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more than he needs women for what
she really needs.
In 1958 Hayes published My Face for
the World to See, an even deadlier take
on his particular brand of lost souls.
This time the opening scene is a beach
party in Los Angeles. The narrator—
again nameless—is the same forty-
ish screenwriter still on his uppers,
the woman now a twenty- six- year- old
who’s been trying unsuccessfully to
make it in the movies for the better
part of a decade. At the party, she gets
drunk and walks into the ocean, appar-
ently to take a swim, but the narrator
sees her going under and plunges into
the waves, pulling her from the water.
He knows he shouldn’t have anything
more to do with her, that once again
he’d be “wander[ing] into an ‘unsuc-
cessful’ life,” but no sooner does she
call than he’s right there: “I stretched
myself out beside her, a stranger, a spy,
sharing the warmth of the bed. Morn-
ing seemed immeasurably far.”
The woman in this book is a far more
experienced loser than her predecessor
in In Love, and therefore twice as dan-
gerous. She’s been living a half- life for
so long she has lost her bearings and
often seems on the verge of losing her
reason. Her days are spent “waiting at
the telephone so long for her agent or
a man or just anybody to call saying
there was a job or an appointment or
even simply a date for dinner.” One
day, however, of this she is certain, “a
limousine would draw up at the curb
of the street where she lived.... The
front desk [at the studio] knew she was
coming.” “The men in power... smiled
at her.... Now at last they were kind.”
The narrator does not realize until
too late how strung out the woman is.
Within a matter of weeks, however,
he knows that she is desperate for him
to tell her that he loves her and, once
again, this he cannot bring himself to
do. Instead, he listens to the woman tell
her painful story, thinking, “Why is it
that even now I don’t quite believe her,
and the sympathy, what there is of it,
isn’t quite what sympathy should be?”
They’re driving to a restaurant when
he tells her that his wife is arriving
from New York in the morning, and the
affair is over. She responds to the news
with a venom that shocks him. Really,
she says, her voice withering, she’s glad
to be done with loving, such a bore, so
good “to be free.” The food comes.
She stubs her cigarette out in the duck.
Another martini, please. “Of course, I
knew she hated me, didn’t I?” Then she
really lets loose:
She’d done so many things. I’d
no idea the sort of things she’d
done....
Well: she’d tell me something....
It was a sick ugly terrible life, her
life, and she knew it, and she didn’t
want me... forgiving her for it.The trouble was, life “never gave you
quite what you really needed. Enough
guts, for example.... She didn’t have
nearly enough.” She gives him a recital
of her conquests: grocery boys, truck
drivers, and (she claims) an eight- year-
old boy:
I looked at her... and I hated
her, and all those like her, for she
seemed at that moment to con-
tain in herself all that I hated andfeared in people, the violent follies,
the vicious melodramas, the gro-
tesque self- destructiveness.That night she cuts her wrists in
the narrator’s apartment. He calls his
friend Charlie the Fixer. Together, the
two men get her half- dead body into a
car, drive to her apartment, dump her,
call a doctor, and go off to Romanoff’s,
where they will be sure to be seen by
dozens. The reader sits staring into
space.The End of Me was published in 1968
and reads like a coda to the other two
novels. By now our corrupted screen-
writer has a name (it’s Asher) and is no
longer failing: he has failed. The story
opens with Asher fleeing his collapsing
life in LA and returning to New York,
where he expects to walk the streets of
his youth, hoping to stumble on some-
thing that will explain him to himself;
at the moment he hasn’t a clue. He has
discovered that the wife he no longer
loves is having an affair and, for rea-
sons that remain obscure to him, he
finds this discovery shattering. He is
also deeply perplexed as to why he’s no
longer getting work:You didn’t know why, certainly it
was not because you had less of
what you had had when you got the
jobs, you were sure of that, were
you sure of that, yes, you said, you
were sure of that.In New York, Asher starts spending
time with Michael, a young cousin,
and Aurora, his girlfriend, expecting
to impress these two with his knowl-
edge of the city. But everything is
changed—friends and family gone,
shops replaced, streets torn up—and
the idea that a savvy New Yorker is
hiding somewhere inside Asher’s angry
passivity proves an embarrassing folly.
