Mixed Fiction

MY FACE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE, by Alfred Hayes (I 83 pp.; Harper; $3), is the latest book by the author who, a decade ago, wrote The Girl on the Via Flaminia, an effective novel about the blighted romance of a frail-gunning G.I. and a beautiful Italian girl who is bothered about being bought. Now Scriptwriter Hayes (The Rainmaker, Island in the Sun) has restaged his old no-soap opera. This time the shattered city is Hollywood. The Girl on Wilshire Boulevard is a blank-souled beauty with a neurotic yearning for stardom. The sentimental, insensitive G.I. is a few years older and wryer--a screenwriter on leave from his wife. The prose still has an unwashed smell, but it has been sponged off here and there with the English lavender of Henry James. The details are still gutsy. In the earlier book, a lonesome U.S. soldier tries to make a pet of an owl, thoughtfully breaks its legs so that it will not escape; in the Hollywood retelling, the girl screams and vomits uncontrollably at the inevitable Mexican bullfight.

The celluloid rubble of Novelist Hayes's Hollywood ("to see or be seen ... to eat or be eaten") seems unreal. And his people, though carefully and competently labeled, are also carefully unexplored, as if he were afraid that the characters, if given life, would twist out of control. But Hayes is tellingly accurate about the emotions of bored bed partners who do not even 'like each other, and sometimes eloquent about the vacant longings of pretty, light-dazzled girls: "If they expected her to resist, or any of the girls like her, then it would have been wiser in the first place to have concealed all of it: wall around the big estates, and abolish from the newspapers those brides in the expensive veils, and keep the cameramen away from the yacht races." There is about Hayes's central character an air of minor damnation, the more poignant because it is insignificant. When struck by thought, she rings dreadfully hollow--and in her hollowness, she sometimes rings true.

THE MAN ON THE ROCK, by Francis King (248 pp.; Pantheon; $3.50), is based on the fact that the human comedy is seldom humane. British Novelist Francis King, 34, pitches his inhumane comedy on the rise and fall of a young Greek spiv of the postwar dead-beat generation. The book's larger theme is the old motif of American innocence v. European corruption. Reflected in the golden eye of a Mediterranean setting, what is sordid and depraved becomes corrosively hilarious. Spiro Polymerides is a sun-baked peasant Apollo. He is taken up by an arty, effeminate, high-minded official of a U.S. relief mission in Athens. To fiftyish Irvine Stroh, Spiro is a kind of male Liza Doolittle, whom he goes about refashioning in his own cultural image. Actually, Irvine is an emotional neuter except for the heartsickness he feels when Greek mulcts Greek. Spiro, who as an adolescent saw Communists murder his father and mother, regards Irvine's sentimentality about Greece as fatuous. In Spiro's world one cheats to live, and underdog eats underdog.

_ Eventually Spiro is infected with the virus of sophistication, lands in the arms of Helen Bristow, a lonely, pliable American matron of about 45 who likes to play with Greek fire. Unfortunately for her, Spiro soon develops a rage to leave--for a pastry-plump Hellenic miss whose shipping-magnate daddy happens to be loaded with sugar. When Helen commits suicide, Spiro suffers a bad quarter-hour's remorse; it is nothing compared to the remorse he suffers after he marries the millionaire's daughter and discovers that wily old papa has cut the newlyweds off without a drachma.

By novel's end, this social Spirochete has destroyed or degraded each life with which he has come in contact. Spiro may be a human parasite, but at least he is true to his instinctual self. The Irvines and Helen Bristows are spiritual nomads, Author King implies, with no selves to be true to. They sleepwalk through reality, wrapped in romantic visions and do-good illusions, until (paraphrasing Eliot) human voices wake them and they drown.

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