‘In Love’ by Alfred Hayes – An End to the Affair

‘In Love’ by Alfred Hayes (1953) – 130 pages

“In Love” is an intense record of a break-up between a man and a woman told by the man. The story opens with a man sitting in a bar telling a lady at the bar the story of the end of his last affair.   This is a smoky noir story in which we never learn the names of the man or of his old girlfriend.

They were at that stage where they both realize it isn’t working. Then suddenly the girlfriend lets him know that she doesn’t want to see him anymore, and that she has a new man

“For she was, I saw now, quite capable of taking care of herself; and I, who had postponed for so long a time the decision to leave her, who had (I thought) been so careful of her feelings, so reluctant (I thought) to hurt her, so solicitous (I thought) of her welfare, had been the one to be shunted aside with so little consideration. “

 Left out in the cold, the man is devastated and finally realizes how much he has been in love the entire time.  We have emotional scenes of the man almost stalking his old girlfriend, scenes where he unsuccessfully tries to re-establish his affair with the woman, a scene where he notices the tooth marks of the new boyfriend on her neck.  Then there is the short reconciliation between them which she uses to get her new man to commit.  It is that old story, you don’t know what you had until it’s gone.

 “I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface.” 

 This is a touching honest depiction of the agony of a dying relationship told from a man’s point of view.   The details ring true.

I had never heard of Alfred Hayes before even though I’ve been studying literature on my own for about forty years.  That is what draws me to the New York Review Books Classics series, their efforts to salvage good writers who would otherwise be totally forgotten.  I found out that Alfred Hayes, besides writing seven novels, had a long career as a screenwriter both in Italy and the United States.  He wrote the film noir classics ‘Clash by Night’ and ‘Human Desire’.  In the television era, he wrote 7 episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, three episodes of Mannix, and 2 episodes each of Logan’s Run and Nero Wolfe.

This is a strong ultimately sad novel which is vivid in its detailed subjective story of the break-up of an affair.