En færdig mand

by Alfred Hayes, Bente Kastberg (Translator)

Alfred Hayes er forfatter til et lille mesterværk af en romancyklus, der startede med Forelsket fortsatte med Mit ansigt ud mod verden og nu afsluttes med En færdig mand. De tre romaner reflekterer over, hvordan mennesker med magt misbruger den, og hvad mennesker uden, vil gøre for at opnå den. Og på den måde umuliggøres kærligheden og håbet om et lykkeligt liv. Hayes dissekerer i en iskold og lakonisk stil fejlslagen moderne kærlighed. Romanerne Forelsket og Mit ansigt ud mod verden er tidligere udkommet på dansk.

Handlingen i En færdig mand finder sted i New York, hvor Hollywood-manuskriptforfatter Ashers karriere er kommet til et ydmygende endeligt. Ganske som hans seneste ægteskab. Tilbage i sin fødeby New York lejer han sig ind på et hotelværelse og tager sit liv op til revision. Midt i livet er det ikke et spørgsmål om penge, men snarere et spørgsmål om mening og formål. Måske også om stolthed.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, The United States Of America, Novels, New York, American

235 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

About the author

Alfred Hayes (18 April 1911 – 14 August 1985) was a British screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy and the United States. He is perhaps best known for his poem "Joe Hill" ("I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night…"), later set to music by Earl Robinson.
Born in London, Hayes graduated from New York's City College (now part of City University of New York), worked briefly as a newspaper reporter, and began writing fiction and poetry in the 1930s. During World War II he served in Europe in the U.S. Army Special Services (the "morale division"). Afterwards, he stayed in Rome and became a screenwriter of Italian neorealist films. As a co-writer on Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946), he was nominated for an Academy Award; he received another Academy Award nomination for Teresa (1951). He adapted his own novel The Girl on the Via Flaminia into a play; in 1953 it was adapted into a French-language film Un acte d'amour.
He was an uncredited co-writer of Vittorio De Sica's neorealist film Bicycle Thieves (1948) for which he also wrote the English language subtitles.
Among his U.S. filmwriting credits are The Lusty Men (1952, directed by Nicholas Ray) and the film adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars (1974). His credits as a television scriptwriter included scripts for American series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Nero Wolfe and Mannix.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

The weakest Hayes of the 3 NYRB releases - the plot a bit flimsy; the writing a bit dated - but weak Hayes is still better than almost anyone else. The book has interesting departures into Joycean style long paragraphs. It is occasionally very funny, and often quite bleak. Start with My Face for the World to See, then In Love. If you like them as I do, this will be worth your time. But I wouldn't start here.

"I could see her look at me. It sounded idiotic. As a matter of fact, that was what had made it even more painful; it was idiotic. Even the worst things that happened to me refused to have dignity when they happened."

[Hux · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd completely forgotten that I'd already read a book by Hayes (In Love) because the style of that one is nothing like this, in fact, I'd say they're wildly different. With that in mind, I actually liked this more, the scatter gun approach, short, pithy sentences followed by long decadent ones. Sometimes it was jarring and a little unpleasant, prone to that Noir-ish detective fiction style, with lots of off-the-cuff, sardonic remarks that amount to very little, but for the most part I found it very compelling and rather enjoyable to read.

The story also helped in my enjoyment given that it was more cynical and built on the always entertaining theme of a wasted life. Asher is a 51-year-old writer (well, a Hollywood screen writer) whose career is going nowhere. The book opens with him discovering that his wife (his second) is cheating on him. So he runs away from his life, gets on a plane, and returns to is old childhood home in New York. Here he rents a hotel room and visits his aunt Dora who, in turn, encourages him to meet up with his nephew, Michael, also an aspiring writer, a poet. When they meet Asher is rather stand-offish and rude but he makes up for it by inviting Michael for drinks. Here he meets Michael's girlfriend, Aurora. What follows is a curious cat and mouse game between these three characters, the combative nature of the two men, the sexual tension between Asher and Aurora, the generational rift, as well as the desperate need of Asher to find new purpose in his life.

I really quite liked the themes being explored here. Asher is entering the late stages of middle-age and has nothing to show for it. Two failed marriages, no children, and a stagnating career. He so desperately wants to experience youth again, to feel connected to the new, more cynical, generation of the 1960s, and potentially find his place among it. In many ways the relationship between these three, the little games the two younger members are playing, is a symbol of the clash between generations of this particular era. I feel like this is yet another book which is scrutinising the consequences of modernity, relentless liberalism and permissive society, and is reaching a conclusion apparently reached by everyone else -- namely, that this kind of atomised society offers very little to anyone (with the possible exception of the young who, by nature, are yet to desire anything but liberation). And so, understandably, everyone wants to be young, to be freed from the constraints of adulthood and responsibility. And everyone is... until they aren't.

It's interesting because when this was published, the young protagonists were hip and happening, part of a 1960s cultural revolution, but today, they would be in their seventies. A society that opens the door to individuality is always a society that is prioritising youth over everything else despite knowing, on some level, that this is perhaps the least important part of a life. But what can Asher do other than accept his growing irrelevance and continue pushing the boulder up the hill?

I thought this was a really interesting book, just cynical enough, and even a tad depressing, to make it worth my while. I enjoyed this particular slice of New York nothingness, of failed middle-age and the competing cynicism of blind youth not far behind, certainly much more than the gentle writing of 'In Love' and I even found something to like in the young characters and their manipulative cruelty. But yeah, if you're approaching, amid, or just leaving middle-age, it's an eye-opening yet bittersweet story.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no point in documenting the amount of wine my first wife drank, or the long vague afternoons she spent drifting from room to room, pausing, now and then, for a long abstracted morose contemplation of the river. The important thing is that I began to dread going home. I began to dread the dark falling and the clock-hand moving towards the dinner hour. Still, in a marriage, for reasons comprehensible to no one at all, you go on. On! As though it were a direction. I gave up imploring her. Hiding the wine. Buying tickets for openings in the hope she'd leave the apartment. All the damn therapeutics. Frankly, by then, if she'd leaned too far out of the window one summer's evening I might have hesitated, oh, just fractionally, to rush to her before she started to fall. And yet: and yet: I'd loved her once. A flat rock in the woods, the sunlight filtered through the pines, I'd loved her once.

