The Girl on the Via Flaminia

 

 

 

Alfred Hayes had fallen out of fashion long before he died in 1985 at seventyfour. Yet in the nineteenfifties/sixties he was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists. His British admirers included such variously discerning authors and critics as Angus Wilson, Walter Allen, J. Maclaren-Ross, Antonia White, Francis Wyndham, and Elizabeth Bowen, who described his novella
In Love
as a “little masterpiece.” Why, then, has his work disappeared, almost without a trace? The answer has something to do with changing tastes in fiction and even more to do with the increasing reluctance of publishers to keep in print those books on their lists that can never sell in large quantities. Otherwise there is no valid reason to account for his eclipse. At least four of his novels deserve to be reissued. They are so short that they could easily be contained within a single volume that would still weigh far less than John Irving's latest.

Hayes was born in London in 1911, but was raised and educated in New York. After leaving college, he was taken on as a reporter for both the
Daily News
and
The
New York American
. He began his serious writing career as a poet and had his poems accepted by the
New Yorker
and several other prestigious magazines. During the Second World War, he served with the U.S. Special Services in Europe and was stationed in Rome in 1943. It was there that he befriended the film directors Roberto Rossellini, Luigi Zampa, and Vittorio de Sica. He fell in love with the Italian language, which he soon learned to speak fluently. He was given an Oscar nomination, along with the young Federico Fellini, for his work on the script of Rossellini's important second movie,
Paisà,
and he also contributed dialogue to De Sica's
The
Bicycle Thief
, for which he was uncredited.

He returned to America in 1945. For the next three decades he was in fairly constant demand as a screenwriter in Hollywood. His credits include Fred Zinneman's
Teresa
(1951), for which he received his second Academy Award nomination, and two films by the great Fritz Lang—
Clash by Night
(1952) and
Human Desire
(1955), a remake of Jean Renoir's classic
La Bête Humaine
. A poem he wrote about the folk singer and socialist militant Joe Hill, who was executed in Utah in 1915, provided the lyrics for the song made famous by Joan Baez and later inspired Bo Widerberg's over-lyrical biopic.

Alfred Hayes's third novel, and the first of the quartet that should be retrieved from obscurity, is
The Girl on the Via Flaminia
(1949). As its title suggests, it is set in Rome, and the girl in question is Lisa, whose friend Nina, a successful whore, persuades her to share a room with a frustrated American soldier named Robert. The room is in an apartment on Via Flaminia owned by the Pulcini family. Signora Adele Pulcini is the most respectable kind of pimp, providing wine and cheese and pasta to the English and American officers who spend their leisure hours and their money in her kitchen. The time is 1944, and the newly liberated city is filled with men desperate for sex. The Roman women are just as desperate for money and food, and prostitution has become almost a regular way of life. Yet this novel is concerned with chastity and the beginnings of love. Lisa and Robert have to pretend to be married. They sleep in the same double bed, and sleeping is all they are able to do. Lisa makes it clear from the outset that she despises herself for being where she is, in the company of a man who assumes he can pay for his gratification with an abundance of
lire
. The scenes between the disdainful Lisa and the genuinely sensitive Robert are like a series of courtly dances—one step forwards, two steps backwards. They both lose their tempers, and they both try to explain the difficult position they're in.

Lisa's fear of involvement is poignantly delineated, as is Robert's progress from simple lust to worried affection. They are on the verge of forming a deeper relationship when the police arrive to interrogate Signora Pulcini. She tells them that Lisa and Robert are a married couple and have papers to prove it. The policeman leading the investigation asks to examine the papers, and Robert has to lie that they are lodged at his army headquarters. It is then that Lisa goes to the authorities and in a fit of self-loathing has herself registered as an official prostitute. She is tested for venereal disease and is given a clean bill of health. She is handed a special identification card which she must, by law, show to her clients. Now, she reasons, she is properly and finally humiliated. Robert listens to her terrible story, kisses and embraces her and assures her that she will never have to make use of the card.

