The End of Me Read online

  ALFRED HAYES (1911–1985) was born into a Jewish family in Whitechapel, London, though his father, a barber, trained violinist, and sometime bookie, moved the family to New York when Hayes was three. After attending City College, Hayes worked as a reporter for the New York American and the Daily Mirror and began to publish poetry, including “Joe Hill,” about the legendary labor organizer, which was later set to music by the composer Earl Robinson and recorded by Joan Baez. During World War II, Hayes was assigned to a special services unit in Italy; after the war he stayed on in Rome, where he contributed to the story development and scripts of several classic Italian neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), and gathered material for two popular novels, All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), the latter the basis for the 1953 film Act of Love, starring Kirk Douglas. In the late 1940s Hayes went to work in Hollywood, writing the screenplays for Clash by Night, A Hatful of Rain, The Left Hand of God, Joy in the Morning, and Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, as well as scripts for television. He was the author of seven novels, a collection of stories, and three volumes of poetry.

  PAUL BAILEY is the author of eleven novels, including At the Jerusalem (1967, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award); Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977) and Gabriel’s Lament (1986), which were both short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction; and, most recently, The Prince’s Boy (2014). Among his nonfiction works are two volumes of memoir; a tribute to Quentin Crisp, The Stately Homo (2000); and a collection of poetry, Inheritance (2019). Having begun his career as an actor, Bailey has also written plays for television and radio, including an adaption of J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1980).

  OTHER BOOKS BY ALFRED HAYES

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  In Love

  Introduction by Frederic Raphael

  My Face for the World to See

  Introduction by David Thomson

  THE END OF ME

  ALFRED HAYES

  Introduction by

  PAUL BAILEY

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1968 by Alfred Hayes

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Paul Bailey

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Saul Leiter, Canopy, 1958; © Saul Leiter Foundation; courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hayes, Alfred, 1911–1985, author.

  Title: The end of me / by Alfred Hayes.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019039488 (print) | LCCN 2019039489 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374338 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374345 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3515.A9367 E53 2020 (print) | LCC PS3515.A9367 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039488

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039489

  ISBN 978-1-68137-434-5

  v1.0

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Contents

  Introduction

  THE END OF ME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  INTRODUCTION

  Alfred Hayes’s penultimate novel, The End of Me, is written in the first person, like its predecessors In Love and My Face for the World to See. It differs from those two self-lacerating narratives in one crucial respect: this time the desperate storyteller has a name. The mordantly witty author calls him Asher, after the biblical son of Jacob. The name means “happy” in Hebrew.

  Asher has much in common with his anonymous brothers-in-arms. He, too, is a writer of sorts, though he’d describe himself as a “writher.” He was a moderately successful screenwriter before his tale of woe begins, living comfortably, if not happily, with his social-climbing second wife in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. But Hollywood no longer requires his services: “The door closes that had always been open. The phone is silent that had always rung.” To add to the humiliation of being suddenly jobless, he has discovered that his unnamed wife is having an affair with her tennis coach. Although he has come to despise her acquisitiveness and the snobbish disdain with which she treats her genial, uneducated father, he succumbs to a fit of jealousy that shows little sign of abating. His confidence, already depleted, is shattered. She has made a patsy of him. He is tempted to burn down their luxury residence, but decides instead to leave the lights blazing in every room before he escapes from the horror confronting and consuming him.

  He flies to New York, the city of his childhood and early manhood. He books into a hotel, taking a room on the eighth floor, a “well-furnished cave” offering a distant view of Central Park. He favors the idea of hiding there indefinitely, but can’t resist the temptation to visit old haunts and walk along the busy streets undisturbed. He goes to a delicatessen in the North Bronx where he last ate ten years ago and wonders why Max Gitlitz, the owner, isn’t sitting by the cash register. A waiter provides the answer. He tells Asher that Max is long gone and that the place has been “alterated” three times. The unhappy chronicler relishes the idiosyncratic coinage, setting it down in italics—alterated reminds him, briefly, of the unexpected pleasure to be gained by listening to the things people say.

  He goes to see his eighty-six-year-old Aunt Dora, who lives alone now that her husband has died. She is frail but is comforted by the fact that her doctor lives nearby. For her, Asher is the famous one in the family, the boy who made good, with a lovely home in a sunny state and a wife to care for him. He lies to her when she asks him how he and his “fine wife” are faring, assuring her that all is well. He learns that Dora’s daughter has a son called Michael who has ambitions to be a writer, too. Perhaps Asher could give him some useful advice.

