In Love E-Book

Alfred Hayes

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 210

Beschreibung

Fifty years ago Alfred Hayes was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists, and he deserves to be better known today. In Love is set in the Manhattan bar scene of the forties and reads like a Edward Hopper painting. A middle aged man tells a young woman on an adjacent bar stool the story of his last love affair: a relationship in the thoroughly modern sense, full of misplaced lust and misunderstood emotion. He depicts the boy of his tale as moody and evasive, the girl as even worse. It was a mostly erratic affair, downbeat, dysfunctional and on the brink of sinking without a trace - until an unscrupulous millionaire intervened. The ensuing turmoil will be recognisable to anyone who has fallen into - and then out of - a relationship. In Love is as much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, an examination of heartbreak rather than the heart itself.

Leseprobe

Praise forIn Love

‘Flawless, a perfectly cut gem.’ – Frederic Raphael

‘In Loveis strange, unsettling, cynical and sad. It is a masterpiece.’ –The Times

‘A noirish masterpiece which combines a plot that prefiguresIndecent Proposalwith the desolate milieu of an Edward Hopper painting.’ –Guardian

‘A little masterpiece.’ – Elizabeth Bowen

‘Besides being a technical tour de force,In Loveis literature; it is a work of art.’ – Julien Maclaren-Ross

‘A complete success … An honest, witty and moving study of an affair.’ – Antonia White

‘A brilliantly reduced masterpiece.’ –Independent

‘A very remarkable novel … Quite unforgettable.’– John Lehman

‘Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.’ – Paul Bailey

IN LOVE

In a Manhattan bar, some time in the1940s, a middle-aged man tells a young woman on an adjacent bar stool the story of his latest love affair, a relationship full of misplaced lust and misunderstood emotion. It was a mostly erratic affair – downbeat, dysfunctional and on the brink of sinking without a trace – until the intervention of an unscrupulous millionaire. The ensuing turmoil will be recognizable to anyone who has fallen into – and then out of – love, and the novel is as much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, an examination of heartbreak rather than the heart itself.

ALFRED HAYES (1911–1985) was born in London. He grew up in New York where he later worked for a time as a newspaper, magazine and radio journalist and broadcaster. After joining the army in1943he served with the US forces in Italy. While in Rome he met Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini and worked with them on the screenplay of the filmPaisà(1946), for which he received one of his two Oscar nominations (the other was for Best Original Story for the1951filmTeresa). After the war he returned to the USA, and, after publishing the novelAll Thy Conquests, he worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood for Warner Brothers. In addition to his seven novels – includingShadow of Heaven(1946),The Girl on the Via Flamina(1947; filmed in154asAct of Love)andMy Face for the World to See(1958) – he published a collection of short stories and two books of poetry (one of his poems, ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’, was set to music as ‘Joe Hill’ in the1930s, a song later popularized by Joan Baez), as well as writing a Broadway play,Journeyman(1940; based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell), and a musical,’Tis of Thee(1952). His later work was mostly for television, and his writing credits includeThe Twilight Zone,Alfred Hitchcock Presents,Mannixand an adaptation of Alec Waugh’s novelIsland in the Sun.

ALFRED HAYES

IN LOVE

With a foreword by Frederic Raphael

PETER OWEN

London

FOREWORD

Although the author of a small masterpiece, Alfred Hayes figures neither in the textbooks of post-war literature nor even in the indices of modern biographies. He wrote no curricular books, and he failed, or did not care, to hang out with those whose company makes people famous by association; he slept with no notorious women (or none who said he did), and he did not win prizes or accrue honours. Born in England, in1911, he was taken, at the age of three, to America, where he attended City College in New York. As a young man he became a reporter with theDaily Newsand on the now defunctNew York American. He seems to have remained in the USA until he died in1985, except for a period during the mid- and late1940s, when he was in the US Army Special Services in Europe.