At last he convinces her of his abiding love, it seems, and at last she responds to his attentiveness. But the novel doesn't end there, with the romantic battle won. Hayes is a master of the narrative that halts or leaps forward to the future rather than concludes. The last two pages of T
he Girl on the Via Flaminia
are acutely painful in their uncertainty.

In Love
is even orter than its predecessor, with a smaller cast and a narrower focus. It takes as its epigraph the opening lines of George Herbert's “Love”: “Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” The story is told by a man in a hotel bar in New York to an attractive younger woman he has recently met. His chat-up line is unusual, in that it rarely shows him in a favourable light. The man is in his early forties and is still smarting from the pain he was made to endure in the last months of an unhappy love affair.

It is clear from the man's tone that he is cultivated, has read books, looked at pictures and appreciated all kinds of music. The woman he has loved and lost is prone to boredom when she isn't being flattered and wined and dined. She discarded him in the most cavalier and unpleasant manner imaginable, only to invite him back into her life when a new lover refused to marry her.

The grateful narrator drives her to Atlantic City for a romantic weekend, forgetting that the season is over and there are no chalets or cottages to hire. The weather is freezing, there is no heating in the car and she is cold, miserable, and monosyllabic. They pass a ghastly night in an otherwise unoccupied hotel and he makes forceful love to her for the first and last time.

The third doomed liaison is accounted for in
My Face for the World to See
(1958). The man this time is a Hollywood screenwriter who spends four months of each year in California, leaving his wife, Charlotte, in New York. He has rented an apartment from a woman who has “gone off to Europe to forget an unsuccessful marriage which had been followed by an apparently unsuccessful divorce.” The book opens with the narrator being bored at a party in Ocean House. To escape all the chatter, he goes out on to the terrace and sees a girl, drink in hand, a “store-bought captain's hat” on her head, walking into the Pacific. He is admiring her body and then he realises that she is about to commit suicide. He rushes down to the beach, hurls himself into the sea and rescues her. It is an act of bravery and decency that he will come to regret as the story unfolds. She is pretty, and it's her prettiness that has brought her to the West Coast. Her single ambition is to become a famous movie star. She phones her rescuer and thanks him. He is wary and cautious to begin with, sensing that she might be seriously disturbed. She has had screen tests, been invited to recline on the casting couch, and has been involved with a married man.

The reader wants to alert him to the mess that's awaiting him—a mess he is aware of but can't extricate himself from. He tells her something he has told no one else—that he no longer desires the wife he respects. Hayes writes luminously about people who can't help themselves, who can't resist the temptations that are set to destroy them. Walter Allen reviewed the novel in the
New Statesman
, noting: “This author's is a truly formidable and terrifying talent. He has a merciless insight into human behaviour and he writes with extreme compression and great directness.” “Merciless” is entirely appropriate, especially in regard to the closing pages when the drunken girl embarrasses him in a restaurant and then slits her wrists behind a locked bathroom door. Here is the glitzy culture that Hayes knew at firsthand and was able to analyse and dissect with lapidary skill. The prose is polished till it shines.

The End of Me
, which appeared a decade later, is by far the most bitter and painful of these bitter, painful books. The man, who is in his fifties, is Asher, another Hollywood screenwriter who discovers that his second, greedily ambitious and snobbish wife is conducting an affair with her tennis partner. He flees from their luxurious home, leaving the lights in every room blazing, and returns to his native New York. He visits an elderly aunt who asks him to help her grandson Michael, who ekes out a meagre living but wants to be a published poet. Asher meets Michael and is unaccountably rude to him. He invites the unprepossessing young man back to his hotel and agrees to read his poems. The year is 1968, and the poems are single-mindedly devoted to the sexual act, with “fuck” and “cunt” in constant employment. Asher understands that the poetry is inspired by Michael's girlfriend Aurora, who is of Italian descent. Aurora teases and torments Asher, and, aided and abetted by Michael, orchestrates a series of bizarre events to humiliate him. They know a victim when they see one. The plot is always surprising in this despairing page-turner. What isn't surprising is that
The End of Me
marks Hayes's farewell to the subject of romantic obsession. Asher, looking down at the street, notices his fellow New Yorkers walking by. It is he who has nowhere to go.