[JacquiWine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The British-born novelist and screenwriter Alfred Hayes – a man who spent much of his working life in the US and Italy – is fast becoming one of those ‘experience everything’ writers for me. His slim, expertly-crafted novellas, with their piecing portrayals of the pain of ill-fated relationships, remain some of my favourites in recent years.

The End of Me (1968) is a later novella, and the passing of time is somewhat reflected in the book’s narrator, Asher, a fifty-one-year-old screenwriter whose career is on the rocks. Having observed his socially-ambitious second wife in flagrante with her tennis partner, Asher flees his home in L.A. for the relative anonymity of New York, a bruised and anguished man. It is a city that has healed Asher in the past — ‘her crowds, like enormous blotters’ possess the ability to absorb his life.

Once ready to reconnect with the world, Asher pays a visit to his elderly Aunt Dora, who views him as the successful one in the family – the one with a good job, a fine wife, and comfortable home in the eternal sunshine. Unwilling or unable to dispel this idyllic vision, Asher submits to the falsehood, assuring Aunt Dora that everything is relatively well in his world. In reality, he lacks a sense of purpose and is pondering what to do.

As a consequence of the visit, Asher agrees to meet Dora’s grandson, Michael, a young man with ambitions to be a poet; but when Michael comes to see Asher in his hotel suite, their meeting is a disaster. Asher is riled by Michael’s somewhat surly, disdainful manner, and his subsequent silence prompts Michael to leave.

The following day, Asher is ashamed of his behaviour; contrition sets in, and he calls Michael to invite him for cocktails at the hotel. When Michael arrives, he is accompanied by Aurora, a striking girl of southern European descent. The attraction for Asher is immediate and intense; Aurora intrigues him, and yet he knows she is part of Michael’s world.

She had immense dark eyes. The lids were whitened; the lips had been administered to with a pale lipstick. She wore her hair caught up in a rich, somewhat loose, coil that threatened if she laughed too hard (and she did, she always laughed too hard, she laughed, if I may amend Michael’s more graphic description of her laughter, vaginally) to come down in a disorderly mass. I wondered, then, how far it would reach: her hair. Down to where. Down to what. The skin was marvelous. And she was Michael’s girl. (p. 31)

To read the rest of my review, please visit:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2020...

[Good Books Good Friends · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'ai retrouvé le style de l'auteur que j'aimais mais cette fois-ci, les personnages m'ont plu également. Une belle lecture et une très belle déclaration d'amour à New-York.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began to realize that what had been, perhaps, not amusing at all, with the boy before me, listening, I tended to make amusing, and what may have had some significance to start with I was making more significant than it had possibly been. It was not only because I had a desire to show Michael, through what I was, what the world had been, but evidently to acquire in his eyes some value. And this disturbed me. Had I come, had I hired him, because I was in need of some judgment? Was I asking a boy, whom, somehow, I didn’t entirely trust, to assess my life for me? Oh, there was a desperation of a kind in me, I could feel that I had been shattered and the essential parts of myself scattered over a vacant lot and that I had to, more or less on my hands and knees, go about picking up or trying to pick up the scattered pieces, that at my age I was in danger of not knowing what I meant, what my own experience meant, what, if anything, the experience of my generation meant.

This novel left me feeling stranded somewhere in the mid-terrains of a rush of prose that was a mixed bag: being full of short and brief Hemingwayesque sequences interspersed with long paragraphs with replete with Joycean run-on sentences. The prose looks clunky in several important sections of the novel, and the plot is mostly loosely put together if not entirely vapid or vacuous. The sort of story that deals with a middle-aged man looking for succour in the midst of several mid-life setbacks and finally getting caught in a troublesome net of the tragicomic inconsistencies of an insecure love triangle could have been better served with a stronger plot and better scene writing. However the author dazzles in several sections with his occasional ribald wordplay, one instance of which I have enclosed above. I have not read the previous two titles from the same author published by NYRB, and surely I may be missing a point or two- a thing that I need to address myselves quickly.

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well nobody does Hemingway quite as well as Alfred Hayes--not even Hem himself. Once again the prose here is outstanding and, as an aging romantic myself, the bittersweet hard-boiled veneer betraying a hopeless romantic bound for yet another disappointment as he ages out of marriage, job, and the sexual world altogether is bound to ring some bells for me. It all worked well: the portrait of this WWII Greatest Generation Sinatra-like tough guy with a romantic streak a mile wide felt real, tragic, and quite honest actually. It's difficult to doubt that Hayes was really baring his soul in this one, more so I thought than in his other mid-century failed romance novels My Face for the World to See and In Love.

As in those two previous novels, however, the casual sexism and double standards in male/female relations still annoy this Blank Generation or oldish Gen Xer. Still, it's hard to doubt the novel's attempt at real honesty, warts and all. At least here Hayes juxtaposes his own alter-ego character with a Beatnik-ish early Baby Boomer whose nihilism makes him seem the far worse option in terms of male role models. The young girlfriend/female character also comes off as rather vacuous, despite the narrator's infatuation with her youth and beauty--and I'm assuming this was done on purpose. Sure, it's generational character assassination, but not wholly wrong for all that. (I mean my parents were Greatest Generation and as insufferably conformist as they were they didn't try revolution, fail, then elect Ronald Reagan and begin dismantling democracy for tyranny. Conservative as they were they still faught against the Nazis instead of emulating them.)

