Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith Read online

  To

  Kate Kingsley Skattebol

  and

  Charles Latimer

  (1937–2002)

  Contents

  Introduction 1

  1 The forever seeking 1921 and before 11

  2 Born under a sickly star 1921–1927 23

  3 A house divided 1927–1933 33

  4 Suppressions 1933–1938 46

  5 The taste of freedom 1938–1940 63

  6 A trail of unmade beds 1940–1942 77

  7 The dungeon of thy self 1942–1943 90

  8 A carefully nurtured bohemianism 1943–1945 103

  9 The strange, subtle pluckings of terror 1945–1948 117

  10 How I adore my Virginias 1945–1948 126

  11 Yaddo, shadow – shadow, Yaddo! 1948 139

  12 Instantly, I love her 1948–1949 151

  13 Carol, in a thousand cities 1949–1951 160

  14 Two identities: the victim and the murderer 1951–1953 173

  15 Pat H, alias Ripley 1953–1955 186

  16 Each Man is in His Spectres power 1955–1958 200

  17 This sweet sickness 1958–1959 211

  18 A lurking liking for those that flout the law 1959–1960 220

  19 The ultra neurotic 1960–1962 229

  20 A freedom from responsibility 1962–1964 243

  21 Love was an outgoing thing 1964–1967 259

  22 This shimmery void 1967–1968 275

  23 The false, the fake and the counterfeit 1968–1969 289

  24 An equal opportunity offender 1969–1970 299

  25 Name: Ishmael 1970–1971 311

  26 What are the odds of cat versus person? 1971–1973 327

  27 The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot 1973–1976 340

  28 Your kisses fill me with terror 1976–1978 356

  29 A girl who allows me to dream 1978–1980 370

  30 People who knock on the door 1980–1982 380

  31 A strange interior world 1982–1983 390

  32 Work is more fun than play 1983–1986 402

  33 No end in sight 1986–1988 414

  34 A face accustomed to its ghosts 1988 425

  35 Art is not always healthy and why should it be? 1988–1992 436

  36 I hesitate to make promises 1992–1995 447

  Epilogue 460

  Notes 466

  List of Illustrations 513

  Acknowledgements 514

  Introduction

  ‘The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself.’

  – Kierkegaard quoted in Highsmith’s 1949 journal1

  When Patricia Highsmith looked up at the luminous face of the clock at the entrance to Pennsylvania station, New York, she would have seen two stone-sculpted maidens flanking the extravagant timepiece. One figure stared out across Manhattan to signify day; the other, with eyes closed, symbolised night – an appropriate double image for Highsmith herself, a writer fascinated by the concept of split identity. On that particular day – 30 June 1950 – the twenty-nine-year-old novelist was in pursuit of her antithesis: a blonde, married woman she had cast as a mannequin in a romantic drama of her own creation. She was going in search of the woman who had, unwittingly, inspired her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt.

  In December 1948 – a year and a half before Highsmith found herself walking through Pennsylvania station – she was working, temporarily, in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s when into the store walked an elegant woman wearing a mink coat. That initial encounter lasted no longer than a few minutes, yet its effect on Highsmith was dramatic. After serving the woman, who bought a doll for one of her daughters, leaving her delivery details, Highsmith later confessed to feeling ‘odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision’.2 At the end of her shift, she went home and wrote the plot for The Price of Salt, published in 1952 under a pseudonym and, in 1990, re-issued under her own name as Carol. A few days after the meeting she came down with chickenpox; one of the runny-nosed children in the toy department must have passed on the germ, she said, ‘but in a way the germ of a book too: fever is stimulating to the imagination’.3

  The Bloomingdale’s woman had done nothing more than buy a doll from a shop assistant in a department store, yet Highsmith had infused the encounter with greater significance. She could not forget the blonde woman and on that day in the summer of 1950 she walked through Pennsylvania station with the intention of catching a train to the woman’s home in New Jersey. She was going to seek her out, to spy on her.

