Beautiful Shadow (2 page)

     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.’
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     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 Schiller 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

     If such a thing is possible, her private notebooks can be seen to represent, if not an authentic self, at least an identity that is somehow more substantial than the one she chose to show to the outside world. In addition to keeping incredibly detailed diaries, she recorded her creative ideas, observations and experiences in what she called her ‘cahiers’ or working journals. She was also a prolific letter writer, dashing off several hundred each year, an activity which earned her the epithet ‘post-addicted’. It is these private documents – the diaries, notebooks and letters held at the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne – together with interviews with Highsmith’s friends, colleagues and lovers, which form the core of this book.

     Many writers’ diaries are works of self-mythology, often more fantastical than their own fiction, but after checking Highsmith’s documents with other archival sources and information gleaned from my interviews, it is clear that her private journals were written without artifice. Her voice was tormented, self-critical but, significantly, brutally honest. She kept a diary, she said, because she was interested in analysing the motivation of her behaviour. ‘I cannot do this without dropping dried peas behind me to help me retrace my course, to point a straight line in the darkness.’
³⁴
Throughout her life she toyed with the idea of burning these most personal of journals, and although she was given the opportunity to incinerate any incriminating material before her death, she only chose to destroy a few letters from one of her younger lovers.

     Writing was Highsmith’s way of exploring the darker aspects of her personality. ‘She wrote from her unconscious,’ says Daniel Keel. ‘It just came out of her. She used herself, her life as a source.’
³⁵
If she didn’t write, Highsmith felt she merely existed. ‘She was an obsessive writer, these stories just boiled up from her,’ says Larry Ashmead, her editor at Doubleday in the sixties.
³⁶
Highsmith herself admitted that she was never short of ideas; in fact she had them, she said, as frequently as rats had orgasms. Writing was a compulsion for her. ‘I’m miserable when I can’t write,’ she said.
³⁷

I never met Patricia Highsmith, but like most biographers I have dreamt about my subject many times. The first time she ‘appeared’ to me was about four years ago. She was sitting at a large wooden table and the first thing I noticed about her were her extraordinarily large hands. Her complexion was tinged with green and she looked rather forbidding. She stared at me with her dark, haunted eyes and with a slight nod of the head, gave me permission to embark on her life. It may well have been wish fulfilment on my part, but I like to think the dream was a good omen. Highsmith, with her guarded eyes and the mane of black hair that she would occasionally wear like a curtain to shield her face, was so secretive that by the end of her life she had been dubbed, quite wrongly, a ‘recluse’ by journalists.