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 wriggling in a chair, I went out to look at the ocean.
There it was, exactly as advertised, a dark and heavy swell, and far out the lights of some delayed ship moving slowly south. I stared at the water, across a frontier of a kind, while behind me, from the brightly lit room with its bamboo bar and its bamboo furniture, the voices, detailing a triumph or recounting a joke, of those people who were not entirely strangers and not exactly friends, continued. It seemed silly to stay, tired as I was and the party dying; it seemed silly to go, with nothing home but an empty house....
This is another Alfred Hayes book, "My Face for the World to See," and it's just as strong as "In Love." Hayes seems to have learned from Chekhov, who famously said, "A story needs only a He and a She." That's all that Hayes gives us--but one twisted relationship is enough to fill over one hundred pages.
Like the hero in "In Love," the narrator in "My Face" seems paralyzed. Why exist? Why not exist? "It's silly to stay," but "it's also silly to go." (The narrator is talking about a particular party, but he might just as well be discussing his existence on the planet, and you can sense this, once you get to know him.) The people at the party are "not entirely strangers" and "not exactly friends." (Then what are they?) The narrator claims "it would be nice to be alone," but within a few paragraphs, he will have involved himself with a stranger, a new entanglement. He's a wreck.
The writing is so balanced, it's a bit mannered. Many weights have counterweights. "A little too animated" has "a little too available." The smiles that "pin" are matched by the questions that "trap." (The use of personification is menacing. Hayes will return to this sinister idea of party-as-wolf-hall at the very end of the novel: "I looked down at those who, when they were in difficulty, always had a fixer to call. They did not look like people who were guilty of anything. Careful, wary, my own teeth visible, my own eyes alert, I went down the carpeted stairs....")
Hayes has a nice defamiliarizing habit. The ocean "as advertised": It's as if the natural world were a set designed by Hollywood. (Later, when the ocean almost swallows a life, someone says, "People ought to put a fence around that thing.") The voices, smiles, and questions seem to exist independently of their owners, so you feel a bit as if you were drunk and unsettled. Hayes has a way of making an apparently familiar scene suddenly disquieting, suddenly capable of making the reader feel unstable.
The dialogue is snappy, and it sometimes works on multiple levels. (Hayes was a screenwriter.) Having rescued a woman from the ocean, the narrator observes to the woman that she was carrying her drink with her. "Martinis aren't very good with salt water, you know." He goes on to invite the woman to dinner: "But not seafood." This dialogue isn't only fun to read, it's also capable of telling us about the speaker: We learn that he's at least mildly witty. He's like Joe Gillis in "Sunset Boulevard." There's also a bit of psychological truth slipped in--here. How do you deal with something unspeakable (a possible suicide attempt)? By making jokes.
I also like Hayes's way of fully assuming the perspective of the character he is writing about. In an alarming discussion of a bipolar woman's struggle with paranoia, he simply takes on that woman's crazy point of view: "There existed behind all her suffering a plan of some sort. The men in power who operated the giant Studio intended something for her. This was not a random ordeal. It was engineered. It was governed. She was being closely watched. She was being tested. She was being subtly tried. It was only what all the great stars had had to endure in their climb to the top, where suffering ended, and they had all been subjected to ordeals as rigorous and as terrible as hers. The fan magazines contained clues; the gossip columns. She read them feverishly...."
In this impressive passage, you're thrust into the life of the deranged character. You're forced to identify with her, to wear her shoes--when many novelists of the 1950s wouldn't think to do this. The rhythm of the sentences helps to reproduce the woman's experience. Those short, choppy declarations: "This was not a random ordeal. It was engineered. It was governed. She was being closely watched." These declarations are like epiphanies--little bursts of faux-insight. You might be led to recall moments in your own life when your thoughts became loose, when your thoughts galloped away from you, and away from reality.
"My Face" isn't a book to read if you're looking for chipperness, but it's nice to encounter someone with such a talent for language--someone who, like Arthur Miller, saw upsetting stories buried underneath the myths that we feed to ourselves. Hayes isn't as famous as Miller, but maybe he should be; I'm happy to have "found" him.
