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Cornell George Hopley Woolrich:
December 1903 to September 1968

At the end, in the last year, he looked three decades older. The booze had wrecked him, the markets had wrecked him, he had wrecked him; by the time that friends dragged him out in April to St. Clare's Hospital where they took off the gangrenous leg, he had the stunned aspect of the very old. Where there had been edges there was now only the gelatinous material that when probed would not rebound.

Nonetheless, if the booze had stripped all but bone it had left his eyes moist and open, childlike and vulnerable. That September in the open coffin, surrounded by flowers sent by the Chase Manhattan Bank, he looked young; he looked like the man who in his late twenties had loafed around the ballrooms and written of the debutantes.

There were five names in the guest book, Leo and Cylvia Margulies of Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine leading off. Leo died in December 1975 and Cylvia divested herself of the publication about two years later.

He died in print. The April 1968 Escapade had a story, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine had taken his stunning "New York Blues" to publish it two years later; that novelette had been written in late 1967. Ace Books had embarked upon an ambitious program of reissue which brought The Bride Wore Black, Rendezvous in Black, Phantom Lady, and others back into the mass market. Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black was in production. The Ellery Queen hardcover mystery annual had a story. Now, more than a decade later, he is out of print; an item for the specialty and university presses, an occasional republication in an Ellery Queen annual. Ace let the books go a long time past: poor sales. There are no other paperbacks. The hardcovers—what few copies remain—are for the collectors.

"It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? . . . I really loved to write."

His mother Claire died in 1956. Shortly thereafter his own work virtually ceased. A novel—never published—found with his effects; it had been rejected all over New York in the early sixties. A few short stories for Ellery Queen and The Saint Mystery Magazine. His relationship with his mother had been the central—it is theorized that it was the only—relationship of his life; they had lived together continuously for her last fourteen years. When she died, he lived alone in one room on the second floor of the Sheraton-Russell Hotel in Manhattan surrounded by cases and cases of beer cans and bottles of whiskey, and invited the staff to come up and drink with him and watch television. Sometimes he would sit in the lobby; more occasionally he would take a cab to McSorley's Tavern in the village. The gangrene which came from an ill-fitting shoe and which untreated turned his left leg to charcoal, slowly, from early 1967 to April 1968, ended all that; he would stay in his room and drink almost all the time and stare at the television looking for a film from one of his novels or short stories which came on often enough and usually after 2 A.M.; between the movies and the alcohol he was finally able to find sleep. For a few hours. Until ten or eleven in the morning, when it would all start again. At the end he had almost none of his books left in the room: he had given them all away to casual visitors. Bellboys. Maids. The night manager. An employee of his literary agent. He could not bear to have his work around him anymore.

"I got six hundred dollars from Alfred Hitchcock for the movie rights to 'Rear Window.' That's all that I got; it was one story in a collection of eight that was sold in the forties by the agent H. N. Swanson for five thousand dollars; he sold everything for five thousand dollars; that's why we all called him five grand Swannie. But that didn't bother me really; what bothered me was that Hitchcock wouldn't even send me a ticket to the premiere in New York. He knew where I lived. He wouldn't even send me a ticket."

The novels were curiously cold for all of their effects and mercilessly driven, but the characters, particularly the female characters, who were the protagonists of many of them, were rendered with great sensitivity and were always in enormous pain. That was one of the mysteries of Woolrich's work for the editors and writers who knew him: how could a man who could not relate to women at all, who had had a brief and terrible marriage annulled when he was twenty-five, who had lived only alone or with his mother since . . . how could such a man have had such insight into women, write of them with such compassion, make these creatures of death and love dance and crumple on the page? Some theorized that the writer could identify with these women because that was the terrible and essential part of him which could never be otherwise acknowledged. Others simply called it a miracle: a miracle that a lonely man in a hotel room could somehow create, populate, and justify the world.

"I tried to move out. In 1942 I lived alone in a hotel room for three weeks and then one night she called me and said, 'I can't live without you, I must live with you, I need you,' and I put down the phone and I packed and I went back to that place and for the rest of her life I never spent a night away from her, not one. I know what they thought of me, what they said about me, but I just didn't care. I don't regret it and I'll never regret it as long as I live."

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work and stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to Black Mask and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibilities, but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimaxes to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple Chandler had verged toward this more than a little; there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature, but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations. Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it, but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death, but the novels and short stories of Woolrich were death—in all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.

Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract Truffaut, whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre and the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. Nothing at all . . . but the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.

"I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried."

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out-of-control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalistic" or the "incredible" was all pretty much the same to him. Rendezvous in Black, The Bride Wore Black, Nightmare are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession, and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the "fantastic" was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer, was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent; the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. "Jane Brown's Body" is a suspense story. The Bride Wore Black is science fiction. Phantom Lady is a gothic. Rendezvous in Black was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.

"I'm glad you liked Phantom Lady but I can't help you, you see. I can't accept your praise. The man who wrote that novel died a long, long time ago. He died a long, long time ago."

At the end, amidst the cases and the bottles and the empty glasses as the great black leg became turgid and began to stink, there was nothing at all. The television did not help, the whiskey left no stain, the bellhops could not bring distraction. They carried him out to St. Clare's and cut off the leg in April and sent him back in June with a prosthesis; the doctors were cheerful. "He has a chance," they said. "It all depends upon his will to live." At the Sheraton-Russell they came to his doors with trays, food, bottles, advice. They took good care of him. They helped him on his crutches to the lobby and put him in the plush chair at the near door so that he could see lobby traffic. They were unfailingly kind. They brought him into the dining room and brought him out. They took him upstairs. They took him downstairs. They stayed with him. They created a network of concern: the Woolrich network in the Sheraton-Russell.

In September, like Delmore Schwartz, he had a stroke in a hotel corridor; in September, like Schwartz in an earlier August, he died instantly. He lay in the Campbell funeral parlor in a business suit for three days surrounded by flowers from Chase Manhattan.

His will left $850,000 to Columbia University (he had inherited money; the markets didn't leave him much) to establish a graduate creative writing program in memory of Claire. He had been a writer of popular fiction, had never had a serious review in the United States, had struggled from cheap pulp magazines to genre hardcover and paperback. Sure he wanted respectability; a university cachet. Sure. Why not? Who wouldn't?

"Life is death. Death is in life. To hold your own true love in your arms and see the skeleton she will be; to know that your love leads to death, that death is all there is, that is what I know and what I do not want to know and what I cannot bear. Don't leave me. Don't leave me.

"Don't leave me now, Barry."

 

1980: New Jersey

 

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