  Michael and Asher meet at the hotel. Michael, it transpires, is an unpublished poet. There is something about the young man’s attitude, which verges on the supercilious, that riles Asher. He is put off by Michael’s knowing references to Pasternak’s poetry and to Rimbaud. Their meeting ends on a sour note, with Asher irritated to the point of rudeness. The following morning, he is ashamed of his behavior: “Contrition set in: one of the milder infections I suffered from.” He contacts Michael, whom he calls “the boy,” and arranges another date. At this second encounter, Michael is accompanied by his girlfriend, a law student who bears the scarcely credible name Aurora d’Amore.

  “But nobody has a name like that. Strippers, maybe. Are you a stripper?”

  “No.”

  “Aurora d’Amore. The dawn of love? Impossible. Unless your mother’s a classical scholar.”

&nbs
p; “My mother’s a classical dago. Isn’t she, Michael?”

  And so the stage is set for Michael and Aurora to perform their grisly double act, a danse macabre consisting of any number of cruelly inventive ways in which to humiliate and ultimately demean the Hollywood hack who once earned ludicrous sums of money. Between them, they put their hapless victim into the confessional, where he reveals his past follies, boasting of sexual conquests he has never boasted about before, and belittling the two women he has married. The darkly pretty Aurora is the more accomplished performer, using her unattainable body as a means of ensuring Asher’s downfall. Her acting skills are at their most adroit in chapter 29, in which she tells lie after lie after lie, every single one of which Asher believes to be true. He is so convinced of her honesty that when she concedes that she hasn’t been honest with him and is miserable as a consequence, he is driven to observe: “The things I do with a woman never vary. I see myself, down the years, in the gathering of time, squeezing unhappy hands. I hear my solicitous voice.”

  The End of Me was published in 1968, during the age of flower power. Some critics have noted that Michael and Aurora are dropouts who renounce capitalism and enact their revenge on Asher because of their principles. They are, therefore, somewhat dated figures. I disagree with this judgment, seeing them, rather, as a pair of conniving tricksters who know a patsy when they see one coming. The human capacity to prey on the vulnerable is timeless and constant. The Internet has strengthened its destructive power. A new Michael and another beautiful Aurora are already making ingenious use of it.

  Hayes said goodbye to fiction with The Stockbroker, the Bitter Young Man, and the Beautiful Girl, which appeared in 1973. It’s written in the third person and deals with the despair of its principal character, Arthur Lewis, in a manner that can justly be accounted hilarious. It’s as if Hayes is looking back on his career as a chronicler of love’s sorrows and discontents and asking himself why he took it all so seriously. It’s an eccentric masterpiece, with scenes of unforgettable farce. His prose is as clean-cut and precise as ever.

  For me, Hayes is a poetic novelist of the rarest kind. It’s instructive to remember that he began as a poet, influenced by Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, among others. Yet he doesn’t indulge in poetic prose of the kind that’s designated purple. He gives objects their proper names, as Williams does. He concerns himself with the difficulties of loving and being loved and eschews philosophical digressions about the state of the world. He looks at a man and a woman drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes and wondering where the hell they are going. I can’t get enough of his exquisitely cadenced “solicitous voice.”

  —PAUL BAILEY

  THE END OF ME

  A young man seated at his table

  Holds in his hand a book you have never written

  Staring at the secretions of the words as

  They reveal themselves.

  —WALLACE STEVENS, The Lack of Repose

  1

  I crawled out of the bush away from the window and I began to run. My only safety lay in flight. If I stopped I’d howl. I knew I must not stop. The thing was in my gut. In my parched in my constricted throat. Humped raw cringing wounded to death I’d howl into the night. Affrighting these houses. These well-kept lawns. These softly polished pianos. The dens would shiver. Rugs cringe. If I stopped. If ever I let it out of me. This wounded this stricken animal. And I didn’t. I didn’t howl. I ran. I still wore my tennis shoes. And I didn’t howl.

  The club was closed. I drove home. The house was dark. I kept saying to myself: You’re finished. This is the end of you. I wanted to stand in some empty place and beat my hands together. I wanted to crawl. I wanted to burrow. Walking seemed unnatural. Perhaps if I went on all fours it would not hurt so much.

  The house stared at me. I knew it was no longer my house. But the most dreadful thing was that it was not unexpected. I had watched it come. It had been coming. Padding toward me. Even if I could not see it clearly and even if I had not believed it I had known it was coming. I was getting old. Was it all simply because I was getting old? One is discarded. The door closes that had always been open. The phone is silent that had always rung. Others are selected where before one had been selected. On the floor through the window with the unheard music he reached under the soft sweater and he unhooked her brassiere. I had not howled. I had run. I was finished.

