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Il mio viso davanti a voi
Hollywood, fine anni Cinquanta. Durante una festa in una grande villa sulla spiaggia, un uomo salva una giovane donna che sta per annegare con un bicchiere di Martini in mano. Lui è uno sceneggiatore annoiato con la moglie a New York. Quasi senza intenzione, si lascia coinvolgere dalla giovane, bella e già amareggiata dall'amore, soprattutto da quello vissuto con uomini sposati. Una relazione fortuita che si gonfia come un'onda, raggiungendo un'intensità tale da risultare distruttiva. Sono due solitudini di segno opposto, del tutto impreparate a frantumare la parete che separa l'egoismo dalla condivisione, due solitudini che accomunano chi è alla ricerca di successo e che spesso è destinato a sopportare il peso del fallimento. Storia di una passione impossibile, "Il mio viso davanti a voi" è un romanzo in cui l'alcool e le notti di Hollywood sono lo sfondo caldo e perfetto perché si consumi un certo tipo di amore.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1958
85 people are currently reading
3922 people want to read
About the author
Alfred Hayes
41 books76 followersAlfred 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 262 reviews
June 25, 2022
Long before Hollywood celebs were made of plastic, had complexions similar with that of a tangerine, and carried on affairs with their yoga instructors or health gurus, there was the golden age of film. A time where for some, the pull of seeing their name up in lights was worth giving everything up for, but the dream would not happen for all, as the darker side of the City of Angels would ultimately lead to ruin.
"My face for the world to see" (1958) was a quick and easy read, and could be seen as either a long novella or short novel, about two bruised people stuck in the Hollywood maze. A screenwriter (the narrator) from New York, saves a young would-be Actress, when after she downs too many martinis at a party wonders off into the pacific, was it an attempt to take her life?, or just drunkenness. All he wants is to be left alone, but can't stop thinking of her, and without really meaning to, gets involved in a somewhat dubious relationship, only to realize she is an emotionally damaged young women. Both are lonely (he is apart from his wife) and she, after years of trying to get in the movies is a fragile but determined person, who has a troubled history of getting mixed up with wrong people. Their casual meetings would intensify into destructive behaviour, and lead to some bad consequences.
Knowing Alfred Hayes had worked on scripts for some of Italy's best Neorealist films including Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece "The Bicycle thieves" (1948), I was a little disappointed with this. It has been mentioned in the same breath as Nathanael West's brilliantly foreboding "the Day of the Locust", both have the same sort of themes, but Hayes's writing here is more intimate and not as dark. Hayes does possess a razor sharp intelligence when it comes to passion and it's dilemma, and
the story itself does has a vivid and dreamlike feel to it, he paints a picture of Hollywood that wouldn't get in any travel brochure, and does use a tunnel vision style, as the writing turns inwards, inwards towards some bleak point, and is never drawn into issues from the outside world, tending to stick to the solitude, loneliness and boredom of the two individuals involved. There could even be a little bit of Richard Yates in here, especially heading to the end, in the honest way he deals with the frailties of love.
It's not totally what I had hoped for, but with it being so short, it's definitely worth another look, as would much rather read about this period in Hollywood, that anything based on the stupid modern one. 3.5/5
Read
September 11, 2018Gentlemen, I address you privately:
You meet a woman for the first time when you're at a beach party filled with Hollywood glitterati, and you see her, a beautiful wannabe actress, walking out into the waves, holding a martini glass, taking the occasional drink, and posing, until a wave knocks her down and she gets up and goes a little farther in, and now the undertow gets her, and you have to leap off the deck and into the ocean to save her. You don't know if it was an accident. She calls a few days later to thank you. You ask her to dinner. (Your wife, who you no longer care for but won't divorce because of the young'un, is a continent away in New York.) So there's dinner and drinks, and days of more drinks. When you finally sleep with her, after, you wake up to her grinding her teeth and calling out names. She's not there in the morning. You call. She says she was afraid of you because you were screaming in your sleep. She tells you about her psychiatrist.
My unsolicited relationship advice, gentlemen, is this is not the best time to invite her to go to Tijuana with you to see her first bullfight.
Because, you know, she could go all Glenn Close on you. Maybe not the rabbit stew, but Glenn Close enough.
And, it's doubly worse when you're as batshit crazy as she is.
I'm not saying don't do any of it. Just no bullfight.
Oh, and have a friend like Charlie, you know, for the cleanup.
You meet a woman for the first time when you're at a beach party filled with Hollywood glitterati, and you see her, a beautiful wannabe actress, walking out into the waves, holding a martini glass, taking the occasional drink, and posing, until a wave knocks her down and she gets up and goes a little farther in, and now the undertow gets her, and you have to leap off the deck and into the ocean to save her. You don't know if it was an accident. She calls a few days later to thank you. You ask her to dinner. (Your wife, who you no longer care for but won't divorce because of the young'un, is a continent away in New York.) So there's dinner and drinks, and days of more drinks. When you finally sleep with her, after, you wake up to her grinding her teeth and calling out names. She's not there in the morning. You call. She says she was afraid of you because you were screaming in your sleep. She tells you about her psychiatrist.
My unsolicited relationship advice, gentlemen, is this is not the best time to invite her to go to Tijuana with you to see her first bullfight.
Because, you know, she could go all Glenn Close on you. Maybe not the rabbit stew, but Glenn Close enough.
And, it's doubly worse when you're as batshit crazy as she is.
I'm not saying don't do any of it. Just no bullfight.
Oh, and have a friend like Charlie, you know, for the cleanup.
July 10, 2014
Really good, really dark, really quick and addictive. A right place/right time read - I might go back to it a couple of months later and see if it doesn't bump up to five stars. Hayes can REALLY write - this is probably the best in the line of cynical California books I've been going through this year. He has the screenwriter's instinct for scene breaks and illustrative show-not-tell details (the scene where the protagonist talks in his sleep is so illuminating), but there's a good deal of weirdness too: the lack of names; the inconsistent treatment of dialogue (and the way the dialogue leaks into the present action); the lack of stakes. A better bullfight then Hitchcock - a better opening scene than Elliott Gould's Long Goodbye variant. The ending ending, the last page, is super rad, but there were a couple of false notes in the denouement. A book that was pleasingly lacking in melodrama was suddenly swimming in it, and it hurt. Predictable plot throughout. But boy - this is a really good brutalist look at a relationship that isn't quite love and isn't quite anything else.
