My apologies for being absent from Woolrich month for the
past few days but I've been tied up with family matters. It's
hard to do much writing when there is the imperative of a
two-year-old grandson tugging at my sleeve to read to him and
his two-day old brother is upstairs crying his first protests
to the world.
I mentioned at the beginning of this Woolrich month that my
favorite Woolrich novel is RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (1948). It
features the "avenging angel" themes that Woolrich often used
in his novels and most resembles the much better known THE
BRIDE WORE BLACK
(1940). In many ways, BRIDE is more striking from the stark
image of the title to the female protagonist. In the first
novel, the bride is left a widow on the church steps when
gunfire from a passing car kills her husband. She then tracks
down everyone in the car in order to avenge her murdered
love.
In RENDEZVOUS, the novel opens with a young man on his way to
meet his fianc饠on a street corner. I love the opening setup
to the novel with the outline of a relationship that is both
wonderful and ordinary in hometown American way. If you were
casting this scene in the year the novel came out, it would
have starred Van Johnson and June Allyson.
One of the joys of reading Woolrich for me is the riffs he
tosses off all along the way. In describing the young man
Johnny Marr, he said he looked "Like any Johnny, anywhere,
any time. Even people who had seen him hundreds of times
couldn't have described him very clearly, he looked so much
like the average, he ran so true to form. She could have, but
that was because she had special eyes for him. He was a
thousand other young fellows his own age, all over,
everywhere. You see them everywhere. You look at them and you
don't see them. That is, not to describe afterwards. `Sort of
sandy hair,' they might have said. `Brown eyes.' And then
they would have given up, slipped unnoticeably over the line
from strict physical description. `Nice, clean-cut young
fellow; never has much to say; can't tell much about him.'
…He would perhaps take his coloring from her, starting in
slowly from this June on. He was waiting to be completed, he
wasn't meant to stop the way he was."
So Woolrich has set up the loss that is about to occur to
Johnny as more than the loss of a fianc饬 an unconsummated
love. Johnny is about to lose a huge piece of himself and his
chance to be complete.
The girl is also idealized. "Her name was Dorothy, and she
was lovely. You couldn't describe her either, but not for the
same reason. You can't describe light very easily. You can
tell where it is, but not what it is. Light was where she
was. There may have been prettier girls, but there have never
been lovelier ones…She was everyone's first love…She was the
promise made to everyone at the start, that can never quite
be carried out afterward, and never is."
And our Johnny is about to enter a world of darkness. Before
he reaches their regular point of rendezvous, a bottle falls
out of the sky and kills Dorothy. In a few pages, Woolrich
outlines how Johnny goes through a period of nearly
immobilized mourning before he learns that the bottle was
thrown from a charter plane carrying a group of
hunters.
The novel then moves to a series of segments dubbed "The
First Rendezvous", "The Second Rendezvous" and etc. as Johnny
seeks revenge against everyone on that plane. It becomes
apparent to the reader that he is not usually seeking to kill
the men from the plane. Typically, he seeks to destroy the
person or relationship each of the men hold most
precious.
There are some brilliant elements to developing the story
this way. Woolrich makes use of Johnny's indistinct
appearance in several ways. As the episodes mount, a
detective named Cameron begins to connect the cases as Johnny
is leaving cryptic unsigned notes at the conclusion of each
rendezvous. Cameron is hampered by the fact that few people
can describe the person that the detective realizes must be
the perpetrator.
More importantly, the reader does not always know which
character in each episode is the avenging angel Johnny.
Sometimes it is not so obvious and this adds to the suspense.
Also it is not obvious at the beginning of each episode is
the intended victim-the person most dear to the object of
Johnny's revenge. Add these two suspenseful features to the
overt "race against the clock" suspense of the later episodes
as Cameron identifies the next victim and races to prevent
the next crime.
One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is how
Woolrich forces the reader to completely reverse emotional
ties. Johnny starts off the novel as a totally sympathetic
character and this continues for a time into the revenge
chapters. But Woolrich forces the reader to turn against
Johnny as the victims are quite innocent of any direct
involvement with his fianc鳠death and are themselves quite
sympathetic. Instead of pulling for Johnny to gain his
revenge, the reader begins to pull against him and for the
detective. In the episodes, Johnny has disappeared and is
replaced by a merciless avenger.
As Francis Nevins points out in his biography of Woolrich,
there are many flaws in the plot, although fewer problems
than he found in BRIDE, …"but on the visceral level where
Wool Rich's work either stands or falls, it is a masterful
performance." I agree with his opinion that it is "one of the
most powerful suspense novels ever written."
I know this is a long post but in winding up Woolrich month,
I want to quote a few paragraphs or from my favorite Woolrich
riff. It is in the "Third Rendezvous" on a troop train (the
novel takes place just before and during World War II): "The
ceiling lights peered down through the blurring layers of
tobacco smoke upon the packed humanity clogging the aisle,
swaying and undulating in unison, but in no danger of
falling, for there was not room enough to fall in. Passing
paper cups of gin or corn from hand to hand, like relays in a
chain…Singing shouting, laughing, scowling in momentary but
quickly- dispelled quarrel…"
Later the train is shunted to the side to make way for
another train. "Somewhere immediately outside there was a
continuous clacking vibration going on. It didn't come from
the car itself now; that stood still; it was an external
vibration that shook its windowpanes, and shook its
wheel-trucks, and even seemed to shake the very tracks it
stood on. On one side only, on the left, outside on the next
track, an endless succession of dark inscrutable cars went
flitting by, ghostlike. Not a light showing. A train of
death. A cavalcade of doom. Dozens of black cars, scores of
them; shaking the rails, shaking the night, shaking the
stalled day coach.
"All the railroad cars there were in the whole country, all
the railroad cars there were in the whole world, going down
to death. Like black dominoes on wheels, like litmus paper
cut-outs against the stars. Not a light, not a glimpse of the
thousands of already dead they were packed with; and all the
more awful for that.
"The war, the war. The madness of the whole universe."
It is a classic Woolrich over-the-top digression that few
writers would attempt because it is difficult to bring off
and so easy to look silly. The scene should be read in full
to judge it accurately and I recognize that some might
consider it purple nonsense. But it blew me away when I first
read it many years ago and retains its power for me
now.
Richard Moore
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Feb 2008 EST