Alfred Hayes, In Love, My Face for the World to See

The clocks change this weekend, ushered in by post-equinoctial northerlies, post-full moon, post-most things. A ripe moment for more Alfred Hayes. Yesterday I read In Love at a sitting then began My Face for the World to See. Alfred Hayes was born in Whitechapel in 1911, eight years before my father, who was born in Whitechapel too. They broke the same bread and fought the same wars. I can read Alfred Hayes as someone who is ten steps sideways from my father, or as a writer I have not read before whose run-on efforts to understand his lusts his losses and his melancholy are touching because few men run on, run in, like this, and because a daughter may colour in her father any way she chooses.