Read it.
Read it.
May 27, 2014
"This might make it sound as though it's a rather grim read; yet somehow it isn't. It's an ordeal, and an unsettling one, as ordeals tend to be; but the beauty of its precision is what carries you through. Hayes is a master of the withheld detail: we learn what the woman's clothes are like, but all the narrator tells us, very often, and with an edge of mockery, is that she is "very pretty". This is an insider's manual for all those who would aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies, and believe they are entitled to it. So it's fitting that the great film critic, David Thomson, should write the introduction, and that I should leave the last words to him: "Hayes is the dry poet of the things we think about while lying in bed, when sleep refuses to carry us off.""
Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian
An ordeal indeed. But the same kind of ordeal as a suffocating, yet eerily beautiful film sequence by David Lynch. A book so meticulous and precise in its language that it gives you no wriggle room, no escape for loftier spaces, no respite in your uneasiness. The existential bleakness is so close to the skin that 130 pages feel like a lot more than that. Quite amazing that such a little object can pack so much weight.
A masterpiece of mood and setting and atmospheric anguish. A cunning study of people lost in the glamorous vapor of Hollywood, characters striving too early or too late for some kind of "success" in a landscape that doesn't have a name for what we call "failure".
An unrelenting and chiseled portrait of self-deception that will haunt you for a while.
April 28, 2025
Hayes' presents Hollywood's underbelly through the jagged dynamic between a nameless disillusioned screenwriter and a nameless desperate actress.
His wonderful observation of La La Land is spot on seven decades later: "I feel, or at least I did not think I felt, superior to the things which concerned these people here. At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous if they weren’t already famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy, or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were. There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires."
The couple's initial meeting sets the tone—"She was like a broken marionette, all strings cut by the sea"—as he retrieves her from a suicide attempt in the Pacific. What follows charts neither love nor redemption, but mutual exploitation.
The screenwriter observes "We were both in the business of manufacturing dreams, except hers had a face, and mine didn't," exposing their transactional dynamic. Hayes, drawing from his own Hollywood experience, crafts dialogue worthy of a TCM classic. When the actress declares "I don't want to be famous. I want to be loved," the words hang suspended between truth and delusion.
Their destructive entanglement escalates through increasingly bleak encounters—a vapid industry party where she becomes "a wounded bird in a cage,"his detached analysis of her suffering, her drunken epiphany that "You don't drown in the ocean. You drown in the reflection of yourself."
The screenwriter's commentary grows colder—"I didn't love her. I didn't even like her. But I couldn't look away"—while the actress clings with the futility of "a letter mailed to the wrong address, and now there was no way to recall her."
Hayes' Hollywood operates by cruel logic where "even the tragedies have a second act," and where "the terrible thing about pity is that it's the closest thing to love we can manage."
"She’d had a horrible moment; in an office; wearing a low-cut dress; and one of the men (there were apparently several) put his hand casually, unsuspectingly, down the front of it. He’d bet someone they weren’t real.
“What did she do?”
“Cried.”
“Didn’t she spit in his face?”
“She needed the job.”
“Not that much.”
“How much is that much?”
The novel's force accumulates through quiet devastation. As their connection disintegrates, the actress "wore her loneliness like a fur coat in summer—absurd, uncomfortable, impossible to ignore," while the screenwriter confronts the consequences of his remove.
Punctuated by moments of shocking intimacy, the book is Crime and Punishment by way of Sunset Boulevard. The tragedy is not in the fall, but in the fact that no one is watching. Is it really a surprise that: "She left quietly, the way people do when they've finally understood they were never really there." Hayes leaves the wreckage exposed, demonstrating why "Hollywood is the only town where you can die of encouragement," and why certain faces cannot withstand the world's gaze.
His wonderful observation of La La Land is spot on seven decades later: "I feel, or at least I did not think I felt, superior to the things which concerned these people here. At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous if they weren’t already famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy, or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were. There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires."
The couple's initial meeting sets the tone—"She was like a broken marionette, all strings cut by the sea"—as he retrieves her from a suicide attempt in the Pacific. What follows charts neither love nor redemption, but mutual exploitation.
The screenwriter observes "We were both in the business of manufacturing dreams, except hers had a face, and mine didn't," exposing their transactional dynamic. Hayes, drawing from his own Hollywood experience, crafts dialogue worthy of a TCM classic. When the actress declares "I don't want to be famous. I want to be loved," the words hang suspended between truth and delusion.
Their destructive entanglement escalates through increasingly bleak encounters—a vapid industry party where she becomes "a wounded bird in a cage,"his detached analysis of her suffering, her drunken epiphany that "You don't drown in the ocean. You drown in the reflection of yourself."
The screenwriter's commentary grows colder—"I didn't love her. I didn't even like her. But I couldn't look away"—while the actress clings with the futility of "a letter mailed to the wrong address, and now there was no way to recall her."
Hayes' Hollywood operates by cruel logic where "even the tragedies have a second act," and where "the terrible thing about pity is that it's the closest thing to love we can manage."
"She’d had a horrible moment; in an office; wearing a low-cut dress; and one of the men (there were apparently several) put his hand casually, unsuspectingly, down the front of it. He’d bet someone they weren’t real.
“What did she do?”
“Cried.”
“Didn’t she spit in his face?”
“She needed the job.”
“Not that much.”
“How much is that much?”
The novel's force accumulates through quiet devastation. As their connection disintegrates, the actress "wore her loneliness like a fur coat in summer—absurd, uncomfortable, impossible to ignore," while the screenwriter confronts the consequences of his remove.
Punctuated by moments of shocking intimacy, the book is Crime and Punishment by way of Sunset Boulevard. The tragedy is not in the fall, but in the fact that no one is watching. Is it really a surprise that: "She left quietly, the way people do when they've finally understood they were never really there." Hayes leaves the wreckage exposed, demonstrating why "Hollywood is the only town where you can die of encouragement," and why certain faces cannot withstand the world's gaze.
