“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
The singing man occupies an unusual position in Depression-era
America. 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 understandings 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
Robert Rose recently
completed a doctoral
dissertation on George
Orwell, through
Dalhousie. He is
currently writing about
totalitarianism in the
British spy novel.
… 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
reasons) Serenade provides a stimulating point of departure for a discussion of masculinity in 1930s America and in particular the position that
singing occupies in its formation. Sharp’s role as an opera singer marks
an obvious transgression of the laconic tough-guy mould; as Paul Skenazy
observes, “opera—is as far from the hard-boiled genre as one can imagine”
(51). More than this, though, Sharp’s conviction that opera should be free
of all signs of queerness puts the novel in obvious tension with opera’s
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, corrupts 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 exploration 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 hypermasculinized 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 subject 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 narrator-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 irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing”
(2). In the act of imagining Juana’s lineage Sharp convinces himself of her
unchanging nature and imposes on her a bare essence: the pot-carrying
indigenous child is thought to explain the hip-swaying adult prostitute; her
appearance and behaviour are unchanging because they can be traced to
an earlier model, an irreducible type. The classic stance of the hard-boiled
protagonist is thus signaled in this opening paragraph by a suggestion of
knowing perceptiveness. Sharp is streetwise in a way that is typical of
the genre; he sees more than others and more quickly, and his success or
58 | Rose
survival rests on an ability to recognize and identify essence. He is not
fooled by appearances, he recognizes affect or concealment, and he is able
to read situations and interpret them at a high level of complexity. He thus
fits Robert Edenbaum’s description of the “ ‘daemonic’ tough guy,” a central
figure of hard-boiled fiction who, Edenbaum observes, “has under his control the pure power that is needed to reach goals, to answer questions and
solve mysteries, to reconstruct the (possible) motivations of the guilty and
innocent alike” (81). He likewise adheres to Sean McCann’s account of the
hard-boiled detective who “conceal[s] extraordinary cleverness beneath
his commonplace exterior” (49). In this opening paragraph, Sharp declares
his heterosexuality in belligerent terms (that will appear in retrospect as
overcompensation) and at the same time displays an essentializing impulse
that is both racialized2 and sexualized.
This tendency of Cain’s “ ‘daemonic’ tough guy” figure to train his
interpretive lens on the subject of sexuality conforms to a convention of
hard-boiled fiction, even as Serenade departs from that convention in its
approach to exposing queerness. In The Homosexual Novel in America,
Roger Austen notes that hard-boiled street wisdom was frequently mobilized as a way of uncovering homosexuality. As Austen observes, “since the
hero [of the tough-guy] novel descended from the hairy-chested he-man
that Hemingway had made famous during the twenties, an attitude of
revulsion toward ‘pansies’ in the Jake Barnes style was de rigueur for the
private eyes, soldiers of fortune, and gangsters who served as tough-guy
characters in the thirties” (85). Skenazy concurs, noting that “the effeminate male is a creature of ridicule and scorn in the tough-guy tradition. He
is the soft-boiled man in a hard-boiled world: vulnerable, gutless, impractical; often a man of high culture characterized by his ‘precious’ tastes”
2 Sharp’s adoption of a racialized discourse here can to some extent be under-
stood against Maureen T. Reddy’s observation that complex “racial codes” are
typically in operation in the hard-boiled novel and that a reiteration of heroic
“white masculinity” is central to the genre. In the hard-boiled tradition, she
notes, “crime and criminality [are] associated with the not-white, not-masculine” (140). As Forter astutely observes of the above passage, however, Sharp’s
“almost hysterically apologetic multiplication of the conjunction ‘but’ … works
at once to condense and confound a racist discourse, since the ‘but’ both installs
a hierarchical opposition between whites and Indians by declaring the temporal
priority of whites, and demolishes that opposition by locating both sets of ‘racial’
attributes in one unthinkably present body” (71–72). In fact, in the same way that
Juana’s status as “not-white” is qualified in this opening passage, so her position
as a “not-masculine” figure is complicated in the novel by her ability to detect
homoeroticism. That is, she performs a task (identifying homosexuality) that
usually falls on the tough-guy protagonist, and so her primitive instincts, in this
respect at least, coincide with the instincts of the (white male) hard-boiled hero.
