Into The Night (27 page)

Where the population's only two--

She started. Was she hallucinating? Or was it her song, playing on the radio?

The tune was unfamiliar, nothing she had heard before. But the lyric was hers, the one lyrical fragment Dell had commented favorably on. The rest of the lyric was as unfamiliar to her as the melody. She heard the song all the way through, entranced by it, and at the end her bit of lyric returned as the song's climax.

You and I, together all alone,

In a little country of our own,

Where the population's only two.

It was easy to guess what must have happened. Dell, even more impressed by the words than she'd cared to admit, had passed them on to a professional songwriter. And he'd incorporated them in a song, stealing them without a qualm, and now a singer had recorded the song and it was getting air play. It might even become a hit.

The irony of it, she thought. That a song with that particular lyric should become popular at just this stage of her life.

Because here she was, just as she'd been at the beginning. All alone, on a desert island of her own.

Where the population's only one.

She was scanning the radio dial, trying to find the song on another station, when there was a knock on the door.

The police, she thought.

She turned off the radio, approached the door. "Who is it?" she called.

The response was muffled. She couldn't make it out.

"Who is it?"

"Why don't you open the door and find out?"

It was his voice! Her heart leaped. She opened the door and thrilled at the sight of him.

"A funny thing happened," he said. "I went through what you must have gone through a year ago, except the gun didn't misfire and it didn't go off and shoot somebody else, either. What happened just took place in my mind, but it added up to the same thing. I chose life."

Her heart hammered in her breast. She looked into his eyes, felt his strength.

"What do you choose, Madeline?"

She was in his arms. He pressed her close, stroked her hair.

You and I, together all alone,

In a little country of our own,

Where the population's only two--

Hadn't she turned off the radio? Of course she had. But the music was playing in her heart, in her mind. Once before she had chosen life--life alone, life of purposeful vengeance. Now once again she chose life--life with him, life spent in love.

The music swelled, drowning all thought.

Afterword by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

On September 25, 1968, in a corridor of Manhattan's Sheraton Russell Hotel, a one-legged man in a wheelchair suffered a stroke. He was sixty-four years old but looked almost ninety. His name was Cornell Woolrich. He was the greatest writer of suspense fiction that ever lived. His two dozen novels and more than two hundred short stories and novelettes had the same wrenching impact, the same resonance of terror and anguish and loneliness and despair, as the darkest films of his cinematic soul-brother, Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent most of his adult years living in a residential hotel with his mother, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship with her and in the quicksand of his own homosexual self-contempt. When she died, he cracked, and began his own slow journey to the grave.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. He spent much of his childhood in Mexico with his father, a civil engineer. When he was eight, his maternal grandfather took him to Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts to see a traveling French company perform Puccini's -Madame Butterfly-. The experience gave the young Woolrich his first insight into color and drama, and his first sense of tragedy. Three years later, on a night when he looked up at the low-hanging stars from the valley of Anahuac, he understood that someday, like Cio-Cio-San, he too would have to die. From that moment on he was haunted by a sense of doom. "I had that trapped feeling," he wrote in his unfinished autobiography, "like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't."

During his adolescence he lived with his mother and aunt and maternal grandfather in the grandfather's ornate house on 113th Street, near Morningside Park, a short walk from Columbia University. In 1921 he entered Columbia College as a journalism major, with his father paying the tuition from Mexico City. During a protracted illness in his junior year he began experimenting with writing fiction, scrawling the first draft of a novel in pencil on sheets of loose yellow paper that he scrounged from around the house. From the beginning he was a rapid, white-heat writer. "The stream of words was like an electric arc leaping across the intervening space from pole to opposite pole, from me to paper.... It was tiring and it wouldn't let go.... You couldn't stop it, it had to stop by itself. Then it fizzled out again at last, as unpredictably as it had begun. It left me feeling spent...

