March 25, 2021 23
Sex, Noir & Isolation
Vivian Gornick
In Love
by Alfred Hayes, with an
introduction by Frederic Raphael.
New York Review Books,
130 pp., $14.00 (paper)
My Face for the World to See
by Alfred Hayes, with an
introduction by David Thomson.
New York Review Books,
131 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The End of Me
by Alfred Hayes, with an
introduction by Paul Bailey.
New York Review Books,
178 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Love bade me welcome. Yet my
soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
—George HerbertOver a period of some fifty- odd years
Alfred Hayes worked as a reporter, a
screenwriter, a novelist, and a poet.
When he died in 1985 he left behind
seven novels, three volumes of poetry,
a collection of short stories, and at
least a dozen screenplays. During the
past decade New York Review Books
has republished three of the novels, In
Love, My Face for the World to See,
and The End of Me. Taken as a whole,
these books, written in the 1950s and
1960s, are the jewel in Hayes’s crown:
the explanation for why he has recently
become something of a passion for
those who find in his writing the mas-
tery that makes a work of literature
take up a permanent place in a reader’s
inner life.
Alfred Hayes was born in London
in 1911, grew up in New York City, and
died in Los Angeles. His family was
Jewish, working- class, and on the left:
Hayes took class struggle seriously all
his life. When he graduated from the
City College of New York his father ex-
pected him to become something sub-
stantial, like an accountant, but the son
announced his intention of becoming
a poet of the working class. Although
none of the poems Hayes wrote in the
1930s are read today, one of them, “Joe
Hill,” written to honor a martyred
Wobbly activist, was put to music and
recorded, first by Paul Robeson, later
by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, and be-
came one of the most famous protest
songs in American labor history.
Hayes saw himself, from the first, as
a blue- collar intellectual more at home
with gamblers and cab drivers—the
historian Alan Wald referred to him
as “the Byron of the poolhalls”—than
he would ever be with other writers.
Byron was an inspired comparison; ev-
eryone who knew Hayes in his twenties
seemed to experience him as a self-
dramatizing Marxist, dark, brooding,
and intense. This was a posture he ap-
parently maintained for the rest of his
life.
Once out of school, Hayes joined the
Communist Party (as so many like him
did at that time), found various menial
jobs (waiter, delivery boy, bootlegger),
and wrote poems, some of them for
the left- wing New Masses and Partisan
Review, the latter then an organ of the
CP. When he landed a job as a crime re-
porter for one of the New York tabloids,
he began to develop the skills he would
put to excellent use some fifteen years
later as a professional screenwriter.
Drafted into the army in 1943 as a
special services noncombatant, Hayes
spent the last two years of World War
II in Italy, where he wrote his first
novel (All Thy Conquests, published in
1947). He stayed on in Rome after the
war ended to pursue work as a writer
at Cinecittà, the fabled Italian film stu-
dio. Taken on by great directors like
Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De
Sica, he found himself lending a hand
on such classics as Bicycle Thieves and
Paisà (for which he received an Oscar
nomination).
Now initiated into the work that
would provide him with a living for
the next twenty years, Hayes went on
to Hollywood as a mid- level studio
writer who contributed to the making
of countless movies for which he re-
ceived a paycheck but seldom a credit.
However, Hollywood gave him the ed-
ucation and the metaphor that turned
him into a novelist of consequence.Although Hayes’s lifelong awareness
of class struggle never lost its edge, in
Hollywood it was transmuted into a
deepened sense of human avarice that
no political theory could adequatelyaccount for. The narrator of his 1958
novel, My Face for the World to See,
lets us know that, at first, it seemed to
him that “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,” but later he had a feel-
ing “that there was something sinister
about the way these people lived.”
It struck Hayes forcibly that the Hol-
lywood obsession with making it was
responsible for some of the most soul-
destroying behavior humanity was ca-
pable of. If you were successful, you
could and did inflict horrifying humil-
iations on those who were not; if you
were on the outside wanting in, you
were capable of prostituting yourself to
an equally degrading extent. The pre-
occupation in Hollywood with its defi-
nition of worldly success never let up.
“At this very moment,” Hayes wrote in
My Face for the World to See,the town was full of people lying
in bed thinking with an intense,
an inexhaustible, an almost raging
passion of bec om i ng fa mous i f they
weren’t already famous, and even
more famous if they were; or of be-
coming wealthy if they weren’t al-
ready wealthy, or wealthier if they
were.For Hayes, Los Angeles had become
emblematic of an America where not
only did love not thrive, the impulse to
trust—oneself as well as others—often
seemed to be draining steadily away.
He knew that the emotional unreal-
ity he now identified with Hollywood
had been a prevailing influence on the
culture for at least as far back as the
Great Depression. In those years, al-
though capitalist greed was the force
behind the economic collapse, many
Americans, we ourselves—our friends,
neighbors, relatives—had had a share
in contributing to a brutalized atmo-
sphere that had brought us all low.
There had, of course, been camarade-
rie during the Depression (my mother
remembered it as a time when people
were kind to one another), but more
often there’d been a deadly sense of the
aloneness that a culture on the skids
greatly magnifies. In his memoir All
the Strange Hours (1975), the anthro-
pologist Loren Eiseley recounts an
incident of the early 1930s in which a
man in a hobo camp hears the twenty-
year- old Eiseley tell of how he’d just
been beaten by a brakeman trying to
throw him off a box car. The man hears
the story out and then instructs Eise-
ley, “Just get this straight.... The cap-
italists beat men into line. Okay? The
communists beat men into line. Right
again?... Men beat men, that’s all.
That’s all there is. Remember it, kid.”For the consumers of the pulp fiction
and gangster movies of the time, none
of this was news. Writers, working in a
vein that grew from American anomie,
steadily chronicled the misfortunes of a
population of women and men now gen-
uinely adrift. In the middlebrow novels
of John Steinbeck it was sharecroppers
and itinerants who bore the brunt of a
failed and heartless capitalism, but in
the pulps it was the urban loner, cold-
eyed rather than cowed, who domi-
nated. This figure is America’s answer
to European modernism’s deracinated
antihero. Alone as alone can be, he (it’s
almost always a he) gradually becomes
the man who must decide for himself
just how far he can go when his back is
to the wall. Pretty far, it turned out. As
the film critic Robert Sklar put it, this
was a genre driven by a plot about “a
crime told from the point of view of the
criminal.” During the Great Depres-
sion, when half the world felt they were
being treated like criminals, readers
and moviegoers couldn’t get enough of
it.
At the end of the 1930s, a new level
of American writing emerged—at ease
with pulp, even inspired by it, yet in a
class all its own. This work made inner
isolation visceral, but it went farther
and struck deeper by making passion
and murder psychologically artful. It
also electrified by putting sexual rela-
tions rather than social realism at the
center of its actual subject: the human
capacity for betrayal.
When the hard- boiled novels of
writers like James M. Cain, Raymond
Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett were
transferred to the screen in the 1940s
and 1950s, exhilarating movies such
as The Postman Always Rings Twice,
The Maltese Falcon, and Murder, MyAlfred Hayes, Italy, circa 1944Josephine^ HayesDean