  Highsmith recorded the incident – in almost photographic detail – in her diary. As she stepped on to the train bound for Ridgewood, she felt as guilty as a murderer in a novel and on arrival at the suburban station she had to drink two rye whiskeys in order to steady her nerves. At Ridgewood station, she climbed on board a 92 bus, but after a few minutes, worrying that she was going the wrong way, she asked the driver whether he had already passed by Murray Avenue, the woman’s home. ‘Murray Avenue?’ said the other passengers, as they all started to shout the correct directions at her. Blushing, she stepped down from the bus and started walking through the neatly planned, suburban streets towards the woman’s house.

  When Highsmith reached North Murray Avenue, a small lane backing onto woodland, she felt so conspicuous and overwhelmed by guilt she decided to turn back. But then an aquamarine car eased its way out of a driveway and headed towards her. Inside was a woman with blonde hair, wearing a pale-blue dress and dark glasses. It was her.

  Already fascinated by the intertwined motives of love and hate, Highsmith wrote in her journal: ‘For the curious thing yesterday, I felt quite close to murder too, as I went to see the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December, 1948. Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, too, a way of gaining complete and passionate attention, for a moment, from the object of one’s attentions?) To arrest her suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant cool and rigid as a statue.’4

  On her return to New York she noticed that strangers eyed her with suspicion, as if they could see the traces of her guilt smeared across her face. Although the two women did not meet that day in Ridgewood, within six months Highsmith felt driven to try and see her again. In January 1951, as she was writing The Price of Salt, which details a love affair between two women – Therese, a shopgirl in a toy department and Carol, a customer, who is married with a child – Highsmith made another trip out to New Jersey. This time she noted how the woman’s house, with its black turrets and greyish towers, looked like something out of a fairy tale. She closed her eyes and imprinted the image in her memory, before watching the woman’s children at play, observing how little they resembled their mother. ‘Yes, I am delighted my Beatrice lives in such a house,’ she wrote in her diary.5

  Highsmith projected a complex array of emotions onto the woman, so she became both the model for Carol in The Price of Salt and an externalised embodiment of past lovers, an incarnation of her drives, desires and frustrations. Highsmith could ‘be called a balladeer of stalking,’ wrote Susannah Clapp in The New Yorker. ‘The fixation of one person on another – oscillating between attraction and antagonism – figures prominently in almost every Highsmith tale.’6 Specifically, she used the women in her life – a quite dizzying parade of lovers – as muses, drawing upon her ambiguous responses to them and reworking these feelings into fiction.

  Like many a romantic, she was, at times, promiscuous, but her bedhopping was an indic
ator, rather than a confutation, of her endless search for the ideal. To paraphrase Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood – a book given to her by one of the women she worshipped – in Highsmith’s heart lay the fossils of each of the women she loved, intaglios of their identities. ‘All my life work will be an undedicated monument to a woman,’ she wrote in her diary.7 Highsmith herself recognised that these women held the key to understanding her personality and her fiction. ‘O who am I?’ she asked herself in the early 1950s. ‘Reflections only in the eyes of those who love me.’8

  Publicly, however, Highsmith was reluctant to talk about her writing, precisely because she knew its source was often so very close to home. ‘She was the least forthcoming of authors, and hated talking about her work,’ says Craig Brown, who interviewed her on a number of occasions.9 ‘She seems to favour two answers to journalistic questions,’ wrote Janet Watts in the Observer in 1990. ‘One is “true”; the other, “I don’t understand the question.” . . . She smiles, but her hand, when I shake it, feels like a reluctant paw, withdrawing from contact.’10 When Watts quizzed her about the inspiration for Carol and her relationships with women, Highsmith responded, ‘I don’t want to say. People’s emotional life . . . I think it’s all accidental, and not planned. It is very hard to talk about.’11

