In Love

by Alfred Hayes

  ALFRED HAYES (1911–1985) was born into a Jewish family in Whitechapel, London, though his father, a barber, trained violinist, and sometime bookie, moved the family to New York when Hayes was three. After attending City College, Hayes worked as a reporter for the New York American and Daily Mirror and began to publish poetry, including “Joe Hill,” about the legendary labor organizer, which was later set to music by the composer Earl Robinson and recorded by Joan Baez. During World War II Hayes was assigned to a special services unit in Italy; after the war he stayed on in Rome, where he contributed to the story development and scripts of several classic Italian neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), and gathered material for two popular novels, All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), the latter the basis for the 1953 film Act of Love, starring Kirk Douglas. In the late 1940s Hayes went to work in Hollywood, writing screenplays for Clash by Night, A Hatful of Rain, The Left Hand of God, Joy in the Morning, and Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, as well as scripts for television. Hayes was the author of seven novels, a collection of stories, and three volumes of poetry. In addition to In Love, NYRB Classics publishes My Face for the World to See.

  FREDERIC RAPHAEL is a screenwriter, playwright, novelist, translator, and critic. His screenwriting credits include Darling (for which he won an Oscar), Far from the Madding Crowd, Two for the Road, and, with the director Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut.

  IN LOVE

  ALFRED HAYES

  Introduction by

  FREDERIC RAPHAEL

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1953 by Alfred Hayes; copyright renewed © 1987 by Marietta Hayes

  Introduction copyright © 2007 by Volatic, Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Saul Leiter, Untitled, c. 1950s; © Saul Leiter; courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Hayes, Alfred, 1911–1985.

  In love / by Alfred Hayes ; introduction by Frederic Raphael.

  pages ; cm. — (New York review books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-666-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3515.A9367I5 2013

  813’.52—dc23

  2013008974

  eISBN 978-1-59017-693-1

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  IN LOVE

  Dedication

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

  INTRODUCTION

  ALTHOUGH the author of a small masterpiece, Alfred Hayes figures neither in the textbooks of postwar literature nor even in the indices of modern biographies. He wrote no curricular books, and he failed, or did not care, to hang out with those whose company makes people famous by association; he slept with no notorious women (or none who said he did), and he did not win prizes or accrue honors. Born in England, in 1911, he was taken, at the age of three, to America, where he attended City College in New York. As a young man he became a reporter with the now defunct Daily Mirror and New York American. He seems to have remained in the USA until he died in 1985, except for a period during the mid- and late 1940s, when he was in the U.S. Army Special Services in Europe.

  His early fictions, The Girl on the Via Flaminia (later filmed, lamely, as Act of Love, with Kirk Douglas in the lead) and All Thy Conquests, derived from experiences during the liberation of Italy. Training as a reporter made Hayes quick to encapsulate the essence of a story. All Thy Conquests delivers a variety of characters and events in a sequence of terse sketches. Its newsreel montage style owes something to Hemingway’s In Our Time and to John Dos Passos’s multifaceted, cinematic fictions such as Manhattan Transfer (to which parts of Sartre’s truncated postwar tetralogy Les Chemins de la liberté are something of an hommage). The Girl on the Via Flaminia introduces the recurrent figure of the vulnerable female, perishable beauty her only fragile asset, who becomes Hayes’s emblematic character both in In Love and in its quasi-sequel My Face for the World to See (set in the studio-dominated Hollywood television was about to subvert).

  Hayes must have had a quick ear for Italian. Soon after the eviction of the Germans from Rome, he became involved with the neorealist school of filmmakers, of whom Roberto Rossellini was the dominant figure. Rossellini’s Roma, Città Aperta, with Anna Magnani, was shot on location with film stock liberated from who knew where, and caught the last days of the Nazi occupation with grainy, unblinking vividness. Hayes worked with Rossellini subsequently, during the making of Paisà, a patchy 1946 film of six episodes, on which Federico Fellini was also another of the writers. Although he was nominated for an Oscar as a writer on Paisà, it is typical of his literary fortunes that Hayes should not even be mentioned in connection with the film in Halliwell’s allegedly authoritative Film Guide. He worked, again anonymously, with Vittorio de Sica on Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 neorealist masterpiece, but seems then to have quit Italy and returned to the USA.

  His cinematic abilities had come to the attention of Fred Zinnemann, for whom he wrote the original (Oscar-nominated) story of Teresa, a film about a GI who brings home an Italian bride. Halliwell’s Guide deigns to cite him as “Arthur Hayes” in this connection. The misprint might be taken to symbolize Hayes’s want of general renown; perhaps his indifference to it. Had apprenticeship as a newspaperman reconciled him with never quite getting the billing he deserved? The old-style reporter was required to make inventories of pain and mortality without queasiness and without intruding his own emotions into them. This unobtrusiveness is the workaday cousin of the Flaubertian novelist, whose personal opinions remain covert and whose signature is the work itself. In Love is a work of art by a man who struck no attitudes as an artist and, it seems, had no political or personal kites to fly. If it has literary precedents (and they are not obvious), they are in the terse, distanced, anti-rhetorical Italian fiction of which Cesare Pavese and Alberto Moravia were already established exponents during Hayes’s European years.