His early fictions,The Girl on the Via Flaminia(later filmed, lamely, asAct of Love, with Kirk Douglas in the lead) andAll Thy Conquests, derived from experiences during the liberation of Italy. Training as a reporter made Hayes quick to encapsulate the essence of a story.All Thy Conquestsdelivers a variety of characters and events in a sequence of terse sketches. Its newsreel/montage style owes something to Hemingway’sIn Our Timeand to John Dos Passos’s multi-faceted, cinematic fictions such asManhattan Transfer(to which parts of Sartre’s truncated post-war tetralogyLes Chemins de la libertéare something of anhommage).The Girl on the Via Flaminiaintroduces the recurrent figure of the vulnerable female, perishable beauty her only fragile asset, who becomes Hayes’s emblematic character both inIn Loveand in its quasi-sequelMy Face for the World to See(set in the studio-dominated Hollywood television was about to subvert).

Hayes must have had a quick ear for Italian. Soon after the eviction of the Germans from Rome, he became involved with the neo-realist school of film-makers, of whom Roberto Rossellini was the dominant figure. Rossellini’sRoma, Città Aperta, with Anna Magnani, was shot on location with film stock liberated from who knew where, and caught the last days of the Nazi occupation with grainy, unblinking vividness. Hayes worked with Rossellini subsequently, during the making ofPaisà,a patchy1946film of six episodes, on which Federico Fellini was also another of the writers. Although he was nominated for an Oscar as a writer onPaisà, it is typical of his literary fortunes that Hayes should not even be mentioned in connection with the film in Halliwell’s allegedly authoritativeFilm Guide. He worked, again anonymously, with Vittorio de Sica onBicycle Thieves, the1948neo-realist masterpiece, but seems then to have quit Italy and returned to the USA.

His cinematic abilities had come to the attention of Fred Zinnemann, for whom he wrote the original (Oscar-nominated) story ofTeresa, a film about a GI who brings home an Italian bride. Halliwell’sGuidedeigns to cite him as ‘Arthur Hayes’ in this connection. The misprint might be taken to symbolize Hayes’s want of general renown; perhaps his indifference to it. Had apprenticeship as a newspaperman reconciled him with never quite getting the billing he deserved? The old-style reporter was required to make inventories of pain and mortality without queasiness and without intruding his own emotions into them. This unobtrusiveness is the workaday cousin of the Flaubertian novelist, whose personal opinions remain covert and whose signature is the work itself.In Loveis a work of art by a man who struck no attitudes as an artist and, it seems, had no political or personal kites to fly. If it has literary precedents (and they are not obvious), they are in the terse, distanced anti-rhetorical Italian fiction of which Cesare Pavese and Alberto Moravia were already established exponents during Hayes’s European years.

Hayes remains biographically eponymous: a hazy figure whose obscurity was due perhaps to lack of thrusting ambition. More probably, he was in the American tradition of the working stiff: the hard-bitten newspaperman, with a hat and a cigarette and matches (not a lighter), who knows the score but doesn’t expect to score himself. Another transplanted Englishman, Raymond Chandler, took up something of the same pose but with more self-consciously wisecracking panache. By the1950s Hayes (like Chandler) had been taken up by Hollywood, where screenwriting was well-paid drudgery without the trudgery of journalism. He had a quick slew of credits, of which the most interesting was Fred Zinnemann’s1957A Hatful of Rain(about a war veteran who becomes a drug addict) and the most memorable, alas, Robert Rossen’sIsland in the Sunwith Harry Belafonte.

By the1960s Hayes had fallen off the A-list of screenwriters (he writes sourly inMy Face for the World to Seeof belonging to the Screenwriters Guild). Although he did script George Cukor’s lame1976remake of Maeterlinck’sThe Blue Bird,most of his many credits after the1950s were for series such asAlfred Hitchcock PresentsandMannix. If he published no more fiction, he continued to be a prolific, if unrenowned, poet: his poem ‘I Dreamed I saw Joe Hill Last Night’ (about a union organizer executed in Utah in1915) was put to music in1936, later becoming a hit for Joan Baez in the1960s.