  It wasn’t only journalists who had a problem getting close to her. Daniel Keel, her literary executor and president of Diogenes Verlag, the Zurich-based publishing company, says it took Highsmith twenty years before she trusted him enough to share her thoughts and feelings. ‘Before that it was simply “yes” or “no”,’ he says. ‘There were great holes in the conversation.’12 Another friend, the writer and art collector, Carl Laszlo says, ‘She was a writer, not a speaker – one always had the idea she concentrated so as not to say anything, not to give anything away.’13

  Barbara Roett, the partner of the late Barbara Ker-Seymer, remembers how Highsmith would tense up when touched. ‘She wasn’t a sensual person at all – when you embraced her, it was like holding a board. I always remember that she was quite shocked when I once said, “I must go and lie in the bath”. She’d never actually laid down in a bath – rather, she would sit bolt upright in it. I said, “Pat, how can you? How could you sit upright in a bath?” She replied, “I would never lie down.” I just had the feeling somehow she was not comfortable in her own body.’14

  Vivien De Bernardi, a friend who lived near Highsmith in Switzerland, and one of her executors, believes the writer had a problem with intimacy. ‘She may have had numerous sexual partners but she did not have that many people with whom she was genuinely intimate. Her relationships never lasted very long.

  ‘She was sincere and direct – those are two key words that describe Pat – and she did not have a drop of dishonesty in her. Yet, I didn’t like the ranting and raving, the nastiness, the hatred which would overflow. She would get on a subject and she would not give it up. She was like a dog gnawing on a bone. There were some subjects that, when she talked about them, I considered her to be a raving maniac. Her really true friends loved her in spite of some of her behaviour.

  ‘It was obvious that this tremendous emotional reaction had nothing to do with reality. It was something internal and it was agonising for her. The nastiness had much more to do with her – with her inner state, her depression, her anger, and her self-hatred – than anything external.

  ‘She did not understand her immediate reality because she had such a strange interior world. I felt strongly she needed to look into her own shadow.’15

  Critics have wrestled with Highsmith’s place in modern literature since the 1960s, when book reviewers and editors first began to notice that her novels were rather different to the mass of pulp fiction being churned out by crime writers. Even today, trying to ‘locate’ her in a literary context or tradition is almost impossible, as she herself admitted. ‘I never think about my “place” in literature, and perhaps I have none. I consider myself an entertainer. I like to tell a fascinating story. But every book is an argument with myself, and I would write it whether it is ever published or not.’16

  Her gothicism – her insatiable appetite for the grotesque, the cruel, and the macabre, particularly evident in her short stories – owes a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, with whom she shared a birthday, 19 January, while the tone of her books was also influenced by the ‘noir’ novels of the thirties and forties. Yet the themes and philosophical arguments that lie at the heart of her fiction reflect the bleak existentialist writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Sartre and Camus, all of whom she read. Behaviour or destiny, Highsmith felt, could not be predicted and deterministic readings of life leached man of the very thing that differentiated him from lower forms of life. ‘Admit that human life can be guided by reason and all possibility of life is annihilated,’ she wrote, quoting Tolstoy, in one of her journals.17 She celebrated irrationality, chaos and emotional anarchy, and regarded the criminal as the perfect example of the twentieth-century existentialist hero, a man she believed was ‘active, free in spirit’.18

  The year before she wrote her first published novel, Strangers on a Train, she read Albert Camus’ existentialist classic, L’Étranger or The Stranger, whose narrator, Meursault, embodies the dislocated hero so favoured by Highsmith. The hero, she surmised in a 1947 journal, represented, ‘willness, like the believer in Existentialism, perhaps?’19 before going on to link the novel with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, another account of a man’s disassociation from society. She observed how man would snuff out his existence rather than endure a life which was rational, determined, planned and predicted.

