My Face For The World To See by Alfred Hayes #ABookADayInMay No.24

When Madame Bibi read Alfred Hayes’ In Love earlier in the month, it reminded me that I had My Face For The World To See (1958) on my shelves. I’d bought it because I’ll always pick up a NYRB Classic, and this one looked interesting – set in mid-century Hollywood, and only 131 pages.

It’s yet another unnamed narrator – this one being, like Hayes, a screenwriter. He is very successful and wealthy, and also the same age as me (37). He’s also clearly rather discontented. We don’t learn huge amounts about his wife, except that she is currently away and he doesn’t seem to miss her very much. (‘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.’) While at a party, he is looking out at the sea when he sees a young woman wandering into the sea, martini glass in hand. Is she simply drunk and foolish, or is she trying to kill herself?

He suspects the latter, and so does the reader, but she is saved from drowning and more or less laughs it off. Somehow they get to know each other, which spirals into a sexual relationship quite quickly and haphazardly. She is also unnamed, but she is sharply drawn with a pathos that rings true for modern-day Hollywood too – one of the success-hungry, fame-hungry, work-hungry young actors who will probably never get more than a handful of lines in a handful of mediocre films, but cannot get away from the longing.

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, 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. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be.

The narrator doesn’t seem to have the same longing. He has found career success, but he doesn’t appear to want much more of that – but he certainly has longing. It’s unclear for what. Perhaps, as his namelessness and the title of the novella suggest, some sort of more solid identity? Some way of presenting himself to the world and to others that feels more secure, and which he can be prouder of?

The morning after the two sleep together, he wakes to find she has already left. I quote this as an example of Hayes’ writing, which I found rather exquisite without being unnecessarily embellished. He really draws you into the minutiae of a moment:

When I awoke again, she was gone. I did not at first remember she had been there; she had slipped out from beneath the blankets and left them carefully arranged as though she had wanted to create the impression, for herself too perhaps, that she had not occupied at all the other half of the bed. I remembered her with a small effect of shock. When had she gone? There was the pillow, indented; in the bathroom, a scrap of tissue with lipstick; on the floor in front of the fireplace, two glasses with what remained of the Scotch. But that was all; only the smallest sort of disarrangement, only the merest trace: she had been careful, as well as quiet.

Typing that out, it really is a riot of colons, semi-colons and commas. If I were writing it, I’d probably be tempted to tidy it up. But it didn’t seem at all obtrusive while I was reading it. Rather, it flowed beautifully to me – the pacing of his realisation, the psychological insights coming naturally alongside the visual observations.

I really appreciated Hayes’ writing, but my only drawback to the novella was that I wish he’d treated the story a little differently. On the one hand, it is just the snapshot of a brief, spontaneous, unexpectedly complicated encounter. But there are moments of melodrama and shock that feel a little jarring. Similarly, I was jarred by a graphic scene at a bullfight in Tijuana. David Thomson’s introduction calls it ‘a magnificent, remorseless scene’, but I found it an inelegant distraction to the flow of the narrative.

Perhaps it is appropriate for a novella set in Hollywood to have a few very dramatic moments, but I think Hayes’ writing would be better served by the mundane. He is so good at exploring the everyday in beautiful prose, I don’t think he needed the gimmicks of shock moments. I still think My Face For The World To See was very good, but perhaps not as good as it almost was?