Beautiful Shadow (14 page)

     She was, according to those who knew her, ‘charming, humorous, wilful, with a magical voice and the airs of a beauty. Wearing her large garden-party hat she would toss her head like a Gibson beauty. Her students of course adored her.’
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Her two favourite words of praise were ‘significant’ and ‘exciting’, qualities she would have recognised in the young Highsmith’s writings. Like Highsmith, she never married; she shared her apartment on West 116th Street with her mother, and on her retirement, moved permanently into the old family home in East Lyme, Connecticut. It was there, in 1950, two years after Sturtevant had left Barnard, that Highsmith showed her extracts of her lesbian novel,
The Price of Salt
(later republished as
Carol
), prompting her to respond, ‘Now
this
packs a wallop! This is an excellent piece of writing, Pat.’
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In the latter part of 1938, Highsmith had a vision of a young, ghost-like girl dancing by herself to the music of a Tchaikovsky waltz. As the girl moved around the room, she had a sense that the music was emanating from within her. It had, she thought, taken years for the melodies to form themselves, but now the rhythm was born effortlessly and with a life of its own. There was no difference between herself and the music that played, no break between the inner and outer worlds. Not only was her self the source of the art, but it was, in a way, also its subject.

     This fantasy, recorded in the opening pages of her first cahier, can be interpreted as a symbol of her burgeoning creativity, an imaginative quality that expressed itself as a terrifically powerful force, ready to ‘burst forth in the selfless spontaneity’.
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At college Highsmith’s creative instinct found expression in the pages of the college magazine. In December 1938, she was elected as one of the literary staff on
Barnard Quarterly
, the college journal which she would go on to edit in her senior year and which in the fall 1939 issue, published her short story ‘Quiet Night’. The unsettling tale, about two old women, Hattie and Alice, who share a room in a New York hotel, articulates the twinned motives of tender affection and violent loathing that would characterise so much of her work. In the middle of the night, when Alice is asleep, Hattie takes a pair of scissors and purposefully makes a number of slashes in Alice’s new sweater, a gift from her niece. ‘In the moonlight her face gleamed, toothless and demoniacal,’ she wrote. ‘She examined the sweater in the manner of a person who plays with a piece of steak with a fork before deciding where to put his knife.’
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When Alice discovers what her friend has done, she is utterly bereft and, in revenge, one night takes the scissors, determined to slice off Hattie’s only vanity – a two-foot long braid of hair – but stops herself as she is about to make the first cut.

     Highsmith would, in 1966, rewrite the story – under the title ‘The Cries of Love’ – so that Alice does cut off her friend’s hair, leaving her with nothing but an ugly stump. And although the two women apologise to one another, there’s no doubting that their repressed feelings will continue to interrupt their lives, further suggesting that neither of them can survive outside this strange sado-masochistic relationship.

     The germ for this story had its origins in a walk Highsmith made through Gramercy Park, where she observed a number of old ladies sitting on benches. Increasingly she looked to real life to provide the base for her fiction. ‘I can never make a character unless I take him from actual life – with as little changes as possible. Sturtevant says the ability to create abstractly comes with experience. But even Proust had a germ of reality for each of his characters. And why not?’
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Later in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
, Highsmith would write about how she would sometimes milk friends and acquaintances for inspiration, occasionally taking the physical characteristics of someone she knew, or using their personality as a base for further development. However, she said she never transported anyone in their totality from real life into her fiction, preferring a mix-and-match approach.

     The supernatural, which she had once adored, now bored her – ghost stories were simply childish and idiotic. Yet her stories did at this stage still bear the traces of her gothic perspective. One of the reasons why her work is so powerful and so disturbing is precisely because, while her subject matter may be the fantastical, the perverse and the bizarre, her style is pared-down, documentary and almost super-realist in tone. In 1940 she said she admired Maupassant because of his ‘economy in writing’.