I first read Hayes in my twenties, suffering the sorrows and indignities of unrequited love. His books struck a plangent chord. Reading him again, in my sixties, I register that certain aspects of the novels belong to their period—the cocktails, the cigarette lighters, the fact that the men wear hats and that “gay” means “merry.” But nothing else is dated. Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.

 

 

T
he wind blew through Europe. It was a cold wind, and there were no lights in the city. It was said the cabinet was about to fall. Nobody knew for sure whether the cabinet which was in power at this time would fall and another coalition government would be formed. There was nothing that was very sure, and all one knew was that, if the cabinet did fall, the government which would be formed from the ruins would be another coalition one, and that the wind was cold. It did not look at this time as though the war would end, although actually the war was coming to an end. Nobody knew at this time that the war would end in a few months. There were children in the city who had never known a time in which there had not been a war. The fighting was going on in the north. Sometimes in the afternoon in the city one could see girls and young men standing in the main piazzas wearing red armbands and rough uniforms. Those were the partisans. The men were usually handsomer than the girls were pretty. Everybody looked at them very respectfully. They were part of the real and important fighting that was going on. In the city itself there were many soldiers. The soldiers were of different kinds. The kinds of fighting they did among themselves and the way they got drunk distinguished the soldiers. The English were very fond of fighting with the big steel buckles of their military belts, and the Americans with bottles, and some of the other troops preferred knives. The drunkenness was everywhere. The most conspicuous of the military drunks were the Americans. The Canadians had discovered that vermouth and banana oil made a kind of cocktail but hardly any of the other troops thought so. The Canadians hated the English and envied the Americans. The English envied the Americans and despised the Canadians. The French wore American uniforms and drove in American vehicles and despised the English and shrugged their shoulders at the Canadians and shook their heads in disbelief at the Americans. The lonesomest troops were the Poles and the Palestinian brigadiers.

The cold was really bad. It was December, and almost Christmas, and the war had been going on for over five years. Sometimes men would escape from the prison camps near the Austrian border. They would come home to their wives so terribly changed the women would shriek. There were some husbands, too, who came home to find their wives with other men or with soldiers. That kind of shrieking in the neighborhoods was also bad.

On this December night, the Via Flaminia was very dark, with the wind blowing down its length, and the night was cold with the kind of coldness that in another country would have meant snow. But here in this country there was no snow except on the mountains. There was rain, and fog, and the damp cold.

In this section of the city the people before the war had not been too rich or too poor. Now, of course, after more than five years of war, they were all more or less poor. The poverty was not of money. In this section of the city there were apartment houses with enormous windows and visible roof gardens. The trolley line went down to the end of the street which was the Via Flaminia and then crossed the Ponte Milvio which was a very old and very much-used bridge and from there the road went up north. During the day there were always accidents on the streets. Pedestrians were killed or hurt with a deadly regularity coming across the bridge or across the Via Flaminia, and they were usually killed or hurt by large fast six- or eight-wheeled military vehicles. The citizens, when there was such an accident, always cursed the fate which had brought the military vehicles to the city, and the dead or dying man would lie in the gutter covered with a blanket or an overcoat until an ambulance and a carabiniere would arrive to take him away to a hospital. Since there were no medicines in the hospitals, the man would often be considered lucky if he died en route. The blood would remain in a thick pool in the gutter.

In one of the apartment houses in that section of the city where the Via Flaminia crossed the Milvio bridge there was a flat in which a family known as the Pulcinis lived. It was a flat of six rooms, and the dining room which was large had been converted by the Signora Adele Pulcini into a place where the soldiers came at night for wine and eggs. There was a big mahogany table in the center of the dining room, a radio which the soldiers liked to have playing music as they drank, and on the wall, of course, there was a lithograph of a Sacred Heart. A French door led out of the dining room into a small shabby garden and to a back gate. The soldiers called the Signora Adele Pulcini “Mamma.” And one night, toward the end of December, as the war unknowingly was coming to its hoped-for end, two soldiers were sitting at the big mahogany table in the Pulcini's apartment, drinking wine. One of the soldiers was a short, wiry, middle-aged English sergeant, and the other was an American, a young American, who was not a sergeant, but who was very flushed with wine, and who walked with a very slight limp.

