Into the Night

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.