“An adventure in music” | 59
Occupying the
position of
protagonist and
narrator, Sharp
conjures
knowledge from
experience and
from his
apparent
familiarity with
types.
(55). Certainly, in Serenade, the demonization of the aesthete Winston
Hawes, the more or less openly gay mentor to Sharp, marks an adherence
to this formula; however, the hard-boiled hero’s characteristic ability to
use his cleverness and essence-seeking interpretive skills to discover (and
uncover) gay men—what Austen calls the tough guy’s “knowledgeability
of the ‘third sex’ ”3—is significantly muted in this case by the hero’s partial recognition of his own homoerotic impulses. It is Juana, after all, and
not Sharp, who most forcefully articulates a revulsion of the pansy in the
novel, and it is she who performs the role of sniffing out the homoerotic
relationship at the centre of the story. “ ‘When you love man,’ ” she berates
him, “ ‘you think I no hear? You think I no know?’ ” (143). Sharp, in other
senses, displays the kind of working-class epistemological dynamism that
is typical of the hard-boiled hero: he combines know-how and intuition,
asking us to believe in the expansiveness of his experiential knowledge,
his familiarity with variety, and his skill in negotiating chaos, while at the
same time demanding that we trust his reductive impulses and his tendency to judge people and events by their surfaces. His “knowledgeability
of the ‘third sex’ ” is compromised, however, by his confusion about his
own desires.
An ironic tension thus emerges in Serenade from Cain’s adherence,
on the one hand, to the hard-boiled style, and his decision, on the other,
to build the novel around a sexually ambiguous hard-boiled protagonist.
Occupying the position of protagonist and narrator, Sharp conjures knowledge from experience and from his apparent familiarity with types, and
his “pure power” ensures that when the lens of interpretation is trained
on his own psyche he is incapable of concealing his homoerotic desires. It
is Juana who “outs” him by detecting a “priestly” note in his singing voice,
but it is Sharp, the “ ‘daemonic’ tough-guy,” who finesses a theory—“ ‘every
man has got five percent of that in him’ ”—that permits him to reassert his
masculinity. When the novel poses a link between homosexuality and the
singing voice, a subtle opposition to essentialist thinking surfaces. What
appears at first to be irreducible and unchanging—the most elemental
3 Most famously, perhaps, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe routinely exhibits
an ability to read and act on the most obscure of signs. Austen quotes a passage
from The Big Sleep, in which Marlowe demonstrates his “knowledgeability”
when confronting the young companion of a wealthy gay villain:
“All right,” [Marlowe] said, “You have a key. Let’s go on in.”
“Who said I had a key?”
“Don’t kid me son. The fag gave you one…. He was like Caesar,
a husband to women and wife to men. Think I can’t figure people
like him and you out?” (quoted in Austen 85)
60 | Rose
qualities of the human voice—turns out to be susceptible to external forces
(specifically, a man who triggers a sexual attraction). Sharp’s singing voice
betrays his homoerotic impulse, which turns out to be an essential ingredient of his psyche, the previously dormant “five percent” that works to such
devastatingly emasculating effect and that makes him sound, in Juana’s
words, “ ‘just like a priest’ ” (48).
