The Scarf by Robert Bloch

"But there's one thing I'm curious about, Dan. With all your perception of the feminine mind, why do you hate women?"

I didn't have any answers ready for that one.

He leaned closer. "You don't happen to be a homosexual, do you?"

In our last episode I was looking at the covers of Avon paperbacks advertised in Donald A. Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13, and I made note of the 1949 Avon edition of Robert Bloch's 1947 novel The Scarf--the Avon people, always appealing to readers' most prurient interests, had retitled the novel The Scarf of Passion.  I've already read quite a few Bloch pieces during the period of this blog's existence, and decided to give this novel a stab.  The internet archive has a scan of the 1966 Fawcett Gold Medal printing, which isfdb tells us is a revised edition, and that is the one I read on the screen of my aging laptop.

The Scarf is the first person narrative of Daniel Morley, novelist, misogynist, and serial killer!  The main narrative consists of Daniel Morley's account of his continent-spanning career as a writer, and is interspersed with italicized passages from his "black notebook."  Bloch, the author of Psycho, is well-known for grounding much of his fiction on psychological bases, and some of the black notebook entries describe the events in Morley's youth that apparently warped his mind and turned him into a murderer of women--for example, being scolded and humiliated by his mother for wetting his bed or "playing doctor" with another nine-year-old.  Morley comes right out and tells you that according to psychological theory events that happen to you as a child determine what your life and personality are like, asserting that he had no free will and was driven by the actions of others to kill lots of people; it is unclear to what extent Bloch himself believes this sort of stuff.  A source of some tension in the novel is the fact that Bloch puts into the mouth of an intelligent but insane killer criticisms and unflattering depictions of psychology, women, and the entertainment and publishing industries, and we readers are unsure to what extent Bloch shares these criticisms and is satirizing psychoanalysts, dames, and people who work in radio, publishing and the movie biz, and to what extent he is lampooning the skeptics, sexists, and critics who hold such views. 

The most important formative event in young Morley's life was his relationship with one of his teachers when he was 18, the 38-year-old Miss Frazer.  As he tells it in the passage from the black notebook that begins the novel, the lonely spinster fell in love with the clever and handsome Daniel and offered him special individual lessons, teaching him to scan poetry and encouraging him in his writing; ultimately  she tried to seduce him right before graduation, getting him tipsy and offering him a gift--a maroon scarf.  In what the kids call a "cringeworthy" moment, Frazer asked Daniel to kiss her, and when he complied she turned it into a French kiss  Teach, totally off her rocker, declared they should commit suicide together in repentance for having soiled their pure love.  Frazer died, and Daniel barely escaped with his life; traumatized, he fled his home town, abandoned any idea of attending college, and bummed around the country for years.      

Some of the black notebook passages are Morley's accounts of his annoying surrealistic dreams--the worst parts of the 160-page novel--and others are Morley's musings about the nature of murder and famous killers of the past, like Jack the Ripper and the likely mythical Spring-Heeled Jack.   

The main plot: Like ten years after fleeing home, Morley is in Minneapolis and uses the maroon scarf to strangle Rena, a silly gullible married woman with whom he was having an affair while her husband was in prison.  With the money he steals from Rena he hopes to get his writing career really going--he has written a story based on Rena's sad life.  He flees the scene of the crime to Chicago.  In Chi-town, while working as a cabbie, he meets and seduces Hazel, a model.  Hazel has friends in radio and publishing, and she gets him a job at a radio station writing ads and jingles, and even helps hook him up with a publisher in New York.  Morley pens a novel based on Hazel's life, and then murders her late at night on the El--he tries to strangle her with the maroon scarf, but in her efforts to escape she falls off the platform to her death.

