Alfred Hayes (1911–1985)

An occasionally smart, occasionally clumsy construction, Alfred Hayes' first novel from 1946 shows an author who had a good eye but did not yet know where to train his lens. Like its superior successor The Girl on the Via Flaminia, released the following year, All Thy Conquests takes place in the noirish nights of Rome in 1944, a few months after the Allies have liberated it from the Germans. Both conquerors and conquered have become disillusioned; sexual politics and shame have become show more potent, and no one throws flowers any more. "Now when a girl smiled she was hustling" (pg. 99). But whereas Via Flaminia flourished in this setting by focusing on the dynamics of one American soldier and his compromised Italian bed-mate, All Thy Conquests dilutes itself.

The novel follows three different American soldiers in similar situations to the one in Via Flaminia, though none of those three seem to differ greatly in their characterisation. Hayes also attempts to have their stories intersect, but they never do so with any purpose, and there is also another story of a native Fascist mayor who is tried and then lynched by the townspeople because he helped facilitate a German reprisal. This should be fascinating, but it never flows well with the other stories, which are themselves unremarkable. Whereas The Girl on the Via Flaminia's clarity is intoxicating due to its focus, All Thy Conquests' is bewildering due to its looseness. Only one of the two novels can be recommended, and unfortunately it is not the one reviewed here. show less

"… what was caught in the water, in the passage of the water down to wherever the Tiber emptied, swirled with it, helplessly… it was deep, he remembered: though it was a narrow river, it was deceptively deep." (pg. 102)

The phrase 'hidden gem' could almost have been created to describe Alfred Hayes' work. I first came across the name serendipitously back in February; the novella My Face for the World to See proved to be an intensely brilliant literary read. His short novel The Girl on the show more Via Flaminia suggests this was not a one-off; it is so perfectly crafted, almost like a painting (one review I read, of another of Hayes' novels, says it is as though 'Edward Hopper paintings had captions', which is very apt). Hayes is becoming not only a writer I can admire, but one I can trust.

The Girl on the Via Flaminia takes place in Rome in the winter of 1944; six months after liberation from the fascists and the Germans, the cold is quite literally creeping in. It is fascinating to move around in this 'occupied' city, for that is what it now feels like: the bunting and the American flags waved during liberation are now gone; the nights are cold and without electricity, there are queues for bread, and the children throw rocks at the G.I.'s jeeps. Hayes served in this theatre and stayed on in Rome after the war, and the book breathes an authenticity that can't be faked.

The book takes as its narrative the story of Robert and Lisa, an American GI and a desperate but beautiful young Italian woman. He has cigarettes and chocolate and soup rations; she has a warm body and the nights are cold. The Girl on the Via Flaminia navigates this taboo of war and military occupation, of the girls who 'disgrace Italy', as one prominent Italian character, an army deserter, puts it. Hayes deals with the intricacies of sexual politics very deftly, and all of the characters and their relationships are excellently drawn. The war is essential to the story but takes a back seat: "they bomb each other, they destroy cities – but a girl in bed is a crime" (pg. 111). The book is like a stage play in its dynamics and its drama, with few – albeit important – scenes outdoors, and it was no surprise to learn that Hayes later adapted it as such. The vibe is crisp and noir-ish, with scenes that are almost begging to be filmed, but this is very much a piece of literature. There are taut descriptive sentences knitting it all together, and the book is almost like the best parts of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms distilled – a perceptive chronicle of affection during a time when things are broken apart.

The story is so finely balanced that books longer than this begin to look unseemly; a brutish mash of words in contrast to Hayes' precision. The only thing I didn't like was how much of Lisa's bitterness remained unexplained – the "envelope of numbness she seemed to sit in" (pg. 138) – but even here I am willing to trust the author. Hayes' writing is very acute, and it is likely that I overlooked some small detail which explained her. Certainly, there are unspoken literary explanations underpinning many of the dynamics; it was only after I finished the book that I realised the crossroads choice between the river or the city was the choice between death or prostitution. Hayes' ambiguities are considered, not cheap; his characters are flawed, not poorly-drawn; his prose is precise, not simple. I think I'm going to end up reading everything by this writer. show less

My three previous experiences of Alfred Hayes have each been excellent, in their different ways, like Edward Hopper paintings in written form. But while The End of Me again brings forth those desolate Hopper-like characters, it is a lesser read. This time, Hayes forgets to bring that all-important light which Hopper never failed to add, and which really makes the composition into a work of art.

Hayes' previous books were all about a vision of a good world that our characters were too broken show more to reach; The End of Me, instead, has an almost nihilistic vision. There's no good country for old men, nor for young men or women either, and while our protagonist, Asher, claims to refute the poet Michael's depiction of a world "more destructive, more finally poisoned… aimed at one like a gun" (pg. 59), there's not really anything in his journey which really supports it. Both Asher and Michael – and the improbably-named Aurora d'Amore, the vampish girl in this love triangle – have a bitter and nihilistic worldview. Though Michael is malicious with it – and has the support of Aurora in this – Asher is also willing to destroy. He is willing to destroy himself – he wants to be "demolished" (pg. 147) by these children and their "terrible games" (pg. 134).