In “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” Philip Brett insists that
homosexuality and musicality have long been associated as terms of identification. “[I]t is surely no coincidence,” Brett writes, “that among the many
code words and phrases for a homosexual man before Stonewall (and
even since), ‘musical’ (as in, ‘Is he “musical” do you think?’) ranked with
others such as ‘friend of Dorothy’ as safe insider euphemisms.” “Musicality
and gay identity,” Brett continues, “exist in an uneasy relationship to one
another” (11). Wayne Koestenbaum corroborates this sense of an uneasy
relationship, noting that, “In ‘The Critic as Artist,’ [Oscar] Wilde observed
that music can create in the listener the illusion of ‘terrible experiences,’
of ‘fearful joys, or wild romantic loves,’ even if the listener seems to have
led ‘a perfectly commonplace life’ ” (190). In both Wilde and in his mentor Walter Pater, Koestenbaum observes, music was used “to symbolize
a homosexuality they could not state clearly in words; they loved what
they were unable to say” (190).4 An even more profound and longstanding
association can be traced between a queer sensibility and opera. As Peter
Rabinowitz notes, gender ambiguities were inherent to the castrati of the
early Italian opera tradition, and (later) English writers of the eighteenth
century, such as Defoe, Swift, and Pope, expressed concern over “opera’s
breakdown of sexual difference” (174). Against these long-standing associations of opera with transgressive sexuality, John Howard Sharp’s (and
Cain’s) efforts to impose on the genre a belligerently hetero aesthetic seem
both audacious and perversely ironic.
In fact, Cain’s effort to dissociate the transgressive elements of opera
from its vital power—that is, his attempts to assert opera as an essentially
4 In contrast, Koestenbaum notes, “writers like Max Nordau and Friedrich Ni-
etzsche … saw music’s connection to the queerness around them, but they didn’t
salute the rising queerness: they tried to quell it” (190). “According to Nietzsche,”
Koestenbaum writes, “Wagner’s use of instruments has the seductiveness to
‘persuade even the intestines (they open the gates, as Händel put it).’ ” To which
Koestenbaum adds, hilariously, “it seems ironic that Nietzsche should borrow an
anal metaphor from queer Händel to perform a homophobic critique of Wagner” (191). Interestingly enough, the other homoerotic relationship in Serenade,
the argumentative musical friendship between Sharp and Captain Connors,
at one point reaches unequivocal agreement on the merits of Händel: “’Tis
something to be grateful for,” the captain muses, “the awakening to Händel” (76).
“An adventure in music” | 61
macho art form whose moments of transcendence are compromised by
its performers’ indulgence of homoerotic desire—is undermined by his
protagonist’s explanation for his own homoerotic impulses. Sharp’s claim
that “ ‘every man has got five percent of that in him’ ” functions as a strategy
of containment in this respect, a counter-metaphor to the idea that (homo)
sexuality operates, in Foucault’s terms, as an “insidious and indefinitely
active principle” (43). As Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, the
nineteenth century marked the emergence of the term homosexual, when
it was “transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgyny, and hermaphrodism of the soul”:
Nothing that went into [the nineteenth-century homosexual’s]
total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it
was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written
immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that
always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as
a habitual sin than as a singular nature. (43)
The “sexuality” of the homosexual is here framed as the irreducible element of his makeup. “It” represents the complete realization of a process
of reduction that ultimately ends in irreducibility. Every conceivable trait,
physical or psychic, is reduced to (and by) sexuality until a singular nature
remains, the irreducible entity known as the “homosexual.” Sharp’s conviction that each man harbours a latent “ ‘five percent’ ” that can be activated
under special circumstances amounts to an anxious opposition to the “hermaphrodism of the soul” reading offered by Foucault. For while Winston
Hawes may play the role of the “one person” who can activate Sharp’s latent
homosexuality, he is presented as one of many, part of a subculture that has
found its way, insidiously, into the world of hetero art. Sharp’s insinuating
description of the opera enthusiasts who follow Winston Hawes betrays
a fear that extends well beyond his attraction to the man:
It was the same mob he had had in Paris, [Sharp laments,]
clothes more expensive than you would see even at a Hollywood opening, gray-haired women with straight haircuts and
men’s dinner jackets, young girls looking each other straight
in the eye and not caring what you thought, boys following
men around, loud, feverish talk out in the foyer, everybody
coming out in the open with something they wouldn’t dare
show anywhere else. (131)
62 | Rose
Sharp’s attitude here is conflicted in a way that reflects the novel’s larger
contradictions. His antagonism is directed at the crowd itself, the queerness of it, but more pointedly at its infiltration into a specific realm, the
opera house. At the same time, there is a clear sense that he believes this
queer crowd belongs in opera’s community, or at least that its infiltration
is complete. They wouldn’t “dare show” their deviant behaviour “anywhere
else,” he complains, thus acknowledging opera’s receptiveness to gay culture, even as he tries to assert the poisonous effects of this infiltration.
