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Presto: Con Mlizia
(Cornell Woolrich)

I've held off on public comment for a long time; I'm perhaps the author's primary source of information on Woolrich in his last years and in the summary chapter my own career and collected works are noted favorably ("a kind of noir science fiction . . ." science fiction, Nevins feels, as if Woolrich had written it and certainly some of the early works, particularly The Empty People or In the Enclosure have the closed, hermetic feel of a Woolrich stalk and a similar mindlessness of unidentifiable but efficient menace). Rather to speed the parting guest to review this unfavorably, a kind of mutuality of layoff if I write approvingly. But four years will have lapsed since publication by the time this review is printed, the book (which won an Edgar for biography in 1989) is effectively out of print and commentary of any kind will not affect the fate of this massive biography nor have any particular effect on Cornell's collected works or mine, their fate by now wholly disentangled from lives and circumstance.

I was Cornell's literary agent at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency from late 1966 until late 1967 when the agency summarily dismissed me for non-Woolrichian reasons (I found my way back that time scant months later); I talked with him a lot, got drunk with him once, refused invitations several times thereafter to get drunk with him, bought him dinner (my wife was along) at his hotel, introduced him to the editor of Escapade magazine, Ted Leighton, who published the last Woolrich story in his lifetime (Warrant of Arrest, April 1968) and then had no contact with Cornell thereafter, seeing him only past the end laid out on September 4, 1968 in the Campbell Funeral Home where, on late Friday afternoon, the second day of his embalming, the only names above mine on the visitor card were those of Cylvia and Leo Margulies. The reasons for my abandonment of Cornell do not reflect great credit upon either of us: I simply ran out of patience. Fuller details of our professional relationship, all of which are reliably reported, are in the biography. Nevins is convinced—and would convince the reader—that Woolrich was a practicing homosexual and that his fiction (emerging from his closeted self-loathing, loneliness, self-deception and despair) was wholly framed by his sexuality, that the fiction can only be fully understood or appreciated in terms of a condition which Nevins regards as pathological. (And which certainly through all the years of Cornell's lifetime was so regarded by the great majority of the populace and by the American Psychiatric Association.)

But Nevins has no credible evidence. This bothered me from the beginning; essays adumbrating this book, some of them fed directly into it, began appearing in publications like The Armchair Detective in the mid-seventies and from the beginning Nevins ascribed homosexuality to his subject. The only evidence which he was able to produce (we had extensive correspondence about this in the late seventies and early eighties) was a poorly recorded, almost inaudible cassette recording of an interview Nevins stated he had conducted with Woolrich's sister-in-law, the sister of the woman to whom Cornell had been briefly married in the late 1920s (and who had died long ago). The voice of the sister-in-law told her interrogator that her sister had told her this. Then her sister had told her that. Her sister had said that Cornell had told her this. Her sister had said that Cornell had told her that. Two (or counting Nevins) three levels of hearsay were invoked and none of them constituted the kind of evidence which would stand up in a court of law for five minutes. As the German filmmaker with whom I discussed this in 1985 said (he was in NYC to film a brief documentary on Cornell centering around the Columbia University exhibit and which was later shown on television in his country). This man is a lawyer, surely he must understand how ridiculous this evidence is." But Nevins goes at it with a prosecutor's zeal, takes no witnesses for the defense, dons the judge's robes and asks for a directed verdict of homosexuality. He gets it from his jury of one—he has been able to scurry during that final charge into the jury box—and he announces that verdict on at least 250 pages of his enormous book. Perhaps 350. I have not, with similar prosecutorial zeal, sat and counted, although if I were the late James Blish I certainly would.

I don't particularly care—and neither should any reader at the end of the millennium, decades after this wretched man's death—whether Cornell was homosexual. Nevins' case has always been disturbing to me, however, because what he carries on is in fact a prosecution and in indicting Woolrich for perceived homosexuality, he is trying to force any interpretation of the writer's work then as a "homosexual vision." This is reductive. It is, if accepted, inevitably a reduction of the writer's vision and the sense of the material. Hemingway's work is not read as that of a terrified and self-loathing misogynist (although there is far more objective evidence of this than of any for Cornell's homosexuality), Faulkner's work is not read as the outpouring of a Southern bigot and Negro-hater (although any perusal of the published correspondence will indicate that this great writer certainly was). Any attempt to frame reading of those writers in such terms would be resisted; any label pasted on a writer which will facilitate categorization is inherently reductive. Some writers have been destroyed by this kind of labelling (Chandler, Hammett and the rest of the congregation are "genre writers," Reynolds Price or Eudora Welty are "southern gothic," Flannery O'Connor or Shirley Jackson are "women writers of the grotesque"). It is the more reductive and dangerous for Woolrich, however, because his angst, the reflexive horror of his visions cannot be seen (in the absence of any real evidence) as mere examples of pathology. Such framing reduces the writer and the work and does so in ways which are irreparable.

Nevins has no evidence beyond his passion and beyond that cassette recording. He says that the late Random House editor, Lee Wright (1909-1986) stated that Woolrich was a homosexual who had made a pass at a male friend of Wright's while going somewhere in a taxi, but this is double hearsay in the first place and in the second place, I knew Lee Wright and she thought a lot of people were homosexuals and liked to say so. Many of them who she chattily named are alive but one other of them is dead: Raymond Chandler. There is a certain kind of personality which will see homosexuals, Communists, liberal Democrats, Jews, everywhere but that personality should function, at best, as the first line of inquiry, not the last.

Gary Indiana, a bright and capable writer and social critic, reviewed this book for The Village Voice in early 1989. He did not like it too well and he deconstructed it pretty good, but what I found most interesting and provocative is that Indiana—a homosexual who has written intensely and autobiographically of his sexuality and many other things—in the process of attacking the book for poor research and lack of enterprise ("if someone could find Genet's old tricks on the docks forty years later, you would have thought that Nevins could at least have looked for someone") utterly accepted the basic premise; there is a monomaniacal, one might say hallucinatory quality to the Nevins prose and its assumptions which does not exactly parallel the Master's own but can have a similar effect and Indiana's failure to carry through his lack of credulity at the research and conclusions to the sourcing itself is disturbing. It would indicate that Nevins has, in the sense that he might well perceive the issue, "won," he has succeeded in making homosexuality in the case of Woolrich an accepted fact and the doctoral thesis and library editions of the next century, assuming that there will be any, will proceed from the "facts" which Nevins has put so insistently into print and for which he has won the highest award of his field. "Forget it," Norman Kagan said to me years ago in relation to my opinions of NASA and the American body politic, "It's like you're talking on a street corner somewhere and you're going up against a team with megaphones and satellite communications. It's not that you're wrong, it's just that the situation is hopeless. Stop blaming yourself."

Well, okay. Nevins has the megaphone, I have a few scrappy signed books and a little primary material, all of which was fed into the one essay on Woolrich (it's in Engines of the Night) which Nevins adapted. But for the record: I never noted any evidence of homosexuality in Cornell. He did not proposition me nor did he lay a hand upon my knee nor ask me to join with him in admiration of a passing stranger. He did not phrase this nor he did not state that. Of course, following the Nevins line of logic, this proves the case; note the bleakness and totality of the repression here, the precision of the reaction-formation. No Edgars for me, lads and ladies, and no gilt editions either but one last bleating mumble as I sink and sink; Nevins has no case. Presto con malizia.

 

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