It was about seven-thirty in the evening.

The middle-aged English sergeant had been listening for some time to the complaints of the young American who was not a sergeant. The Englishman did not think that anyone in the American army had a thing to complain about. The Englishman loved his country but not his country's rations. The Englishman often said, when he was thoroughly disgusted with the slice of bread and the slice of spam served in the sergeants' mess where, as an English sergeant, he had the luxury of being able to sit down at a long rough board table with seven other sergeants, that more than once he thought of going absent up into the hills to live with the bloody
partigianos
. Now, in the dining room, with a glass of wine in his hand, he said to the young American, “What're you blokes got to grouse about? Gawd,” the Englishman said, “you ought t' be in His Majesty's fightin' forces for a bloody month, and chew our bully, and wash it down with a cup o' stinking tea, and be happy when they puts a bit o' marmalade on the bread, and then you'd have something to write home about.”

“Beef to the brass,” the American said.

“Ay,” the Englishman said. “Scum o' the earth, her ladyship called us. Stood up she did, in the House o' Commons, and said it: scum o' the earth. An' bloody right she was.”

The American limped slightly as he went toward the door. The door opened into a hallway, and the other rooms in the flat were off the hallway.

“Hey, Mamma!” the American called. “Mamma Pulcini! How about a bottle of vino? Subito!”

“Sì, sì,” a woman's voice replied from the kitchen. “Un momento.”

“Everything in this country's un momento,” the American said. He limped back toward the table. He wore a wristwatch and a ring made of an Arabian coin and an identification bracelet. It looked like a great deal of jewelry. “How did I wind up in Italy?” he said to the English sergeant. “I wanted to go to France. My old man was in France in the last one. You ever go with a French broad, sarge?”

“No,” the Englishman said.

“I met a sailor was in Marseilles,” the American said. “He had a girl named Marie. He says when he was in Marseilles he used to sleep in her house, and in the morning her mother used to serve him breakfast in bed. They weren't even married, and she was only eighteen years old. How do you like that?”

“Eighteen,” the English sergeant said. “Me missus is twice eighteen.”

“France, that would have been for me,” the American said.

“Oh,” the sergeant said, “Rome ain't bad.”

“Rome's a city,” the American said. “Cities are different. But you take the rest of the country. Mountains!”

“Well, it's a pretty country, except for the flies.”

“Listen, sarge,” the American said. “Know what they can do with Europe? All of it? Fold it three ways and ram it. Listen. I walked up here from Anzio. Then at Velletri I fell off a cliff. In the dark! Fell off a cliff and bust my ankle.”

He pulled up the leg of his trousers.

“Feel that,” he said to the Englishman. “Feel that ankle.”

Solicitously, the Englishman touched the stockinged bone.

“Here?” he asked.

“Right there,” the soldier said. “Feel it?”

“Bit o' somethin' stickin' out,” the Englishman said.

“That's where it's bust,” the soldier said. “Off a goddam cliff in Velletri in the dark. But nobody believes me. Everybody thinks I'm trying to goof off from my outfit. Could I go back to my outfit with an ankle bust like that?”

He looked at the sergeant unhappily. The sergeant poured a glass of wine.

“I saw a chap once had his whole foot smashed,” the sergeant said. “Bloody gun fell on him.”

The Signora Adele Pulcini came into the dining room. She was a tall woman, with gray hair, in her fifties, and her face was sharp and dark. She was dressed in black, and a cigarette was in the corner of her mouth. At night she lay in bed, with the electric light on, smoking cigarettes and coughing. She looked at the two soldiers in the room, and she said to the American, “Imbecille! How many times have I told you not to shout? Twice last week the carabinieri came in . . .”

“Come here, Mamma,” the American said to the Signora Pulcini. “Feel this ankle.”

“Ankle?” the tall hard-faced woman said. “What ankle?”

“Feel it,” the American said.