     ‘What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like his! One must say “fashion” because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one’s work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one’s idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.’
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     She had always been a voracious reader, but now she turned down invitations to dinner in favour of staying at home and immersing herself in the dark imaginative landscapes of Thomas Mann, Strindberg, Goethe, Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Baudelaire. The mere thought that she was alone and surrounded by books gave her a near-sensuous thrill. As she looked around her room, dark except for the slash of light near her lamp, and saw the vague outlines of her books, she asked herself, ‘Have I not the whole world?’
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During her time at Barnard, Highsmith embraced a number of different ideologies with the hope of finding an interpretative tool which would help her understand the world. When she was seventeen she became fascinated by Eastern philosophy, a system of thought which she would later describe as having a ‘powerful’
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influence on her and something she would study for two years. In her first cahier, in an entry dated August 1939, she made a list of the major character traits of Hinduism, detailing the Yogic explanation for how the universe came into being. She also outlined a number of rules and codes of behaviour designed to promote a deeper level of consciousness: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, moderation, non-possessiveness, purity, contentment, austerity, study and surrender. However, for all her reading and thinking, Pat abandoned the East as a source of possible philosophical illumination because she felt that ultimately she could not relate to it, ‘never getting anywhere with a real connection with my life of the Western World’.
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     Perhaps communism would give her the answers she was looking for? During her teenage years she had positioned herself as an intellectual and as such aligned herself with other writers who, like Thomas Mann, believed that ‘politics is everybody’s business’.
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When, in July 1936, she heard the news of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – which began as a civil conflict but which soon translated into an ideological battle – it seemed natural for the fifteen-year-old’s sympathies to lie with the Republicans, fighters for democracy and freedom, rather than the fascist military regime imposed by Franco. Within the space of a few months, Spain had become a symbol of hope for anti-fascists everywhere; the conflict set the intellectual world aflame, foregrounding the power struggles that would dominate world politics throughout the twentieth century. According to W.H. Auden, the struggle ‘X-rayed the lies upon which our civilization is built’
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, while C.S. Lewis articulated the conflict as ‘a battle between light and darkness’.
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     During the Spanish Civil War, the written word was used as a shield to protect the country from the sting of fascist bullets and the stirring language employed by authors such as John Dos Passos in his 1938 work
Adventures of a Young Man
, appealed to the young Highsmith, passionate as she was in the fight for liberty, compassion, tolerance and free speech. Many American intellectuals like Highsmith turned to communism because they realised that, in Spain, democracy had failed to stop the rise of fascism – in 1939 the Nationalist forces squashed the Republican uprising and Franco ruled over the country as dictator – and they felt frustrated by their own country’s hypocritical attitudes to the conflict. Highsmith became a communist, she said later, simply ‘for the good reason USA was financing Franco, who was being supported by Hitler and Mussolini.’
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Franco’s victory also forced people to question accepted notions of morality and many young writers like Highsmith were left feeling increasingly depressed and alienated by the modern world. Their state of mind, described by Frederick R. Benson, in
Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War
, has particular resonance with Highsmith’s work.

The war revealed, in the case of fascism, a capacity for evil in human beings that negated certain optimistic psychological assumptions and destroyed the basic political arguments advanced in the democracies by right-wing defenders of ‘national socialism’ . . . Often the individual conscience was numbed, and acquiescence to nihilism as a result of the loss of human identity was the immediate consequence.
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     The Spanish Civil War ‘made a great impact on me, on all my generation’,
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Highsmith said, and in 1939 she joined the Young Communist League, an organisation created in 1922 that by 1935 boasted a membership list of 8,000. Later, she would confess to Patricia Losey – whose husband, the film director, Joseph Losey was blacklisted – that she had been placed on the S-list because of her one-time communist sympathies. Highsmith read her way through Karl Marx’s
The Class Struggles in France 1848
–1850, Marx and Engels’
The Communist Manifesto
, and a number of other key Marxist texts such as
The Civil War in France
,
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and Stalin’s
Foundations of Leninism
. ‘How Socialism works,’ she noted passionately. ‘One hates the rich!’
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Despite European unrest, Barnard was an extremely conservative college. ‘There were only two girls in my dorm who were Democrats, the rest were Republicans,’ says fellow pupil Rita Semel.
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Undoubtedly, Highsmith’s decision to sign up as a party member would have shocked, had she chosen to tell them, many of her contemporaries.

     Throughout the thirties, the communist party took advantage of America’s failing economic and spiritual health. During the first three years of the Depression, in a seismic societal shift appropriately dubbed the great ‘American earthquake’, the communist party doubled its membership, then doubled it once more in the first two years of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and once more again in the following two years. By October 1936, the majority of its members were native-born, rather than immigrants.

     ‘Second generation Americans found the communist movement a channel for their rebellion,’ writes Joseph Starobin, a historian of American communism, ‘a cure for their anomie, a vehicle for ambitions.’
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Similarly, the Young Communist League appealed to the nation’s increasingly dissatisfied youth, men and women who felt at odds with mainstream society. The first ambition of the League, as expressed by its leader, Gil Green, was the destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

     During her two years as a member of the YCL, Highsmith would have been told that the organisation could be compared to a machine operating on a belt system connecting it both directly and indirectly to various sections of society, including student networks and young workers. ‘In turn, as a result of our mass work,’ according to Lewis Miller, compiler of the YCL’s handbook, ‘we recruit new members for the Young Communist League.’
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     In January 1941, Highsmith heard Earl Browder, the general secretary of the communist party of the United States, speak at the Lenin Memorial meeting in Madison Square Gardens. ‘Lenin died seventeen years ago,’ said Browder. ‘But his spirit lives as the beloved teacher and guide of tens of millions in all lands, because he and his party alone showed the way out of the last imperialist war, the way to peace and socialism.’
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Browder went on to attack Roosevelt’s politics, arguing that American democracy was in fact a whitewash, merely imperialism in disguise. Instead, the people of America should look to the USSR, which Browder claimed somewhat naively, was the ‘embodiment of the rule of the people’, a ‘realisation of the teachings of Lenin, and of his great and wise successor and continuator, Stalin.’
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