing trajectory of American masculinity. In certain cases, the strong, silent man becomes the singing man and thus subverts the very role that he ostensibly occupies. James M. Cain’s 1937 novel Serenade offers an especially intriguing manifestation of this phenomenon. Usually considered among the works of hard-boiled American fiction produced in the period, Serenade departs dramatically from the conventions of its genre by having at its centre a protagonist, John Howard Sharp, who is both a prototypical tough-guy and, bizarrely, a down-and-out opera singer who loses his singing voice as a result of a homoerotic attraction to his gay conductor and mentor Winston Hawes. Serenade has been described by Steve Erickson as “lurid ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 55–70 … verging on tabloid-phantasmagoric” (14), and Greg Forter has noted the “sheer homophobic idiocy” of its quasi-theory of the relationship between voice and sexuality (287). It is my contention, however, that (for these very Robert Rose recently reasons) Serenade provides a stimulating point of departure for a discus- completed a doctoral sion of masculinity in 1930s America and in particular the position that dissertation on George singing occupies in its formation. Sharp’s role as an opera singer marks Orwell, through an obvious transgression of the laconic tough-guy mould; as Paul Skenazy Dalhousie. He is observes, “opera—is as far from the hard-boiled genre as one can imagine” currently writing about (51). More than this, though, Sharp’s conviction that opera should be free totalitarianism in the of all signs of queerness puts the novel in obvious tension with opera’s British spy novel. transgressive history. By attempting to impose a radical hetero-aesthetic on a genre such as opera, Serenade dramatizes the gesture of overcoming that underlies the ethos of the strong, silent man (that is, overcoming of weakness, of ambiguous sexuality) and in doing so draws attention to the precarious constructedness of that figure. Serenade tracks the efforts of John Howard Sharp to overcome what is framed in the novel as an artistically debilitating homoerotic attraction. We first meet him in Mexico City, after he has flopped in performance at the opera house and is trying to gain the affections of a Mexican prostitute, Juana, in an effort to overcome his sense of failure. Juana performs the special function in the novel of being able to identify the repressed truth of Sharp’s homoerotic impulses: “ ‘I know when you sing,’ ” she tells him. She is, in her own words, a “little dumb muchacha” who cannot read or write but who understands men. “ ‘These man who love other man,’ ” she tells Sharp, “ ‘can do much … But no can sing.’ ” They “ ‘[h]ave no toro in high voice, no grrr that frighten little muchacha, make heart beat fast. Sound like old woman, like cow, like priest’ ” (142). Thus, when Sharp serenades her with Carmen, she is able to detect, with the intuition of a “primitive,” a “priestly” quality in his voice, and so she abruptly dismisses him. As Megan E. Abbot observes, “Sharp’s voice betrays his desire, though not through what he says but through how his voice sounds” (66). The emasculating effects of his homoerotic impulses mark him audibly; Juana can, in effect, hear that he is attracted to another man. This is the essence of the theory of the relationship between voice and sexuality that is advanced in the novel. Homoerotic desire, the logic goes, even at the level of thought, cor- rupts masculinity, which in turn weakens the male singing voice. Sharp’s homoerotic impulses had lain dormant until his collaboration with the brilliant (and gay) composer Winston Hawes, but as Sharp later explains to Juana: “ ‘Every man has got five per cent of that in him, if he meets the one person that’ll bring it out, and I did, that’s all’ ” (144). Working closely with 56 | Rose Hawes in a musical relationship activates a previously repressed homoerotic desire, and this in turn triggers a disruption of his singing voice. To regain his former power as a singer, to rediscover the “toro” in his high notes that will make the “little muchacha” tremble, Sharp must soundly repress his desire for Winston Hawes. Cain seems to have at least partially endorsed the notion that sexuality and singing were connected. His biographer, Roy Hoopes, reports that the author believed strongly that “there was a relationship between homosexuality and voice” (266). In a letter to H. L. Mencken, Cain writes that “[t]he lamentable sounds that issue from a homo’s throat when he tries to sing are a matter of personal observation.… Several doctors of eminence assure me that they could believe [sex with a woman could restore the voice]” (283–84). Cain acknowledges in the same letter that Serenade ultimately turns “facile” and “silly” in its attempt to push the idea that “heavy workouts with a woman would bring out the stud horse high notes,”1 but the centrality to the novel of this singing voice/sexuality relationship should not be understood in ironic terms (284). Cain seems, in fact, to have written the story to dramatize the theory. Serenade is thus, in a certain sense, a novel of ideas (albeit dumb ones). If the “sheer homophobic idiocy” of this theory is beyond question, though, Cain’s attempt in Serenade to incorporate a musical sensibility into the hard-boiled tough guy aesthetic (and to keep all signs of queerness at bay in doing so) gives the novel an enduring interest. Serenade’s explora- tion of a homoerotic relationship, although crude, is fascinating for the sheer bizarreness of its handling. Still more fascinating is its incongruous melding of opera, homoeroticism, and the hard-boiled style. Although Cain’s efforts to rewrite opera’s queer history through a hypermasculin- ized hard-boiled aesthetic were bound to fail, the result yields a number of productive contradictions that speak directly to the tensions that underlie the hard-boiled incarnation of American masculinity in the 1930s. 1 Sharp initially regains his singing voice after raping Juana in a church. And later, when Sharp’s homoeroticism has been re-activated by the return of Winston Hawes to his life, Juana bizarrely acts out the symbolic role of female life force that has the power to stifle Sharp’s attraction to the other man: All of a sudden she broke from me, shoved the dress down from her shoulder, slipped the brassiere and shoved a nipple in my mouth. “Eat. Eat much. Make big toro!” “I know now, my whole life comes from there.” “Yes, eat.” (145) “An adventure in music” | 57 The incongruity that is created by Cain’s decision to take on the sub- ject of opera corresponds directly, of course, with the degree to which Serenade operates in the register of hard-boiled fiction. It is precisely the novel’s adoption of the hard-boiled style, in other words, that makes the presence of opera in the novel, and specifically of an opera-singing nar- rator-protagonist, seem so strange. Clearly, however, the novel’s opening passage, a detailed description of Juana, is meant to establish Sharp as a classic hard-boiled character: I was in the Tupinamba, having a bizcocho and coffee, when this girl came in. Everything about her said Indian, from the maroon reboza to the black dress with purple flowers on it, to the swaying way she walked, that no woman ever got without carrying pots, bundles, and baskets on her head from the time she could crawl. But she wasn’t any of the colors that Indians come in. She was almost white, with just the least dip of café con leche. Her shape was Indian, but not ugly. Most Indian women have a rope of muscle over their hips that give them a high-waisted, mis-shapen look, thin, bunchy legs, and too much breast-works. She had plenty in that line, but her hips were round, and her legs had a soft line to them. She was slim, but there was something voluptuous about her, like in three or four years she would get fat. All that, though, I only half saw. What I noticed was her face. It was flat, like an Indian’s but the nose broke high, so it kind of went with the way she held her head, and the eyes weren’t dumb, with that shiny shoe-button look. They were pretty big, and black, but they levelled out straight, and had kind of a sleepy, impudent look to them. Her lips were thick, but pretty, and of course had plenty of lipstick on them. (3) Cain offers here a tough-guy protagonist who, true to type, traffics in the language of essence—what Diana Fuss defines as “that which is most irre- ducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing” (2).

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