  Hayes remains biographically eponymous: a hazy figure whose obscurity was due perhaps to lack of thrusting ambition. More probably, he was in the American tradition of the working stiff: the hard-bitten newspaperman, with a hat and a cigarette and matches (not a lighter), who knows the score but doesn’t expect to score himself. Another transplanted Englishman, Raymond Chandler, took up something of the same pose but with more self-consciously wisecracking panache. By the 1950s Hayes (like Chandler) had been taken up by Hollywood, where screenwriting was well-paid drudgery without the trudgery of journalism. He had a quick slew of credits, of which the most interesting was Fred Zinnemann’s 1957 A Hatful of Rain (about a war veteran who becomes a drug addict) and the most memorable, alas, Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun with Harry Belafonte.

  By the 1960s Hayes had fallen off the A-list of screenwriters (he writes sourly in My Face for the World to See of belonging to the Screen Writhers Guild). Although he did script George Cukor’s 1976 lame remake of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, most of his many credits after the 1950s were for series such as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Mannix. If he published no more fiction, he continued to be a prolific, if unrenowned, poet: h
is poem “Joe Hill” (about a union organizer executed in Utah in 1915) was put to music in 1936, later becoming a hit for Joan Baez in the 1960s.

  In Love is Hayes’s slim claim to lasting fame. First published in 1953, it came out in (although it does not at all exemplify) a period of well-turned fiction which was already becoming dated. In New York Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead introduced a new, swaggering style. Not only was Mailer’s vocabulary raunchy (although not yet quite four-lettered) but the voice of the author was unsubtly loud and willfully egocentric. In the same spirit, at much the same time, Jackson Pollock’s action painting made the artist’s own energy an ingredient of his picture. Pollock was putting an end to the centrality of the American urban pastoralism to be seen in Edward Hopper, whose solitary drinkers in midnight bars are cousins to the characters whom Alfred Hayes depicts, with similarly distanced sympathy.

  In In Love the action takes place, we can assume, in post-war New York, but its locations have the 1930s decor in which Hopper framed his elegies of anonymous despair and loneliness. The girl in Hayes’s story listens to the radio, but she doesn’t watch television. She belongs to the lonely bed-sitting sisterhood that feminism (and its magazines and their empowered editors such as Cosmopolitan’s Helen Gurley Brown) would, supposedly, come to liberate and whom Sex in the City would show to be hardly less, if more luridly, desperate. Hayes’s nameless antiheroine’s best hope is still the happy-ever-after marriage that the puritan tradition, and its dream-factory mutations, had wished on middle America. In her early twenties, she is already the divorced victim of one such ruptured romance and has the (offstage) baby daughter, Barbara, to prove it.

  The love story recounted by the almost forty-year-old man in the bar, to an adjacent girl who is another candidate for disillusionment, is soiled by his failure, or inability, to commit; he may have been in love, but he lacked the will, or the innocence, to make loving into something positive. The story is no more obsolete than an Edward Hopper painting; art—as Ezra Pound said—is “news that stays news,” the working stiff’s ideal story. Yet In Love is undoubtedly a period piece: it belongs to a time when your fortieth was a birthday to dread (in My Face for the World to See someone is described as “an old man in his late sixties”) and when a thousand dollars could be a fortune to a working girl with a baby daughter and no husband. After the rich man called Howard (drawn with pitiless sympathy) offers the pretty girl that much to spend one night with him, we know that sooner or later she will make the call she tells her lover she will never make.

  Do I spoil the story by revealing what happens? Art doesn’t require surprise; the beauty of Hayes’s novella is in an inevitability which is neither artificially contrived nor tearfully salted. To measure the difference between a work of art and its degradation, compare In Love with Adrian Lyne’s 1993 film Indecent Proposal, in which Robert Redford offers Demi Moore a million dollars to sleep with him and you don’t believe a word of it, or give a damn whether she does or not, because the whole thing is famous-people confectionery and a million dollars is only a fraction of what Demi and her kind get for flashing their charms and not even having to give a decent performance when they do it. Howard’s proposal is made almost diffidently and conveys the honeyed menace of wealth without Redford’s glinting conceit. Howard’s author may despise him, but the accuracy of Hayes’s contempt leads him to understand and almost to pity him. Mary McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” has something of the same character in Mr. Breen, but her sprawling story lacks the trimness which makes Hayes a master. McCarthy is too manifestly promising you what a babe she, the author, can be in the sack; Hayes makes all sexuality a kind of frustration; his lovers are shadows clutching shadows.

