Light is drawn to darkness

My Face For The World To See 

By: Alfred Hayes

(New York Review Books Classics)

A novella written with compact brilliance riddled with brief sentences that don’t hold back and paragraphs sculpted with absolute precision to give its reader exactly what needs to be had. Alfred Hayes started off as a journalist later going on to write poetry and finally ending his career writing screenplays in Hollywood. Hayes is best known for contributing to the script of one of (in my opinion) the greatest movies made, Bicycle Thieves. Yet although his contributions to Hollywood films are many Hayes never really made it big in the City of Angles therefore I cannot think of anyone better to write such a novel than Hayes, a novel about the seduction of fame and the darkness behind Hollywood lights.  

My Face for the World to See is set in 50’s Hollywood otherwise known as the golden age when actresses like Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren graced the screens, yet what is revealed through this novel is what festered beneath the golden veneer of glamour. Hayes describes the juxtaposition of the cosmetic illusion of beauty and the dark reality of its inhabitants, their insatiable lust for fame, money and power so brilliantly, it could be the best representation of Hollywood I have yet come across in a piece of fiction.

The opening scene of the novel puts the reader face-to-face with the desperation that camouflages itself within the glitz and glamour of the L.A lifestyle. As an A-List party is taking place in one of the Hollywood mansions a drunken young woman is walking towards the sea to end her life, to be swallowed by it’s dark waters. She is rescued by the novel’s narrator, who like Hayes, is a middle-aged, married man and a not-so-famous screenwriter. As I read through this first encounter between the protagonist and his would be love-interest I couldn’t help but hear Patty Smith’s song Redondo Beach play in my head. Many a song-writer has been seduced by Hollywood yet this particular song about the body of a beautiful blonde washing up on the shore, a ‘victim of sweet suicide’ was particularly fitting although Hayes’s main character does not die and is in fact rescued haphazardly by the narrator. In any other case I would refer to the main characters by their names but in this particular one I cannot, simply because Hayes hasn’t named them. Both the narrator and his love-interest remain nameless which feels like a deliberate act by Hayes to emphasize the irony of being anonymous in a place where being known is everything, this choice also succeeds in making the desperation and struggle to achieve fame more tangible.

At first glance our narrator is certain that he has nothing in common with this girl who he’s convinced is like every other young woman trying to make it in Hollywood. Although he makes a good living writing for the movies he is quite resentful of it describing his work, he calls it: ‘writhing not writing’, he is resentful of all that Hollywood represents of which this girl is a part of. The narrator pities the struggle of women in Hollywood and empathizes with what they have to put up with at one point saying:

“I said, then, tentatively, that it seemed a bad life to me, the life of an actress in a town like this; I meant, of course, the way she lived, and the inevitable passes made in the inevitable offices; I’d have chosen another life if I were a pretty girl.”

Considering this book was published in 1958 it seems like this issue is more potent today than it ever was for sixty years later we are witnessing Hollywood actresses speaking up about the very point Hayes made in this novel with the Time’s Up movement in full force. So much has changed in Hollywood since Hayes was a cog in its movie-making machine yet nothing has changed at all. 

  

                             

Regardless of what our narrator thought of this girl and what she represented, a love affair ensues and we witness the struggle that occurs when opposites attract, when one is passionately drawn to someone so unlike them for the very reason that they are. The sheer denial of all the signs that point towards the tragic demise of love and the lust that drives one over the edge and away from the familiar and safe, it is an escape of a sort, an escape from one’s self and a desire to be someone else even for a moment. Yet Hayes’s truth reveals that try as we may to be someone other than ourselves we are bound to fail for one cannot change the nature of his being and although opposites might attract, most often than not, it is an attraction that is self-destructive, one which will leave in it’s wake at least one person hurt, or worse.