Beautiful Shadow (23 page)

     Another of Gregory’s dreams can be seen as a metaphor for Highsmith’s thematic obsession with the concept of the double. New York has had to be evacuated, but Gregory misses the last boat and he is the only soul left in the city. Then, as he walks down Fifth Avenue, he sees the shadow of a man in the distance and starts to run in pursuit of it, ‘fear and curiosity warring in his spine, and the shadow had ducked in and out of streets trying to avoid him’.
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The spectre, when he eventually confronts it, transforms itself into another friend and idol, Paul. ‘Paul, displeased with him, scowling, displeased at something he had done.’
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     Eventually Gregory successfully infiltrates the eccentric Willson household – he becomes particularly close to Margaret, the mother – and the book ends with his request to stay with the family in their attic. Highsmith planned to continue the novel and a possible climactic flourish she sketched out included a fight between Gregory and George over Margaret, during which the woman would hit her head and die.

     Although Highsmith was often besieged by uncertainties and doubts – she asked herself, how was she going to complete the story, did she even have anything worthwhile to say? – she also realised that the novel was essential to her development. ‘It is a heightening and romanticising of my own aspirations, found-delights, and material disillusionments coupled with, I believe sincerely, a spiritual awakening,’ she wrote in her diary.
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After reading through her first chapter, she compared the style to that of Carson McCullers, but friends who read the early draft of the manuscript told her that it lacked a certain intensity.

     Highsmith herself was clearly dissatisfied with the material she had composed in Mexico. In a letter to Kingsley, dated 12 May 1944, she considered scrapping everything she had written except for the first six pages. Yet
The Click of the Shutting
, for all its clunky sentences and melodramatic plotting, takes on a fresh, new perspective when compared to the book which so clearly inspired it – André Gide’s 1925 novel
The Counterfeiters
. Highsmith first read the novel in 1941 and the following year she noted how, ‘Adolescents have enormous possibilities in a novel. Witness what André Gide did with them in
The Counterfeiters
. They are good because they are extremes . . . What keeps returning to me as a fundamental of the novel is the individual out of place in this century.’
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     Like
The Click of the Shutting
, Gide’s novel focuses on the fragmented world of the adolescent; it contains characters called Bernard, George and Margaret (Marguerite in French); explores similar themes such as homo-eroticism and the fabricated personality, while its climax, in which Boris takes a gun into the classroom and kills himself, is similar to the one in Gregory’s dream in which Charles and Bernard take a dead dog to school. Like Proust, Gide, via the character of Edouard, a writer whose journal forms a large part of the book, posits the theory that love is essentially illusory. ‘Involuntarily – unconsciously – each one of a pair of lovers fashions himself to meet the other’s requirements – endeavours by a continual effort to resemble that idol of himself which he beholds in the other’s heart . . .’ runs a passage from Edouard’s journal. ‘Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity.’
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     Highsmith, too, believed that love was based on a fantasy, as is evident from the title of
The Click of the Shutting
which she borrowed from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. Sonnet XXIV in the sequence describes a self-enclosed, self-created world which enshrouds and protects the loving couple from outsiders, a solipsistic imaginative space which the poet likens to a warm hand clasping hold of a folding knife. ‘After the click of the shutting. Life to life – I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm.’

For Gide and for Highsmith, feelings, like love, were prone to the fantastical fluctuations. Highsmith’s protagonists bore witness to Gide’s theory, outlined at the end of
The Counterfeiters
, that emotions taken on as pretence, those which are feigned, can be felt as keenly as so-called ‘real’ feelings. Just as Gide uses the counterfeited gold coins to symbolise the notion of the fabricated personality, so Highsmith would work out elaborate plots featuring fakes and con-men in order to explore the mercurial fluidity of human identity.

     It seems as if Highsmith used Gide’s novel as a blueprint for her writing; she reread it in late 1947, together with his journals and
Corydon
and looked to the character of Edouard as a kind of fictionalised mentor figure. Like Edouard, Highsmith believed that reality did not exist unless she saw it reflected in her journal, while she also subscribed to his theory of depersonalisation, the ability of writers to negate their identities and take on the qualities of others. Such writerly empathy, Edouard states, ‘enables me to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own’. Similarly, Highsmith, in her notebooks, often wrote about how her imagination provided her with inner experiences which were more ‘real’ than the actuality being played out around her. Although she was occasionally attacked for creating characters riddled with inconsistencies and illogicalities, Highsmith articulates the paradox of human nature: the irrationality of the civilised rational man. Gide, in
The Counterfeiters
, expressed another contradiction – the fact that in fiction one is often presented with men and women who behave in a logical fashion, while in real life it is common to meet people who behave irrationally.