May 22, 2015
Another obscure title in the Hollywood novel category! Beyond that this is an excellent novel. I can tell you the plot or narrative, but that is not that interesting. What is interesting is how the characters see themselves in this narrative. The inner-dialogue parts are fantastic, and although the novel was written in the late 1950s - it reads very contemporary. Alfred Hayes himself, sounds like a very interesting fellow. He wrote or co-wrote neb-italian film classics as well as being one of those guys who is in the right place at the right time - yet, I never heard of him! Till now. He captures the beginning of a causal affair turning into a nightmare very well.
The edition i read is from the library and it's the original release - NYRB just recently put out their edition - and I strongly recommend those who have a fascination with the Hollywood film world - as well as reading a great psychological narrative on a group of disturbed individuals, to get and read this novel.
The edition i read is from the library and it's the original release - NYRB just recently put out their edition - and I strongly recommend those who have a fascination with the Hollywood film world - as well as reading a great psychological narrative on a group of disturbed individuals, to get and read this novel.
February 4, 2025
Det är väl paradoxalt, men jag måste inleda den här recensionen med att berömma bokens enastående omslag som är så gäckande, snyggt och svårmodigt och på sätt och vis säger allt som jag hittar i boken.
En målning av Marta Mena-Bernal
Bildanalys: Det nakna paret som jag tolkar som en man och en kvinna befinner sig i något som liknar en cell. Längst fram i bild finns vinet och kvinnan målad i åtminstone delvis varma färger. Hennes kluvna ansikte är riktat mot mannen, boken och läsaren. Mannens kalla gestalt och ansiktslösa huvud, vars krävande hand försöker sno åt sig av hennes livsenergi är en slående bild av patriarkatet. Faktiskt tycker jag mig skönja hur hans fingrar väcks till liv genom kontakten med hennes hud. Kommer den kraften användas till att krama åt om hennes hals och kommer hon ges möjlighet att koncentrera sig på sin bok undrar jag.
Alfred Hayes (1911-1985) skrev Mitt ansikte för världen att beskåda 1958. Det är en filmisk kortroman i noir-tradition. Den utspelar sig i Hollywood, staden ”som liknade hur helvetet kunde sett ut med en duktig elektriker”. Berättaren är en namnlös man som inleder en relation med en namnlös kvinna efter att han ”räddat henne från att drunkna”. Han är manusförfattare, pappa och ”lite” gift med en kvinna han inte längre älskar. Hon är yngre ��n honom, vill bli skådespelerska och dricker för mycket.
”Det tycktes inte finnas något annat än äktenskapet när man tänkte på saken, och när man väl tänkte på saken, herregud, var det allt? Det, och att bilda familj. Det, och att tjäna sitt levebröd. Det, och att ringa begravningsbyrån.”
Jag älskar Hayes estetiska prosa som är sparsmakad och ändå lyckas väcka stora mörka känslor. Översättningen av Christoffer Stuveback och Maria Warnefors är klockren. Stämningen är djupt obehaglig och pessimistisk. Den generiska stilen håller mig på lagom avstånd och jag slipper bli engagerad till utmattning. Största anledningen till det är dock att berättaren som skriver i första person singular förtäljer föga om sina egna tankar och när han gör det råder kognitiv dissonans. Desto mer handlar det om kvinnans tankar som förmedlas med en modalitet som utelämnar alla tvivel. Hon är som ett husdjur, eller snarare en sommarkatt, som han tar vad han vill ha av och sedan lämnar. Hon har boken igenom absolut ingen egen agens utan kommer till liv på raderna endast genom berättarjaget. Att läsa den här boken är att genomleva patriarkatet, nyttigt och mycket frustrerande.
Sen handlar det om hur svårt och komplext det är att vara människa, om kärlek och relationer. Hur utsida och insida, makt och pengar, fördomar och självbedrägeri, fantasi och drömmar krånglar till det för oss.
”I detta nu var stan full av människor som låg i sina sängar och drömde om att bli berömda med en brinnande, en outtröttlig, en nästintill rasande lidelse, om de inte redan var berömda, och ännu berömdare om de var det; eller om att bli rika om de inte redan var rika, och ännu rikare om de var det; eller mäktiga om de inte var mäktiga nu, och ännu mäktigare om de var det.”
4+
En målning av Marta Mena-Bernal
Bildanalys: Det nakna paret som jag tolkar som en man och en kvinna befinner sig i något som liknar en cell. Längst fram i bild finns vinet och kvinnan målad i åtminstone delvis varma färger. Hennes kluvna ansikte är riktat mot mannen, boken och läsaren. Mannens kalla gestalt och ansiktslösa huvud, vars krävande hand försöker sno åt sig av hennes livsenergi är en slående bild av patriarkatet. Faktiskt tycker jag mig skönja hur hans fingrar väcks till liv genom kontakten med hennes hud. Kommer den kraften användas till att krama åt om hennes hals och kommer hon ges möjlighet att koncentrera sig på sin bok undrar jag.
Alfred Hayes (1911-1985) skrev Mitt ansikte för världen att beskåda 1958. Det är en filmisk kortroman i noir-tradition. Den utspelar sig i Hollywood, staden ”som liknade hur helvetet kunde sett ut med en duktig elektriker”. Berättaren är en namnlös man som inleder en relation med en namnlös kvinna efter att han ”räddat henne från att drunkna”. Han är manusförfattare, pappa och ”lite” gift med en kvinna han inte längre älskar. Hon är yngre ��n honom, vill bli skådespelerska och dricker för mycket.
”Det tycktes inte finnas något annat än äktenskapet när man tänkte på saken, och när man väl tänkte på saken, herregud, var det allt? Det, och att bilda familj. Det, och att tjäna sitt levebröd. Det, och att ringa begravningsbyrån.”
Jag älskar Hayes estetiska prosa som är sparsmakad och ändå lyckas väcka stora mörka känslor. Översättningen av Christoffer Stuveback och Maria Warnefors är klockren. Stämningen är djupt obehaglig och pessimistisk. Den generiska stilen håller mig på lagom avstånd och jag slipper bli engagerad till utmattning. Största anledningen till det är dock att berättaren som skriver i första person singular förtäljer föga om sina egna tankar och när han gör det råder kognitiv dissonans. Desto mer handlar det om kvinnans tankar som förmedlas med en modalitet som utelämnar alla tvivel. Hon är som ett husdjur, eller snarare en sommarkatt, som han tar vad han vill ha av och sedan lämnar. Hon har boken igenom absolut ingen egen agens utan kommer till liv på raderna endast genom berättarjaget. Att läsa den här boken är att genomleva patriarkatet, nyttigt och mycket frustrerande.
