A Young Man's Heart Read online

  A

  YOUNG MAN’S

  HEART

  Published: 1930 by Mason Publishing

  Reprinted: 2006, 2010 by Ramble House

  Artwork: Gavin L. O’Keefe

  Preparation: Fender Tucker

  A

  YOUNG MAN’S

  HEART

  By

  Cornell Woolrich

  With an Introduction

  By

  Francis M. Nevins

  Ramble house

  INTRODUCTION

  Francis M. Nevins

  He was the Poe of the 20th century and the poet of its shadows, the Hitchcock of the written word and one of the founding literary fathers of film noir. The career that earned him those tags began in 1934 when he started selling stories and short novels to pulp magazines like Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and Black Mask. After several years of writing almost exclusively for these markets he moved into the field of hardcover suspense novels, beginning with THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1940). Those novels continue to be reprinted in paperback and new collections of his shorter fiction still come out in hardcover today, almost forty years after his death.

  When he first began writing, however, he hadn’t a clue that he’d become famous for suspense fiction. His original ambition, like that of almost every young man of the 1920s with a literary bent, was to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald. The six novels and 30-odd short stories that he wrote during his first period have remained buried for generations, but now there seems to be a mini-revival of interest in them. Pegasus Books will soon release the first-ever paperback edition of MANHATTAN LOVE SONG (1932), which back then was published as a mainstream title but by contemporary standards is clearly a crime novel, and one with close ties to some of Woolrich’s suspense classics. A YOUNG MAN’S HEART, which has never been reprinted in any form since its first publication in 1930, is certainly no crime novel. But to anyone interested in the death-haunted master of suspense it’s a source of endless fascination. And questions.

  His full name was Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich and he was born in New York City on December 4, 1903. His mother and maternal grandfather figure prominently in Woolrich’s posthumously published autobiographical manu­script BLUES OF A LIFETIME. His father doesn’t appear in that work at all but plays a key role in A YOUNG MAN’S HEART, and some background information about Woolrich’s ancestry on the paternal side helps in understanding the novel.

  That we now know much about this subject is due to Peter Woolrich, a Canadian who is related to Cornell through common great-great-grandparents and has exhaustively researched his family’s roots. Briefly, James Woolrich (1761-1823), an Englishman born in Yorkshire, emigrated to Montreal, in the Canadian province of Quebec, and became a prosperous dry goods merchant as well as a ship­owner, banker and land speculator. In 1791 he married Magdeleine Gamelin, a union that produced nine children. One of their sons was Thomas Hall Woolrich (1802-1842), whose marriage to Mehitable Shaw of Nova Scotia produced Thomas Hopley (or Hopply) Woolrich. This man, who was born in Quebec in 1829 or 1830 and lived until at least 1916, migrated from Canada to the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where he had eleven children by at least five women. His first wife, Aurora Sandoval, was the mother of his son Genaro Hopley-Woolrich, who was born in the early or middle 1870s.

  Genaro himself was a complete enigma until, late in the 1990s, chance put me in touch with his half nephew Carlos Burlingham (1925-2004), a psychiatrist whose mother was a daughter of Thomas by his fifth marriage. Thomas, whom Carlos described to me as “a man who hung around many women,” was both Carlos’ maternal grandfather and the paternal grandfather of Cornell Woolrich. In the early 1940s, when Carlos was in his teens, he lived with his Tio Genaro for more than a year. The memories he shared with me before his death provide the only solid information we have about Woolrich’s father.

  Thomas or Tomás Hopley-Woolrich was prosperous enough not only to support children by five marriages but to subsidize North American educations for them. “My grandfather sent all his children to different schools in the United States,” Carlos told me. After completing his education Genaro “went to work building the subway system in New York City.” It was probably in 1901 or 1902 that he met Claire Attalie Tarler (1874-1957). Claire’s father, George Abelle Tarler (1849-1925), was a prematurely white-haired Russian, the son of a rabbi. After emigrating from his native Odessa to Panama and then Mexico, he settled in the United States and became a pioneer in the import trade with Central America, dealing in real estate as a sideline. He married Sarah Cornell (1855-189?) early in 1874 and Claire was born on November 29 of the same year. She married Genaro a few years after her mother’s death.

