A review by dvlavieri
In Love by Alfred Hayes

4.0

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

It has been a long time since I have written a review on here, and for that matter a long time since I have really read a book cover-to-cover. November was, and December is now, a bit of the doldrums for my reading. Something about the cold, grey sky and the gawky black skeletons of trees, my little crackling lungs letting out clouds of breath: something about the winter settles into my bones and it's a sort of depression of my body: I don't do what I love to do. I sit and sip tea, and go to bed. I write a lot of bad sentences. My brain isn't frozen but its becomes slack and lazy. Alfred Hayes' In Love marked a temporary break in this mental slackness for me: it was a rapid read, I was roped up and held bound to it, despite its brevity and ambiguity, it is an incredibly powerful novel.

Written and published in the years following the second World War, when the United States was enjoying a period of economic dynamism and success was flourishing, money became the currency of social interaction. This book asks "what is love worth?" in the most coldly economic terms. This monetary quantification of the heart is made explicitly manifest throughout the novel, but like all things money can buy, it exists very close to the surface. The heart of the novel is about desire, what do we want - why do we want it? Money is a red-herring oftentimes in the novel, the glitz and glimmer of money and success distract us readers, and the narrator distracts us with it, perhaps fools his own heart with it, for much of the narrative. Something about love has to transcend the material world, the realm of monied success, of investments and properties, of nights out and thousand-dollar solicitations. It sounds trite to say so, that love transcends. We think often of the rags-to-riches stories in the literary canon: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, even Proust's affair with Albertine is a cross-pollination among classes. We may ask why the wealthier party condescends beneath his class, but implicitly we must also wonder what the attraction is for the lesser party? Is the promise of wealth and stability factored in to the concept of "love"?

The unnamed object of the narrator's love in In Love must chose what money and love are worth to her. But we are given a skewed view of her choice. Our narrator does not quite love her until she is gone from him, and Howard truly seems to care for her, at least for something about her. The question of love for our heroine is less her love for either of these men, but rather the maternal love for her absent child. She doesn't want for money for herself, but for her child, she ponders if her gold-greedy hands can be washed clean in the Phrygian waters of her pure motives. She suffers for her child, and her love for her is the only truly moving love in the novel, the rest are simply the yearning for touch.

As Beckett explains in his essay on Proust, our desires, our passions, fluctuate and change, not because we perceive a change in the object, but rather because we are an ever-changing subject: constantly reformed, new faces freshly painted and hanging on the walls of our lives' infinite corridors, always a new man. When the impossibility of the unnamed woman becomes apparent, when her break is affected, the narrator's desire for her is piqued, we want what we cannot have. His possession of her dulled his desires, let them roam errant across the city. Her absence does not awaken in him a newfound appreciation for her, but rather a void which demands filling by someone, she becomes a silhouette invested with his aimless desires for something which he lacks. He indulges in his suffering, which is half-poison and half-remedy, by seeking on the surface what he cannot have. He is never happy, not when he possesses her, not when he loses her, he is a servant to his own sense of suffering. We all are addicted to suffering sometimes, that powerful feeling of loss, even if what we lose is unimportant, a trifle, we mourn the change in ourselves, the reminder of our missing something. But the release of suffering, it is an escape from the horror of routine, the hideous monster of Habit, it is an escape from time and the tortures of what we allow our lives to become out of complaisance and distraction. We find solace in our own pain, and the narrator identifies his pain with the loss of the woman, though he ultimately has lost something which mattered very little to him. She has become the allegory for his life's failures and disappointments. She is invested not only with his failures in love, his loss of romance and of human touch, but also of his meager professional accomplishments. He never meets Howard, he hears about him only in relation to the girl, he becomes a part of her, a Janal face prim and upright, attached to her, transforming the two into a true monstrosity. But her break from him does not console him, because he doesn't want her.

The failed trip to Atlantic City, the perfunctory congress in the small motel bed, the silent drive home, send a shudder through the cozy suffering of the narrator, he can no longer embody his suffering in her, he can only feel for her a flash of hatred and an ocean of indifference.

The only thing we haven’t lost, I thought, is the ability to suffer. We’re fine at suffering. But it’s such a noiseless suffering. We never disturb the neighbors with it. We collapse, but we collapse in the most disciplined way. That’s us. That’s certainly us. The disciplined collapsers.

We are silent sufferers, disciplined collapsers. We envision our pain always as individual, as unique, no one could understand the tremolo of our sufferings: its waxes and wanes, the crescendo, the syncopes, and the declension, the falling apart. We feel alone, us sufferers, but it is not the painful loneliness in the dark, but rather a self-indulgent aloneness of genius. When we suffer we feel that our hearts transcend words, language, that our suffering is a language of self-communion alone. We are the kings and queens of our desolate castles of suffering, our vast empty empires. To realize the universality of our suffering is to tear down the walls, to burn the thrown and surrender our thorny crowns. We find solace only in the solitary discipline of collapse, not in the siege of communion.

Loss in not the opposite of love, it is its sister, and they travel together always. Loss feeds love with desire, we want what we feel we have lost, or have lost before even beginning the chase. "The only true paradise in the paradise lost" - we don't love our Edens until we are thrown out of them, and Eden has no price of admission.