Sen handlar det om hur svårt och komplext det är att vara människa, om kärlek och relationer. Hur utsida och insida, makt och pengar, fördomar och självbedrägeri, fantasi och drömmar krånglar till det för oss.
”I detta nu var stan full av människor som låg i sina sängar och drömde om att bli berömda med en brinnande, en outtröttlig, en nästintill rasande lidelse, om de inte redan var berömda, och ännu berömdare om de var det; eller om att bli rika om de inte redan var rika, och ännu rikare om de var det; eller mäktiga om de inte var mäktiga nu, och ännu mäktigare om de var det.”
4+
November 10, 2015
Hayes walked his spleen from Hollywood to Cinecittà. He worked with the greatest : Rossellini, Lang, Huston..I did not know him until the edition in France of this short novel. Atmosphere disenchanted at the edge of a swimming pool, a tepid champagne, Bill Evans as sound track. Improbable Love with a starlet, the bitter confusion of the feelings, amour amère.
Hayes is a professionnal.
Hayes is a professionnal.
April 16, 2025
לסקירה מפורטת בעברית, קישור לבלוג שלי -
https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/העול...
https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/העול...
December 14, 2013
Alfred Hayes has been described as writing pointillist prose. Pointillism, is of course, the technique used by painters, such as Seurat, who build up an image using tiny dots of colour. Hayes was a master of considered prose - particularly in this book. Look at the opening sentence:
'It was a party that had lasted too long; and tired of the voices, a little too animated, and the liquor, a little too available, and thinking it would be nice to be alone, thinking I'd escape, for a brief interval, those smiles which pinned you against the piano or those questions which trapped you in a chair, I went out to look at the ocean.'
Metrical prose, is disaster. As the Fowler brothers explained, a novice should watch narrowly for metrical snatches in his prose - a sure sign that the fit is on him. Most great writers succumb to the fit occasionally. But Hayes is too adroit. His words are still prose but the rhythm (not metre) is impeccable. One can forgive him everything - even his now obsolete lust for the semi-colon. He has the most finely tuned ear for prose I have encountered, with the exception of brief passages from Traherne.
'It was a party that had lasted too long; and tired of the voices, a little too animated, and the liquor, a little too available, and thinking it would be nice to be alone, thinking I'd escape, for a brief interval, those smiles which pinned you against the piano or those questions which trapped you in a chair, I went out to look at the ocean.'
Metrical prose, is disaster. As the Fowler brothers explained, a novice should watch narrowly for metrical snatches in his prose - a sure sign that the fit is on him. Most great writers succumb to the fit occasionally. But Hayes is too adroit. His words are still prose but the rhythm (not metre) is impeccable. One can forgive him everything - even his now obsolete lust for the semi-colon. He has the most finely tuned ear for prose I have encountered, with the exception of brief passages from Traherne.
September 14, 2019
Brilliant, effective, not a trace of hackery... Noir without camp...disturbing. Excellent book! (2014)
Second reading (2019) — fewer exclamation points, but a greater understanding and appreciation of the writing.
Second reading (2019) — fewer exclamation points, but a greater understanding and appreciation of the writing.
April 4, 2024
There's a certain fervor to discovering a new author. A new author, who is essentially an old author. Someone who was once read by many is probably being read anew as I write this down.
The art of discovery is, thus, a public deed. Despite the promised intimacy of the act, it turns into a public menagerie the moment you talk about it. Your thoughts and takeaways clash with those of a stranger from the other side of the world. And suddenly, Alfred Hayes goes back to where he initially came from. He's no longer your own gift to unwrap in peace. Christmas is over, someone says. Turn the lights off. Get back to work. Get back to your life again, will you?
As history would attest, Hayes was an interesting man. He was a broadcaster when he was young. A poet whose poetry was adapted by the likes of Joan Baez. A writer of cinema, not only in the meadows of Hollywood but also in Europe. Collaborating with the Italian neo-realist moviemakers Including the likes of Rossellini and De Sica. Quite amazing, to say the least.
And yes, his credit does include the 'Bicycle Thieves'. Of which he was an uncredited co-writer. Even writing the English-language subtitles that played out in the movie. Now, who knows, maybe these were the very same lines through which the likes of Satyajit Ray ended up watching the film? I may be wrong, but it's intriguing to wonder how history plays out its curious part.
As such, it doesn't come off as a surprise to find a total of seven novels under his storied belt. Bit forgotten. Swept under the rug, if you may. But solid stories, nonetheless. Told by a very cool customer. 'My Face for the World to See' is a bleak little tale set in the dark belly of Los Angeles. Hollywood in the late 1950s, with all its dreams, sadness, and nihilistic undertones.
Like a film noir of old, it stars, through its black-and-white lens, a married man in his late thirties and a woman coursing through her troubled twenties. The man, our narrator, is a screenwriter who happens to be at a Hollywood party. The same party, where the woman, an out-of-luck actress, tries to drown herself in the ocean.
A fit of alcohol? Or something worse? As the questions pile up, the two of them get entangled in a stiff romance.
The novel plays out in the narrator's voice. A cynical, closed-off microscope of human folly. Self-aware, selfish, and judgmental. At times guilty of the subdued inflection of clumsy adultery. Prone to play the savior in a bloated Greek tragedy. As long as acceptable normalcy remains within a beck-and-call.
The woman, on the other hand, brings a world of turmoil to the stage. A hurricane of sorts. Damaged beyond repair. Cracks beneath the powdered face. Pretty yet sad. Eternally sad, while grabbing onto the carcass of the great American dream. Almost caricaturish, once portrayed through the unforgiving male gaze. Stumbling through a romance, which is mechanical at best. A placeholder of sorts until the bell tolls again.