  Genaro, so Carlos told me, was not happy living away from his homeland. “Every child that my grandfather had, they always could not stand the environment. They always wanted to come back to Mexico. Genaro was exactly that way . . ..He said to Claire: ‘I have to go. I don’t like this place. Your role is to follow me.’ ” They left New York in 1907, taking three-year-old Cornell to Mexico with them. The marriage did not long survive the move. When the couple separated it was decided that the boy would stay with his father at least until adolescence. Claire Attalie Woolrich (as she continued to call herself for the rest of her life) returned to New York and the Tarler household.

  That Woolrich and his father must have had a very rocky relationship is illustrated by an anecdote that one of Carlos Burlingham’s many uncles told him generations ago and that Carlos shared with me. “There was a situation that happened in the city of Oaxaca. I don’t know how old Cornell was but he was probably walking around in the park or something like that, came back to the hotel where he and Genaro were staying and found his father with a woman in his bed. He created a mess and became quite upset and angry, because his idea was that his father was very loyal to his mother even though they were separated. Perhaps uncle Genaro never spoke with him regarding the trauma of the separation and the finality of the separation. He probably had this idea that sooner or later they were going to get back together.”

  From his perspective as a psychiatrist Carlos looked back on Genaro as “somewhat schizoid, extremely withdrawn, extremely silent . . ..He had a custom of getting up late in the morning. Before dinner he would have two or three shots of rum, and then some more after dinner and some more before supper.” One can’t help wondering if Woolrich’s own withdrawn personality and problems with alcohol were the dark side of his inheritance from his father.

  In early adolescence Woolrich had the experience that would mark him forever. It happened, he says in BLUES OF A LIFETIME, “one night when I was eleven and, huddling over my own knees, looked up at the low-hanging stars of the Valley of Anahuac, and knew I would surely die finally, or something worse.” This, he tells us, was the beginning of “the sense of personal, private doom” that has been with him ever since. “I had that trapped feeling, 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.” There is no more perfect description of our situation in the world as Woolrich sees it. From that feeling springs almost everything in his noir novels and stories that is most distinctive and intense and chilling. Not having begun yet to write that kind of fiction, in A YOUNG MAN’S HEART he never alludes to this experience.

  In his mid-teens his painful life below the border with Genaro came to an end and his life as a New Yorker with his mother and the Tarlers began. For the first ten years or so after his return to the States, Woolrich’s home address was 239 West 113th Street, an imposing house near Morningside Park, completed at the turn of the century and occupied ever since by his grandfather and other members of his family. Geo
rge Tarler was the only man after Genaro who played a major role in shaping Woolrich’s life and world. In his own last years he still recalled countless details about his grandfather: that he spoke “four of the main European languages” and loved opera and kept several glass cases in the house crammed with curios from his travels in Mexico and Asia. It was Tarler who, on a visit to Mexico City, had taken the 8-year-old Woolrich to see a performance of Puccini’s then recent opera MADAMA BUTTERFLY, introducing the boy to color and drama and the world of tragic love and unhappy endings in an intensely visual ambience—elements which were to become building blocks in his own fictional world—and it was Tarler who, after the adolescent Woolrich had come up to New York, took him to the movies once a week, introducing the teen-ager to the medium which over the years was to teach him how to write visually.

  Woolrich was still living with his mother and maternal grandfather in 1921 when he enrolled as a freshman at Columbia University, just a short walk from 239 West 113th Street. He was alone in the house one day a few years later when the doorbell rang and he went downstairs and found in the vestibule a uniformed policeman who announced bluntly that Grandfather Tarler was dead. We know from the New York Times obituary that the date was April 25, 1925, and that George had died of a heart attack as he entered his lawyer’s office downtown, at 41 Park Row. “It was the first time I’d ever come up against death,” Woolrich wrote decades later in BLUES OF A LIFETIME. When his first novel sold to a major publisher, he left Columbia and spent the next several years writing the mainstream novels and short stories with which he hoped to establish himself as the next Fitzgerald.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  A YOUNG MAN’S HEART, the fourth of his six pre-suspense novels, was published in November 1930 by a short-lived house little better than a vanity press and was reviewed almost nowhere. Much of it takes place in a large nameless metropolis south of the border which is clearly meant to be Mexico City.