  She loved the paintings of Francis Bacon and, towards the end of her life, she kept a postcard of his Study Number 6 on her desk. ‘To me Francis Bacon paints the ultimate picture of what’s going on in the world,’ she said, ‘mankind throwing up in a toilet with his naked derríre showing.’20 Highsmith’s fiction, like Bacon’s painting, allows us to glimpse the dark, terrible forces that shape our lives, while at the same time, documenting the banality of evil. The mundane and the trivial are described at the same pitch as the horrific and the sinister and it is this unsettling juxtaposition that gives her work such power. As Terrence Rafferty, writing in The New Yorker, said, ‘Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing – not great cathartic nightmares but banal bad dreams that keep us restless and thrashing for the rest of the night . . . Our minds have registered everything, the ordinary and the horrible, with absolute neutrality; we seem to have been marooned in a flat, undifferentiated territory, like a desert – a place without values, without the emotional landmarks of our fictions or our waking lives.’21 Highsmith, although working within the suspense genre, not only transcended its confines, but created a whole new form. ‘Popular fiction isn’t supposed to work on us this way,’ added Rafferty.22

  The writer Will Self, in a BBC2 television programme discussing Highsmith’s legacy, said, ‘I think she’s only a crime writer in the sense that you would say Polanski made thriller movies; that’s not what they’re about. To me the experience of reading my first Highsmith book was a physical experience of being confronted with evil . . . I put it [the book] away because I felt tangible evil coming off the page . . . I think she’ll be remembered as one of the great mappers of this topography of criminal psychopathology, and an anticipator, in a way, of the collective obsession with serial killers and evil that has come to pass, a precursor if you like.’23

  According to Daniel Keel, ‘She was better than other American writers such as Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. In the future she’ll be remembered long after more “fashionable” novelists have faded into obscurity. Her voice is unique in fiction.’24

  Highsmith’s most famous creation is Tom Ripley, the charming psychopath who features in five of her twenty-two novels. He is a cold-blooded killer with a taste for the finer things in life. He paints and sketches, plays Bach’s Goldberg variations and Scarlatti on the harpsichord, reads S
chiller and Molíre and is rather proud of his art collection (van Goghs and Magrittes, together with drawings by Cocteau and Picasso). The thud of a corpse falling into a freshly dug grave gives him a positively delicious pleasure and he laughs at the sight of two of his victims burning in a car – yet this is the same man who is moved to tears at the sight of Keats’ grave.

  Highsmith used Ripley as a device with which she could dismantle the cosiness of conventional crime writing. According to W.H. Auden, the basic formula of detective fiction could be plotted out as follows: ‘A murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.’25 Not so in a Highsmith novel. ‘I think it is a silly way of teasing people, “who-done-it”,’ she said of the detective novel. ‘It doesn’t interest me in the least . . . It is like a puzzle, and puzzles do not interest me.’26

  She cleverly seduces the reader into identifying with Ripley until by the end our moral responses have been so invaginated, we are actively on the side of the killer, hoping he will escape punishment, as indeed he does, with increasing bravura, in each book. Without a doubt, Highsmith admired her rather superior breed of murderer and often regarded their victims as second-rate citizens. ‘In some of my books the victims are evil or boring individuals, so the murderer is more important than they,’ she said. ‘This is a writer’s remark, not a legal judge’s.’27 Graham Greene, one of her greatest fans, called her ‘the poet of apprehension’,28 a writer who has created a ‘world without moral endings . . . Nothing is certain when we have crossed this frontier.’29

  From the second novel in the series, Ripley lives in a house near Fontainebleau named ‘Belle Ombre’ and the metaphor of the ‘beautiful shadow’ is an appropriate one for Highsmith. Not only does she legitimise entry into a world where we can savour, as Graham Greene said, a range of ‘cruel pleasures’,30 but her work explores the motif of the double or splintered self. The changeable nature of identity fascinated her both philosophically and personally. ‘I had a strong feeling tonight . . . that I was many faceted like a ball of glass, or like the eye of a fly,’ she wrote in a 1942 journal.31 Highsmith’s friend Julia Diethelm testifies to the truth of the notebook entry. ‘With every person she knew, she was always a different Pat,’ she says.32 Diethelm’s husband, Bert, adds, ‘That’s why it is so difficult to define her character. She had many facets, many different projections.’33