Hayes writes about it in prose, as dry as ice. All the lyricism butchered through sentences, punctuated with commas, semicolons, and dividers. Through dialogues, commonplace yet effective. And chapters, short and sharp-edged to the tee. Sometimes, he rambles on with a brand of sorry philosophy. While sometimes he gives into the art of naked dread. There is an uneven balance between infatuation and revulsion. Both with the opposite sex and the empty shell of a promise land.
A by-product of the ghost of Hollywood past. The timeless treasure of the (hallowed) tinseltown of yore. The book might not be a timeless classic by any means. But it does warrant a read for anyone intrigued by literature in general. If not for the plot, for the author himself.
(3/5 || February, 2024)
The art of discovery is, thus, a public deed. Despite the promised intimacy of the act, it turns into a public menagerie the moment you talk about it. Your thoughts and takeaways clash with those of a stranger from the other side of the world. And suddenly, Alfred Hayes goes back to where he initially came from. He's no longer your own gift to unwrap in peace. Christmas is over, someone says. Turn the lights off. Get back to work. Get back to your life again, will you?
As history would attest, Hayes was an interesting man. He was a broadcaster when he was young. A poet whose poetry was adapted by the likes of Joan Baez. A writer of cinema, not only in the meadows of Hollywood but also in Europe. Collaborating with the Italian neo-realist moviemakers Including the likes of Rossellini and De Sica. Quite amazing, to say the least.
And yes, his credit does include the 'Bicycle Thieves'. Of which he was an uncredited co-writer. Even writing the English-language subtitles that played out in the movie. Now, who knows, maybe these were the very same lines through which the likes of Satyajit Ray ended up watching the film? I may be wrong, but it's intriguing to wonder how history plays out its curious part.
As such, it doesn't come off as a surprise to find a total of seven novels under his storied belt. Bit forgotten. Swept under the rug, if you may. But solid stories, nonetheless. Told by a very cool customer. 'My Face for the World to See' is a bleak little tale set in the dark belly of Los Angeles. Hollywood in the late 1950s, with all its dreams, sadness, and nihilistic undertones.
Like a film noir of old, it stars, through its black-and-white lens, a married man in his late thirties and a woman coursing through her troubled twenties. The man, our narrator, is a screenwriter who happens to be at a Hollywood party. The same party, where the woman, an out-of-luck actress, tries to drown herself in the ocean.
A fit of alcohol? Or something worse? As the questions pile up, the two of them get entangled in a stiff romance.
The novel plays out in the narrator's voice. A cynical, closed-off microscope of human folly. Self-aware, selfish, and judgmental. At times guilty of the subdued inflection of clumsy adultery. Prone to play the savior in a bloated Greek tragedy. As long as acceptable normalcy remains within a beck-and-call.
The woman, on the other hand, brings a world of turmoil to the stage. A hurricane of sorts. Damaged beyond repair. Cracks beneath the powdered face. Pretty yet sad. Eternally sad, while grabbing onto the carcass of the great American dream. Almost caricaturish, once portrayed through the unforgiving male gaze. Stumbling through a romance, which is mechanical at best. A placeholder of sorts until the bell tolls again.
Hayes writes about it in prose, as dry as ice. All the lyricism butchered through sentences, punctuated with commas, semicolons, and dividers. Through dialogues, commonplace yet effective. And chapters, short and sharp-edged to the tee. Sometimes, he rambles on with a brand of sorry philosophy. While sometimes he gives into the art of naked dread. There is an uneven balance between infatuation and revulsion. Both with the opposite sex and the empty shell of a promise land.
A by-product of the ghost of Hollywood past. The timeless treasure of the (hallowed) tinseltown of yore. The book might not be a timeless classic by any means. But it does warrant a read for anyone intrigued by literature in general. If not for the plot, for the author himself.
(3/5 || February, 2024)
February 14, 2014
For its bleakness and its Hollywood setting, I loved My Face For the World To See-a dark tale of a tangled relationship between a married screenwriter and a very damaged would-be actress. At 131 pages, this book doesn’t waste words. The story flings us right into the drama with an opening set at a beach house party with various Hollywood people in attendance. The screenwriter, who remains nameless throughout the story, is bored and feeling alienated when he goes outside and spots a woman stepping into the ocean. He thinks he’s seen the girl before, but then again perhaps not. She looks, after all, like so many other pretty, desperate young women who drift to Hollywood. He realizes that she is trying to commit suicide, so he pulls her out of the ocean, and the drama begins.
The screenwriter, who’s in his late thirties, is well paid but not particularly happy. His wife of fifteen years, a woman he’s no longer attracted to, lives in New York with their child. He’s not a wolf by any means or a predator, but he’s used to being alone with his cynicism:
"I thought of my wife. She was at a distance. The distance was in itself beneficial. I supposed I was being again uncharitable. She was what she was: I was what I was. That, when you came down to it, was the most intolerable thing of all. If only she weren’t, now and then what she was, always. If she’d let up a little or knock it off a little or hang it out for a good airing once in a little while. God, marriage. No: it wasn’t marriage. There wasn’t, even on close examination, any other available institution, any other available institution you could substitute. There seemed to be nothing but marriage, when you thought of it, and when you thought of it, my god, was that all there was? That, and raising a family. That, and earning a living. That, and calling the undertaker."
This bleakly abbreviated view of the meaningless of life says a great deal about our narrator. He finds his tired marriage, strained by “something that resembled a truce,” suffocating; perhaps he married too young, and he has yet to find anything to substitute for any sort of meaning to his existence. Yet his attitude towards life extends beyond his marriage, and he hates New York. Hollywood isn’t much better as far as the screenwriter is concerned. He dislikes Hollywood and the money it generates. To him the town is “rotten” and its immense wealth has a ”phantasmal quality.” In a town driven by money, power, and fame, all three leave him cold.
The meeting between the screenwriter and the young woman grows into a relationship. He senses that “something quite heavy, quite immovable, weighed her down.” When questioned, he’s frank about his marital status, and an affair begins–with the young woman accepting that what they have is a dead-end with no future. Not a great deal happens during the course of the affair–a few dinners, a disastrous trip to Mexico, and, of course, confidences, which include the woman’s troubled past, are exchanged.