By the time he was well enough to return to school he'd become a writing addict. Every evening from nine until midnight he'd sit in a second-floor room and scribble furiously--the door closed, the family out of hearing, a Burmese elephant-head lamp lit on a pedestal in the corner behind him. By late spring of 1924 the first draft of his first novel was done, and he borrowed a friend's typewriter to turn it into readable form. When the novel found a publisher, Woolrich quit Columbia to pursue his dream of bright lights, gay music, and a meteoric literary career like that of his whole generation's cultural idol, F Scott Fitzgerald.

Woolrich's early mainstream fiction is saturated with the Fitzgerald influence, especially the first novel, -Cover Charge- (1926). It chronicles the lives and loves of the Jazz Age's gilded youth--the child-people, flitting from thrill to thrill, conversing in a mannered slang which, sixty years later, reads like the gibberings of creatures from another galaxy. But if nothing else, the novel is eerily prophetic in the way its protagonist's fate foreshadows its author's. Ballroom dancer Alan Walker winds up alone, in a cheap hotel room, his legs all but useless after a drunken auto smash-up, abandoned by all the women he loved, contemplating suicide. "I hate the world," he cries out. "Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty."

This debut novel was followed by -Children of the Ritz- (1927), a frothy concoction about a spoiled heiress's marriage to her chauffeur, which won Woolrich a $10,000 prize and a contract from First National Pictures for the movie rights. He was invited to Hollywood to help with the adaptation and stayed on as a staff writer. Besides his movie chores (for which he never received screen credit) and an occasional story or article for magazines like -College Humor- and -Smart Set-, he completed three more novels during these years. Early in 1931, after a brief, inexplicable and disastrous marriage to a producer's daughter, Woolrich fled back to Manhattan and his mother. His last mainstream novel, Manhattan Love Song (1932), anticipates the motifs of his later fiction with its love-struck young couple cursed by a malignant fate which leaves one dead and the other desolate.

Over the next two years he became one more victim of the Depression. He sold next to nothing and was soon deep in debt, reduced to sneaking into movie palaces by the fire doors for his entertainment. What he didn't know was that he was on the brink of a new creative life, that he was about to become the foremost suspense writer of all time.

It was in 1934 that Woolrich decided to abandon his hopes of mainstream literary prestige and concentrate on the lowly genre of mystery fiction. He sold three stories to pulp magazines that year, ten more in 1935, and was soon an established professional whose name was a fixture on the covers of -Black Mask-, -Detective Fiction Weekly-, -Dime Detective- and other pulps. The more than one hundred stories and novelettes which he sold to the pulps during the Thirties are richly varied in type, including quasi-police procedurals, rapid-action whizbangs, and encounters with the occult. But the best and the best known of them are the tales of pure edge-of-the-seat suspense. Even their titles signal their predominant mood of bleakness and despair: "I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes," "Speak to Me of Death," "All at Once, No Alice," "Dusk to Dawn," "Men Must Die," "If I Should Die Before I Wake," "The Living Lie Down with the Dead," "Charlie Won't Be Home Tonight," "You'll Never See Me Again." These and dozens of other Woolrich suspense stories evoke with fierce power the desperation of those who walk the city's darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in commonplace settings. In his hands even such clichéd storylines as the race to save the innocent man from the electric chair and the amnesiac's search for his lost self pulsate with human anguish. Woolrich's world is a feverish place where the prevailing emotions are loneliness and fear, and the prevailing action a race against time and death. His most characteristic detective stories end with the discovery that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with the terror not dissipated but omnipresent.

The typical Woolrich settings are the seedy hotel, the cheap dance hall, the run-down movie house and the precinct station backroom. The overwhelming reality in his world, at least during the Thirties, is the Depression. Woolrich has no peer at putting us inside the skin of a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protagonist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that the protagonist not only can't find her but can't convince anyone she ever existed. Or, in another classic Woolrich situation, the protagonist awakens after a blackout--the result of amnesia, drugs, hypnosis or whatever-- and little by little becomes certain that he committed a murder or other crime while out of himself. The police are rarely sympathetic; in fact, they are the earthly counterpart of the malignant powers above, and their main function is to torment the helpless.

