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THE VIEW FROM THE REAR WINDOW:THE FICTION OF CORNELL WOOLRICH

While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down 1

He was the Poe of the twentieth century and the poet of its shadows. 2

Horror movie fans counted 1960 as quite one of their best years. put in his appearance. Screens everywhere seemed full of Anthony Perkins’ performance, his every facial twitch and leer the promise of trouble to come. Repeated late-night TV showings may have taken down much of the initial shock of Hitchcock’s , but what film more stunned its audiences or more served as the by-word for cinematic menace? Contemporary full colour contenders like The Exorcist or The Shining or Alien look if not exactly mild then formulaic by comparison. Hitchcock himself spoke of his film as something of a dark comedy, a jokily done nightmare, which did little to assuage critics who discerned in Psycho a worrying inclination towards sexual nastiness and violence. But it hardly came across to aficionados that way. This was definitive horror, a perfect sum of its

1 Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea”, 1831, 1845. The poem first appeared as “The Doomed City” in 1831 and underwent various revisions before the eventual version as “The City in the Sea” published in American Review ( 1845). 2 Francis M. Nevins, Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die, NY: The Mysterious Press, 1988, 10. This work is of enormous significance as it offers a complete biography, an analysis of the fiction, and a bibliography and filmography. Other studies include Otto Penzler, Cornell Woolrich, NY: The Mysterious Bookshop. 1999, and, as an interesting addendum to the writing and screen versions, David Butler, Jazz Noir: Listening To The Music From “Phantom Lady” to “The Last Seduction”, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. 318 Gothic to Mulicultural parts, in sequence the sinister , the peep hole voyeurism through a wall hung with stuffed birds, the great vertical stairway and hall shots, the off-camera double voices, Janet Leigh’s shower curtain knifing, Bernard Herrman’s shriek-like music, and the final glimpses first of the mummified Mrs Bates and then a regressed and wouldn’t- hurt-a-fly Norman. But why, in an account of the fiction of Cornell Woolrich (1903-68), begin here? Hitchcock, as the opening credits show, based Psycho on the novel by , though the screenplay was done by Joseph Stefano. Bloch, for his part, had in fact developed the novel from two of his earlier short stories of menace, “Lucy Comes to Stay” and “The Real Bad Friend”. So far, as it seemed, all belonged to the realms of pure invention, the film, the novel and the stories. But Norman Bates, key aspects of him at any rate, would turn out to have had something of a real life counterpart: none other than Cornell Woolrich. Evidently Woolrich was no leering split personality motel-keeper, but his life might easily have been taken as a chapter out of one of his stories. In the first place he had lived out his own powerful mother-fixation, after a brief early spell in Hollywood sharing suites with her in a run of New York residential hotels until what for him was her crushing death in 1957. From then on Woolrich descended ever more into isolation, alcoholism and a deepening homosexual self-contempt. Towards the end of his life one of his legs became infected with gangrene and needed amputation. A scholarship he endowed at Columbia University, where he had been a student in the 1920s, bore not his own name but revealingly that of his mother. Were any or all of this not sufficiently gothic in itself, however, at his funeral only the merest handful of mourners attended, a leave taking as spare as that of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby or Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore in 1849. But as compulsive, and indeed by all accounts as wretched, as he became in his private life, for Bloch, and one assumes for Hitchcock subsequently, Woolrich offered no more than a suggestive contour or outline in the making of Norman Bates. And in no greater respect was he not Bates than in his simply prodigious output of mysteries, suspense stories and romans noirs, a list which even at the time Psycho was being filmed (for Paramount but actually made at