     ‘Inconsistency. Characters in a novel or a play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to . . . This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognize that they are artificially composed.’
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     The point was taken up by Graham Greene in his foreword to Highsmith’s book of short stories,
Eleven
. ‘Her characters are irrational; and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train.’
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     Ultimately, although Highsmith was thrilled by the philosophical arguments expounded in Gide’s novel, she rejected meta-fictional literary self-consciousness in favour of stylistic simplicity. She admired the work of James M. Cain – author of
The Postman Always Rings Twice
,
Mildred Pierce
and
Double Indemnity
– describing him as ‘a kind of genius’,
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and rating his
Serenade
as ‘a great book – brilliant’.
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Although she identified with Kafka, she decided not to try and emulate his style. ‘Tales of horror, physical or mental, of bizarre, startling events, physical or mental,’ she wrote in her notebook in October 1944, after reading his
Metamorphosis
, ‘are more impressive when told in ordinary (but excellent) prose, when they are the more memorable for their uniqueness in the everyday world symbolized by the everyday prose.’
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After five months in Mexico, Highsmith ran out of money and at the beginning of May she started to make her way back home. On 8 May she stayed overnight at the Hotel Monte Carlo in Mexico City – described in
Strangers on a Train
as ‘a great shabby building that looked like the former residence of a military general’
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– where she met with her ‘alcoholic beauty’,
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Chloe, who had decided to stay on in the country. Four days later, in Monterrey, she gathered her energies ready for the officials at the border town of Laredo, men she knew would be especially suspicious of the number of books and papers she had in her possession. From Monterrey, she wrote a letter to Kingsley, telling her friend about her progress on her novel – she had written 160 typewritten pages of
The Click of the Shutting
, but she described it as ‘mediocre stuff’.
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Of course, it didn’t help that she was reading Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and she asked herself ‘what need of more after this?’
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She quizzed Kingsley about a handful of Barnard friends and wondered whether any of them were directly involved in helping with the war effort. Approximately six million American women went to work in the war plants, while around 100,000 joined the armed services, but Highsmith, like many educated young women, opted out. If she had wanted to take on one of the war jobs offered to women, she would, she said, rather flee to Russia, where at least they might have let her train as a fighter pilot.

     Surely, such a role was better than mucking out kitchens? ‘Pat was not one to be lost in a crowd of uniformed servicewomen or to be joining Rosie the Riveter in a gaggle of female factory workers,’ says Kingsley, ‘but it might have been a different story had there been an opportunity to distinguish herself as an individual. One must also take into account her abhorrence of war no matter who was waging it.’
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     She arrived back at her grandmother’s house in Fort Worth in June, where she spent her days writing, reading and drawing. Her visit, although initially pleasurable, was not particularly creatively stimulating and she found she couldn’t bear to engage in typical topics of conversation such as the merits of the local golf courses, the selection of songs on the radio and the state of the weather. Fort Worth, she said, was a ‘city of the truly dead’,
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and after one of her cousins refused to sit still long enough for her to paint their portrait, she left the house and, in frustration, walked out to the edge of town. Logically, she knew something so trivial should not, by rights, produce such powerful emotions in her, but nevertheless she felt on the verge of taking her own life. ‘(At such raging times, “suicide” flashes to my mind, as inevitably as lightning produces thunder.)’ she wrote. ‘I walked home, feeling such unnameable melancholic emotion I wondered what it was?’
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     Yet her wicked sense of humour had obviously not deserted her, as is clear from another entry in her notebook about a family pet, a fox terrier called Trixie Queen. ‘Should like to see her do her business in her initials – TQ – an exercise for the dog and a novelty for her owners.’
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Considering Highsmith’s emotional attachment to painting, it’s perhaps not surprising that the interrupted sitting should precipitate such an extreme reaction. In her late teenage years and early twenties, Highsmith flirted with the idea of dedicating her life to art, instead of writing. ‘I was on the fence ’till I was 23 as to whether I wanted to do drawing or painting or writing,’ she said,
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but for her painting did not provide as much of an intellectual and creative challenge as writing. In 1947, she would come to acknowledge that she had made the right decision to concentrate on fiction. ‘Painting could never have been sufficiently complex, sufficiently complicated and explicit to please me,’ she said.
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However, she did acknowledge that the lessons she had learnt from art had influenced her writing. ‘Think of each story to be written, as a painted picture,’ she noted. ‘I think more clearly in a painter’s terms. There is a choice of words, as there is a choice between gouache and watercolor.’
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Even when she had dedicated herself to writing, she continued to paint and sketch; drawing, she said, opened her heart.
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     The paintings, sketches and drawings gathered together by Diogenes Verlag after her death and published as the 1995 book,
Patricia Highsmith Zeichnungen
represent only a tiny fraction of her artistic output – landscapes; lovers; pets (particularly her cats); the view from her window in New York, New Orleans, Venice, Rome, Florence, Positano and Paris; together with the occasional surreal work such as
Marcel Proust Examining Own Bathwater
, showing the writer, eyes ringed by shadows, holding a test-tube full of water taken from a miniature bath which is sitting before him; and
Departure
, a 1948 piece showing a truncated female form, breasts mutated into square eyes, a navel fashioned into a nose, and a waistline drawn as a smile. ‘I thought Pat was extremely gifted as an artist,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘She had a real talent for drawing, an exceptional line and extraordinary eye. I suspect her talent came largely from the genetic inheritance from her parents – her mother had the same eye for line.’
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When Janice Robertson, Pat’s editor at Heinemann, visited Highsmith at her house in Moncourt in the early seventies, she noticed that some of the floors, ‘were painted these jewel-like colours – bright red and brilliant blue – and the effect was almost magical; there was no doubt about it, these were the floors of an artist,’ she says.
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