In Love (Peter Owen Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Alfred Hayes (1911-85), above, was born in England but grew up in New York. He worked as a journalist, served in Italy during the Second World War and became a scriptwriter in Hollywood. He is not well known but, as Frederic Raphael says in his introduction to this new edition, In Love is a gem - brittle, dreamlike, always promising a revelation that never comes. It opens in Manhattan in the 1940s at the cocktail hour: "'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 ... all of me real enough if one doesn't look too closely.' He begins to tell her the story of a past affair. This other woman, in her early twenties, already divorced and with a child back at home, lived in a rented apartment with fruit rotting in a black porcelain bowl. He was a man bored, but satisfied with her easy convenience. Then a millionaire offers her $1,000 for one night. She tells this to her lover as a funny story. But she takes it, once, and then again. Suddenly the man is in love, and cruelty and contempt take over. When the millionaire proposes marriage, the lover resorts to manipulation. "It was all like something in a bad movie, if they still did things like that even in the movies; but mostly it was like something in a bad life." Eventually she marries her millionaire. And the lover tells his story in Manhattan bars at the cocktail hour. The epigraph to In Love is taken from George Herbert's poem about religious love: "Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin...." And the novel ends: "'There's a poem I always thought I'd someday use ... Do you know it?' He began to quote: Love bade me welcome ...' The pretty girl did not know the poem. They went out together." In Love is strange, unsettling, cynical and sad. It is a masterpiece. But if you are in love and want to believe, then don't read it. --The Times, November 2007

Alfred Hayes's slender grasp on posterity rests on having penned a song recorded by Joan Baez in the 1960s, alongside a single screenwriting credit in Halliwell's film guide which gives his name as Arthur. But the English émigré journalist also produced this minor, noirish masterpiece which combines a plot that prefigures Indecent Proposal with the desolate milieu of an Edward Hopper painting. An unnamed young woman lives in a single-room apartment in New York, licking the wounds of an unsuccessful marriage and failed dancing career. Her life is transformed by a faceless millionaire's offer to pay up to $1,000 for a single night's assignation. The story is fairly schematic and the characterisation slight, yet Hayes has a devastating eye for the details of solitary existence: towels in the bathroom that are "not quite clean and never entirely dry", stockings suspended from the curtain rods "as limply as hanged men". He unerringly captures the impersonality of the great metropolis: "not so much a city as a giant apparatus, a machine that required an island to house it. It rusted under the dark sky." --The Guardian, October 2007

Fifty years ago Alfred Hayes was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists, and he deserves to be better known today. In Love is set in the Manhattan bar scene of the forties and reads like a Edward Hopper painting. A middle aged man tells a young woman on an adjacent bar stool the story of his last love affair: a relationship in the thoroughly modern sense, full of misplaced lust and misunderstood emotion. He depicts the boy of his tale as moody and evasive, the girl as even worse. It was a mostly erratic affair, downbeat, dysfunctional and on the brink of sinking without a trace until an unscrupulous millionaire intervened. The ensuing turmoil will be recognisable to anyone who has fallen into and then out of a relationship. In Love is as much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, an examination of heartbreak rather than the heart itself.