Thus the unnamed narrator enters the equally nameless girl’s “unsuccessful” life, which acquires for a time, in his eyes, a kind of fatal glamour, compounded of her beauty and her defeated ambition and her desperation, a desperation to be seen, noticed-“discovered,” in the industry parlance-and compounded also of the fact that he has rescued this foundering beauty from what may or may not have been a joke but would certainly have had, delivered by the remorseless ocean, a permanent punch line. Before going under, she raises her martini glass in a toast to the moon. It’s unclear whether she is suicidal or merely drunk. In My Face for the World to See, a married screenwriter, alienated from his own apparent success-he says he belongs to the “Screen Writhers Guild”-saves a penniless aspiring actress from drowning at a beachfront party.
What is the lonely usherette of New York Movie dreaming of? What waits at home for the cinephile of Intermission? In what lines of work are his anonymous hotel guests employed, and whom, if anyone, do they love? Hayes seems to answer questions implicit in Hopper’s paintings. Most obsessively, his writings revolve around ambition and failure and the complex relationship that our professional identities have to our larger selves.
Love and illusion, domesticity and its discontents are, for Hayes, permanent concerns. Reissued by NYRB Classics, Hayes’s three short novels of merit- In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958), and The End of Me (1968)-form a thematic trilogy. At the same time that I was rediscovering the painter of Nighthawks, watching at one remove the growing chaos in the cities, charting the frightening symptoms of my fiancée’s long Covid, and worrying about the future, I found myself reading the novels of Alfred Hayes, a mid-century original who resembles a sort of Edward Hopper in prose. It was, as no one needs to be told, a difficult season of an impossible year.
Taking walks along the Hudson, I could see the painter’s birthplace, the town of Nyack, just across the river-near but unreachable. Hopper was much on my mind that summer, which I spent hunkered down with my then-fiancée in a waterfront townhouse in Tarrytown, a village in Westchester County, New York. Hopper’s ambiguous, voyeuristic depictions of isolated figures, dramatically lit and deeply involved in their private worlds, seemed to speak to that anxious moment, even as they captured something essential about the atomized poetry of American lives.
In the pandemic spring and summer of 2020, as lockdowns took hold and the coronavirus spread, the paintings of Edward Hopper enjoyed a resurgence of interest.
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