In a discussion of the figure of the “opera queen,” Paul Robinson points
to a hostility toward the affiliation between gay men and lesbians and
opera. Despite this long-standing association, whose historical roots, Robinson speculates, “lie in the distinctive repressions of Victorians,” resistance to the idea endures. There are “heterosexual opera-lovers who rail
against the notion,” Robinson writes, “in part, I suspect, because it seems
to bring their own sexual identity into question” (159). In fact, as Robinson
points out, the hostility is not restricted to heterosexual sources. He offers
as an example of intra-community hostility a passage from Bruce Bawer’s
A Place at the Table:
It demeans opera, and it demeans those of us who happen to
be gay but who also happen to love opera for itself, not for
some psychological boost it supposedly gives us as gay people.
To be a gay opera fan is not necessarily to be an “opera queen.”
Opera is art. I don’t respond to it as a gay man who identifies with divas or finds the melodrama wonderfully campy
or thinks that the whole thing speaks in some special way to
me as a homosexual; I respond to it as a human being who’s
capable of appreciating beauty. (quoted in Robinson 161)
This rejection of essence—of what it is “to be a gay opera fan”—is reminiscent of John Howard Sharp’s (and Cain’s) rejection of any elements in
opera that would open it to a queer sensibility. Indeed, the most striking
element of the intensely homophobic thematics of Serenade is the degree
to which they are directed at an art form that has so deep and complex a
history of sexual transgression.
In an analysis of the role music plays in several of Cain’s works,5 Rabinowitz argues that “Cain’s perceptions … replay familiar myths about
opera, class, and sexuality” (174). Rabinowitz acknowledges the homophobic character of Serenade but maintains that “Cain’s novels can offer
5 Rabinowitz’s discussion also makes reference to Career in C Major (1938), Mildred Pierce (1941), The Butterfly (1947), and The Moth (1948).
“An adventure in music” | 63
valuable insights into the relationship between music and ethics” (168).
“The issue,” he writes,
is not whether Cain’s sociological analysis of the interconnections of culture, class, and sexuality is correct. The point,
rather, is that Cain tries to remedy the perceived problem by
proposing an alternative way of listening, one that is straight,
masculine, and working class. Or, to put it more accurately,
he tries to come up with a set of attributive strategies that is
consistent with what he believes to be the worldview of the
working-class guy who uses steel and goes for football. (175)
Rabinowitz misses a crucial point here by ignoring the extent to which it is
precisely Cain’s wonky sociological analysis that leads him to close off an
alternative way of listening. Far from offering an alternative, Cain’s efforts
to impose on opera a distinctly working class, white male hetero aesthetic can in fact be understood in the context of what Allison McCracken
refers to as the emergence of a “hegemonic national culture” in the 1930s.
According to McCracken, the materialization of this culture was founded
on the “establishment of national gender norms,” which were made possible in large part because “the representation of sexual difference was
banned from public entertainment and mass media, thus greatly narrowing the spectrum of accepted gender behaviour” (366). The homophobic
characterization of the opera crowd in Serenade reflects this agenda, as
does the novel’s assertion that the male singing voice is compromised by
an indulgence of homoerotic desire. At least in terms of its engagement
with music and accepted gender behaviour, Cain’s novel falls squarely into
a cultural mainstream by conforming to a conservatively heterosexual
notion of musicality.