Why, oh why, would anyone be insane enough to get mixed up with this emotionally damaged woman? Yes, she’s attractive and available, but as the narrator points out, the town in swamped with beautiful, attractive women eager to make connections and more than happy to attend Hollywood parties. The screenwriter’s introduction to the young woman, her suicide attempt, should tell him all he needs to know. This is not a stable young woman, and an affair can only end in disaster for both of them. Why then, given the benefit of all the warning signals, does he take the green light and begin an affair? Vulnerability can be a weapon, and it can also be a magnet.
In Love is the story of two people in a relationship that sours even as it goes nowhere. My Face For the World To See, the finer book of the two, is the story of a relationship that goes to hell. Alfred Hayes has a self-interruptive style which is only occasionally apparent in My Face For the World to See whereas this style is pervasive in its repetitive uncertainty in In Love. This is a sparsely, beautifully written tale of damaged souls, with sentences that lap over our senses and recede slowly, leaving behind an emotional stain:
"There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had chosen, I thought, from a small collection of smiles she kept for occasions like this, fixed upon her face."
The screenwriter, who’s in his late thirties, is well paid but not particularly happy. His wife of fifteen years, a woman he’s no longer attracted to, lives in New York with their child. He’s not a wolf by any means or a predator, but he’s used to being alone with his cynicism:
"I thought of my wife. She was at a distance. The distance was in itself beneficial. I supposed I was being again uncharitable. She was what she was: I was what I was. That, when you came down to it, was the most intolerable thing of all. If only she weren’t, now and then what she was, always. If she’d let up a little or knock it off a little or hang it out for a good airing once in a little while. God, marriage. No: it wasn’t marriage. There wasn’t, even on close examination, any other available institution, any other available institution you could substitute. There seemed to be nothing but marriage, when you thought of it, and when you thought of it, my god, was that all there was? That, and raising a family. That, and earning a living. That, and calling the undertaker."
This bleakly abbreviated view of the meaningless of life says a great deal about our narrator. He finds his tired marriage, strained by “something that resembled a truce,” suffocating; perhaps he married too young, and he has yet to find anything to substitute for any sort of meaning to his existence. Yet his attitude towards life extends beyond his marriage, and he hates New York. Hollywood isn’t much better as far as the screenwriter is concerned. He dislikes Hollywood and the money it generates. To him the town is “rotten” and its immense wealth has a ”phantasmal quality.” In a town driven by money, power, and fame, all three leave him cold.
The meeting between the screenwriter and the young woman grows into a relationship. He senses that “something quite heavy, quite immovable, weighed her down.” When questioned, he’s frank about his marital status, and an affair begins–with the young woman accepting that what they have is a dead-end with no future. Not a great deal happens during the course of the affair–a few dinners, a disastrous trip to Mexico, and, of course, confidences, which include the woman’s troubled past, are exchanged.
Why, oh why, would anyone be insane enough to get mixed up with this emotionally damaged woman? Yes, she’s attractive and available, but as the narrator points out, the town in swamped with beautiful, attractive women eager to make connections and more than happy to attend Hollywood parties. The screenwriter’s introduction to the young woman, her suicide attempt, should tell him all he needs to know. This is not a stable young woman, and an affair can only end in disaster for both of them. Why then, given the benefit of all the warning signals, does he take the green light and begin an affair? Vulnerability can be a weapon, and it can also be a magnet.
In Love is the story of two people in a relationship that sours even as it goes nowhere. My Face For the World To See, the finer book of the two, is the story of a relationship that goes to hell. Alfred Hayes has a self-interruptive style which is only occasionally apparent in My Face For the World to See whereas this style is pervasive in its repetitive uncertainty in In Love. This is a sparsely, beautifully written tale of damaged souls, with sentences that lap over our senses and recede slowly, leaving behind an emotional stain:
"There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had chosen, I thought, from a small collection of smiles she kept for occasions like this, fixed upon her face."
September 9, 2014
Alfred Hayes goes two for two with this cynical look at the effects of Tinseltown on the psyche of those drawn to it's bauble. You could draw comparisons to a whole raft of authors writing at a similar time to Hayes such as Dorothy Hughes, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy and Nathanael West but whilst Hayes shares similarities with those great authors he is entirely his own beast. My Face for the World to See is a bleak and unrelenting love story told with sparse, evocative prose, it's an analysis of greed and desire and of the emptiness of all involved in making movies, it's also an unflinching look at despair and depression, isolation and solitude. And Hayes does it as good as anyone you'll ever read.
June 23, 2023
Really torn about how I feel about this novel. On the one hand, it's quite well written, but so much in the post-Hemingway/noir terse style with almost no exposition (even including a bullfighting scene right out of The Sun Also Rises!) that it verges on plagiarism. I was also slightly attracted to hearing a first person male viewpoint on a tragically doomed love affair, along the lines of a Jean Rhys novel in reverse (as advertised by a blurb on the cover), but found the narrator so self-serving and blissfully unaware that he quite literally has all the power in the relationship and that his dumb self-imposed loneliness is absolutely no excuse for heaping more sorrow on this obviously desperately traumatized woman. Also making such a damaged, powerless female the villain of the piece is pretty inexcusable. Granted, given the generation of the narrator, and the '50s Hollywood atmosphere, the narrative voice is probably super believable and honest, it's just hard to take in 2023, since Fox news has completely institutionalized this tradition of men who hold all the cards and run everything bitching endlessly about all the backlash to the dystopian world that they themselves have created, as if all the fallout and consequences of their actions somehow make them the victims when the more direct victims of their sexism and bigotry raise any sort of protest against the horrors of white male American bigotry, racism, misogyny, and the horrors of heartless capitalism and the gross inequalities it naturally produces between the genders, the center and minorities, and, of course, the rich and poor.
I'm not sure if this novel inadvertently tells this great truth (and is thus infuriatingly unhip to its own most salient point) or if Hayes was actually smart and brave enough not to editorialize the point but merely show this totally egotistical, self-serving and utterly dishonest I'm-the-real-victim-here behavior for what it is and leave it to us to take that from the book and to be infuriated. Either way it's infuriating--and, authorial intention aside, I'd lay even money on the fact that 90% of the men who read this novel never see the irony, if it is indeed irony and not an accidentally represented truth.