Anyway, forgiving a bit of our fathers' (or fathers' fathers') cultural assumptions regarding women and love relationships, this novel is well worth reading for the fabulous prose style and certain moments of raw emotional terror that are excellently wrought. Romantic existential crises are real and Hayes is one of the best as depicting them.

[Veromika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where did one start when it was no longer clear how one had gotten to where one was now? By what folly? By what minute surrenders? By what self-neglect?

Asher, a once-successful hollywood screenwriter, is left scarmbling when he discovers his second wife cheating on him with her tennis coach. He runs away to New York, the city of his youth, to regain some of his composure and confidence. Though the past is enticing, it isn’t kind and it brings Asher face-to-face with a younger relative through whom Asher desires to give himself a second chance at everything.

Asher’s story isn’t novel. We have seen thousands of Ashers in literature, cinema, art. He is the man who has dwindled his good fortune and suddenly finds himself destitute of charm, confidence, and belief that dictated his youth. Call it mid-life crisis or a series of unfortunate events, it doesn’t matter. Things once used to work for Asher and now it just simply doesn’t. In a bid to reclaim some of the optimism and luck that boosted him in his youth, he runs away to New York and finds the city altered.

So there it was, altered. I had the word. In my absence, in my exile, when I too was long gone, the place, of infinite extension, the remembered place, had been altered.

- - x - -

Along with the city, he gains a new accomplice, his relative Michael. Like Asher, Michael is an aspiring writer. And that is about where the similarities between them end. Michael is harsh, unyielding, and supercilious in his conduct. He looks down on everything that Asher has left behind and ultimately Asher himself. A sense of responsibility brings them together, but their relationship develops from feelings of penitence, pity, and pride. Asher finds himself gravitated towards the contemptuous youth.

I had wished to create something between us; something, I admit, involved his slipping into a category of a kind: that is, a son, a protege, or a pupil, or simply a younger version of myself, or, in a queer way, a younger version that I hoped to become, that is, to go backward to him and therefore to be able to go forward again… but he resisted all categories.

Asher isn’t a likable character. He cheats on his first wife and gets cheated on by his second. He is rich, but shallow. He pitys Michael with a veiled jealousy of his passions and youth. And Michael is on a mission to teach Asher a lesson. The humiliation of their initial encounter is never far away from his mind. He uses every weapon, cunning manoeuvre, and deceit to confront Asher with his failings and make him admit that he is a fraud and has no right to any sense of superiority. Asher remains confused by this allure towards Michael but at the same time enjoys their interaction for its flimsy camaraderie.

Michael brings Aurora into Asher’s life. While Michael appeals to the ambitious memory of Asher, Aurora entices him with the promise of begone youth. Though he really didn’t need much of enticing. In Michael’s words, Asher was an utter creep. I am not a fan of lecherous old men and this was my least favourite part of the novel. I can’t identify who took advantage of whom when it comes to Asher and Aurora.

Aurora is a 22-year-old law student tied by the hip to Michael, to such an extent that towards the end she relinquishes her ‘ownership’ to the boy. She seems air-headed but she can be deviously cunning. Between her and Michael she’s the one with conscious, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a deception too. The author doesn’t give Aurora her due credit. The story is driven by the constant volley between Michael and Asher, but without Aurora, the tale would have lacked its depth and dimension. If it was me writing, Aurora would have been a bigger part and a critical driver of the plot. One day you will find me marching for justice for female characters in well-written books by male authors. They need to look the women in their story from lens other than eroticism. It is tiring.

In the end, Michael and Aurora seem to have everything more than Asher. More years ahead of them, more confidence, more cohesion, more daring, more cunning, more authority. Asher was nothing but a plaything in their hands, and sometimes a willing plaything. They toy with his emotions, question his morals, and chide his life choices. It’s as though the vast and dangerous New York plays with Asher through Michael and Aurora, to teach him a lesson, to remind him not to take himself so seriously, to mete out his karma, to declare that his youth is over and he needs to relinquish his passions for the next generation.

I am condemned to a fiction of myself. To a false well-being. To a counterfeit success.

- - x - -

The writing is fascinating. I am partial to stories that understand the limitations of language and play with them. Hayes writes short sentences, repeated sentences, as though Asher is too busy feeling things to be able to coherently translate them for the page. Grammar, dialogues, and sentence structures are forgotten. Hayes takes great liberties with the language while not compromising its comprehension. The dialogues are sparse and tightly controlled. When used, they deliberately tell us more about the speaker.

Asher is a complicated thinker. He observes more and feels more. He has multiple streams of thought running in his mind and that is shown brilliantly through the writing. Hayes cleverly depicts the duality of Asher - his cynical attitude towards both the trivialities and luxuries of life and his indubitable sense of superiority.

The satire is powerful and when used it strikes a chord. Michael and Asher’s fight, Aurora conning Asher, and the trio’s final showdown are all chapters that leave a lasting impact. I look forward to exploring more of Hayes' terrific writing.

- - x - -

I’d recommend this book to anyone willing to explore unchartered literary fiction. I am deducting one star for the injustice of constricting Aurora to a plot point. She deserved better.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A concise, precisely written short novel in the first person about Asher, a sixty year old Hollywood screenwriter whose career has come to an end, as has his latest marriage. He returns to New York, where he grew up, pondering what he should do next. In New York he meets the young Michael, a want to be poet, and Aurora,a young flirtatious woman. Aurora seems to be interested in Asher.

I prefer his novels, ‘In Love’ and ‘My Face for the World to See’, however I enjoy Alfred Hayes writing style and found this book to be a satisfying read.

This book was first unlisted in 1968.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Oh, there was a desperation of a kind in me, I could feel that I had been shattered and the essential parts of myself scattered over a vacant lot and that I had to, more or less on my hands and knees, go about picking up or trying to pick up the scattered pieces, that at my age I was in danger of not knowing what I meant, what my own experience meant, what, if anything, the experience of my generation meant." (105)

I suppose that, after In Love, My Face for the World to See, The Girl on the Via Flaminia, and now The End of Me, this is the end of Hayes (for me). None of his other works appear to be in print. We have to be grateful to New York Review Books and Pushkin Press (and Peter Owen before them) that at least this quarter of Hayes's works is still in print. Hopefully, one day, they'll also reprint Hayes's other novels (like All Thy Conquests) and poems. With regard to The End of Me: it's not as good as his best, but definitely still worth reading.

"There are episodes to which one always returns not quite believing that one participated in them." (91)

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve liked the other Hayes’ novels I’ve read, but in this book, while I loved the writing, I loathed the narrative which is both dated and hugely misogynistic. While the narrator was having his epiphany, it’s a pity he didn’t realize that perhaps his marriages didn’t entirely fail because his wives were such awful women and he was a dupe. I was on his side at the start; by the end, I thought he’d got what he deserved.

[julieta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiene momentos pero no se compara ni de lejos con "Los Enamorados" que es una pequeña obra maestra.
Este queda más opaco, y gris. También tiene chicas traidoras, y hombres solos, pero es otra onda, como escrito en un mal momento. Sin ritmo para mí.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The New York Review of Books has reissued three novels, in a kind of loose trilogy, written by Alfred Hayes, a writer who should be much better known. Written in the late 1950s/early 1960s, they are about many things, including the failure of love. Each features a first-person narrator, a man who is a screenwriter, either in his success or just past it. I read them a bit out of order: My Face For the World to See; In Love, then this one, The End of Me. Here, for the first time, the narrator has a name, Asher, and he's 50, a screenwriter who is past his flush of success, is no longer getting jobs, and his second marriage is imploding. He hightails it out of his house and LA and returns to NYC, where he grew up. There, via an elderly aunt, he meets a young relative, the 26 year old Michael Bey, a young man with a smirk, a would-be poet, and a fetching girlfriend named Aurora. In some ways, this novel is about the distinction in generational views, and also about pride and ego and how one, desiring something more in their lives, can be manipulated. It was a compelling read. And reading all three was a fascinating experience.

[Liina · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Saul Leiter's photos would be novels they'd be this one. So desolate, ironic, bleak but utterly beautiful and with dashing, crisp cool style. And the paragraphs of a city snowed in. oh my god.
A sort of love letter to a bygone New York and to bygone youth. So good. tho his best for me, remains "In Love".

[Pratheesh Parameswaran · Rating 3 out of 5]

ആകസ്മികമായി കണ്ടുമുട്ടുന്നവർ തമ്മിലുണ്ടാകുന്ന ബന്ധങ്ങളും അവയിലെ സങ്കീർണ്ണതകളുമാണ് Alfres Hayes - ൻ്റെ നോവലുകളിൽ മിക്കതിലും പ്രമേയമായി കാണാവുന്നത് .THE END OF ME എന്ന നോവലിൽ തൻ്റെ അമ്പതുകളിലെത്തിയ 'Asher എന്ന തിരക്കഥാകൃത്ത് തൻ്റെ പരാജയപ്പെട്ട വിവാഹ ജീവിതത്തെ തുടർന്ന് താൻ ജനിച്ചു വളർന്ന സ്ഥലമായ ന്യൂയോർക്കിലേക്ക് മടങ്ങിവരുകയാണ് അവിടെയെത്തി ഹോട്ടലിൽ തനിച്ചു താമസിച്ചു വരുന്നതിനിടയിൽ യുവ കവിയായ Michael നെയും കൂട്ടുക്കാരി Aurora യെയും പരിചയപ്പെടാനിടയാകുന്നു .മൂവരും തമ്മിലുള്ള പരിചയം വളർന്നു വരുന്നതിനിടയിൽ Michael തൻ്റെ കൂട്ടുകാരിയുടെ സഹായത്തോടെ താൻ സൃഷ്ടിക്കുന്ന നുണകഥകളാൽ Asher നെ വഞ്ചിച്ചു കൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നു .തൻ്റെ സിനിമാ ജീവിതത്തിനിടയിൽ കണ്ടതും താൻ അനുഭവിച്ചതുമായ സംഭവങ്ങളിൽ നിന്നാണ് തൻ്റെ നോവലിനുള്ള പ്രമേയങ്ങൾ Hayes കണ്ടെത്തുന്നതെന്ന് തോന്നിപ്പിക്കുന്ന വിധമാണ് അദ്ദേഹത്തിൻ്റെ നോവലുകൾ .Hayes ൻ്റെ മറ്റു നോവലുകളായ In Love , My Face for the World to See എന്നീ നോവലുകളുടെ പിൻഗാമിയായി കരുതാവുന്ന നോവലാണ് The End Of Me .