  When In Love was published in Britain, influential literary figures such as Antonia White, Elizabeth Bowen, John Lehmann, and Stevie Smith immediately saluted its qualities. They were, however, representative of an ancien régime which the Angry Young Men would soon load into their tumbrils. The maverick short-story writer Julian Maclaren-Ross reviewed In Love at the top of a column which finished with a dismissive few lines about a novel entitled Lucky Jim, which he denounced as cheap and ephemeral. It may be that, like Sainte-Beuve, Maclaren-Ross recognized all literary merits save genius; or it may be that Kingsley Amis and his contemporaries were about to make anti-art into the going form of fiction and authorial self-advertisement into the best means to achieve primacy.

  It is unlikely that the advent of either Amis or even of Mailer, Roth, and Updike was responsible for Hayes ceasing to publish fiction before the 1960s had begun, but the pointilliste refinement of his prose and the perspicuity of his self-effacement were abruptly out of fashion. In Love can be dated by the economy of its eroticism (that singular curl of black hair in the rumpled bed) and by the austerity of its despair. The malaise of Hayes’s characters will never be cured by Marxist activism or feminist rebellion or blokeish booziness. Although never “hip” in the terms laid down in Norman Mailer’s famous article in Dissent, Hayes’s masterpiece reads like a white writer’s tribute to the blues; its tersely syncopated lament calls for a soundtrack improvised by Thelonious Monk.

  It is always dangerous to return, after half a century, to a book one has greatly admired. Once, when Vladimir Nabokov was maintaining that H.G. Wells was a better novelist than Joseph Conrad, an outraged Leavisite asked when Nabokov had last read Kipps. “When I was fifteen,” he replied, “and I have never made the mistake of looking at it again.” I have just reread In Love and found it just as compelling and as flawless as I thought it when I was in my twenties. Hayes may have been forgotten (if he was ever remembered), but he belongs to a serene company of petits maîtres whose exquisite work, however sparse, need not await the endorsement of critics or the retrieval of anthologists. A gem is a gem is a gem.

  —FREDERIC RAPHAEL

  IN LOVE

  Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

  Guilty of dust and sin.

  But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

  From my first entrance in,

  Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

  If I lacked anything.

  —GEORGE HERBERT

  1

  HERE I am, the man in the hotel bar said to the pretty girl, almost forty, with a small reputation, some money in the bank, a convenient address, a telephone number easily available, this look on my face you think peculiar to me, my hand here on this table real enough, all of me real enough if one doesn’t look too closely.

  Do I appear to be a man, the man said in the hotel bar at three o’clock in the afternoon to the pretty girl who had no particular place to go, who doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, or a man who privately thinks his life has come to some sort of an end?

  I assume I don’t.

  I assume that in any mirror, or in the eyes I happen to encounter, say on an afternoon like this, in such a hotel, in such a bar, across a table like this, I appear to be someone who apparently knows where he’s going, assured, confident of himself, and aware of what, reasonably, to expect when he arrives, although I could hardly, if now you insisted on pressing me, describe for you that secret destination.

  But there is one. There must be one. We must behave, mustn’t we, as though there is one, cultivating that air of moving purposely somewhere, carrying with us that faint preoccupation of some appointment to be kept, that appearance of having a terminal, of a place where, even while we are sitting here drinking these daiquiris and the footsteps are all quieted by the thick pleasant rugs and the afternoon dies, you and I are expected, and that there’s somebody there, quite important, waiting impatiently for us? But the truth is, isn’t it, that all our purposefulness is slightly bogus, we haven’t any appointment at all, there isn’t a place where we’re really expected or hoped for, and that nobody’s really waiting, nobody at all, and perhaps there never was, not even in the very beginning, long ago, when we hurried even faster than we do now, and there wa
s in us something that permitted us to believe, even for a short while, when we were younger—or at least I was; you, of course, are still comparatively young; how old are you, actually: twenty-four, twenty-five?—that the intensity with which we set out must compel such a destination to exist.

  So now, close to forty, I tell myself that perhaps there isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, a place at all, thinking that to be, not disillusioned, but just the opposite of illusioned, is a sort of improvement, when it probably isn’t; and with this sense, that’s hard to describe, of permanent loss; of having somewhere committed an error of a kind or a mistake of a kind that can never be rectified, of having made a gesture of a sort that can never be retracted.

  But you’re pretty. And it’s close to four o’clock. And here are the cocktails on the table. And in that mirror both of us are apparently visible. The waiter will arrive when we want him, the clock tick, the check will be paid, the account settled, the city continue to exist.

  And isn’t that, after all, what we really want?

  Things in their place; a semblance of order; a feeling, true or deceptive, of well-being; an afternoon in which something apparently happens.

  Nothing shaken; nothing really momentous; a certain pleasure, without a certain guilt.

  The guilt comes later, doesn’t it? The guilt’s further down the menu. It’s only when, after the waiter’s been paid and the bill settled, that something’s always somehow left over, unaccounted for, and that’s when we come to the guilt, don’t we?

  Odd, though, the man said to the pretty girl, how I sleep well, how unimpaired my appetite is, and yet I seem always tired now; there are inexplicable pains in my back, here, where the muscles seem mysteriously knotted, my eyes (although I hardly ever read now, and hardly ever go to the movies) ache; how a rough, dry taste’s settled in my mouth.