I'm not sure if this novel inadvertently tells this great truth (and is thus infuriatingly unhip to its own most salient point) or if Hayes was actually smart and brave enough not to editorialize the point but merely show this totally egotistical, self-serving and utterly dishonest I'm-the-real-victim-here behavior for what it is and leave it to us to take that from the book and to be infuriated. Either way it's infuriating--and, authorial intention aside, I'd lay even money on the fact that 90% of the men who read this novel never see the irony, if it is indeed irony and not an accidentally represented truth.
set-aside
September 27, 2024I have to set this aside. I didn't care about the characters and I didn't like the writing style which is disjointed at best. Here are examples:
You could, she had thought, but no longer thought, it was another of Dr. Ritter’s triumphs, stay drunk right through the consequences.
That her face, after all, wouldn’t be, despite all her ambitions, the face that the world would see so greatly magnified, there, in the darkened theatres.
You could, she had thought, but no longer thought, it was another of Dr. Ritter’s triumphs, stay drunk right through the consequences.
That her face, after all, wouldn’t be, despite all her ambitions, the face that the world would see so greatly magnified, there, in the darkened theatres.
November 20, 2024
A concisely, vividly written, sad short novel about an aspiring young actress living in Los Angelos. The narrator, a New York screenwriter, spending some months working in Los Angelos, rescues the young woman from a drunken suicide attempt in the ocean.
A relationship begins. The narrator has been married for fifteen years and has a daughter. His marriage is an unhappy one at present. The young actress is in her early twenties and is single.
The author writes about the dark side of 1950s Hollywood. The back cover of my penguin edition aptly states ‘Alfred Hayes’ cool, exquisite, disquieting novella is a razor-sharp portrayal of damaged people acting out their lives in a town of hollow dreams.’
A novel worth reading just for the way the story is told.
This book was first published in 1958.
A relationship begins. The narrator has been married for fifteen years and has a daughter. His marriage is an unhappy one at present. The young actress is in her early twenties and is single.
The author writes about the dark side of 1950s Hollywood. The back cover of my penguin edition aptly states ‘Alfred Hayes’ cool, exquisite, disquieting novella is a razor-sharp portrayal of damaged people acting out their lives in a town of hollow dreams.’
A novel worth reading just for the way the story is told.
This book was first published in 1958.
September 1, 2020
Alfred Hayes was until yesterday a novelist I'd never heard of. The New York Review of Books has been reissuing his novels, in a loose kind of trilogy, of Hayes' "short, powerful, first-person novels about a young writer (like Hayes) who moves to Hollywood (like Hayes) and lives to tell about it (like Hayes)." This is the first that I've read and I stayed up late reading to the end. Then I went searching for more about him. From the LA Times: "Hayes has been unfairly forgotten for many reasons: the biggest one was that he wasn't writing the types of books being praised in the postwar era - like those by Mailer, Barth, Bellow, and Roth. Those writers aspired to produce big books with big themes, big books about a big country....Hayes didn't write those kinds of books. Rather, his novels explore the ways in which small souls sought to cut their own safe path across the world's unforgiving bigness." But this novel is not at all confessional. It is sinewy, a whittled 130 pages, focused both on the surface of things, the precipices in life, and all that's inscrutable. The main characters are a man aged 37, living for months at a time in LA as a screenwriter, what he calls "writhing," with a wife and daughter back home in NYC, and a young woman aspiring to be an actress, with a face for the world to see, who has not made it yet, aged 25. They are never named. In fact, we learn very little even about what they look like. Set in the late 1950s, in Hollywood, the man rescues the woman from what might have been a drunken suicide attempt in the Pacific at a party they are both attending. That saving act leads to a relationship. Taut, disturbing, the madness of those who seek to attain what others in Hollywood have attained - the wealth and the fame - it's a fascinating and precisely written novel. And I'm going to start the first one in the series, In Love, next.
June 11, 2015
A wonderful book with a cynical and jaded tone. Spare writing, an aloof chilling style. Enjoyed but best described by the books I would shelve it next to: Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, What Makes Sammy Run? by Bud Schulberg, or Image of Hell by Steve Fisher, all heavy hitters in the LA/Hollywood noire category.
March 2, 2025
My Face for the World to See is another book I borrowed from the library because the title intrigued me. It is a sharp, bleak novella about the affair between a married screenwriter and a young aspiring actress in 1950s Hollywood. I say affair rather than romance as there is nothing particularly romantic about it. Their relationship is obviously doomed from the start and bracketed by acts of self-destruction. Hayes writes in a deft, thoughtful manner about 1950s gender roles and mental illness. From the point at which the relationship begins to unravel to the end of the book, the narrative has a tension and tautness that constricts your chest to read:
The whole novella is infused with a sense of gloom, making Los Angeles seem a deeply haunted place. My Face for the World to See certainly isn't enjoyable, but it's beautifully written and well worth reading. The ending is hard to forget.
"I suppose you thought I was in love you with," she said. "Helplessly. Well, you thought wrong, darling. It's another of my surprises. I can get up and walk out any time I want to."
Not steadily, I said.
Steadily. Did I want to see her?
No, I said. I believed her. She could get up and walk and undoubtedly do it as straight as an arrow. The duck had come, in its rich sauce, and I tried, since I was hungry, and thought perhaps the automatic gestures of eating and chewing on the meat might possibly divert her, I tried to persuade her to try the duck.
She looked at the duck, in its sauce; and then, deliberately, put her cigarette into the meat.
The whole novella is infused with a sense of gloom, making Los Angeles seem a deeply haunted place. My Face for the World to See certainly isn't enjoyable, but it's beautifully written and well worth reading. The ending is hard to forget.
February 10, 2023
A nameless protagonist of about 40 years old working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, with a wife and child at home in New York, falls for, and becomes involved with a much younger woman.
Originally, he meets the girl at a party, when he saves her from drowning, an apparent, would-be, suicide.
One of the attractions of this is that it isn't a Hollywood success story, and rather, the opposite.
Though good-looking, after five years in town the young woman has failed to find acting work in Hollywood, and is battling demons within. She has quit drinking, and following the ocean incident, is seeing a therapist.
At just 120 pages, this is a short novel that feels exactly right in its size. Hayes writes directly, strong sentences, but also very descriptive, but with no flab.