There it was, exactly as advertised, a dark and heavy swell, and far out the lights of some delayed ship moving slowly south. I stared at the water, across a frontier of a kind, while behind me, from the brightly lit room with its bamboo bar and its bamboo furniture, the voices, detailing a triumph or recounting a joke, of those people who were not entirely strangers and not exactly friends, continued. It seemed silly to stay, tired as I was and the party dying; it seemed silly to go, with nothing home but an empty house....
This is another Alfred Hayes book, "My Face for the World to See," and it's just as strong as "In Love." Hayes seems to have learned from Chekhov, who famously said, "A story needs only a He and a She." That's all that Hayes gives us--but one twisted relationship is enough to fill over one hundred pages.
Like the hero in "In Love," the narrator in "My Face" seems paralyzed. Why exist? Why not exist? "It's silly to stay," but "it's also silly to go." (The narrator is talking about a particular party, but he might just as well be discussing his existence on the planet, and you can sense this, once you get to know him.) The people at the party are "not entirely strangers" and "not exactly friends." (Then what are they?) The narrator claims "it would be nice to be alone," but within a few paragraphs, he will have involved himself with a stranger, a new entanglement. He's a wreck.
The writing is so balanced, it's a bit mannered. Many weights have counterweights. "A little too animated" has "a little too available." The smiles that "pin" are matched by the questions that "trap." (The use of personification is menacing. Hayes will return to this sinister idea of party-as-wolf-hall at the very end of the novel: "I looked down at those who, when they were in difficulty, always had a fixer to call. They did not look like people who were guilty of anything. Careful, wary, my own teeth visible, my own eyes alert, I went down the carpeted stairs....")
Hayes has a nice defamiliarizing habit. The ocean "as advertised": It's as if the natural world were a set designed by Hollywood. (Later, when the ocean almost swallows a life, someone says, "People ought to put a fence around that thing.") The voices, smiles, and questions seem to exist independently of their owners, so you feel a bit as if you were drunk and unsettled. Hayes has a way of making an apparently familiar scene suddenly disquieting, suddenly capable of making the reader feel unstable.
The dialogue is snappy, and it sometimes works on multiple levels. (Hayes was a screenwriter.) Having rescued a woman from the ocean, the narrator observes to the woman that she was carrying her drink with her. "Martinis aren't very good with salt water, you know." He goes on to invite the woman to dinner: "But not seafood." This dialogue isn't only fun to read, it's also capable of telling us about the speaker: We learn that he's at least mildly witty. He's like Joe Gillis in "Sunset Boulevard." There's also a bit of psychological truth slipped in--here. How do you deal with something unspeakable (a possible suicide attempt)? By making jokes.
I also like Hayes's way of fully assuming the perspective of the character he is writing about. In an alarming discussion of a bipolar woman's struggle with paranoia, he simply takes on that woman's crazy point of view: "There existed behind all her suffering a plan of some sort. The men in power who operated the giant Studio intended something for her. This was not a random ordeal. It was engineered. It was governed. She was being closely watched. She was being tested. She was being subtly tried. It was only what all the great stars had had to endure in their climb to the top, where suffering ended, and they had all been subjected to ordeals as rigorous and as terrible as hers. The fan magazines contained clues; the gossip columns. She read them feverishly...."
In this impressive passage, you're thrust into the life of the deranged character. You're forced to identify with her, to wear her shoes--when many novelists of the 1950s wouldn't think to do this. The rhythm of the sentences helps to reproduce the woman's experience. Those short, choppy declarations: "This was not a random ordeal. It was engineered. It was governed. She was being closely watched." These declarations are like epiphanies--little bursts of faux-insight. You might be led to recall moments in your own life when your thoughts became loose, when your thoughts galloped away from you, and away from reality.
"My Face" isn't a book to read if you're looking for chipperness, but it's nice to encounter someone with such a talent for language--someone who, like Arthur Miller, saw upsetting stories buried underneath the myths that we feed to ourselves. Hayes isn't as famous as Miller, but maybe he should be; I'm happy to have "found" him.
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