His best work was as an anonymous editorialist for the New York World, where he worked for seven years under Walter Lippmann. He wrote debunking articles-which read like imitation Mencken. Mencken’s The American Mercury, he wrote satirical dialogues, mostly in mock-rural dialect-which read like imitation Ring Lardner. He tried the life of a freelance journalist, teaching English composition at a local college to pay the bills. His reporting from the West Virginia coal country moved him to try a novel, but when three drafts made him cringe, he was convinced he was no novelist. Compared with a musical career, “writing to me was distinctly a consolation prize.”įor the next 20 years, Cain made his way in a profession in which he displayed vague talent but no distinction. The decision “was no clarion call,” he later said. You have some musical sense, but it’s not enough”-proved correct. Alas, his mother’s verdict-“You have no voice, no looks, no stage personality. After college, he worked as a state road inspector and a high-school teacher in rural Maryland, but he longed to be an opera singer, so he moved to the big city, Washington, D.C., to take voice lessons, and sold insurance to pay for them. Born into a genteel Irish-American Maryland family, he had a childhood less than happy (his distant relationship with his parents, he later said, was “one of the blights” of his life). Eight months shy of 40, Cain had always been a man somewhat adrift. Cain had a desperate lunch with his agent.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |