Jimmy Cagney — or Does the Way We Fight Make Us Strong or Weak?

The Fight in Jimmy Cagney

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #151, Eli Siegel writes:

To be born is to engage, willy-nilly and constantly, in the great fight between the seeing of the world as uncouth, unwelcome, painful; and as profound, subtle, engaging.

Jimmy Cagney had that fight. He was born July 17, 1899, the second child of James and Carolyn Cagney. They lived first on Avenue D and 8th Street, and then uptown, always struggling to get a decent meal on the table. Then a baby sister and brother died of childhood illnesses. With all this, there was an energy in the Cagney household of four boys and a girl that was admirable. Jimmy Cagney writes in his autobiography Cagney by Cagney, "We were a musical family, with the piano always on the go."

One of the things that pained Jimmy Cagney was the way he saw his father. James Cagney, Sr. had a hard time holding down a job, and was often not home for long stretches at a time, suddenly reappearing. Cagney was bitter about his father, who was alcoholic. In his mother, however, he saw something steadier. She apparently had a mingling of sweetness and toughness he cared for. "We loved...the great staunchness of her," Cagney writes. There was a great deal of pain between Cagney's parents, and then, Carolyn Cagney made the decision to have her husband committed to jail to cure his alcoholism. At his mother's instruction, Jimmy Cagney served the detention papers on his own father. He writes:

We stood there in the hallway...and he cried when I gave him the papers—we both did. I put my arms around him. 'I'm sorry, Pop,' I said...He never forgave us...

That memory haunted Jimmy Cagney all his life. He said years later that maybe this one time he should have disobeyed his mother. I think Cagney felt guilty because this stood for what he was too ready to do in his mind—get rid of a person who he did not understand, who seemed complicated and troubling, and this, I learned, is a way of fighting the world.

Growing up, Jimmy Cagney met the ill-will of the profit system which has made families have to fight just to live. When he was 15, he held down three jobs simultaneously to bring home money. To his credit he didn't give in to self-pity or withdraw; in fact he often met tough situations with energy. But I believe there was also a terrific desire in Jimmy Cagney to fight, to swiftly and contemptuously put the world and people in their place. He tells of an incident concerning his little sister Jeanne:

I'll never forget. She was crying and holding open the ice-box door. I gave her a...kick in the behind, and told her to close the door... She looked at me with those big eyes, tears streaming down her face. I wanted to cut my throat.

Cagney felt awful because he got a sight of how unkind and mean he could be. Like men today, he needed to hear Aesthetic Realism's definitive criticism of contempt, how it worked in him and how it could change.

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