Woolrich suggests that the only thing we can do about this nightmare in which we live is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at portraying the corrosion of a once beautiful relationship. Yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; if one loves or needs love, Woolrich makes us identify with that person, all of his or her dark side notwithstanding.

Purely as technical exercises, many of Woolrich's novels and stories are awful. They don't make the slightest bit of sense. And that's the point: neither does life. Nevertheless some of his tales, usually thanks to outlandish coincidence, manage to end quite happily. But since he never used a series character, the reader can never know in advance whether a particular Woolrich story will be light or dark, will end in triumph or despair--which is one of many reasons why his work is so hauntingly suspenseful.

In 1940 Woolrich joined the migration of pulp mystery writers from lurid-covered magazines to hardcover books, but his suspense novels carry over the motifs, beliefs and devices that energized his shorter fiction. The eleven novels he published during the Forties--six under his own by-line, four as William Irish and one as George Hopley--are unsurpassed classics in the poetry of terror. -The Bride Wore Black-. -The Black Curtain-. -Black Alibi-. -Phantom Lady-. -The Black Angel-. -Deadline at Dawn-. -The Black Path of Fear-. -Night Has a Thousand Eyes-. -Waltz into Darkness-. -Rendezvous in Black-. -I Married a Dead Man-. These titles, all published between 1940 and 1948, make up the finest group of suspense novels ever written.

Those were his peak years, in which he became a wealthy man and a superstar of his genre. Publishers began issuing hardcover and paperback collections of his shorter fiction, which then came to the attention of the story editors of the great dramatic radio series of the Forties, leading to dozens of Woolrich-based dramas on -Suspense- and -Mollé Mystery Theatre- and similar programs. Meanwhile Hollywood rediscovered the "boy wonder" of the Twenties and paid him handsomely for the right to make movies out of large numbers of his novels and stories. These pictures helped shape the uniquely Forties brand of suspense movie known today as -film noir-. But all the money and adulation didn't make Woolrich happy. In a letter of February 2, 1947, to Columbia's poet and professor Mark Van Doren, he seemed to blame his unhappiness on the fact that he was revered only as a mystery writer, not as a literary figure. "I don't like to look back on the Columbia days for that reason; the gap between expectation and accomplishment is too wide." On the other hand, impenetrable as the shield of self-contempt was with which Woolrich had surrounded himself, it's unlikely he would have been any happier if he -had- been acclaimed as another Scott Fitzgerald.

Around the end of the Forties Woolrich's mother became seriously ill, and that combined with his personal problems seemed to paralyze his ability and desire to write. During the Fifties he published very little, but he and his mother continued to live in their comfortable isolation, for his magazine stories proved to be as adaptable to television as they'd been to radio a decade earlier, and almost all the classic TV dramatic series---Robert Montgomery Presents-, -Ford Theater-, -Schlitz Playhouse of Stars-, -Alfred Hitchcock Presents-, -Climax!-, even the prestigious -Playhouse 90--- offered live or filmed versions of his fiction.

The day his mother died in 1957 was the day he began to die himself, but in his case the process dragged on for more than ten years. Diabetic, alcoholic, racked by loneliness and self-hate, he dragged out the last years of his life. He continued to write but left unfinished much more than he completed, and the only new work that saw print in the Sixties was a handful of final "tales of love and despair." He developed gangrene in his leg and let it go untended for so long that when he finally sought medical help the doctor had no choice but to amputate. After the operation he lived for a few months in a wheelchair, unable to learn how to walk on an artificial leg. He had "the stunned aspect of the very old," said science fiction writer Barry N. Malzberg, who was as close to Woolrich at the end as anyone could get. "Where there had been the edges there was now only the gelatinous material that when probed would not rebound." But his eyes were still "open and moist, curiously childlike and vulnerable."