The Signora Pulcini accommodatingly felt his ankle.

“So?” she said.

“Busted,” the soldier said. “Off a cliff in Velletri. That's what I got liberating your goddam city.”

“Peccato,” the woman said.

“Could I march with an ankle like that, busted?” the soldier said. “Could I, Mamma?”

“Of course not,” the Signora Pulcini said, knowing that one must always agree with the soldiers who came to drink in her dining room on those nights when the city was dark and cold and lonely. “You are a very brave soldier.”

“I'd have gone back to my outfit,” the American said. “It wasn't I didn't want to. I came up with them from Oran. I went through Venafro with them. We hit the beach together. But the medics reassigned me. They could see I couldn't do the walking anymore.”

“Of course,” Adele Pulcini said, seeing how agitated he was, and how inside him something hurt, and knowing that the soldiers could be ugly and dangerous when the things inside them began to hurt. “Now sit down,” she said. “Mimi will bring the wine.”

She, too, went to the door and called, but not loudly, “Mimi!”

From the kitchen a girl's voice, very light and quick, answered, “Sì, signora?”

“Fai presto,” the tall woman in black said.

“Sì, signora,” the girl's voice replied. “Vengo subito.''

Adele Pulcini turned to her two soldiers. “In this house,” she said, smiling, “we are all heroes.”

“Bloody heroes,” the English sergeant said.

Mimi entered the dining room, carrying a bottle of wine. It was a red wine made in the hills. The wine sparkled in the light. Mimi was sixteen. She enjoyed the soldiers, and she respected and was somewhat afraid of the Signora Pulcini. It was not that the signora was not kind. She was kind, but the kindness had a harsh quality, and Mimi would be frightened hearing the signora cough at night in the bedroom. The cough was frightening because the electricity would be on in the bedroom, and the signora would be lying in bed, fully clothed, in her black dress, smoking and coughing. It was impossible to know what the signora thought when she lay like that in bed with all the bedroom lights on.

When the American who limped saw Mimi he put his two hands over his heart like an opera singer, and said, “Bella mia.”

Little Mimi giggled.

She said to the Signora Pulcini, in her own language, “Is he crazy?”

“Sì,” Adele said. “A little. Put down the bottle.”

“Sì, signora,” Mimi said, setting the bottle of wine on the dining room table.

“What did she say?” the American asked.

“She asked if you are crazy,” Adele answered.

“We're all crazy, honey,” the American who limped said. “The crazy Americans.”

Mimi giggled at the soldier.

“That is true,” she said to Adele.

“Yes,” Adele said, “that is absolutely true.”

“Come on, bella mia,” the American said to the little girl. “We dance. American tip-top ballerino.”

“Have I permission?” Mimi asked.

“Sì,” the Signora Pulcini said. “Dance with him. He is drunk.”

“Who's ubriaco?” the American said. “I ain't ubriaco.”

“Hokay,” Mimi said in English. “I danze.”

They danced. The radio played, the wind blew against the wooden shutters, the Englishman poured himself another glass of wine, and the tall woman in the corner of whose eyes there were so many dark wrinkles smiled a little thinly as she watched her maid dance with the drunken and clumsy soldier.

The Englishman tasted the wine.

“Scum o' the earth she called us,” he said, “her ladyship. Right in the House o' Commons.”

He should have gone absent up into the bloody hills with the partigianos. It was almost Christmas and it was a good thing his missus wasn't in London. From London, now the air raids were over, there were reports of the big buzz bombs, and that was worse, his missus wrote, than the raids.

Another girl came into the dining room. She was very red- haired, and very trim, and she wore high-heeled shoes. In the wintertime hardly any of the women of the city, even when they could afford it, wore high-heeled shoes. In America, of course, the women wore them, and in Paris. Nina wore them, too. They had been bought for her in a smart shop by an American captain. She had been very grateful to the captain the night the shoes were purchased. Now, with the shoes, she wore a bright tight silk print dress, with a red leather belt around her small waist, and she was carrying a valise. She put the valise down on the floor. The silk dress fell away from her breasts.