![]() He worked as a reporter for the New York American and Daily Mirror before being drafted in 1943 that same year, three of his poems appeared in Poetry, along with work by Langston Hughes. Born in London, he was three when he moved with his family to New York, where he attended City College. “It was something apparently in the nature of the work itself, this precariousness.” America still on the gold standard, and already there is something ghostly about the business of hitting it big.Īlfred Hayes (1911–85) was possible only in America. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a “phantasmal quality.” The screenwriter, who at 37 is 11 years older than the actress, suffers from a kind of affluent precarity. Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The protagonist calls New York “that immense slum.” After Christmas with her parents, the girl feels “a stiffening of her resolution to make money.” Though even this hell-“the smoky and sullen bed of neons that was Los Angeles from the air”-is preferable to the nonbeing of one’s small-town roots, or the lonesome Antarctic of a loveless marriage back East. The girl has suffered various indecencies and indignities, come-ons in casting offices and unsavory business in “little photography dens,” all for the sake of a glittering career that may never come. It’s a kind of purgatory that looks to outsiders like paradise, and which feels to those inside it, at times, like a special hell. Equally hardboiled is Hayes’s depiction of the Tinseltown milieu. Their brief, poignant affair, as unsentimental as it is inevitable, unfolds like a noirish romance. ![]() These, together with the man’s self-doubt and unhappy long-distance marriage, are the dark materials out of which Hayes builds his narrative. Thus the unnamed narrator enters the equally nameless girl’s “unsuccessful” life, which acquires for a time, in his eyes, a kind of fatal glamour, compounded of her beauty and her defeated ambition and her desperation, a desperation to be seen, noticed-“discovered,” in the industry parlance-and compounded also of the fact that he has rescued this foundering beauty from what may or may not have been a joke but would certainly have had, delivered by the remorseless ocean, a permanent punch line. Before going under, she raises her martini glass in a toast to the moon. It’s unclear whether she is suicidal or merely drunk. In My Face for the World to See, a married screenwriter, alienated from his own apparent success-he says he belongs to the “Screen Writhers Guild”-saves a penniless aspiring actress from drowning at a beachfront party. What is the lonely usherette of New York Movie dreaming of? What waits at home for the cinephile of Intermission? In what lines of work are his anonymous hotel guests employed, and whom, if anyone, do they love? Hayes seems to answer questions implicit in Hopper’s paintings. Most obsessively, his writings revolve around ambition and failure and the complex relationship that our professional identities have to our larger selves. Love and illusion, domesticity and its discontents are, for Hayes, permanent concerns. Reissued by NYRB Classics, Hayes’s three short novels of merit- In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958), and The End of Me (1968)-form a thematic trilogy. At the same time that I was rediscovering the painter of Nighthawks, watching at one remove the growing chaos in the cities, charting the frightening symptoms of my fiancée’s long Covid, and worrying about the future, I found myself reading the novels of Alfred Hayes, a mid-century original who resembles a sort of Edward Hopper in prose. It was, as no one needs to be told, a difficult season of an impossible year. Taking walks along the Hudson, I could see the painter’s birthplace, the town of Nyack, just across the river-near but unreachable. Hopper was much on my mind that summer, which I spent hunkered down with my then-fiancée in a waterfront townhouse in Tarrytown, a village in Westchester County, New York. Hopper’s ambiguous, voyeuristic depictions of isolated figures, dramatically lit and deeply involved in their private worlds, seemed to speak to that anxious moment, even as they captured something essential about the atomized poetry of American lives. In the pandemic spring and summer of 2020, as lockdowns took hold and the coronavirus spread, the paintings of Edward Hopper enjoyed a resurgence of interest.
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