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III Even God Felt the Depression "Even God Felt the Depression" is a vivid description of Woolrich's feverishly desperate attempt, in 1933, to compose another successful romantic novel. His only hope for an escape from Depression-era poverty seemed to be this: he could write a novel to be sold to Hollywood. After struggling with the new manuscript for weeks, Woolrich finally feels a renewed sense of hope, and he looks forward to a kind of salvation. Awaiting his agent's verdict, he stops to pray before a Roman Catholic icon in a church he passes while walking to the subway stop. While the reader awaits an answer to Woolrich's prayer, a mood of despair gradually overwhelms the prose, until it is as black as his suspense fiction. At the end of the story comes a startling fatalistic gesture, and an unexpected irony. This episode reveals how it came to be that, as surely as if he had been murdered, Woolrich one day lost all faith in God. Perhaps it explains his move from romantic to suspense fiction too. I'd hardly made a cent that whole year. Or for that matter the one before, or the one before that. The Depression had become stabilized by this time. It was now accepted as a permanent condition. The sharp downgrade had come to an end, and it had leveled off, but with that had also ended all the earlier hopes of an upturn, of a magic-wand dismissal, of a just-around-the-corner mirage of a picture-postcard goddess called Prosperity spilling roses and gold pieces indiscriminately out of a brimming cornucopia. People had given up hoping. It was now a part of everyday existence, and everyday existence is the most difficult thing of all to change; all the emperors, kings and conquerors have found that out. It was the Present, it was the Thirties, you couldn't have one without the other. Even the songs were tinged with it. "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"; "I'll never be the same, Stars have lost their meaning for me-"; "No more money in the bank-"; "Potatoes are cheaper, tomatoes are cheaper-."l For the first time, love, in this context, ran a poor second. As the new decade plodded dejectedly on, holding an apple for sale in one hand, an upturned hat in the other, it became hard even to remember the time when there hadn't been a depression. That time was 68 Even God Felt the Depression 69 legend, not reality any more. There'd been a time when there'd been Indians and colonists. There'd been a time when the States warred against each other. So too had there been a time when you went to parties and speakeasies. And the only thing that mattered, if you were a girl then, was to wear the shortest possible haircut and the shortest possible skirts. And if you were a young man, to know the greatest number of speakeasies so long and so well that you were called by your first name there and admitted on sight when the small grille first opened and an eye looked out at you, without having to present one of those meaningless, ubiquitous little cards that seemed to be floating around by the thousands and say, "Charlie sent me," or "John," or "Joe"; only the uninitiated had to do that any longer, by the time the period reached its crest. That was for visitors, out-of-towners, strangers, and even they were seldom refused. Even a policeman would now and then drop in, not for purposes of inspection-for he was on their payroll, so to speak-but to have a friendly drink; and on one occasion at least, at which I was present, to sing "Silver Threads Among the Gold" in a beautiful baritone for the entertainment of the other customers, who then passed around the hat.2 During the Twenties, there was always money around somewhere near at hand, somehow. If not right in your pocket, then over in your room, or your apartment. If not in your apartment, then around at the bank. If not around at the bank, then in some friend's pocket, until there was once more some around at the bank. Never a matter of more than a few days or a week at the most. Of course it didn't just grow on trees, no. You worked for it. But the work...

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