Galatea

by James M. Cain, Víctor Pozanco (Translator)

Veintitrés años después de consagrarse, con El cartero siempre llama dos veces, como uno de los grandes narradores norteamericanos de nuestro tiempo, James M. Cain publica Galatea, novela que se aparta en cierto modo del resto de su obra. A partir de un mínimo número de elementos, y con la sobriedad y precisión que le caracterizan, el autor retoma el mito griego, sólo que aquí Pigmalión es un ex boxeador que sale de la cárcel, y Galatea, una mujer monstruosamente gorda, una informe bola de grasa en la que el protagonista, oponiéndose a un marido odioso, esculpirá un cuerpo espectacular. ¿Se trata, pues, de la transformación de una mujer grotesca en un ser física y psíquicamente adorable? ¿Es la crónica de un crimen presentido? ¿La victoria de un hombre básicamente honesto y bondadoso sobre una sociedad canallesca? Se trata, en cualquier caso, de una novela insólita, cuya tensión crece de capítulo en capítulo y que se lee apasionadamente hasta la última línea.

Genres: Crime

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892–October 27, 1977) was an American journalist and novelist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hard-boiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the "roman noir."

He was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a prominent educator and an opera singer. He inherited his love for music from his mother, but his high hopes of starting a career as a singer himself were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough.

After graduating from Washington College where his father, James W. Cain served as president, in 1910, he began working as a journalist for The Baltimore Sun.

He was drafted into the United States Army and spent the final year of World War I in France writing for an Army magazine. On his return to the United States he continued working as a journalist, writing editorials for the New York World and articles for American Mercury. He also served briefly as the managing editor of The New Yorker, but later turned to screenplays and finally to fiction.

Although Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, his name only appears on the credits of three films, Algiers, Stand Up and Fight, and Gypsy Wildcat.

His first novel (he had already published Our Government in 1930), The Postman Always Rings Twice was published in 1934. Two years later the serialized, in Liberty Magazine, Double Indemnity was published.

He made use of his love of music and of the opera in particular in at least three of his novels: Serenade (about an American opera singer who loses his voice and who, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the States illegally with a Mexican prostitute in tow), Mildred Pierce (in which, as part of the subplot, the only daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer) and Career in C Major (a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer who unexpectedly discovered that he has a better voice than she does).

He continued writing up to his death at the age of 85. His last three published works, The Baby in the Icebox (1981), Cloud Nine (1984) and The Enchanted Isle (1985) being published posthumously. However, the many novels he published from the late 1940s onward never quite rivaled his earlier successes.

Reviews

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Good Mystery

A well written story and one of Cain's less popular novels.

It had strong elements like a lone anti-hero, female temptress, and a love triangle.