In Loveis Hayes’s slim claim to lasting fame. First published in1953, it came out in (although it does not at all exemplify) a period of well-turned fiction which was already becoming dated. In New York Norman Mailer’sThe Naked and the Deadintroduced a new, swaggering style. Not only was Mailer’s vocabulary raunchy (although not yet quite four-lettered) but the voice of the author was unsubtly loud and wilfully egocentric. In the same spirit, at much the same time, Jackson Pollock’s action painting made the artist’s own energy an ingredient of his picture. Pollock was putting an end to the centrality of the American urban pastoralism to be seen in Edward Hopper, whose solitary drinkers in midnight bars are cousins to the characters whom Alfred Hayes depicts, with similarly distanced sympathy.

InIn Lovethe action takes place, we can assume, in post-war New York, but its locations have the1930s décor in which Hopper framed his elegies of anonymous despair and loneliness. The girl in Hayes’s story listens to the radio, but she doesn’t watch television. She belongs to the lonely bed-sitting sisterhood that feminism (and its magazines and their empowered editors such asCosmopolitan’s Helen Gurley-Brown) would, supposedly, come to liberate and whomSex in the Citywould show to be hardly less, if more luridly, desperate. Hayes’s nameless anti-heroine’s best hope is still the happy-ever-after marriage that the puritan tradition, and its dream-factory mutations, had wished on middle America. In her early twenties, she is already the divorced victim of one such ruptured romance and has the (off-stage) baby daughter, Barbara, to prove it.

The love story recounted by the almost forty-year-old man in the bar, to an adjacent girl who is another candidate for disillusionment, is soiled by his failure, or inability, to commit; he may have been in love, but he lacked the will, or the innocence, to make loving into something positive. The story is no more obsolete than an Edward Hopper painting; art – as Ezra Pound said – is ‘news that stays news’, the working stiff ‘s ideal story. YetIn Loveis undoubtedly a period piece: it belongs to a time when your fortieth was a birthday to dread (inMy Face for the World to Seesomeone is described as ‘an old man in his late sixties’) and when a thousand dollars could be a fortune to a working girl with a baby daughter and no husband. After the rich man called Howard (drawn with pitiless sympathy) offers the pretty girl that much to spend one night with him, we know that sooner or later she will make the call she tells her lover she will never make.

Do I spoil the story by revealing what happens? Art doesn’t require surprise; the beauty of Hayes’s novella is in an inevitability which is neither artificially contrived nor tearfully salted. To measure the difference between a work of art and its degradation, compareIn Lovewith Adrian Lyne’s1993filmIndecent Proposal, in which Robert Redford offers Demi Moore a million dollars to sleep with him and you don’t believe a word of it, or give a damn whether she does or not, because the whole thing is famous-people confectionery and a million dollars is only a fraction of what Demi and her kind get for flashing their charms and not even having to give a decent performance when they do it. Howard’s proposal is made almost diffidently and conveys the honeyed menace of wealth without Redford’s glinting conceit. Howard’s author may despise him, but the accuracy of Hayes’s contempt leads him to understand and almost to pity him. Mary McCarthy’s ‘The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt’ has something of the same character in Mr Breen, but her sprawling story lacks the trimness which makes Hayes a master. McCarthy is too manifestly promising you what a babe she, the author, can be in the sack; Hayes makes all sexuality a kind of frustration; his lovers are shadows clutching shadows.

WhenIn Lovewas published in Britain, influential literary figures such as Antonia White, Elizabeth Bowen, John Lehmann and Stevie Smith immediately saluted its qualities. They were, however, representative of anancien régimewhich the Angry Young Men would soon load into their tumbrils. The maverick short-story writer Julian MacLaren-Ross reviewedIn Loveat the top of a column which finished with a dismissive few lines about a novel entitledLucky Jim, which he denounced as cheap and ephemeral. It may be that, like Sainte-Beuve, MacLaren-Ross recognized all literary merits save genius; or it may be that Kingsley Amis and his contemporaries were about to make anti-art into the going form of fiction and authorial self-advertisement into the best means to achieve primacy.