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The short opening chapter of Alfred Hayes’s 1968 novel THE END OF ME, hardly more than a page in length, doesn't contain a single comma. Though the style of the book is consistent, characterized by punchy parataxis plus vivid stumblings and stammerings evocative of certain American poets celebrated at roughly midcentury (perhaps especially William Carlos Williams), the studied absence of commas is a quirk that I believe is entirely relegated to that introductory chapter. (The second sentence of the second chapter already compensates by making use of six commas.) “The thing was in my gut. In my parched in my constricted throat. Humped raw cringing wounded to death I’d howl into the night.” This from the novel’s opening paragraph, transcribed precisely as it appears there (without error, I assure you), incantatory accompaniment to spree, the language like the man, overcome, running, tripping over itself to escape itself. In my parched in my constricted. Further atomizing one just excerpted, I have provided a modified sentence very much itself like one we might expect Alfred Hayes to produce. “Humped raw cringing wounded to death I’d howl” becomes all the more properly incantatory when echoed near novel’s end, testament to the hopelessly circular nature of this self’s or this voice’s attempt to outmaneuver itself, to get away. In vain, ever in vain. Circular: the eddy of a pathology. A little more from that introductory chapter, if you’ll spare me the indulgence: “I had watched it come. It had been coming. Padding toward me. Even if I could not see it clearly and even if I had not believed it I had known it was coming. I was getting old. Was it all simply because I was getting old? One is discarded. The door closes that had always been open. The phone is silent that had always rung. Others are selected where before one had been selected. On the floor through the window with the unheard music he reached under the soft sweater and he unhooked her brassiere. I had not howled. I had run. I was finished.” Ah, yes, the delirium of the cuckold. Running. Running away. “I was finished.” This is in fact the final sentence of the opening chapter of THE END OF ME, its crowning clause. But we are, naturally, just getting started. Asher, our narrator, the fleeing cuckold, is a man less and less short of sixty years of age, a milestone he can see coming, no doubt. (“I have watched it come. It had been coming.”) Asher has just witnessed a scene we will later find he went to some considerable (sneaky) lengths for which to be present. His second wife, with whom things have long been chilly, has been more than canoodling with a gentleman from the tennis club…on the floor of the gentleman’s domicile. Once a successful screenwriter or contract hack in Hollywood, the job offers have comprehensively dried up, having first progressively dropped off. The tableau Asher has just beheld, that of the ritualistic infidelity, pathetic in the categorical cliché of the particulars, is something like the final straw. Asher flees, if not “finished” then wishing to be, seeking a direct communion with nullity, erasure, the cessation of thought—if not death than a form of life that no longer has all that much of messy and humiliating life left of it. If he does not end up injecting heroin or morphine or one of the other elixirs, he clearly desires an equivalent. To be or become nothing (or be a becoming-nothing). This insistent drive maintains its grip for the remainder of Hayes’s novel, ultimately earning itself the final word…in a sense. It immediately follows Asher away from the scene of his marital humiliation to the large home which is the marriage’s facade, its false front. Second chapter: “I put the silk kimono I had bought in the silk mill in Kyoto into the suitcase. I could have used the money I still had to go back to Japan. Japan was a good place to be nothing in.” Later in the same paragraph: “I wanted to be lost. I wanted to be effaced. I wanted a place that could suck the pain out of me. I was going back to New York.” At something perhaps like the height of his pique, before dashing off to the airport and then on to New York, his hometown, Asher considers burning down his home as an act of outlandish compensatory redress. But he does not do this. Instead, he turns on every last light in the large house. The light is meant to “tell” his wife. It is a sublated semiotics standing in for fire, a hanging signifier, just like the word “fire” sitting there on a white page, doing no actual damage to property or person; “that light of my house, that fire I had set but not set…” In such a manner might a writer not burn down his house in the burning down of his house…and have not arrived at the being “finished” he declares complete. You with me? Alfred Hayes, the author of this novel whose two introductory chapters I have just outlined at length, is obviously a writer too, like Asher, but there's a little more to this, because Hayes also did his time in Hollywood, especially successful there in the '50s, when he wrote, among others, two remarkable screenplays for Fritz Lang (both adaptations of high-class properties). Sticking around in Italy after having served there with US Army Special Services in the Second World War, Hayes participated in the birth and early development of Italian Neorealism, the tide in the country taking a decisive turn to the left, collaborating with internationally major film directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. He had received two Academy Award nominations by 1951. The beginnings of a career in motion pictures hardly get more auspicious than that. By the late 1960s, the time of the publication of THE END OF ME, which would prove to be Hayes’s penultimate novel, the motion picture industry gigs Hayes was picking up were no longer all that worth writing home about. Most of those infrequent paychecks (horror of horrors) were coming from the television people. I do not know anything about Hayes’s track record with women, or even if he happens to have been married twice (first to a brunette and second to a blonde) when he undertook to compose THE END OF ME, but surely we might imagine Asher to take on some of the foreboding and personal grievance of his creator. Is this novel something like a bilious purge? In his not all that strong, none too penetrating Introduction to the 2020 New York Review Books edition of the novel, Paul Bailey does not really get into any of this, but he does counterpoint the dark and disconsolate THE END OF ME with its follow-up, THE STOCKBROKER, THE BITTER YOUNG MAN, AND THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL, which I have not read but which Bailey makes sound a heck of a lot like THE END OF ME, only told in the third person and framed as something approximating pure comedy. Bailey on that final novel: “It’s as if Hayes is looking back on his career as a chronicler of love’s sorrows and discontents and asking himself why he took it all so seriously. It’s an eccentric masterpiece, with scenes of unforgettable farce. His prose is as clean-cut and precise as ever.” While THE END OF ME is commonly assessed as bleak and bruising, and it doesn’t seem like anybody would be likely to declare it altogether or in part “unforgettable farce,” might there be more to its family resemblance to its follow-up than at first appears evident? How “all so seriously” does it actually take all of Asher’s woe and