Into The Night (28 page)

It ended on September 25, 1968, two and a half months short of his sixty-fifth birthday. By the time the ambulance brought him from the Sheraton Russell corridor to Wickersham Hospital he was dead. He left no survivors. His funeral was attended by exactly five people.

The handful of tales he completed in his last years was by no means all he wrote during that period. Among his papers were found the typescripts of four works more or less in progress. He had finished several chapters of a heavily fictionalized autobiography he called -The Blues of a Lifetime-; some sections of a few mainstream stories he intended to use in a collection entitled -I Was Waiting for You-; the three key chapters of a novel with the quintessentially Woolrichian title -The Loser-; and the book you are holding in your hands.

I first read -Into the Night- around 1970, soon after becoming a consultant to the Woolrich estate, and said in print a year or so later (in my 1971 Woolrich collection -Nightwebs-) that I thought it contained some of the most haunting scenes Woolrich had written in the last twenty years of his life. Now that the book has been completed and published I see no reason to change that view. Woolrich may have thought that at last he was giving up suspense fiction and going back to his mainstream origins, but -Into the Night- is clearly in the direct line of descent from his classic thrillers of the Forties. Madeline Chalmers' guilt-racked entry into the life of the young woman she accidentally killed, her rage to avenge the earlier mangling of that young woman's life by a third woman and by a man, the way she takes on new identities and insinuates herself into the worlds of the two she lives to destroy (and falls in love despite herself with the man she feels compelled to kill)-- none of this will surprise readers who are familiar with Woolrich's great Vengeance Woman suspensers -The Bride Wore Black- (1940) and -The Black Angel- (1943). Like his last two short stories of pure tension--"For the Rest of Her Life" (1968) and "New York Blues" (1970)---Into the Night- proves that even in those final and most wretched years of his life Woolrich hadn't lost the magic touch that chills the heart. It's immensely satisfying to see this powerful novel in print.

But how much of it (you must surely be wondering) is by Woolrich, and how much by Lawrence Block?

During the several years he worked intermittently on the book, Woolrich apparently became dissatisfied with its opening pages and threw them away. The typescript as we have it, which is now in the Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the Columbia University Library, starts on the twenty-third page, with the words: "Madeline stood there motionless for a long time after...." Every word of the published text from the beginning till that point (on page 14 of this edition) is by Block.

The bulk of the rest of the book is Woolrich's work, with no more editing than would have been called for if he'd lived to complete it himself. However, pages 73, 75--78, 83, 87--88, and 100--101 are also missing from the typescript, and Block had to fill in the gaps of the scenes between Madeline and the singer Adelaide Nelson. He is responsible for the following segments of the published text.

"'What do you mean?'" (p. 46) to "The other Dell was quieter, less forceful. And" (p. 50).

"'I wind up someday with too much rust in my pipes'" (p.52) to "'The last thing I need is somebody walking in at the wrong moment'" (p. 54).

"What the hell,' she said" (p. 56) to "How did the two of you meet?" (p. 56).

""The thing is," he says,'" (p. 63) to "'while your mind just spins like a top.'" (p. 64).

The next gap in the Woolrich typescript comes during the dialogue between Madeline and Mrs. Fairfield, and the published text from "'I don't suppose most people deliver'" (p. 110) to "the address listed for V. Herrick, on Lane Street" (p. 110) is Block's. When the wrong Herrick tells Madeline of his sexual mutilation during World War II, a few hundred words of the scene (from "Just a little patch of hell" on p. 115 to "'My God,' she breathed" on p. 116) come from Block. The last five brief paragraphs of the scene on page 125 where Madeline discovers the photograph from Vick's studio are likewise Block contributions. Nothing else has been added to the typescript until we reach the climax.

There is no end to the typescript as we have it. As of Woolrich's death, the story of these tormented people stops with the words "which had the advantage of not taking time" on page 170 of the published text. From there until the end, the author of -Into the Night- is Lawrence Block. And if there's a single problem with what overall is a magnificent job of matching Woolrich's structure and style and spirit, it's with these final pages, which to me at least seem too neat to fit what has gone before.

Block chose an upbeat ending because he felt he had to in view of the last two pages of the typescript as we have it, pages from which Woolrich crossed out all but a few words but which are still readable beneath his deletion marks, and which prove beyond dispute that at least for a while during the project Woolrich had an extremely sentimental happy ending in mind. However, those who think the story should close more darkly can point to one hint in those crossed-out pages. Madeline and Vick come together again, -but he calls her Starr-. If this is not an oversight on Woolrich's part, it suggests all sorts of possibilities: That Vick's near-fatal confrontation with Madeline has pushed him over the edge. That he thinks Madeline is the original Starr, come back from the dead. That Madeline completes her atonement by accepting the role, undoing what she'd done at the start of the book, making the woman she'd killed return to life and to Vick's arms, with all the incestuous overtones that implies. Here is the kind of twisted, perverse, downbeat ending which, if he'd lived long enough to work out all the bugs, Woolrich perhaps would have opted for. Or maybe it's just a typo after all.

"I was only trying to cheat death," Woolrich wrote in a fragment found among his papers. "I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone." In the end of course he had to die, as we all do. But as long as there are readers to be haunted by the phantoms of his life, by the way he took his wretched psychological environment and his sense of entrapment and solitude and turned them into poetry of the shadows, the world that Woolrich imagined lives.

The End