  Did the young Woolrich overhear his parents quarrelling bitterly about Genaro’s womanizing as young Blair does in Chapter One? Did he see his mother board the night train for the north as Blair does at the end of the chapter? Probably not, since Woolrich was only four or five when Claire and Genaro broke up. In a scene full of religious imagery showing Woolrich’s identification with Blair and his mother, she tells the boy that her husband “won’t let me take you with me” and his father promises (or threatens) to “make a man” of him. That the latter detail accurately reflects how the boy was brought up is suggested by an anecdote shared with me by Lou Ellen Davis (1937- ), who knew Woolrich in his last years. “He told me that near where they lived . . .there was a bigger kid, and that he paid this bigger kid to let Cornell beat him up where Cornell’s father could see it . . .Here was this skinny, frail, very gifted, very artistic kid, and here was this macho guy, and the kid so wanted macho approval.”

  In Chapter Two the year is 1916 and Blair and his father are living in a house in Calle Bruselas. Giraldy has become a social lion, throwing endless parties at which he entertains his guests by playing the “black and neurotic” piano, “his ring dashing about over the keys like a mad jewel.” Was the real Genaro musical? Carlos Burlingham said no. Discovering that Blair has filched a cigarette, Giraldy makes the boy smoke in front of his guests, who laugh uproariously until Blair is sick. Regardless of whether anything like this incident really happened, it shows that Woolrich in his mid-twenties had for his father nothing but contempt.

  Chapter Two also introduces us to the novel’s most important female character, the teen-age temptress Mariquita. Her first conversation with Blair is on the subject of devils. “There are no devils,” the boy tells her. This throwaway line suggests what Carlos Burlingham confirmed for me, that Genaro was not at all a religious man. In BLUES OF A LIFETIME Woolrich claims that until 1933 he had never set foot inside a church—“Neither for a wedding nor a funeral, a baptism nor a confirmation nor a mass”—and that he didn’t know a single formal prayer. Where then did he pick up the Christian imagery that we find in A YOUNG MAN’S HEART and also in his later noir classics like “Three O’Clock” (1938)? Quién sabe? We’ll also never know whether Mariquita had a real-world counterpart, but some of the incidental details of Blair’s life at this time, like seeing Pearl White cliffhanger serials on Sunday afternoons at the Parisiana Ciné, seem to ring true. Later in the chapter religion rears its ugly head again: Giraldy’s current mistress has a terrifying experience that causes her to refuse his sexual advances, give away everything she owns and go off to join the black-veiled nuns who look “like apparitions of death.”

  In Chapter Three Blair is sixteen and the woman now living with his father suggests that Giraldy should remedy the boy’s spotty education by sending him to school in Europe or the United States. Blair is terrified by the prospect of being torn away. He senses that his father wants to get rid of him so that he’ll have a freer hand with women—and that he wants the boy to have to sail to Europe through the World War I blockade as a test of manhood. “At eighteen,” Giraldy boasts, “I had already been through the Boxer War in China and was fighting headhunters in the Philippines.” This statement is clearly fiction: the real Genaro was somewhere between 25 and 30 at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. But Giraldy’s contempt for his unmacho son does seem to reflect Woolrich’s personal experience, and so does young Blair’s contempt for his father. “A man to whom the height of youthful endeavor had been firing at brown and yellow peasants . . . A man who would send his son halfway around the world, to live among strangers in a land of rumbling terrors, to make room for a soiled mannequin.” That night he dreams that his father is aiming a rifle at him. Not knowing what day has been set for his departure, dreading each daily fall of darkness and only breathing again when that evening’s train has gone: these incidents prefigure the Death Wait sequences that abound in Woolrich’s later novels and stories.

