The following excerpts from a reference article I wrote a
couple of years ago address the question of what fame did to
Cornell Woolrich. The full article can be found in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 226,
"American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers" pp. 349-363.
David Schmid
By the mid-1940s, Woolrich was at the top of his profession.
He was regarded as the premiere suspense writer in the
country, and he was making good money both from his fiction
and the sale of radio and movie rights. But it appears that
Woolrich did not derive much enjoyment from his success or
his reputation. In 1943, in a letter he wrote for inclusion
in an anthology of mystery stories, Woolrich described his
life in distinctly muted tones: "I have never had any other
job or occupation than a writer...so you can see that very
little has happened to me. This makes for a very uneventful
life, with nothing to report. One day is exactly like
another" (quoted in Nevins 282). Although Woolrich was
naturally self-effacing to the point of being
uncommunicative, this is actually quite an accurate
description of his life at this time, and it points to the
significance of Woolrich's relationship with his mother. By
this stage, Woolrich and Claire Attalie Tarler had been
sharing an apartment in the Hotel Marseilles for eleven
years, and the nature of their relationship is indirectly
indicated by the dedication to Phantom Lady: "To Apartment
605, Hotel M___ in unmitigated thankfulness (at not being in
it anymore)." In the last year of his life, Woolrich
explained that this dedication referred to his attempt to
break away from his mother in 1942, albeit only by moving to
another room in the same hotel. Woolrich's attempt at
independence lasted only three weeks, and then his mother
persuaded him to come back. Woolrich was to stay with his
mother until her death, and he said he never regretted his
decision to return. Whatever we may think of the
relationship, there is no doubt that Woolrich's mother
jealousy hoarded her son's attention, and made it very
difficult for Woolrich to form any other attachments during
her lifetime. Bearing this in mind, Woolrich's 1943
description of his daily life should be admired for its
restraint as well as its accuracy.
I Married A
Dead Man shows that Woolrich was still at the height of his
powers fourteen years after his first crime story, and eight
years after his first crime novel. His stature in the field
can be measured by the fact that in 1948, the Mystery Writers
of America awarded Woolrich an Edgar
(their equivalent of an Oscar) for lifetime achievement. In
retrospect, the presentation of the award to Woolrich on
April 19, 1949 marks the end of the most active phase of
Woolrich's career, because after this time he would produce
very little new work. Instead, from now on Woolrich was
largely content to live off reprint and movie rights of his
work, and he augmented his income even further by developing
the unfortunate habit of passing off old stories as new by
changing their titles repeatedly.
The paucity
of new work during this period can perhaps be attributed to
developments in Woolrich's personal life. In the Spring of
1956, Woolrich's mother suffered a massive heart attack and
from then on she was unable to even leave her room. Always
emotionally shackled to his mother, Woolrich now became even
more of a prisoner in the Hotel Marseilles. Claire Attalie
Tarler died in October 1957 at the age of 83, with Woolrich
at her bedside. At first, there were signs that Woolrich was
going to assert his independence in the wake of his mother's
death. He moved from the Hotel Marseilles to the Hotel
Franconia, and although his aunt, Estelle Tarler Garcia,
moved in with him and tried to take the place of his mother,
he soon sent her packing. Woolrich also traveled, something
he had never been able to do when his mother was alive, and
his trip to Canada in 1961 was his first trip outside of New
York City in thirty years. Most significantly, there is
evidence to suggest that Woolrich was trying to send his
writing in new directions. His most ambitious work of this
period, Hotel Room (1958), was a collection of largely
non-criminous stories set in a New York City hotel at
different periods of its history from its early fashionable
years to its last days before demolition. In writing the
book, which was dedicated to his mother, Woolrich drew upon
his years of experience in hotel living, but if the book was
designed to win Woolrich a larger, non-mystery audience, it
failed to do so.
In spite of
Woolrich's signs of independence, the true aftermath of his
mother's independence was to make Woolrich even more
reclusive and embittered. After having cataract surgery in
1965, Woolrich moved into his last hotel, the
Sheraton-Russell. During the last years of his life, Woolrich
saw practically no one, and he would spend his evenings
sitting in the hotel lobby, staring out at the life on the
streets. Woolrich was in the middle of slow but inexorable
process of decline, and the extent of that decline was
vividly illustrated in January, 1968 when, having failed to
seek medical treatment for a gangrenous leg, he had to have
it amputated. After a stroke which rendered him unconscious,
Woolrich passed away on September 25, 1968, two and a half
months short of his 65th birthday. Like so many of his
fictional characters, Woolrich died practically alone, with
very few friends or family to mourn him. He left his estate
of some $850,000 to Columbia University for them to establish
a scholarship fund for journalism in his mother's
memory.
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