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DOUGLAS HAYES
Let me first of all say that this is not a biographical essay, nor
one in the spirit of literary criticism. I know nothing at all about
Douglas Hayes, and there is little or no information about him on
the internet. What I’m writing is simply a response to finding a
grubby and tattered old copy of a 1962 paperback edition of his
novel, The Comedy Man, in
a charity shop. I bought it and thought it one of the funniest and
most pleasurable novels I’ve read for a long time.
“Pleasurable”? Ah, now that’s a word likely to upset those who feel
the need to look for significance or seriousness in anything they
read. Some years ago, 1990 to be precise, there was an anthology,
published by the magazine,
Antaeus, under the title “Literature as Pleasure,” in which a
number of well-known writers talked about the pleasure they got from
reading. There is, of course, a great deal of pleasure to be gained
from reading widely, and Madison Smartt Bell is quoted as saying:
“Reading, say, the latest Elmore Leonard gives me pleasure. Reading
Dostoevsky gives me pleasure too. Is there a qualitative difference
between these two experiences?”
The collection was also prefaced with a number of quotations, one of
which was William Carlos Williams’s, “If it ain’t a pleasure it
ain’t a poem,” something that often came to mind during my fifty
years reviewing poetry. I also liked Doris Lessing’s view that,
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and
bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those,
dropping them when they bore you”. I once met a man who claimed to
have started at “A” in the fiction shelves of Aberdeen Public
Library and worked his way through the alphabet, stopping reading if
a book lost his attention. He reckoned to have read quite a few
interesting books, and abandoned a lot of dull ones.
Doris Lessing’ advice is worth taking note of, and a policy I worked
out for myself years ago, and why I ignore hyperbole about this
prize or that award, and the latest fashionable young novelist, and
prefer to wander around bookshops, old and new, where they still
exist, and disturb the dust in charity shops.
But to return to Douglas Hayes. It seems obvious that he had worked
extensively in the theatre in a number of positions, including stage
management and acting. The
Comedy Man (it was, incidentally, made into a film with Kenneth
More in 1963) is about the lives and misadventures of actors who
seem to spend most of their time “resting” between engagements which
are often only too brief and usually poorly paid. Hayes wasn’t
writing about successful actors, though he sometimes brings in
characters who had known their five minutes of fame and then faded
from sight due to a variety of problems, ranging from drink to a
failure to make the right decisions regarding career moves. They’re
now reduced to queuing with the rest in an effort to persuade a
shady agent to find them a couple of days work as a film extra, or a
walk-on part in a second-rate play in a third-rate theatre.
It’s obvious that Hayes had lived the life of an obscure and
struggling actor. After reading
The Comedy Man, I tracked
down some of his other books, such as The
Shy Young Man, Quite a Good
Address, and A Player’s
Hide, working on my normal basis of finding them where I can and
never paying too much for them. I’m not a collector wanting pristine
copies complete with dustjackets. Paperback or hardback,
beer-stained or with a shopping list or telephone numbers scribbled
on a blank page, I’m happy provided all the pages are there for me
to read.
The Comedy Man
is probably the best of Hayes’s books, or at least the best of those
I’ve read. Perhaps I should say that it’s the one that gave me most
pleasure. But that isn’t to say that the others don’t have a lot to
offer. They’re lively and the details they provide about working on
a film set, with its endless disruptions, doing commentaries for
inane TV commercials, providing the voice of a parrot for a play
where the parrot on stage can’t be relied on to talk when necessary,
and trying to persuade fumbling amateur actors in a local theatre
group to play to the audience and not each other, ring true. They
also refer to the sort of jobs, like working in a chocolate-biscuit
factory, that “resting” actors have to take to make ends meet. A
bit-part actor I knew told me that the only speaking part he ever
had (“There’s a gentleman to see you, sir”) was left on the cutting
room floor when the film was released. He also pointed me to a
large-scale historical film in which he was one of a group of cowled
monks wending their way into an abbey. “I’m the third from the front
on the left,” he said, “the one whose candle is shaking. There was a
bar on the set and the leading players, several well-known actors,
weren’t stand-offish and insisted we drank with them”. I think
Douglas Hayes would have recognised his experiences.
If the books are at least semi-autobiographical,
The Shy Young Man comes
early in the account as the hero leaves home, and after some early
experiences, is hired by “Harry Sparks and the Sparklers: Your
Family Concert Party”, working in the North, and doing a bit of
everything, on-stage and off. A
move to
It’s not my intention to summarise the plots of the Hayes novels
I’ve read. They’re probably what might best be described as
“picaresque” in the sense that they have a sequence of events that
don’t necessarily add up to some important conclusion. Things
happen, characters come and go, the humour in situations is
exploited, even when it might verge on the tragic. Taking pity on a
decrepit old actor down on his luck, the young actor in
Quite a Good Address,
allows him to stay in his lodgings. He eventually has to force him
to leave, his habits and behaviour being dirty and disruptive, but
as the old man points out to him, there might come a time when he’ll
get too old for most parts in plays, he won’t have clean clothes to
go for an interview, or his memory will begin to fail him and he
won’t be able to remember his lines. Beneath the entertaining veneer
of bohemianism there’s an underlying feeling that theatrical life is
precarious, and poverty a presence even when times appear to be
good.
Shabby bedsits, pubs with coal fires, dole offices, pawnshops, old
army greatcoats worn to keep warm. It’s a world that has long gone,
or mostly so. The dole office and pawnshops still exist, though with
different names to describe them. But I suspect that the kind of
life, and the sort of circumstances, Hayes was writing about didn’t
seem too relevant as the 1960s developed and the increasing
affluence of the 1970s began to change tastes. I don’t think “Harry
Sparks and the Sparklers” would have been in great demand anymore.
And a lot of theatres in the provinces were beginning to go out of
business. So, perhaps all the social changes that became evident
from the 1960s on were partly responsible for Hayes slipping from
fashion as a writer and so being “forgotten”.
As I said earlier, I know very little about Douglas Hayes, and I’m
not even sure when his last book was published (the early 1970s?)
or when he died. I’d be interested if someone came up with a little
information about him, but it’s not essential to have it. A writer
is known by his work, and I’ve read enough of Douglas Hayes’s to
know that he wrote some good books, and that reading them has given
me a great deal of pleasure.
see also http://pursewardenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/douglas-hayes.html
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