First You Dream, Then You Die                    11

years. Diabetic, alcoholic, wracked by self-hate and loneliness, he
dragged out the last years of bis life. He continued to write but
left unfinished much more than he completed, and the only new
work that saw print in the Sixties was a handful of final "tales of
love and despair." He developed gangrene in his leg and let it go
untended for so long that when he finally sought medical help the
doctor had no choice but to amputate. After the operation he lived
in a wheelchair, unable to learn how to walk on an artificial leg.
On September 25, 1968, he died of a stroke, leaving unfinished
two novels, a collection of short stories and an autobiography,
the typescripts of all of which can be seen in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. He had prepared a long list of titles for stories
he'd never even begun, and one of these captures the essence of his
life and world in a single perfect phrase: First You Dream, Then
Yott Die.

"I was only trying to cheat death," he wrote in a fragment
found among bis 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 try¬
ing 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 fruit 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 Woolrich imagined lives.