impotent frustration? What is this novel doing, specifically, in putting Asher through the wringer? The hardboiled vernacular, twin to the parataxis, definitely comes on pretty thick. Arrived in New York, fleeing, hiding, returning, Asher discovers that many of his old friends, more or less contemporaries, are dead, and the city of yore has undergone the unavoidable transformations on any number of levels. The sixth chapter ends with some taut heaviness equal parts Mickey Spillane and T. S. Eliot: “At precisely 7:05 the sun would rise. As over a battlefield. As over a junkyard. As over a devastated star.” So this is basically the tone, dig. And the tone don’t seem jovial. Still, we have to consider what the author is up to in broader terms, from the standpoint of the governing schematic, and this has to do with looking at what specifically happens to Asher when he gets to New York, a question of the enabling conflict that has to be worked out and is indeed worked out. This is what we must “read.” In returning to New York, Asher holes up for a while in a not-too-posh hotel, mostly anonymously observing the passing parade of mortal souls, brooding like the dickens, nursing the wound of a writerly castration not to be mistaken for an actual material unmanning. Called by his aunt Dora out of the blue, Asher goes to visit her and comes to be made aware of a young cousin, Aunt Dora’s son, who happens to be named Michael and who also happens to evidently fancy himself something of a poet. Asher invites young Michael over to the hotel and thereby invites the enabling conflict which fields all that is to come (the second and third acts). Michael pays a visit to Asher. Asher momentarily projects young cousin Michael outside of the domain of immediately accessible sense-data. “He is playing an ironic game with himself as he comes down the corridor. He is in enemy country.” The ironic game that is imagined, if only faintly: what might be its aim? Michael enters Asher’s hotel room and refuses to remove his overcoat. “Did he remove it only under direct orders from a superior? Superior what? Superior who?” What if the ironist’s “Superior who” is not just a numeral x, a placeholder, but actually somehow the antithesis of Asher’s symbolic-symbological writerly castration? What if the “Superior who” is something very close to Anything Goes with a touch of I Truly Do Not Give a Fuck. Maybe Asher’s ultimate failure in life was always already the failure of having believed in a world or a world system by whose standards he has ultimately become a failure. Maybe it is this, rather than the mere happenstance of a faithless spouse, that makes him the ultimate “cuck.” And maybe Michael knows it. Immediately. Michael’s very desirable “dago” girlfriend, improbably named Aurora d’Amore, becomes a negotiated placeholder herself, a personage apparently of exchange, who, though no blood relation, is ultimately a kind of spiritual twin sister to Michael more than an autonomous alterity, and as such represents the irony that sets out to draw Asher back into the eddy of his pathology and make a monkey out of him. In the carrying out of this dexterous bit of guerrilla theatre, Michael and Aurora will very much succeed, if only for a brief moment, in causing Asher to directly face the fake self and the inauthentic world model that both ground him and ground him as washed-up. Does this not sound more than a little like a dark comedy? Consider also that this is 1968 we are talking about. The New York Review Books edition happens to come to us in 2020, and ’68 was almost certainly, in case you are unaware, the last year to be quite this totally fractious and outright mad. Both the conservative old guard and a the radical youth, pretty much everywhere—America, France, Latin America, Japan—were legitimately aware that civilization might be about to grind to a halt and that a transnational revolution might already be underway. The students and labour unions did in fact shut down the entire nation of France during May of that year. At the barricades in May were many who were aware of the slogans, pamphlets, and bromides of the Situationist International, a disorganized organization very informally headed by a guy named Guy Debord, on-and-off partner of a lovely young woman named Michèle Bernstein. Actually, by 1968, Michèle Bernstein is well into her thirties, but at the beginning of the decade, a woman in her late twenties, Bernstein had been persuaded by Debord to turn out a pair of louche “youth culture” novels as a kind of fundraising initiative. (It proved to be a highly successful one.) Bernstein’s 1960 novel ALL THE KING’S HORSES, about a pair of non-monogamous nouveaux libertins flouting bourgeoisie propriety, is very much like THE END OF ME from the perspective of Michael and Aurora. Alfred Hayes is actually closer in spirit to Michèle Bernstein than may at first appear to be the case. Consider Asher’s meditations, trapped in the net of the two ironists, knowing they are playing games but unable to break the code: “Apparently, there were a few more sacred objects left in my tabernacle than I believed were there. I may have been too solemn about the forked creature we are. I couldn’t quite see, yet, man and all he was or did as the funniest thing since vaudeville. It was possible that he was, but it took something I didn’t have to hang a vulva instead of a mistletoe on even the most contemporary and most metallic of Christmas trees.” Alfred Hayes is writing this, but so is 1968. A great deal more is expressed here than could be expressed by a house with all its lights on. (This is something Paul Bailey not only misses in his Introduction, but goes out of his way to pointedly miss.) There is something else here that expresses far more than is expressed by a house with all its lights on: this is the “act” by way of which the game played by Michael and Aurora consummates. You are going to have to read the novel to discover it. I wrote earlier of how Michael enters THE END OF ME (in the hotel corridor) before he makes himself present for Asher (upon entering the room). Aurora likewise insinuates her way in well in advance of a proper introduction. We are back at the sixth chapter again. “But it did not snow. It would snow later. New York was going to be buried in snow and it would be in the buried city that I would make love to Aurora. In the whiteness. In the white silence.” The snow does come. Eventually. The thirty-second chapter. It really, really comes down, Asher is really, really in it, the wool really, really pulled over his eyes. Both comedy and tragedy are about human folly and how it plays out. The ultimate difference is that tragedy is supposed to gut you. I don’t think THE END OF ME is supposed to gut you. A man gets his just deserts. Aurora is the rising sun is the narcotic pacification of a Nietzschean blanket of nullifying snow. Except not hardly. Asher’s ultimate point of weakness, the “sacred object” remaining in his “tabernacle,” is the idolatry of sex, of romantic love and of the sex “act.” He thinks it can be the saviour nothing. The nothing isn’t here yet. It’s mostly always still on its way. “I have watched it come. It had been coming.” It can set you up like a hook-a-duck. For something like your whole goddamn life. You do generally have to live a little before you can read the comedy in it. Human folly, mischievous interlopers, circuitous human lesson. All of it’s already in Shakespeare. You know, the comedies.