It has plenty of potential, but with the tension built up, it ultimately disappoints, just as the screenwriter's wife and daughter turn up. Its nonetheless affecting and enjoyable.
Its strength, is that the protagonists talk such a good game in the first quarter of the book, that the reader is swayed into thinking this is another Hollywood success story, but gradually cracks appear, their affair seems a pretense, they acknowledge minor flaws to hide much larger ones, and are generally elusive. There is air of mystery, but for no apparent reason.
Originally, he meets the girl at a party, when he saves her from drowning, an apparent, would-be, suicide.
One of the attractions of this is that it isn't a Hollywood success story, and rather, the opposite.
Though good-looking, after five years in town the young woman has failed to find acting work in Hollywood, and is battling demons within. She has quit drinking, and following the ocean incident, is seeing a therapist.
At just 120 pages, this is a short novel that feels exactly right in its size. Hayes writes directly, strong sentences, but also very descriptive, but with no flab.
It has plenty of potential, but with the tension built up, it ultimately disappoints, just as the screenwriter's wife and daughter turn up. Its nonetheless affecting and enjoyable.
Its strength, is that the protagonists talk such a good game in the first quarter of the book, that the reader is swayed into thinking this is another Hollywood success story, but gradually cracks appear, their affair seems a pretense, they acknowledge minor flaws to hide much larger ones, and are generally elusive. There is air of mystery, but for no apparent reason.
April 20, 2020
No, not the wrestler/commentator.
This novel of one of many titles in the new Penguin Classics range Peter Owens used to publish. (See also Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask.) The blurb compares it to the Hollywood novels - Fitzgerald, West - but does so mistakenly. This is about an affair, delusion, and drink first and foremost - the setting is almost incidental. So is the plot, but that perhaps is beside the point. Extreme situations - wars, disasters - supply their own sort of plot. So does this.
Hayes’ handling of first-person POV deserves credit. Though presented episodically - some chapters are shards a paragraph in length - the story never feels that way. The effect is scenic. Notice how the gaps between the narration are typically minutes or hours apart, not days or weeks. It allows Hayes the immediacy of first person narration while sidestepping its traditional potholes about moving the characters around.
Hayes’s instinct for alternating between live and reported dialogue is also admirable. One of the best chapters comes late in the book as the girl gets slowly plastered on Martinis at dinner. Like her paranoid monologue earlier in the novella (there’s a file kept on her by the movie moguls who are all secretly testing her worthiness for stardom) it’s delivered entirely in reported speech and feels all the more immediate for it.
So do Hayes’s details. Watching his lover tossing and turning in bed, the narrator notices her lips ‘making those small nibbling movements.’ And at a bullfight he notes the animal’s ‘manure, all yellow, streaking its rear hoofs.’
Worthy of comparison with James Salter’s A Sport and A Pastime.
This novel of one of many titles in the new Penguin Classics range Peter Owens used to publish. (See also Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask.) The blurb compares it to the Hollywood novels - Fitzgerald, West - but does so mistakenly. This is about an affair, delusion, and drink first and foremost - the setting is almost incidental. So is the plot, but that perhaps is beside the point. Extreme situations - wars, disasters - supply their own sort of plot. So does this.
Hayes’ handling of first-person POV deserves credit. Though presented episodically - some chapters are shards a paragraph in length - the story never feels that way. The effect is scenic. Notice how the gaps between the narration are typically minutes or hours apart, not days or weeks. It allows Hayes the immediacy of first person narration while sidestepping its traditional potholes about moving the characters around.
Hayes’s instinct for alternating between live and reported dialogue is also admirable. One of the best chapters comes late in the book as the girl gets slowly plastered on Martinis at dinner. Like her paranoid monologue earlier in the novella (there’s a file kept on her by the movie moguls who are all secretly testing her worthiness for stardom) it’s delivered entirely in reported speech and feels all the more immediate for it.
So do Hayes’s details. Watching his lover tossing and turning in bed, the narrator notices her lips ‘making those small nibbling movements.’ And at a bullfight he notes the animal’s ‘manure, all yellow, streaking its rear hoofs.’
Worthy of comparison with James Salter’s A Sport and A Pastime.
February 12, 2020
Coolly observed novella about the wannabe Hollywood circuit in the 50s. The hero, a screenwriter saves a 'starlet' (in truth a would be one) from drowning (suicide) at a party on the Pacific Ocean and thereafter gets entangled with her life. How she accepts the cruelty of the city, the industry, but hates to see cruelty enacted (particularly acute in the bullfight scenes in Mexico). Her disappointment, her dreams thwarted are seemingly inevitable. Meanwhile the screenwriter (whose wife is in New York) gains minor success and hardens, becomes more cynical, with it. Tightly written and compelling.
January 5, 2026
Hayes writes poetically about another failed affair, this time with a damaged wannabe starlet in California.
His writing was really ahead of its time, and I’ve quickly become a fan.
Great stuff 4/5
His writing was really ahead of its time, and I’ve quickly become a fan.
Great stuff 4/5
May 12, 2025
An absolutely exquisite novella, so small and sparingly written but powerful and moving. Like the other Hayes books I’ve read, I found this one very cinematic and evocative of a time and place, and it also shares that quality of capturing a character’s psyche while keeping them at a distance from the reader. Pretty much perfect.
Read
February 6, 2017Yeah, just fabulous. About a middle aged Hollywood hack who makes a bad decision with a young woman. Short, and the plot is simple, but it feels authentic and honest in its despair. Also pretty fabulously written. Reading it, I found myself thinking of Mulholland Drive, the themes of which – innocent woman in trouble, or is she – are on display here. So, yeah, if anyone knows David Lynch, maybe ask him if he’s read this? And if he hasn’t, you know, tell him he should, cause I think he’d like it. You can also read it if you aren’t David Lynch. You don’t have to be David Lynch to read it, obviously.
February 10, 2017
This is on a par with Nathaniel West--quietly devastating.
July 4, 2025
Reread July 2025.
November 12, 2025
with this book Alfred Hayes literally just reheated Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s nachos, which were already quite a bit past their expiration date if we are being honest
October 9, 2017
Un peu déçue, j'en attendais plus et les personnages ne m'ont pas vraiment accrochée.
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