My Face For the World to See

Alfred Hayes is one of the secret masters of the twentieth-century novel, a journalist and scriptwriter and poet who possessed an immaculate ear for prose and wrote two perfect short novels about passion and its payback.
"My Face for the World to See" is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for ano [...]
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Alfred Hayes is one of the secret masters of the twentieth-century novel, a journalist and scriptwriter and poet who possessed an immaculate ear for prose and wrote two perfect short novels about passion and its payback.
"My Face for the World to See" is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame rather than family and you're only as real as your image. At a party, the narrator rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into a heavy undertow. He is living in Hollywood far from his wife in New York and working as a screenwriter. He has no illusions about the value of his work, though it pays well, and none about Hollywood, either. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without really meaning to, he gets involved with the young woman he rescued, who has, it seems, no illusions about love, especially with married men. Like him, she's a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures, years during which she's grown a bit paranoid, too. She's just like him, he thinks, and as their casual relationship takes on an increasingly troubled and destructive intensity, it seems that might just be true, only not in the way he supposes.
Nelson Algren called "My Face for the World to See" "the most vivid picture of Hollywood since Nathaniel West's "Day of the Locust."" Like "In Love," it is a deeply lyrical, utterly honest, and hypnotically intense reckoning with self-deception and desolation.