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  • “An adventure in music I’ll never forget”:Opera, Queerness, and the Hard-Boiled Style in James M. Cain’s Serenade
  • Robert Rose (bio)

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 [End Page 55] … 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...

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