A Young Man's Heart Read Free

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.
     
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    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 113 th Street and Cornell and Claire took an apartment together in the Hotel Marseilles, a comfortable Victorian pile at Broadway and 113 th 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?
    Still, he continued to write. He had to. “New York Blues,” apparently the last story he ever completed and one of the most darkly powerful of his entire career, was included in the collection NIGHT AND FEAR (2004). TONIGHT, SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK (2005) brought together an assortment of first-rate fiction and autobiographical reminiscence from his last twenty years.
    In A YOUNG MAN’S HEART we see Woolrich long before then, still young, still hoping to be accepted as a mainstream author, never dreaming of what chance or fate held for him. More than thirty years later he looked back less than fondly on his first literary incarnation. “I was lucky,” he said in BLUES OF A LIFETIME. “I got a second chance. I finally learned to do my job competently only in the mid-Thirties, after I’d