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'Cause now I doze and daze and drown and cling to the wreckage of a sinking town
I wish my night had not involved quite so many nightmares. I enjoyed the part where the younger sister of a high school friend of mine had a local reputation as the kind of artist who anonymously photobombs civic events with enormous, kite-winged white swans, but I did not enjoy the part where when she created a similar effect in the harbor everyone kept assuming I was involved with the iridescent green sea serpent that surfaced next to a whale watch and kept complimenting me for something I hadn't even known about, in the way that involved saying they'd never have imagined it of me. After a while it started to feel like gaslighting, as if everyone had to know the truth but wanted to see me keep making those helpless, look-if-it-were-me-I'd-be-honored-but denials. There were short films of all of her projects on YouTube, for God's sake. She put them up after every release. That blonde hair that blew intermittently into the camera was not going to turn out to be mine.
Alfred Hayes' My Face for the World to See (1958) is one of the great Hollywood insider movies, except it's a short novel by a screenwriter better known for his work in Italian neorealism and for writing the lyrics to "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night." It's beautifully written, elliptical and poetic; it's vague about a lot of the expected information, like its characters' names or the particulars of their work, but excruciatingly precise with the muffled layers of their inner lives, which they sometimes successfully conceal from themselves and others and sometimes only misinterpret. The narrative voice is one of those clear, careful first persons that look limpid as water and achingly self-aware, until you realize a lot of the ache is wishful thinking. It doesn't end well, but you knew it wouldn't. You'd been wondering for some time whether the characters even wanted it to. I can't help wanting to see it as a movie, even knowing that in the year it was published it could never have been faithfully adapted and the narrator would perforce have been the hero; besides, the camera would have shown you too much. I learned from the foreword by David Thomson that Hayes wrote the screenplay for Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952), which I have wanted to see for some time—it's maybe noir and maybe not, but it stars Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan and was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets. So now I'm curious if Hayes brought to it any of the complexity of relationships he demonstrated so lucidly in My Face for the World to See, but I may be even more curious what his other novels are like, if any of them are like this one. It's so perfectly done that I can't find it upsetting, even when I understand abstractly that its last pages would be a gut-punch if the reader had any breath left to lose. I find myself wanting to use words like crystalline. And then smash them for the sharpest edge.
I can't promise to review Gun Crazy (1950) before we hit Arisia, but I can say that I understand why Peggy Cummins was remembered for it. John Dall, too, in a totally different part from Rope (1948). There's a one-take heist like the French New Wave came early. It may be one of the most American movies I have ever seen.
Alfred Hayes' My Face for the World to See (1958) is one of the great Hollywood insider movies, except it's a short novel by a screenwriter better known for his work in Italian neorealism and for writing the lyrics to "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night." It's beautifully written, elliptical and poetic; it's vague about a lot of the expected information, like its characters' names or the particulars of their work, but excruciatingly precise with the muffled layers of their inner lives, which they sometimes successfully conceal from themselves and others and sometimes only misinterpret. The narrative voice is one of those clear, careful first persons that look limpid as water and achingly self-aware, until you realize a lot of the ache is wishful thinking. It doesn't end well, but you knew it wouldn't. You'd been wondering for some time whether the characters even wanted it to. I can't help wanting to see it as a movie, even knowing that in the year it was published it could never have been faithfully adapted and the narrator would perforce have been the hero; besides, the camera would have shown you too much. I learned from the foreword by David Thomson that Hayes wrote the screenplay for Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952), which I have wanted to see for some time—it's maybe noir and maybe not, but it stars Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan and was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets. So now I'm curious if Hayes brought to it any of the complexity of relationships he demonstrated so lucidly in My Face for the World to See, but I may be even more curious what his other novels are like, if any of them are like this one. It's so perfectly done that I can't find it upsetting, even when I understand abstractly that its last pages would be a gut-punch if the reader had any breath left to lose. I find myself wanting to use words like crystalline. And then smash them for the sharpest edge.
I can't promise to review Gun Crazy (1950) before we hit Arisia, but I can say that I understand why Peggy Cummins was remembered for it. John Dall, too, in a totally different part from Rope (1948). There's a one-take heist like the French New Wave came early. It may be one of the most American movies I have ever seen.
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That blonde hair that blew intermittently into the camera was not going to turn out to be mine. --that aspect of the dream seems like maybe like imposter anxiety ("I'm being credited with things I didn't do") The art sounds cool in any case--both the swans and the sea serpent.
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Several of his novels are in my local library system, so I wish you the same luck with yours. I'm going to try to track down In Love (1953), also recently reprinted by the NYRB.
The art sounds cool in any case--both the swans and the sea serpent.
The art was great! The impostor syndrome was unnecessary.
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I had had the book in my house for some time without reading it; I'm not even sure where I picked it up, other than a used book store. I needed something to read on public transit yesterday. It was just spectacular.
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WOW. Love that image.
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It was wonderful art!