For a number of reasons, however, locating Serenade within this nexus
of cultural reaction is misleading. Just as the strangeness of the novel
determines its ambivalent relationship to the genre of hard-boiled fiction,
so its internal contradictions and its depiction of a same-sex relationship
ensure that it cannot be slotted easily into a cultural movement toward
hetero-normativity. For one thing, the novel was controversial; it was
widely denounced upon publication, and so, from the standpoint of its
reception at least, should not be viewed as an artifact of cultural hegemony.6 Moreover, contrary to the trend McCracken identifies, Serenade
does represent sexual difference. Its homoerotic elements are overt and
6 Hoopes reports that the Catholic Church’s denunciation of the novel upon its
publication was thought by Cain and others to have adversely affected sales
64 | Rose
acknowledged, despite Sharp’s declaration that the object of his homoerotic attraction, Winston Hawes, is the “ ‘one son-of-a-bitch that’s been
the curse of [his] life’ ” (145). In this respect, the relationship between Sharp
and Hawes departs from the model outlined by Eve Sedgwick in Between
Men, in which “sanctioned forms of male-homosocial bonding,” including
certain moments in novels, can appear “with only a slight shift of optic,
quite startlingly ‘homosexual’ ” (89). Serenade distinguishes itself from the
sort of barely concealed homosocial bonding to which Sedgwick refers
by performing the shift in optic for us, by making explicit a homoerotic
attraction. In so doing, the novel distances itself from the very attributive
strategies to which Rabinowitz alludes. The novel’s assertion of a “straight,
masculine, and working class” way of listening is crucially qualified by its
protagonist’s (albeit tortured) recognition that his own musical sensibilities have been at least partially formed through a homoerotic encounter.
Serenade thus departs from the hard-boiled genre’s standard depiction
of gay men, even as it villainizes them in the most conventional terms.
Austen contends that gay male characters in tough-guy novels occupied
a dual role that was both complementary and contradictory: they were,
he writes, “useful as weak-sister antitheses to the macho heroes—rather
than being hard-boiled, they were laughably easy-over—but at the same
time these weak sisters had to be presented as villains rather than victims”
(85). The “weak-sister” villain presented obvious aesthetic problems, however: a too-weak villain posed no threat and therefore failed to bring out
the requisite degree of toughness in the he-man protagonist. Pitting the
“easy-over” gay villain against the “hard-boiled” protagonist thus required
a compensating element, something to balance the emasculation that was
built into the gay character as a matter of convention. As Austen observes,
“the problem of how to shape a pansy with ‘no iron in his bones’ into a
menacing force was solved in The Big Sleep and Serenade in a way that
must have been most satisfying for readers during the Depression: the gay
characters were extremely wealthy and powerful and thus more oppressive
than oppressed” (85). Although Austen accurately describes the role that
Winston Hawes plays in the novel as a demonized gay man, he ignores the
unconventional deployment of John Howard Sharp as both “weak-sister”
and hard-boiled he-man. To suggest that the treatment of homosexuality
in Serenade fits the generic convention described by Austen is therefore
of the book (283–84). Some years later, in 1948, Cain had to defend the novel
against charges of obscenity in a lawsuit in the State of Massachusetts (Hoopes
443–44).
“An adventure in music” | 65
Serenade thus
departs from
the hard-boiled
genre’s standard
depiction of gay
men, even as it
villainizes them
in the most
conventional
terms.
to disregard the highly unconventional confluence in the novel between
opera, homoeroticism, and hard-boiled style as it manifests itself in the
figure of John Howard Sharp.