Those who have read anything by Hayes won't be surprised by this content, but it doesn't take as well in The End of Me as it does in other novels. The writing itself, though accomplished, is just less remarkable. There's no phrase as potent as the "delayed ship moving slowly south" that I noted in my review of My Face for the World to See. The book's snowy New York setting isn't evoked even half as well as the noirish Rome in The Girl on the Via Flaminia. And Aurora isn't given the opportunity to make a counterpoint that makes the female character in In Love redeemable, and instead alternates cartoonishly between cruel vamp and fragile doormat.

The character dynamics are less clear than the main relationship conflicts in Face (a toxic May-December romance), Flaminia (a wartime sex-for-food trade between victor and conquered) or In Love (an Indecent Proposal-style proposition). How Asher is suckered into the events of The End of Me are understandable, but the baseless cruelty of Michael and Aurora ("as though, from the beginning, [they'd] been collecting a dossier" (pg. 108)) is more confusing. Young people with their "terrible games" played on the older man, perhaps, like pulling the wings off flies, but such a depiction feels a tad shallow and isn't explored. Consequently, for the reader the book exists in a sort of haze, with Hayes' usual noirish coolness hardening into impenetrable ice rather than distilling into the chill that, in his better novels, can take your breath away. show less

Predating the premise of Indecent Proposal by a number of decades, Alfred Hayes' short novel In Love tells the story of a middle-aged man and a young woman in love – or "in love" – and the underlying problems in their relationship which surface when a rich businessman offers the young woman money to spend a night with her.

Hayes eschews salaciousness in favour of a raw look into all the decimating effects of possessing, and being possessed by, someone else. The cool, almost nihilistic, show more approach to romance is something Hayes has also done arrestingly well in The Girl on the Via Flaminia and My Face for the World to See, and while I prefer those two books, it is in this book where Hayes really takes that despair and jealousy and anxiety and pulls it down into those psychological depths where it hardens and becomes something yet worse: that feeling where love turns to bitter hate.

Hayes is at his most nakedly observational here, whether it is in extended riffs on different facets of relationships in general (such as, on pages 50-51, how "a woman always seems to choose… the goddamnedest moments to end a love affair") or by delving into the particularly complex relationship of the two main characters. Despite the male protagonist also serving as narrator, his female partner-in-crime treats with the reader, if not on equal terms, then at least honestly. Hayes captures the ennui of post-modern Western man – "a man who privately thinks his life has come to some sort of an end" (pg. 3) – but the realisation of the female co-protagonist too not only prevents the book from becoming too self-pitying or misogynistic, but enhances the literary value. As Hayes' narration remarks after the two have torn each other apart at the end, it is "quite an overwhelming piece of character reading" (pg. 117), and the wounds are so open and vicious that you, as the disquieted reader, wish they weren't quite so recognisable to our own lives and histories. The self-destructive battle between the two is very vivid; it's like how a fight you witness between two people in the street always seems more dangerous than one you see on television.

In the books of his that I've read previously, one of Hayes' greatest qualities was his writing style. While that's also in evidence here, I was, to be honest, a bit more ambivalent this time around. There are a great number of compelling observations, delivered in crisp prose, but there are also many things that feel odd. The framework of the story can become convoluted: the male protagonist is telling the story to another woman in a bar, which means the female protagonist's story is told from the perspective of the male protagonist being told by the female protagonist what happened to her. The lack of speech marks doesn't help with this, and some unnecessarily laborious shuffles ("Isabel had been, because she was fond of her, and worried about her, frank…" (pg. 76)) come across as hesitant when the book should be definitive. For all Hayes' usually crisp writing, there are also some oddly constructed long sentences in In Love – enough for me to remark upon it. Try, for example, to maintain your train of thought with the following:

"But what was it, then, I wanted? she would ask, almost angrily, not really believing me (as, possibly, I did not believe myself), thinking that the obstinacy with which I spoke of some vague freedom, without shape, without substance, was only another of my infinite poses; and that it was all bound up (she could not say exactly how or why) with my reluctance to proclaim I loved her (desperately, of course) and could not live without her (when, after all, there were so many girls I had loved and managed to live without)." (pg. 23)

It is possible to gather yourself after a sentence like that, but Hayes' persistent use of such writing makes an already exhausting book – given the intensity and toxicity of the subject matter – more difficult than it perhaps ought to be. One could charitably say that such use of language simulates the tangled gnaw of this disruptive love affair, that we must unpick along with our characters, but the book doesn't need the technique. In Love is an excellent character study that, with one rich businessman's maxim, takes one of the most taboo truths about human interaction – "one should be born either beautiful or rich, everything else was a handicap" (pg. 32) – and sets two lovers to war over the proposition.

In the blackmail ultimatum of the finale, the resolution of the story ingeniously reinforces and yet inverts the businessman's maxim: in the end, we are all looking to take something, and it is not only the world which destroys us, but each other. It's just a shame that this dangerous, barbed tangle of love is sometimes expressed in long, tangled sentences. Hayes is much more devastating when he just delivers it cold and straight: "I suppose, she said, I'll never have a life of my own again simply because I was in love with you once" (pg. 107). show less