I recommend.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in the 1980's.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I happened to spend about half a day in Montreal late last month in the aftermath of having attended the Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville. During that half a day I was able to reconnect meaningfully with a friend I haven’t seen in over a decade and make a couple A#1 scores at a used bookstore, the foremost of which was a first edition of James M. Cain’s 1953 novel GALATEA, marked at a highly reasonable fifteen Canadian dollars. Sweet dreams are made of this. I have been a devoted bibliophile since I was a child, but I did not get to James M. Cain until I read THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE in my mid-twenties. It was a revelation. Certainly I was aware of Cain’s contribution to the pulp tradition, especially to the species of crime fiction commonly called “hard-boiled,” and I had by that point seen film adaptations of POSTMAN, MILDRED PIERCE, and, of course, DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Still, I was not expecting the level of mastery I encountered in that prodigiously brilliant debut novel, published as it originally was in 1934 (approximately smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression). Crime fiction in general appeals because it deals with the aberrant and the amoral, and certainly part of Cain’s genius is his ability to credibly demonstrate how a fully human person, driven by desperation and resentment and appetite, can rationalize all manner of sordid misconduct without ever having admitted to the outright abandonment of moral justification, but what makes his writing especially fascinating is how he situates the alienated self-justifying subject in relation to fate. The title of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, often a source of perplexity for readers, is itself a sly gag about the pratfall of destiny to which the book inexorably builds. Justice may trick you into believing you have evaded her only to arrive later, unexpectedly, catching you in the specific trap that was always lying in wait, this postponed consummation something like a dark joke (perhaps one being played on us all). The alienation of Cain’s doomed protagonists is always both socioeconomic and more nakedly existential in nature. Albert Camus would concede that POSTMAN was a major influence on his monumentally influential L’ÉTRENGER, and there can be no denying that it shows. Fate itself has both a socioeconomic dimension and a more broadly cosmic or divine (though perhaps diabolic) one as well. In this sense Cain's fiction looks forward to the American films of Fritz Lang. I would go on to read much of the celebrated early Cain stuff, especially those works which would be adapted into what would later come to be designated films noir, but have always continued to think of POSTMAN as his greatest novel (and as quite likely the greatest American novel of the interwar period). GALATEA, published nearly twenty years after POSTMAN and at a time when Cain’s work was no longer enjoying much popular success, in many ways seems to superficially ape his brilliant debut, telling as it does the story of a hard-luck proliterian drifter who finds himself embroiled with the disaffected wife of a man in the restaurant business with whom the drifter in question has found temporary employment under compromised circumstances. It is also likewise in large part a novel about alienation and fate. That being said, GALATEA differs from POSTMAN in a number of significant respects, and it is perhaps regional specificity above all else that informs this divergence. The novel in fact begins with a brief exordium in which the author informs the reader of the grounding of the work to follow in the specific historically-informed realities of the culture of southern Maryland. “The Marylander will find much in it that is familiar to him, of names, places, and legend, but the characters are imaginary, not representing, nor being intended to represent, actual persons.” It is all too clear that what we have here is far more than your average bit of perfunctory legalistic boilerplate. Cain is preparing us for a work whose focus is in part almost practically anthropological or ethnographic. He was originally from Maryland, but transplanted himself after serving as a noncombatant in the First World War, and the early novels upon which his fame depends pretty much uniformly take place in California. In retrospect it strikes me that we need to insist that those California novels are themselves deeply informed by specificities of place. You will note also that in the aforementioned introductory exordium, Cain speaks of the centrality of “southern Maryland,” though much of the novel proper is more strictly situated in northern Maryland, closer to Washington. This is no mistake. GALATEA is in fact engineered around this divide, this specific disjunction of north and south, a set of national clefts immanent to Maryland itself, and part of the background of the novel, quite fascinatingly, is the spiritual legacy of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, a spiritual legacy that in due course will take on practically occult proportions when filtered through narrative events informed by regionally specific superstitions. What we end up with in GALATEA, then, is very much a kind of pulp template, in large part lifted from THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, intersecting with a kind of Southern Gothic not exactly a million miles off from what Flannery O’Connor was doing during that same period. Regional specificity perhaps declares itself most immediately at the level of language and diction. We have Holly Valenty, for example, wife to farmer-restauranteur Val Valenty (Mr. Val), daughter of a prominent explicitly-southern-Maryland family, using “prowtocowl” for protocol and “hawndshake” for handshake. “You git, and git quick,” demands one character of another. You will note also the highly stylized idiomatic language of a young black boy made to testify at a criminal trial. The Southern Gothic element also presents itself in GALATEA by way of a highly unorthodox inclusion of the ‘grotesque.’ You might even say that the entire novel is to a certain extend build around a fascinating quasi-musical dialogic thematics of tenderness and grotesquery. At the heart of all this we find Holly Valenty, perhaps one of the most unusual ‘objects of desire’ in all of literature. When we first meet Holly, you see, she is morbidly obese. This in itself is not necessarily grotesque. It is James M. Cain who is set on emphasizing the grotesque element. “She was standing there, in the light dress she had put on, like some pink blimp with electric lights for eyes.” Surely you see what I mean. The novel is narrated in the first person, POSTMAN-style, by Duke Webster, a one-time washout boxer (he couldn’t punch unless sufficiently enraged) who had more success as a much-sought-after sparring partner, had to hit the rode to evade consequences for a sparring-related malfeasance, and at the start of the novel has just been finagled out of jail in the aftermath of holdup, put to work on the farm of Mr. Val, restaurateur and aspiring somebody, a man with, uh, serious fucking control issues. Duke, inadvertent farm labourer. His labour is not merely being coerced in the manner of your standard wage slavery. He is victim of something closer to outright extortion. “I thought a fast shuffle was back of it, and it didn’t take any lawyer to see where it put me. But I was over a barrel, and had to take it and like it. Just the same, when the prickles went over me, I felt distinctly itchy.” Duke does not like Mr. Val. Mr. Val puts off crass vibes. “Part of it, maybe, was how he rubbed his hands and jerked his head as he talked, reminding me of a waiter. And part of it, I’m sure, was his everlasting ant-pantedness, which had even annoyed the girls in the Marlboro courthouse.” So Duke has found himself in the pocket of a nervous entrepreneur with political aspirations and control issues. The man’s wife, Holly, heiress of the southern portion of the sate whose family originally owned the farm her husband has commandeered, is in his pocket as well. Her situation is more dire. Her husband, you see, would appear intent on feeding her to death, fattening her to an early grave. Foie gras metaphors are utilized. Pretty grotesque. When Duke first lays eyes on Holly, what he sees instinctively horrifies and disgusts him. However, in short order Duke and Holly discover that they are able to be tender to one another, a paradigm-altering eventuation, as genuine tenderness has eluded each of them for what might well have been the entirety of their lives. This is not at all a novel about the folly of dumb lust, morbidly obese Holly not exactly being Lana Turner. Instead it is a much more touching and a much more weirdly perverse love story, and one Cain refuses to keep remotely saccharine. Tenderness, intimacy, and caring come with many of the same risks as does lust, and the principal characters here, our incipient adulterous couple, may be fundamentally good people, but they are not well educated, they are not especially self-aware or worldly, and their personal liabilities routinely threaten to sink them, to precipitate all manner of calamity. And, you now, the primary universal law of the grotesque is that we are each of us part monster. Duke is an interesting narrator, a man attempting to defend his own actions, because he is not very intelligent in ways that are glaringly obvious, while remaining extremely intelligent in more subtle ways, a fact that becomes increasingly clear. He is also a profoundly moral person not necessarily able to always commit to the course of action he knows he ought to, and with a tendency, evident in many other Cain characters, to obfuscate his own responsibility. What is perhaps most brilliant about GALATEA, as well as most profoundly odd, is the way desire manifests itself, routed through tenderness and devotion, productive of emotional and sexual terror, and speaking to the Greek myth from which its title is appropriated. What the myth of Galatea most immediately invokes is this idea of creating somebody and then falling in love with them. You see, Duke Webster just so happens to be a man whose greatest professional asset has proven to be his ability to help boxers take off the weight necessary to drop down into weight classes where they will be more competitive. He has a genius for helping others take off the pounds through dietary adjustment. Holly is obese precisely because she exists and has always existed in a state of complete spiritual defeat. Subjection to cruel circumstance, spiritual catalepsy. Duke in his tenderness and genuine concern for Holly allows her to be born anew, for an inert will buried in fat and inertia to come to life and assert itself. She begins to lose weight. She really begins to shed pounds. Poof. She is wholly transformed. Of course, this is James M. Cain and a love story in Cain is always a story about danger, and usually the danger is the shadow of fate, the pallor of a doom to which our folly invariably leads us. Desire sculpts with the flesh of its object and is aghast to behold its bewitching creation. Hence the sexual and emotional terror. “From then on, my life was simply a hell. Because while I’d known that I loved her, that was a love of a different kind. It was a friendship, which in a way is deeper than love, as it’s there in spite of fat, and in spite of anything. This was all that and more besides, so it was more like insanity.” Duke retreats from Holly’s initial amorous advances, and later tells her brother Bill that “she made like friendly and I made like scram, quick.” Love. Desire. Insanity. A trinity at the heart of our obfuscations of responsibility. Duke has already told us that he can only punch when he is suitably enraged and consequently loses control. This idea of conduct beyond one’s control is what we traditionally use to garner ourselves some leverage, to mitigate our wrongdoings, the doings we know were wrong. Love. Desire. Insanity. The very idea of a Crime of Passion. In reinventing Holly by way of a genuinely giving tenderness, Duke is aware of opening the door to frenzy. And naturally frenzy cannot help but enter. It does so progressively, Cain constructing with sobriety and skill, the whole thing nevertheless remaining deeply unusual, dizzy and grotesque. A major catalyst is the arrival of Sol Lippert, a seedy man “with a pasty citified face, a small eyebrow mustache, and a look in the eye that said underworld.” Sol provokes the adequate amount of rage for a proper punch. And things escalate. There is tragedy and there are reprisals. But things don’t play out quite how you might expect. Another way that GALATEA diverges from those earlier highly successful James M. Cain novels is that its vision of destiny is ultimately more a vision of hope (even of faith) than it is of doom. And you’ve got that final paragraph of the penultimate chapter. We’re talking about Chapter XIX here. That utterly magnificent paragraph. American myth navigation at its very finest.