It is unlikely that the advent of either Amis or even of Mailer, Roth and Updike was responsible for Hayes ceasing to publish fiction before the1960s had begun, but thepointillisterefinement of his prose and the perspicuity of his self-effacement were abruptly out of fashion.In Lovecan be dated by the economy of its eroticism (that singular curl of black hair in the rumpled bed) and by the austerity of its despair. The malaise of Hayes’s characters will never be cured by Marxist activism or feminist rebellion or blokeish booziness. Although never ‘hip’ in the terms laid down in Norman Mailer’s famous article inDissent, Hayes’s masterpiece reads like a white writer’s tribute to the blues; its tersely syncopated lament calls for a soundtrack improvised by Thelonious Monk.

It is always dangerous to return, after half a century, to a book one has greatly admired. Once, when Vladimir Nabokov was maintaining that H.G. Wells was a better novelist than Joseph Conrad, an outraged Leavisite asked when Nabokov had last readKipps. ‘When I was fifteen,’ he replied, ‘and I have never made the mistake of looking at it again.’ I have just rereadIn Loveand found it just as compelling and as flawless as I thought it when I was in my twenties. Hayes may have been forgotten (if he was ever remembered), but he belongs to a serene company ofpetits maîtreswhose exquisite work, however sparse, need not await the endorsement of critics or the retrieval of anthologists. A gem is a gem is a gem.

Frederic Raphael

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything.

ONE

Here I am, the man in the hotel bar said to the pretty girl, almost forty, with a small reputation, some money in the bank, a convenient address, a telephone number easily available, 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.

Do I appear to be a man, the man said in the hotel bar at three o’clock in the afternoon to the pretty girl who had no particular place to go, who doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, or a man who privately thinks his life has come to some sort of an end?

I assume I don’t.

I assume that in any mirror, or in the eyes I happen to encounter, say on an afternoon like this, in such a hotel, in such a bar, across a table like this, I appear to be someone who apparently knows where he’s going, assured, confident of himself, and aware of what, reasonably, to expect when he arrives, although I could hardly, if now you insisted on pressing me, describe for you that secret destination.

But there is one. There must be one. We must behave, mustn’t we, as though there is one, cultivating that air of moving purposely somewhere, carrying with us that faint preoccupation of some appointment to be kept, that appearance of having a terminal, of a place where, even while we are sitting here drinking these daiquiris and the footsteps are all quieted by the thick pleasant rugs and the afternoon dies, you and I are expected, and that there’s somebody there, quite important, waiting impatiently for us? But the truth is, isn’t it, that all our purposefulness is slightly bogus, we haven’t any appointment at all, there isn’t a place where we’re really expected or hoped for, and that nobody’s really waiting, nobody at all, and perhaps there never was, not even in the very beginning, long ago, when we hurried even faster than we do now, and there was in us something that permitted us to believe, even for a short while, when we were younger – or at least I was; you, of course, are still comparatively young; how old are you, actually: twenty-four, twenty-five? – that the intensity with which we set out must compel such a destination to exist.

So now, close to forty, I tell myself that perhaps there isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, a place at all, thinking that to be, not disillusioned, but just the opposite of illusioned, is a sort of improvement, when it probably isn’t; and with this sense, that’s hard to describe, of permanent loss; of having somewhere committed an error of a kind or a mistake of a kind that can never be rectified, of having made a gesture of a sort that can never be retracted.

But you’re pretty. And it’s close to four o’clock. And here are the cocktails on the table. And in that mirror both of us are apparently visible. The waiter will arrive when we want him, the clock tick, the check will be paid, the account settled, the city continue to exist.

And isn’t that, after all, what we really want?

Things in their place; a semblance of order; a feeling, true or deceptive, of well-being; an afternoon in which something apparently happens.

Nothing shaken; nothing really momentous; a certain pleasure, without a certain guilt.

The guilt comes later, doesn’t it? The guilt’s further down the menu. It’s only when, after the waiter’s been paid and the bill settled, that something’s always somehow left over, unaccounted for, and that’s when we come to the guilt, don’t we?

Odd, though, the man said to the pretty girl, how I sleep well, how unimpaired my appetite is, and yet I seem always tired now; there are inexplicable pains in my back, here, where the muscles seem mysteriously knotted, my eyes (although I hardly ever read now, and hardly ever go to the movies) ache; how a rough, dry taste’s settled in my mouth.