[Nanu · Rating 3 out of 5]

El problema de este libro fue haber leído la sinopsis de la contratapa, porque cuenta prácticamente TODA la trama. Si la leés, te enterás de un tirón del pasado del protagonista (que en el libro se descubre de a poco), te enterás de que algo le va a pasar (no sabés exactamente qué, pero podés llegar a intuirlo) y cuando pasa, ¡pum! Termina.
Es difícil explicar de qué se trata esta novela sin revelar mucho detalle. Alfred Hayes escribe acerca de la vejez, el (des)amor, la soledad, la decadencia, la traición. De eso se trata.
Me gusta su estilo de escritura, me gustan los diálogos que tenés que leer dos veces para entender quien habla, me gustan los monólogos interiores sin puntuación que cambian de primera a segunda persona. Las oraciones cortas. Las repeticiones.
Pero la historia en sí, no me gustó. No terminé de entender las actitudes y motivaciones de los personajes.
No debería hacer comparaciones, pero supongo que haber leído recientemente Que el mundo me conozca le jugó en contra a esta lectura, ya que esta otra novela (del mismo autor) me encantó.
En fin, van tres estrellas, porque me gusta Hayes y porque la portada es genial.

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eclectic. Frenetic. Pure festering. Like escaping to claustrophobia, realizing that you can never run away from the problem because the problem is you. What is man to do? What is he to think? Can he continue to try to escape? How much of the past haunts us when they have died so long ago? How is everything weighted in pain?

The dialogue is screenplay and the prose is strange and wonderful. It isn’t too showy, but there’s poetry in the way adjectives and nouns and how objects and people sit and move through rooms, how they think, that creates this Tim Burton-ish wonderland that exists in the fever of feelings, in the delight of being alive.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I imagine Neil Simon picking up Asher (our narrator) from Raymond Chandler's yard sale in L.A., thinking that with a little dust up and polish, he could find a swell use for him. Back in New York, with too much on his plate, Simon lends Asher out to James Purdy on the weekends. Somewhere near the end of this arrangement, there was even a scare when Asher was left in a Yellow Cab driven by Donald Barthelme.
This book is perfect short, perfect sweet and perfect to the point. Hot dog.

[Mike Futcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

My three previous experiences of Alfred Hayes have each been excellent, in their different ways, like Edward Hopper paintings in written form. But while The End of Me again brings forth those desolate Hopper-like characters, it is a lesser read. This time, Hayes forgets to bring that all-important light which Hopper never failed to add, and which really makes the composition into a work of art.

Hayes' previous books were all about a vision of a good world that our characters were too broken to reach; The End of Me, instead, has an almost nihilistic vision. There's no good country for old men, nor for young men or women either, and while our protagonist, Asher, claims to refute the poet Michael's depiction of a world "more destructive, more finally poisoned… aimed at one like a gun" (pg. 59), there's not really anything in his journey which really supports it. Both Asher and Michael – and the improbably-named Aurora d'Amore, the vampish girl in this love triangle – have a bitter and nihilistic worldview. Though Michael is malicious with it – and has the support of Aurora in this – Asher is also willing to destroy. He is willing to destroy himself – he wants to be "demolished" (pg. 147) by these children and their "terrible games" (pg. 134).

Those who have read anything by Hayes won't be surprised by this content, but it doesn't take as well in The End of Me as it does in other novels. The writing itself, though accomplished, is just less remarkable. There's no phrase as potent as the "delayed ship moving slowly south" that I noted in my review of My Face for the World to See. The book's snowy New York setting isn't evoked even half as well as the noirish Rome in The Girl on the Via Flaminia. And Aurora isn't given the opportunity to make a counterpoint that makes the female character in In Love redeemable, and instead alternates cartoonishly between cruel vamp and fragile doormat.

The character dynamics are less clear than the main relationship conflicts in Face (a toxic May-December romance), Flaminia (a wartime sex-for-food trade between victor and conquered) or In Love (an Indecent Proposal-style proposition). How Asher is suckered into the events of The End of Me are understandable, but the baseless cruelty of Michael and Aurora ("as though, from the beginning, [they'd] been collecting a dossier" (pg. 108)) is more confusing. Young people with their "terrible games" played on the older man, perhaps, like pulling the wings off flies, but such a depiction feels a tad shallow and isn't explored. Consequently, for the reader the book exists in a sort of haze, with Hayes' usual noirish coolness hardening into impenetrable ice rather than distilling into the chill that, in his better novels, can take your breath away.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike other readers and reviewers, this was my favorite of the Hayes sort-of-trilogy published by NYRB. (The earlier entries are In Love and My Face for the World to See.)

My reading of this differs somewhat from other assessments I’ve read. I see Asher as someone being discarded by the world as he grows older in favor of younger generations. This is, of course, a universal experience, but one particularly acute in the late 1960s when the novel is set. Asher, the fifty-something narrator of the novel seems unaware of the extent of his own obsolescence, and in its course is led only partially down the path to oblivion, though the title of the novel provides a hint of the ultimate denouement. His nostalgia for a Manhattan that is past and passing is the signal of his pending oblivion, and, though it is never explicitly stated, I believe that it his age that has led to the drying up of his Hollywood writing career, as producers look for young writers to draw in a young audience.

Early in the novel Asher unconsciously visits his future self (that is, if he lives that long) in Aunt Dora, warehoused away from the city, still grateful for kindnesses long past, lucky to be living across the street from her doctor. But sinisterly, it is she who introduces Asher to his nemesis, the young poet Michael who, together with his girlfriend Aurora, takes Asher through a round of humiliations. The young are unmannered, their jokes aren’t funny, and their poetry is not only bad but also coarse; not only that but they envy and resent the successes and relative financial security of the older generation. Before it’s over, after being robbed and humiliated by the young pair, Asher snatches a fleeting moment of victory: an evening in bed with Aurora; perhaps that’s Hayes’ concession to the reader or his own ego before the long night falls and the book closes. The future is out to kill you and there’s nowhere to hide.