  Chapter Four begins precisely as Chapter One did, with Blair opening his eyes. Seven years have passed but Woolrich dismisses them in a few phrases. Blair had been educated in New York rather than Europe (for reasons never made clear), had not wanted for money (thanks apparently to affluent maternal relatives), had never received from his father as much as a letter. His mother seems to be dead. Blair has married Eleanor, a Manhattan socialite, and their honeymoon has taken them to the city of his boyhood. In a horse-drawn carriage they ride to the house in Calle Bruselas where Blair and his father had lived. As they pass a sidewalk cafe the musicians are playing “Poor Butterfly,” a song which relates back to Puccini’s opera and was to become a leitmotif in Woolrich’s suspense classic “Dime a Dance” (1938). The house’s present occupants know nothing of Giraldy except that he’d left years ago. As Genaro never returned to Woolrich’s life, Giraldy never reappears in A YOUNG MAN’S HEART.

  The rest of Chapter Four and much of Chapter Five describe Eleanor’s involvement with Rafael Serrano, a diplomat attached to the Argentine legation. Their intense flirtation, which makes Blair violently ill, is punctuated by something with which Woolrich’s childhood in Mexico had made him intimately familiar: a revolution. Serrano offers the Giraldys the safety of his legation in case of violence. The city is plagued by food hoarding and skyrocketing inflation, the rebels dynamite the railroad tracks, Blair and Eleanor return to their hotel in an atmosphere of impending doom.

  Chapter Six introduces the mighty rebel general who has turned the hotel into his headquarters. The evocation of Palacios and his entourage of gunmen, spies, cooks, whores and toadies makes us wonder whether Woolrich could have sat through hagiographic movies like VIVA VILLA! and VIVA ZAPATA! without vomiting. The stage is set for the climax, which I won’t spoil by discussing here except to say that as so often in his noir fiction it hangs on a huge coincidence and that, as one might expect with Woolrich, it’s tragic.

  And perhaps also operatic. In another time, in the age of Verdi, Bizet, Puccini, A YOUNG MAN’S HEART might have been hailed as the perfect libretto for an
opera. But it found few readers in 1930 and none at all between then and now. Its autobiographical roots remain tantalizing, and its intense emotional excesses demonstrate that Woolrich’s obsession with the maniacal power of love is by no means confined to his noir fiction. Like so many of the novels and stories he wrote later, this one could with perfect propriety have been entitled what I called my own account of his life and world: FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  In the early 1930s, when the Depression had wiped out any possibility of Woolrich’s realizing his early literary ambitions, George Tarler’s children sold the house on West 113th Street and Cornell and Claire took an apartment together in the Hotel Marseilles, a comfortable Victorian pile at Broadway and 113th Street: the prison cell where he was to serve a 25-year sentence. During the first 15 years of that sentence he wrote the 11 novels and the 200-odd stories of pure suspense that earned him his reputation as the Hitchcock of the written word: “Johnny on the Spot” (1936), “Dusk to Dawn” (1937), “Three O’Clock” (1938), “Guillotine” (1939), THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1940), THE BLACK CURTAIN (1941), PHANTOM LADY (1942), THE BLACK ANGEL (1943), DEADLINE AT DAWN (1944), NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1945), RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (1948) and countless others.

  On January 12, 1948, Genaro died. A recurring motif in his son’s noir fiction is that at death one is forgiven much. When Woolrich in New York heard the news, no doubt from some relative in Mexico, he reverently set down in the 1937 desk diary he used as a sort of portable file cabinet “my father’s resting place—Pantéon Espanol, Cuartito IV (Spanish Cemetery, Section IV), Mexico City, Mexico,” and noted that the grave was “marked with a tile plaque, on which his name is written.” To whatever extent his son’s career was a plea for Genaro’s attention and respect and love, and an attempt to build a bridge on which his long parted parents might reunite, its raison d’être was gone now. The fire of creative passion which had sustained Woolrich for almost fifteen years was stamped out. With his mother almost 75 and in worsening health and with the virtual guarantee of steady money from paperback reprints and movies and radio and soon television, why keep writing?