Michael and Aurora pose as his good
friends but they are in fact his come-
uppance: a pair of amateur con art-
ists who hold him, a Hollywood hack,
in contempt. The narrative consists
of a series of misadventures that end
in Asher’s monumental humiliation
at their hands. In the final scene he
stands, drained, at the window of his
eighth- floor hotel room, looking down
onto the unforgiving street below. And
now, in all his bitterness and bad faith
and moving self- deceptiveness, he be-
comes the existentially mortified suc-
cessor to the narrators of In Love and
My Face for the World to See, the one
who binds the novels together.In Love is my favorite of the Hayes
novels, the one that speaks most di-
rectly to me. I have read and reread this
small book as though it were a poem
rather than a fiction: not a description
of experience but the thing itself. Hayes
knows what it’s like to not feel, and to
want to feel, and to not have the where-
withal to do it. What he knows he puts
down on the page not through dialogue
or plot turn but through a gripping tone
of voice: “Here I am, the man in the
hotel bar said to the pretty girl,” Hayes
writes at the beginning of In Love,almost forty, with a small reputa-
tion, some money in the bank, a
convenient address...this look on
my face you think peculiar to me,my hand here on this table real
enough, all of me real enough if
one doesn’t look too closely.Wherever this voice is going, the re-
sponsive reader thinks, I’m going with
it.
The ability to make a tone of voice
central to the work at hand is not com-
mon, but good writers often display it.
In The Rings of Saturn, the solitary
wander is W. G. Sebald’s controlling
metaphor. Without human connection,
the narrator—clearly a stand- in for the
author—sees devastation wherever he
goes. It would seem we have here a man
so morbidly obsessed with the gigantic
mess humanity has made of the world,
he might even be a nihilist. But no. The
tone of his voice—calm, clear, wonder-
fully curious—tells us he is more inter-
ested in than despairing of what lies
before him. Life is bleak but the narra-
tor is not. His voice belies the content
of his observations, makes the prospect
of what might come next exhilarating.
The narrative voice in a Hayes novel
is equally necessary to the book’s cen-
tral concerns. Posing as the history of a
failed love affair, the books are actually
concentrated on the narrator’s effort to
figure himself out. Neither cynical nor
vengeful nor emotionally out of con-
trol, at every turn he seems to realize
that both he and the woman are acting
out of what for each is an understand-
able necessity.
Nevertheless, while he does not de-
monize the woman—he is often trying
to see why she acts as she does—in the
final analysis, he always comes out the
more injured of the two. He admits to
all his emotional insufficiency, but histone belies accountability. He can’t
help it; no matter how he looks at it, he’s
the one bleeding in the street! Every
now and then he wonders fretfully why,
with all his experience, he repeatedly
links up with women who are walking
disasters. In fact, why does he link up
with them at all?
Of course, this narrator is a pawn in
Hayes’s game. It’s as though somewhere
inside this material a vital piece of un-
derstanding is trapped, and as long as
it remains beyond the narrator’s reach,
Hayes is destined to obsess over what
really happened in that affair. One
more time, each of his novels seems to
entreat, just one more time, and I’ll get
it right. But he doesn’t get it right. He
can’t get it right. Ultimately, not getting
it right is Hayes’s achievement.The problem is that his people are
looking for salvation in the wrong
place. The men and women in the Hayes
novels hang around each other as long
as they do, making each other as mis-
erable as they do, because one and all
are persuaded that the next love affair
(if not this one) will deliver them from
their own unknowing selves, and when
it doesn’t they retreat behind those
ever- hardening exteriors that noir
made such good use of, the ones that
were really begging to be cracked open.
If anything is essence- of- Hayes, it’s the
capacity to make a metaphor out of
that retreat and the plea implicit in it.
In one sense, the Hayes novels are
time- bound; in another, they live on
because they capture brilliantly the in-
sult and injury inherent in looking forsalvation in the wrong place. (^) Q
The man. The myth. The writer revealed.
CONVERSATIONS ON HEMINGWAY
A VIRTUAL EVENT SERIES
Hemingway and Women
Presented by The New York Review of Books
March 24, 7:00 PM ET via Zoom
PANELISTS
Ken Burns, Lynn Novick,
Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose
MODERATOR: Edward Mendelson
Register to attend at pbs.org/hemingwayevents
HEMINGWAY premieres on PBS stations April 5–7, 2021