Our narrator hurries to New York, where he gets all mixed up with people in and around the publishing business.  The significant members of this cast of characters are 1) a nymphomaniac, Constance Ruppert, 2) Constance's former husband, psychoanalyst Jeff Ruppert, and 3) Patricia Collins, novelist, editor and agent at the firm publishing Morley's book, as well as Jeff's fiancé.  Jeff, master head shrinker, can sense from reading Morley's book that our narrator is an expert on women's psychology, and also that he hates women.  Jeffy boy also warns Morley to avoid Constance, whom he says is dangerously insane.  Morley tries, but fails, to give Constance a wide berth--Constance has fallen in love with him, and he can't just give her the brush off because she has figured out what happened to Hazel back in the Windy City, and blackmails Morley into agreeing to marry her!  While out shopping for a house, Morley puts the kibosh on their nuptials by killing Constance with the scarf and burning down the house, with her in it, to destroy the evidence.  Clever Jeff spots some holes in Morley's alibi, but Morley's smart thinking throws the analyst off the trail...or so he thinks!

Complicating all this business in the Big Apple is the fact that Morley has fallen in love with Patricia Collins.  It looks like Pat (as everybody calls her) will be out of Morley's life for good when she gets transferred to California to manage the publishing house's office there; Jeff goes with her to open a practice with his father, who conveniently already lives out on the Left Coast.  But then a few months later Morley moves to Tinseltown himself after a big movie producer who saw an early draft of Morley's new novel (this one based on Constance's life) bought the rights to make a movie out of it.  This Hollywood big shot hires Morley to be part of the team punching up the script that is based (increasingly loosely) on his half-finished novel.

In Hollyweird, Morley's psyche begins to crack.  Working alongside a stable of more experienced screenwriters turns out to be stressful, especially since Morley doesn't have a woman in his life right now to base his writing on.  He pursues Pat when Jeff is busy setting up his new practice, and she gives him mixed signals--is she just trying to be his friend, or is she having trouble choosing between him and Jeff?  Morley becomes obsessed with the maroon scarf, wearing it everywhere, even when alone at home banging away at the typewriter.  He keeps seeing some guy following him, but is this guy real, or just a guilt- and fear-generated hallucination?  A creepy photographer who collects photos of mangled murder victims and voraciously reads mystery novels tries to make friends with Morley, thinking they share an interest in grue and gore, and Morley wonders if this guy can read on his face that he is a killer.

In the end Morley's lust to kill overcomes him, and he tries, and fails, to murder some waitress he picked up while drunk; a few days later the waitress finds her way to that ever-suspicious shrink Jeff and Jeff lays a trap into which Morley falls.  Then comes the surprise ending--Morley's black notebook is full of delusions and fantasies.  It wasn't Miss Frazer who tried to force herself on him and then murder him in a suicide pact, he tried to force himself on her and then kill both of them, but failed to kill either of them.  More surprising than the fact that Miss Frazer is still alive is the fact that she is such a softie that after hearing of Morley's publishing success she wrote a letter to his publisher to congratulate him, even though he tried to rape and kill her!  

I don't care for these endings that pull the rug out from under you, telling you in the last chapter that the stuff you've been thinking was the very foundation of the whole book is in fact a trick and a lie.  Especially when the real explanation--Miss Frazer was just a nice lady--is more boring than the grim scenario the book had been fostering, that Miss Frazer was a murderous mental case with sexual issues who turned another person into a murderous mental case with sexual issues!  What kind of horror story undermines its single most disturbing scene in its final pages?  What a let down!  Bloch's deflating ending also feels cheap, because I don't think there were any clues suggesting the black notebook might not be legit.

A particular problem with the ending revelation of The Scarf is how it further muddles whatever opinion about psychology Bloch may have been trying to put across and whatever explanation he might be presenting for why Morley started killing women.  These issues are the heart of the novel, and if what Bloch is trying to say is not clear, the book falls flat.  Now, if Miss Frazer didn't drive Morley crazy, does that mean psychology is bunk, that it is not childhood events that made Morley a killer, but that Morley was just evil from birth?  Or was it Morley's mother who turned him into a woman-hating woman killer?  If his mother is to blame, why did Bloch spend so many pages on the relatively minor figure of Frazer instead of on the pivotal character, Mom?  That is not good storytelling!  And if Morley lied in his black notebook about Frazer, maybe he lied about his mother, too.  Do we really have any idea why Morley became a misogynist serial killer?

