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I Remington Portable NC69411 The first section of Blues of a Lifetime is particularly valuable for Woolrich's biographers. It is the episodic account of his motives, while a student at Columbia University, for writing his first novel. From time to time, the chapter glances at key experiences from Woolrich's youth. Here readers can learn about his reactions to his grandfather's death; Woolrich's first sexual encounter; his first publication; his writing habits; his first opera; his fatalism; and his hollow craving for companionship, joy and meaning in life. More loose, structurally, than the other chapters in Blues of a Lifetime, this nostalgic opening "story" contains passages ofgreat beauty and a typical Woolrichian twist at the end. Most of the action takes place in New York City during the months of March through September 1925, when Woolrich was 21. We first met, you and I, a long time ago. You looked different then, I looked different then.l Who wouldn't look different, that long a time ago? I can give you the exact date, year-date, if you want. I've a very good head for dates, a very good memory for them.2 I've seen so many of them go by. But no-dates are cold, rigid, precision-like things, dates are for calendars, not for a warm story, not for a brotherly-love story, like yours and mine. This was a mating if there ever was one. A life-long partnership, a fellowship, a combine, of flesh and of thin steel casing, of fingertips and of keys, of mind and of agilely responsive mechanism: lower case that turned to upper at a tap, upper that turned back to lower at another tap; asterisks, apostrophes, parentheses, quotation marks, single quotation marks to go within the double, hyphens and colons and commas that flashed up like sparks, and like sparks dimmed again, left behind in the onrush; the warning bell that stopped each line in its tracks; the indentation brake that made each line start even with the ones before; the seldom-used dollar sign and the never-used \4- and ~-symbols that looked so unreal somehow when they did crop up, perhaps due to that very lack of use; the color-lever that could turn the ribbon from black to red (but only if the ribbon was half red already, and I never used one of those hybrids, those bastards, in my life). 3 4 Blues of a Lifetime And into this transformer, this reagent, went streams of thought and dramatic highspots and narrative stretches printed invisibly on the retina of the mind, and out of it they came printed visibly now in black type on white paper, in order that they could be conveyed to others, and taken in again to the retinas of other minds. From privacy out into publicity, and then back into privacy again. But why? Where the need for it? We're not concerned with that here. That's a question no painter of pictures, no writer of words, can fairly be asked to answer. He must do it, that's all he knows. The love of a man for his machine. I never loved women much, I guess. Only three times, that I'm fully aware of. And each time I got more or less of a kick in the jaw, so there wasn't much incentive to go ahead trying more frequently. The first time it was just puppy love, but it ended disastrously for at least one of us, through no fault of mine.3 The second time, somebody else married her, and it was only after it happened that I realized I wished it hadn't. The third time, I married her, and it was only after it happened that I realized I wished it hadn't. I was born to be solitary, and I liked it that way. Some are, and some do. And all the many times, probably the hundreds of times, I've sat alone at a table somewhere, a drink out in front of me, during the late hours, the closing hours, holding my face against my hand and staring pensively before me because I had no one to go home to and nowhere to go home to, it was just a sentimental "act" (meaning a piece of theatrical stage-business), a melancholy pose for my own benefit, and deep down inside I knew that I was lying to myself, and that...

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