Despite its determination to uphold a hard-boiled aesthetic (and all
the homophobic sentiment that goes with it), Serenade engages with
larger questions of aesthetics in ways that complicate its apparent hostility toward all things queer. John Howard Sharp is not merely a singer;
he is a self-appointed authority who frequently indulges in diatribes on
filmmaking, acting, recording, classical music and opera, and, especially,
singing. In this respect, he applies the knowledgeability of the hard-boiled
hero to the realm of the aesthetic. He offers decisive, no-nonsense appraisals of art that mirror in their clipped yet insightful articulation the classic
hard-boiled protagonist’s displays of street wisdom. In one amusing passage, in a discussion of the relative merits of McCormack’s performance
of Händel, we get this exchange:
“He had a great voice.”
“He could have the Magic Flute in his throat and I’d never
know it.”
“Well, he goddam near had the Magic Flute in his throat, if
somebody happened to ask you. And your ears knew it, even
if your head didn’t. He had a great voice, not just a good voice.
I don’t mean big. It was never big, though it was big enough.
But what makes a great voice is beauty, not size, and beauty will
get you, I don’t care if it’s a man throat or a woman’s leg.” (77)7
In contrast to the confident tone expressed here, Sharp’s assessments
of Winston Hawes are strikingly uncertain and even contradictory. He
describes Hawes as “the man that had done more for modern music than
anybody since Muck,” but he then denies the composer’s brilliance and
originality with oddly unformed explanations. “There was something
wrong about the way he thought about music,” Sharp claims, “something
unhealthy, like the crowds you always saw at his concerts, and what it
was I can only half tell you” (127). Echoing Rabinowitz, Forter argues that
Hawes stands for “an excessively cultured ‘homosexual’ disposition that
the novel reads as the flaccid cause of pervasive cultural decay” (58). But
7 The anatomical emphasis of this dialogue is reminiscent of Koestenbaum’s dis-
cussion of homosexuality and opera. “The throat,” he writes, “for gay men, is
a problem and a joy: it is the zone of fellatio. Not everyone chooses fellatio:
gayness doesn’t depend on oral sex, and straightness includes it. But sexuality,
as a symbolic system of checks and balances, measures and countermeasures,
has chosen the throat as a place where gay men come into their own” (156).
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Sharp himself is strangely at a loss for words on the question of Hawes’s
shortcomings, particularly in light of the sheer conviction and volume
of opinion that he otherwise displays. He is overbearingly assured in his
assessments of opera and of what constitutes great singing, but he is oddly
unable to pin down what is wrong with Hawes’s approach to music and
instead struggles with vague impressions. He can “only half tell you” what
offends him.
Meanwhile, Sharp cannot quite suppress the joy of his musical encounters with Hawes. “ ‘I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t admit it was an
adventure in music I’ll never forget,’ ” he reluctantly acknowledges. “ ‘I sang
for him four times, and each time it was something new, something fresh,
and a performance better than you even knew you could give.… Perfection is something no singer ever got yet, but under him you came as near
to it as you’re ever going to get’ ” (129). Sharp’s contradictory assessments
of Hawes’s musical talents reflect a more deeply grounded contradiction
in Serenade, specifically in its approach to questions of aesthetics and
especially to the influence exerted by the homoerotic impulse on singing.
Sharp’s need to find fault in Hawes’s approach to music (despite recognizing his brilliance) mirrors, and is part of, his refusal to embrace his sexual
attraction to the man. In the above quotation, Sharpe’s abrupt shift to the
second-person pronoun to describe his experiences with Hawes indicates
a desire to universalize the account, to distance himself from the attraction
that bursts at the seams of his tale. But he cannot conceal his affection for
Hawes. When Hawes is stabbed to death by Juana in a bizarre re-enactment of the final scene of Carmen, Sharp continues to express confused
and contradictory emotions. His initial reaction is crass celebration—“I
wanted to laugh, and cheer, and yell Olé!” (158)—but the sight of the dead
man soon has him retching, a more appropriate response, even if Sharp
cannot ever equate it with grief.
