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Loading... My Face for the World to See (New York Review Books Classics) (original 1958; edition 2013)by Alfred Hayes (Author), David Thomson (Introduction)
Work InformationMy Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes (1958)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 3.5, for the writing, for believable characters. Such a sad story, of a husband bored with his wife, who fishes a suicidal young woman out of the Pacific ocean, and goes on to begin an affair with her, almost as an afterthought. She is obviously mentally disturbed, but he keeps going to bed with her, encouraging her to believe that he cares for her. Then, when his wife writes that, as her dad has died, she feels a sudden urge to try to make things work with him again. Now, when he tells his little bed partner about it, Miss mental disorder lets all her demons out. Oh dear, poor man, having to deal with this! ( ) "Strange, how I thought that the scene at which I was looking must end in darkness." (pg. 74) Occasionally I browse the shelves in second-hand bookshops and charity shops, not looking for anything in particular but wanting something to leap out at me, serendipitously; something I would never have known about or considered had it not been there, directly in front of me on a randomized shelf and available for pocket change. So it was when I came across Alfred Hayes' cool, slim novella My Face for the World to See, with an exquisite 1950s high-style cover design by Penguin Modern Classics. That serendipity was a true one; whatever butterflies had flapped their wings to bring it to me had known their mark. I am a big fan of Hemingway, of coolly clipped sentences with a quietly devastating undercurrent; of Chandler's world-weariness and grime in the sun; and of the smoky aesthetic of 1950s Mad Men. Quite out of the blue, Hayes' book was a mix of all of these. I am also a fan of existential writing, that awareness of life as something hollow and the West as "some delayed ship moving slowly south" – as the opening page of My Face for the World to See has it (pg. 3). The book starts by the Pacific Ocean, the natural geographical end-point of western expansion, amongst the decadence of Hollywood and the dreams that are shattered there. A young aspiring actress at a house party walks out into the dark surf with the intention of committing suicide. Our narrator, an older screenwriter, sees this and rescues her. The reaction of the faceless people at the party include the suggestion to "put a picket fence around that ocean" (pg. 6). Such an apposite response from a tamed civilization looking only to mingle. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is an obvious analogue here, and it says a lot for Hayes that one does not scoff at the comparison, even if Gatsby has greater literary merit and depth. Hemingway is another, not only because of Hayes' bullfighting scene but because of the sentence structure. Hemingway's sentences are better (Hayes' are able, but I did lose the thread more than once), but Hemingway never got this existential. There develops, naturally, an affair between the young actress and the married screenwriter, and no matter how well-worn this scenario might be nowadays (this book was published in 1958), I was impressed with what Hayes did with it. Despite the book's short length, both characters are well-drawn and we plumb into their depths. There is one particularly fine extended passage in Chapter 14, where the young actress imagines all the 'enigmatic' people of Hollywood, who she believes have assailed her and blocked her ascent, suddenly summoning her to a room where she is told she has passed the 'test', and that outside her limousine awaits, ready to take her to her new life among the beautiful people. "It had been such a difficult ordeal, and you were so exhausted. Now at last they were kind, now at last everything was to be explained." (pg. 46) Such tragic wistfulness is bound to end in tears; love of this type is "a grim subject" (pg. 68), if indeed it can be called 'love' and not just a "semblance of warmth" against the cold outside (pp 37-8). This is a messy situation told cleanly by Hayes. The young actress (neither of the two main characters are named) came out to Hollywood with "my face for the world to see" (pg. 22), a device which, over the course of the novel, can be applied to both her and the man in various situations and for various motives. It is great and subtle writing, even if the ending loses some of the tightness of the early chapters. "It startled me: to have that come out of the depths. I knew, of course, the contours of the pit into which she was looking. I'd looked into it in my own time… It never really closed over" (pg. 75). Hayes knows the contours of the pit, and, thanks to serendipity, he's one writer that I'm certainly going to explore in the future. no reviews | add a review
Alfred Hayes is one of the secret masters of the twentieth century novel, a journalist and scriptwriter and poet who possessed an immaculate ear and who wrote with razorsharp intelligence about passion and its payback. My Face for the World to See is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame and you're only as real as your image. At a party, the narrator, a screenwriter, rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into the Pacific. He is living far from his wife in New York and long ago shed any illusions about the value of his work. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without really meaning to, he gets involved with the young woman, who has, it seems, no illusions about love, especially with married men. She's a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures. She's just like him, he thinks, and as their casual relationship takes on an increasingly troubled and destructive intensity, it seems that might just be true, only not in the way he supposes. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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