[Mauro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Autor prácticamente olvidado que si no fuera por la editorial argentina La Bestia Equilátera, seria imposible hallar sus obras en castellano. Esta editorial edito 3 de sus obras en castellano: Los Enamorados, Que el Mundo me Conozca, y Mi Perdición.
Todas recomendables, sobre todo la primera que es una genialidad. Esta es la mas floja de las tres.
trata sobre un hombre maduro desencantado con la vida porque encontró a su mujer siéndole infiel, y para no caer en la depresión intenta volver a su barrio de la infancia, a su antigua vida cuando era feliz.
Por diversas circunstancias se encuentra con una pareja joven, y el creyéndose mas sabio y experimentado comienza un juego, suponiendo que puede manipularlos. Pero el mundo y las nuevas generaciones ya no son lo que el conocía, estos jóvenes tienen otro manejo de los sentimientos, y el que va a terminar perdiendo va a ser el, Asher el protagonista, de ahí el titulo de la novela.
Si bien hay un montón de diferencias, la trama me recordó a la de El Ultimo Tango en Paris, que también trata sobre un cuarentón deprimido, pero en este caso por el fallecimiento de su esposa, que se entrega al sexo desenfrenado con una mujer joven y termina de la peor manera. Hay similitudes creo.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites for the poetry







Quotes from The End of Me by Alfred Hayes:

But I did not want to go back to Japan and Paris, where I had lived, too, wasn't a place to hide. Switzerland was peaceful but it wasn't a peaceful life I wanted. I did not want to ski or buy watches or take long walks through the country past small vegetable gardens. I wanted to be lost. I wanted to be effaced. I wanted a place that could suck the pain out of me. I was going back to New York. p. 5

They had died in different ways. . . . Their deaths had not thinned the crowds on Broadway: nevertheless, without them, the city was emptier. It was as though they had, as when I was a boy, been sent away for the summer; I was left alone to play cards on the tenement stoop. Except, of course, they would not be coming home after Labor Day. p.18 (speaking of his friends)

"At a tennis club." I could see her look at me. It sounded idiotic. As a matter of fact, that was what had made it even more painful; it was idiotic. Even the worst things that happened to me refused to have dignity when they happened. p. 145

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

From what I can tell this is a fairly unheard of title. Unheard of to me as well, until I came across a cheap NYRB copy. While I was reading the Author bio in the front of the book, I was very interested to see that Alfred Hayes was a part of the film"Bicycle Thieves," which is a film I think is a masterpiece.

'The End of Me' is a dated narrative but one I enjoyed. What stood out most to me was the way this is written. Hayes, a screenwriter, lets his film writing bleed into his fiction writing here. The writing is a bit choppy, but makes a nice rhythm as you continue your read.

The story starts out with our protagonist finding his wife cheating with another man, and somehow the rest of the story is much more grim and dark than that. The hollowness of love, fame and money make this a depressing read.

Overall, I enjoyed this and was happy to see that Hayes has more books published in the NYRB classics series.

[Miranda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Asher, an aging screenwriter, is running away from his problems in Hollywood to escape into the claustrophobic Manhattan that Hayes expertly writes about in The End of Me. New York City is itself a character in this short novel, which is one of my favorite things a writer can do when a story takes place there. That is mainly why the story receives 3 stars. The weather is eternally moody, on the verge of thundersnow the majority of the novel. Tension builds throughout and I liked the tone. Although I tried to suspend judgment of the dated language due to the times, there were some racial undertones that I didn't appreciate with this one. The misogyny was also quite strong in this, but I wasn't surprised by it due to the nature of the story and the men being absolute trash.

Asher is trying to escape his problematic past, but he never will. He is the problem.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite it obvious difference my mind can’t help not being reminded of ‘Last words from Montmarte’. Everything in both books feels like the author’s imagination is flooding out onto the page, lending it a somewhat romanticised yet extremely authentic quality to the work. They also a have a disturbing voyeuristic quality where the more I read the more I feel like I’m egging the characters further into unrelenting bleakness. In this case for Heyes it is somewhat of a crisis where you’re past your prime and disconnect between generations and that voyeurism is less present. I do like the somewhat hope implied towards the end of the book yet I highly doubt sleeping with a young woman is really the best way to frame what Hayes is going for. Ah well that’s the 60s for ya.

[Don Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another hidden gem of a book/author. Published in 1968, this was out of print for years before NYRB rescued it. I'm glad they did. The story deals with an aging screenwriter as his marriage ends in spectacular fashion and he heads east toward home in an attempt to reconnect with his roots. Instead he encounters bitterness in a young relative and a deceitful plan hatched by him and his alluring girlfriend.

The prose is razor sharp, and the picture of himself that the protagonist sees by the end of the story is laid bare. It's not flattering. His self-absorption blinds him to the world around him.

[Devin Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably my least favorite Hayes. It felt a little overly sentimental (even though I love sentiment) and the narrator felt stilted and inconsistent, like Hayes was still trying to figure him out by the book's end. That said, there are moments of pure beauty in this, and Hayes is so particularly gifted at narrating the inner-workings of the human heart, especially when it is the process of devastation.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Alfred Hayes were still alive, I’d call someone to do a wellness check on him. His opinion of people, especially men, is quite low and he seems to be writing while drowning in a puddle of darkness.

“In Love” will always be my favorite, but this one is second for me. It’s the most nihilistic of his novels I’ve read (there’s no heroes here, no hard won victories) and I think it’s above “My Face for the World to See” in my ranking.

[Cartoisb · Rating 3 out of 5]

The End of Me deals with a middle-aged man’s disillusionment with the world and humiliation as his career declines, his marriage fails and he is unable to connect with the younger generation. It is atmospheric and poignant but feels a bit dated and hokey in parts and not as well-written as My Face for the World to See or The Girl on the Via Flaminia .