And why? The man said, having promised to tell her a story, smiling at her, with an odd sort of restraint, looking at the pretty girl who had all the advantages of being not yet forty, and all the disadvantages, why should I feel this way? What have I lost that cannot, supposedly, be recovered? What have I done, he said, to be so unhappy, and yet not to be convinced that this unhappiness, which invests me like an atmosphere, is quite real or quite justified?

Perhaps, the man said, frowning now, to the pretty girl, that’s the definite thing that’s wrong with me, if something’s wrong; I don’t know, any more, what things signify; I have difficulty now identifying them; a sort of woodenness has come over me. There they are, the objects that comprehend my world, and here I am, unable to name them any more – an ornithologist to whom all birds have identical feathers, a gardener whose flowers are all alike. Do you think, the man said, earnestly, that’s my malady, if it is a malady? My disease, provided it is a disease?

Yes, the man said, I’ve often wondered why I impress people as being altogether sad, and yet I insist I am not sad, and that they are quite wrong about me, and yet when I look in the mirror it turns out to be something really true, my face is sad, my face is actually sad, I become convinced (and he smiled at her, because it was four o’clock and the day was ending and she was a very pretty girl, it was astonishing how gradually she had become prettier) that they are right after all, and I am sad, sadder than I know.

He began the story.

TWO

She inhabited a small apartment. Next door, I recall, there was a rather queer girl, New England-looking and tubercular; downstairs, there were a pair of elegant boys who were in television together, and had black candles over an imitation fireplace, and prints on the wall of the muscular guards at Buckingham Palace; a Mrs O’Toole had a dog.

Tiny and high up, her windows faced toward a large office building, and there were always eyes, distantly lascivious, which lifted hopefully from desks or machines or shipping-room tables whenever her curtains stirred. At night she would lock her windows, as well as curtain them, because she had the idea that a prowler (in her dreams he was always a Negro) might lower himself from the roof (she would be asleep, of course, and alone, and it would all be done noiselessly) to the rather wide window ledge and break into the living room in which she slept. I used to try to reassure her about the prowler by pointing out how nearly impossible the feat was, and how close by people were. Mrs O’Toole’s dog could bark; at what? she said, it hasn’t a tooth in its head; the girl next door could hear if she screamed; but there’s something wrong with the girl, she said: she never goes out of that apartment; well, there were the boys downstairs; my God, she said, who could they scare? So I would argue then that the street she lived on was a populated street, and noisy with trucks and buses, and it was not as though she were alone. She was protected, if people were a protection; she was hemmed about, if being hemmed about was a reassurance; she was guarded, if having neighbors who drank too much, and a subway at the corner, and a hack stand with sleepy-eyed hackies reading the late tabloids in their parked cabs were any sort of a guard.

But she had had the usual terrifying experiences. Once, in a local movie house, when she had used the ladies’ room; she had screamed then, in absolute panic, seeing the face lifting itself horribly above the edge of the door. And once, in her own apartment. She had heard footsteps in the hallway, very soft and guarded, the insistent creaking of the stairs, a low sound of human breathing. And then a knock. Her door was bolted (and later, when we quarreled, I remember her face appearing in the cautious slit) and chained. She stood there, I used to imagine her standing there, in the short white soiled terrycloth bathrobe she wore, on the scatter rug, forcing herself to ask in a voice that probably wasn’t far from hysteria, Who is it? And then (it was odd how unvariable the phrase was, how graven) the unidentifiable voice answered: It’s the man you asked for, and she could hear the doorknob being softly tried. She had, then, retreated swiftly to the telephone which rested on the small coffee table beside the studio couch on which she slept, and telephoned the operator, asking in a voice made quite loud and shaken by her terror for the operator to call the police, loud enough for it to penetrate the door, and the experimenting with the doorknob stopped and she could hear the footsteps, hurried now, going down the flights of stairs. But the image stayed with her of that unidentifiable voice disappearing into a crowd of ordinary-looking people coming up or descending into the subway or pausing for a newspaper at the corner stand or mingling with the heavy faces at the bar in the bar and grill, an unidentifiable voice that would insist, as it tried the doorknob softly again, poised there outside her not completely invulnerable door, It’s the man you asked for.