(The fact that Jeff turns out to be some kind of mastermind detective as well as an expert analyst who even gives a little speech at the end of the novel explaining that Morley's writing is a means of achieving catharsis and the scarf was a symbol of death, suggests Bloch highly respects psychoanalysis, so I guess that sort of answers that question, but not in a satisfying way.)  

A competent psychological crime story for most of its length, OK but no big deal.  The pace is deliberate--there are no real action scenes or suspense scenes--but it never drags, either.  There is little gore and there are no sex scenes, so if you are looking for those kinds of thrills, look elsewhere--the covers of the paperback editions are much sexier than the contents.  As I have suggested, The Scarf contains many of the elements we have come to expect from Bloch: quite a lot of psychology blah blah blah, some social satire and goofing on industries with which Bloch was familiar--radio, movies, publishing--those references to famous real-life mysterious criminals, and even a few puns.  

Do I have anything interesting to say about this pretty conventional book?  Well, let us consider the possibility that Bloch means to portray Morley as a man who is a repressed homosexual.  The Scarf is full of snide remarks about "queers," and Jeff directly asks Morley if he is a homosexual, something Morley denies, so the topic is right out there in the open.  Morley is a man who is an expert on how women think; now I guess people don't say this kind of stuff anymore, but it used to be normal for people to suggest that gay men are "inverts"--male in body but woman in mind.  (Proust uses the term "invert," and early in The Scarf, when he is working as a cabbie, Morley carries a copy of Proust around with him to appear more intellectual.)  Maybe Morley is an expert on women's psychology because, in a sense, he is a woman.  

Then we have the fact that Morley hates women, and is not sexually attracted to women.  That gay men hate women is a recognized stereotype that, perhaps, Bloch is employing here.  And there is evidence that Morley has little or no sexual interest in women: Constance admits that Morley "can't bear to touch" her unless he is "crazy mad, or crazy drunk," going so far as to tell him, "I want you, and I'm going to have you, and you'll get drunk if it's the only way, every single night for me...." and that waitress is all over Morley, but he is disgusted by her, his only desire is to slay her.

Now, you will object that Morley falls in love with Miss Frazer and with Pat Collins and wants to marry and have sex with both of them.  Well, Frazer is old, and maybe Morley sees her as some kind of mother substitute?  Isn't there some stereotype about gay men and their mothers?  My theory is on firmer ground with Pat Collins, who not only has the ambiguous name but is repeatedly described in ways that are stereotypically masculine--she manages an office and wears suits, for example.  On the same page on which Morley talks about what an effective business woman Pat is he also informs us that Pat has "blunt, babyish thumbs;" a weird thing to include, I thought when I read it.  Maybe Pat is a man substitute!

The other potentially interesting thing about The Scarf is the fact that Bloch revised it.  What differences might there be between the two versions?  There is a sneering reference to Bob Dylan in the 1966 edition I read that must not have been in the 1947 edition, but there must have been more changes.  Is one edition more sexy, more sexist, more gory, more homophobic?  Or did Bloch just try to improve the style?  

(Apparently S. T. Joshi, the premier scholar of weird fiction, has written an essay about Bloch in which he deals with The Scarf--maybe I should track that down.) 

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Not a bad novel, but I can't say you should seek out The Scarf unless you are some kind of Robert Bloch completist.

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I'm still reading manga about the challenging emotional lives of Japanese schoolgirls, and today I can recommend one that is less perverse, less depressing and less subversive than the ones I have been recommending in past blog posts.  High Score Girl (AKA Hi Score Girl) is about a love triangle among teenagers in the early '90s who are obsessed with video games, especially the Street Fighter games.  The jokes are funny, the relationships are touching, and maybe you will be inspired to fire up MAME on your old laptop and relive your youthful days playing fighting games at the local arcade.