  2

  I packed. I put the ribbed socks, the expensive slacks, the shirts with the neat small monogram, the good shoes, the tweed sport jacket, the dark suit with the fine lining, into the suitcase. I put the album of pictures of myself into the suitcase. There were no books to pack. I did not want books. I could always buy books. Reading was painful anyway. I put the jockey shorts whose waist size had increased the last few years into the suitcase and a sleeveless sweater. I expected it to be cold in New York. It was January and it would be cold in New York. I was running away to New York. I could have gone elsewhere: I had money enough. I had this money from the good years. I was not going to let that bitch get her hands on what was left of the money. I put the silk kimono I had bought in the silk mill in Kyoto into the suitcase. I could have used the money I still had to go back to Japan. Japan was a good place to be nothing in. In Japan the Americans I had known had all been more or less finished. The sex in Japan had been like the booze used to be in the jungle or the islands. The sex went on with the obsessiveness that the drinking had in other places. But I did not want to go back to Japan and Paris, where I had lived, too, wasn’t a place to hide. Switzerland was peaceful but it wasn’t a peaceful life I wanted. I did not want to ski or buy watches or take long walks through the country past small vegetable gardens. I wanted to be lost. I wanted to be effaced. I wanted a place that could suck the pain out of me. I was going back to New York.

  I did not destroy anything in the house although all the time I was packing there was a pulse, a throb in me to destroy things in the house. To cut up my wife’s clothes. To smash the paintings I had bought in the years when the money had been good. To open the faucets and to let them flood and to empty the ashes in the fireplace all over the rugs and to put a knife through the upholstery of the chaise longue and to set fire to the king-sized bed. I did not, after I had packed, do any of these things but what I did do was to go through the house and turn all the lights on. Every lamp, the concave, the convex, every ceiling light, the direct, the indirect, all over the house, the patio lights, the lights in the carport, all the lights there were. The house blazed. It was utterly illuminated. It drew on every circuit. Then I called the cab company for a cab and I waited in the blazing house and I left the house glaring there among all the dark or the quietly lit houses in the neighborhood. The taxi drove me to the airport and that light of my house, that fire I had set but not set, remained in my mind all during the time I waited in the terminal for the big jet to arrive and for my flight to be called. It was ten minutes after midnight when I boarded the plane for New York. I had a window seat. At twelve-thirty it took off. The blue ground lights blurred. As the plane lifted and became airborne, I thought the pain would diminish, but it did not diminish. Perhaps I had not gone far enough yet for it to diminish. I stared at the small square box of the Astrovision set above me. The late news ended. I reached up and turned off the narrow pencil beam of the reading light. I hoped to be enclosed in darkness. We were flying at 37,000 feet. Was that high enough? We were flying at 500 miles an hour. Was that fast enough? What would be fast enough, what would be high enough, what would be far enough, what would be dark enough for where I was going? Beneath me was the continent. The air bumped uncomfortably several times. Neat and girdled, the stewardess moved in the darkened cabin. Small triangular sandwiches appeared. Coffee in plastic cups. I ate mechanically. I drank mechanically. The in-flight movie would soon begin. I had seen it. I wanted to fall asleep. I prayed I’d fall asleep. Sleep and distance: that was what I needed. A profound sleep, an immeasurable distance. I sat in the incl
ined chair, sleepless, in the cabined darkness. They started the in-flight movie. I looked at the headphones plugged into the ears of the passengers. They resembled stethoscopes. The passengers were doctors called in on some severe illness. I was alone. I had abandoned everything. I had left it blazing in a token fire. The plane rocked. We were over Colorado. Colorado was not far enough. The plane settled and flew. I half wished it would not stop flying. Traversing continents. Oceans. Poles. I would sit like this, seat half-inclined, oxygen mask there, emergency exit there, the stewardess making her apparitional rounds, the crushed pillow so. They would occasionally flash a signal. I’d fasten my seat-belt. The signal would silently snap out. I’d unfasten my seat-belt. I’d obey the instructions as though the safety precautions mattered. I’d read what magazines there were as though they contained something to be read. Then the magazines would be exhausted. The triangular sandwiches, the olives on a toothpick, the spears of carrot, would give out. The fuel would give out. There would be alternations of light and dark. Below the land would become unrecognizable. Mountainous, snowy. There would be cloud formations of an unknown nature. I would go on to the end of it, with Astrovision. It was a way of dying.

  Abruptly, I could not breathe. My lungs labored. There did not seem to be any air in the plane. The plane was silent. The in-flight movie had ended. The reading beams had been extinguished. I could not swallow. My mouth gaped. I was really going to die. In panic I pushed at the emergency button.

  The stewardess materialized.

  She bent over me.

  Pressure clotted my ears.

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Would you like an oxygen mask?”

  She loosened my collar.

  I labored.

  All the sustaining air seemed sucked out of the plane. The cabin became a hollow tube. Airless I was hurtling through the transfixed dark.