[Mauro · Rating 3 out of 5]

En la contratapa de la edición que tengo de la editorial Lumen, dice "McCain con esta obra se aleja un poco de su estilo". Bueno, si es así, yo no me di cuenta, porque con pequeñas diferencias es prácticamente el mismo argumento de su anterior y mas famosa obra "el cartero siempre llama dos veces", pero de menor calidad.
Un forastero llega a un pueblo, solo que acá, acaba de salir de la cárcel, y empieza a trabajar en una casa con un matrimonio que esta en crisis. El esposo haciendo un destrato psicológico a su mujer. En el "Cartero" la mujer era despampanante, acá es una mujer bella pero obesa, este forastero descubre ese especie de diamante en bruto y la hace adelgazar, la transforma en una mujer esbelta y se enamoran, ahí empiezan las tensiones a agudizarse con el marido, y aunque no se planea un crimen, las cosas van sucediendo.
Quizás la descripción que se hace para aproximar a un lector que quiera saber de que trata, sea decirle que imagine una mezcla de "Pigmalión" de Bernard Shaw y el "cartero llama dos veces", como un aproximación bastante correcta. Pero le recomiendo mas estas dos ultimas obras que Galatea.

[LisaMarie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't expect this to be as punch-packing as JMC's *****best sellers like Double Indemnity, but talk about blah! It even has an interesting-sounding premise: a sort-of ex-con sculpts his employer's wife out of obesity into his true love, but at 54% nothing has happened and I feel like I've been treading over the same ground between Duke's workplace, his cabin, Val and "Galatea"'s house, their restaurant, and a few short car rides in the Maryland humidity. It's rare that I DNF books this short but I just can't take anymore!

[peach boot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best Cain I've read but good enough to kill at bedtime & long, dull afternoon. He carved her out of the grease and she him out of all the vile, base, mud-smeared life & himself. Having replaced marble in the original greek mythology with fatness & grease, that deserves a giant kudos to the american writer James M Cain.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dated.

Hard to understand some of the action and some of the farming procedures.

A married woman is encouraged to take better care of herself and she is reformed into a beautiful woman.

At that point she is ready to leave her abusive husband, but he is not going along with the program and he is killed.

I borrowed a copy from the public library.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Cain pulled off his version of the Greek myth rather well while blending in some specific history about the state of Maryland, boxing metaphors, health and diet tips, the politics of power, and finally a love story.
It felt clunky while I was reading it and spoiler: boy that ending was hokey

Very different but still fine stuff.

[Socraticist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it fair to say that this book is “pulp”, probably dashed off in a single draft and published forthwith in paperback.

The plot is a little more interesting than usual. The female temptress does not start off as a sexpot and that really sets this apart from the usual predictable
“ beautiful woman gets main character in trouble in spite of himself”.

So, it’s memorable.

[Palo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the protagonist, disliked the other characters. Lots of taking advantage of others. The mess at the end could be fun to unravel, but instead just left a bitter aftertaste. It was some fun to read through, though and is not too long.

[Highlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought it was interesting enough to keep reading, but it was still rather weak and nonsensical at times. Not the strongest Cain novel.

[Douglas Castagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast and furious, like most of Cain's work so far that I have read. This one will not disappoint. Former boxing man and ex con befriends an very overweight woman and helps her to become the woman she is inside much to the chagrin of the woman's husband. Twists, and turns as would be expected from the man who brought us Double Indemnity and Postman.

[Brad Wojak · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this was not the strongest Cain book I have read, it was still an enjoyable yarn.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Cain's lesser known novels, but worth seeking out by all his fans. All the classic elements are present: lone anti-hero, female temptress, forbidden love.