The full measure of the contradiction that emerges from Cain’s attempt
to unite a musical sensibility with the aesthetic of the hard-boiled hero
(and yet deny any traces of queerness in that convergence) reveals itself
in the use of a shark fin as a unifying (and yet contradictory) metaphor.
The metaphor is first used by the sea captain, Connors, who transports
Sharp and Juana from Mexico to California. Apropos of their aesthetically
inclined conversation on the deck of the ship, Connors, seeing a shark
swimming in the waters nearby, embraces the image as an emblem to
describe the sublime beauty of Mexico. “ ‘ ’Tis the knowledge of what lurks
below the surface of it,’ ” he tells Sharp, “ ‘that awful-looking thing, as you
call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with
“An adventure in music” | 67
all beauty’ ” (79). Later in the novel, when Hawes has re-entered Sharp’s
life and has precipitated, yet again, a loss of Sharp’s singing voice, Sharp
frames his re-awakened homoerotic attraction as a descent into the abyss,
one that is signaled by the same metaphor that Connors had earlier used
to describe the terrible beauty of the Mexican people. Sharp’s invocation
of the shark fin as metaphor ignores its association with beauty, though,
and instead he uses it merely to express a terror of his own sexuality and,
in particular, of his inability to conceal it from Juana: “I wanted to shut
it out,” he laments, “the whole horrible thing she had showed me, where
she had ripped the cover off my whole life, dragged out what was down
there all the time. I screwed my eyes shut, kept pulling the pillow around
my ears. But one thing kept slicing up at me, no matter what I did. It was
the fin of that shark” (144).8 Despite itself, Serenade seems to align beauty
with the homoerotic impulse in fairly clear terms: the shark fin, used first
to describe an intimation of the sublime, becomes the image by which
Sharp understands the depth of his attraction to Winston Hawes. Thus
the novel advances the case for a homoerotic sublime, a love between men
that provokes terror but that yields beauty.
Ultimately, of course, Serenade repudiates this idea by crassly attributing the loss of Sharp’s singing voice to his susceptibility to loving another
man, but not before leaving the impression of a tragic incongruity between
the novel’s assertion of a love between Sharp and Hawes that offers beauty
and its need to squash it with an absurd theory. Writing on the sublime,
Edmund Burke observed that “When danger or pain press too nearly,
they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at
certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they
are, delightful” (13–14). For a time, Sharp adjusts his distance from Winston Hawes, embraces the sublime beauty of his attraction, and expresses
delight. In the end, however, he (and Cain) recoil, Hawes is murdered by
Juana, and the attraction between the men is left to seem only terrible.
Cain famously distanced himself from the genre of hard-boiled fiction. “I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise,” he claimed in the
8 Cain earlier employs the image of the shark in the closing pages of his 1936 novel
Double Indemnity. Soon after we learn that Walter Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger
plan to jump to their deaths at sea, a sailor they encounter on deck tells them,
“ ‘There’s a shark. Following the ship.’ ” Upon hearing this news, Phyllis insists
that they wait until the moon is up before carrying out their suicide pact: “ ‘I
want to see that fin,’ ” she tells Huff. “ ‘That black fin. Cutting the water in the
moonlight’ ” (114). Perhaps anticipating some strain of the tortured psychology
of John Howard Sharp, Huff, waiting for the moon to rise, confesses, “I keep
thinking about that shark” (114).
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preface to his 1946 novel The Butterfly (352). And indeed, Serenade is in
some respects too weird to function as a commentary on any genre. Its
attempt to incorporate the high-end aesthetic of opera into the low-end of
hard-boiled style marks the novel as a conscious departure from convention that to some extent validates Cain’s claims to singularity. Ultimately,
though, Serenade’s bizarre attempt to absorb queer opera into a hardboiled aesthetic, and to purge it of its queer elements, has the paradoxical
effect of lodging it firmly in the hard-boiled tradition and of bringing to
light certain anxieties of the genre that were present all along.
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