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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

IN LOVE

Alfred Hayes was born into a Jewish family in Whitechapel, London in 1911. A few years later, the family moved to New York, where Hayes grew up, went to college and subsequently worked as a reporter and broadcaster. He also began to write verse, including the poem ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’, which was later set to music and became a hit for Joan Baez. When the war broke out, Hayes joined the US army and left for Europe. Staying on in Rome after the end of the conflict, he became involved in the neo-realist film movement and worked on the scripts of several classics, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Rome was also the backdrop for his first two published novels, All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949). In the late 1940s, Hayes moved to Hollywood and worked in the movie business as a screenwriter. His scriptwriting credits include the films Clash by Night, The Lusty Men and A Hatful of Rain, as well as The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents for television. He was nominated for two Academy Awards, first for Paisà and later for Teresa (1951). In 1953, his great novel In Love appeared and was widely praised by such influential figures as Antonia White, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Julian Maclaren-Ross. In total, Hayes wrote seven novels, including My Face for the World to See (1958) and The End of Me (1968). He died in 1985.

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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.

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

IN LOVE

Alfred Hayes

IN LOVE

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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