Beautiful Shadow (25 page)

     If she saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of ‘the eternal hypocrisy in me’
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, rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her – her negative capability, if you like – was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, ‘the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness’,
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yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this ‘daedal planet’
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and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment. Plotting, she said at this time, was not so important to her; she was much more interested in the exploration of consciousness, inhabiting the mind of her characters and representing this on the printed page.

     When ‘The Heroine’ appeared in the August 1945 issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
it attracted the attention of one of the editors at the publishing house, Knopf. ‘Your characterization of Lucille is extraordinarily real and poignant,’ wrote Emily Morison. She praised Highsmith for her skilful handling of the tragic ending and her clear, direct style. ‘I am so impressed by this story, in fact,’ she added, ‘that I would like very much to see a book of yours, with of course a view to publication.’
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After a meeting with the young writer, Morison wrote an internal memo, recording the fact that Highsmith was working on a forty page story, which she promised to show the editor when it was complete. Pat also told the publisher that she planned to start another novel that winter, and once she had written sample chapters and an outline these too would be sent to Knopf. However, after repeated requests for material – Morison wrote to Highsmith in 1946 and 1948 – the publisher failed to secure the author.

     Despite Knopf’s keen interest, during the late summer and autumn of 1945, it still seemed impossible that she would ever publish a novel. Her New York agents told her frankly that if she did not make the endings of her short stories more upbeat, they would remain, for the most part, unsaleable. ‘Too bad you had to write like that,’ they said. ‘It’s sad to write and not be published.’ Such a prospect, however, did not seem to bother her. As she walked out of their office into the blinding August sunlight, she concluded that her way of perceiving the world was vastly different from the rather business-minded approach of the agent. ‘We do not speak the same language,’ she said.
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In October 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered an influential lecture, ‘L’Existentialisme est un humanisme’, translated into English and published in America in 1947 as
Existentialism
, in which he said that for human beings ‘existence precedes essence’. There was no such thing, he believed, as preordained human nature; rather individuals are free to make certain choices, with each one of us responsible for determining one’s being, a concept articulated in Sartre’s play
Huis Clos
– ‘You
are
your life and nothing else.’ In his 700-page epic,
L’Etre et le néant
,
Being and Nothingness
, published in 1943, Sartre stated, in a teasingly enigmatic line, that ‘the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it is’.

     His ideas instantly appealed to Parisian intellectuals, encapsulating as they did the aspirations and anxieties of post-liberation France. ‘Sartre is automatically fashionable now among those who once found surrealism automatically fashionable,’ wrote Janet Flanner, later a friend of Highsmith’s, in her
New Yorker
column in December 1945.
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The philosophical revolution centring around individual freedom also set New York buzzing and thousands of column inches were devoted to trying to untangle Sartre’s complex ideas. ‘There is much talk in Paris, in Greenwich Village, even in the center of Manhattan,’ wrote Jean Wahl, in the October issue of the
New Republic
, ‘about existence and existentialism’,
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while the mass market
Time
magazine, in January 1946, proclaimed that existentialism ‘had called forth more words and more ink than any intellectual movement since Dadaism ushered in Europe’s “lost generation” after World War I. Existentialism has its long-haired snobbish fringe . . . But the word has filtered down to everyman’s and everywoman’s level.’
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The philosophy also appealed to the post-war sensibility of pessimism. After Hiroshima in August 1945, America woke up to the fact that, as one historian put it, ‘the bomb became the possible instrument of universal extinction and Americans wondered how they would live with it, as though civilization had inherited an incurable disease.’
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     The philosophical issues surrounding being and nothingness had always intrigued Highsmith and after reading his work, she felt stimulated by Sartre’s audacious attack on conventional thinking. ‘The riddle of the universe,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘the relation of the individual to one other person, to the rest of humanity.’
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What particularly intrigued her was Sartre’s analysis of subject-object relations – the impact of other people on the nature of our consciousness – which he illustrated by the use of an anecdotal example. In
Being and Nothingness
, Sartre imagines being possessed by jealously and peering through a keyhole to find out what is happening on the other side of the door. At first he is completely immersed in the scene in front of him and in this state – the non-thetic or pre-reflective mode of consciousness – he is unaware of himself as a self, only of the images before his eyes. But then he hears footsteps behind him and realises, shamefully, that someone is looking at him. He is shocked into acknowledging that he himself is an object, something viewed by another consciousness. One’s self is not, after all, an extension of the world but merely, and quite inevitably, another object contained within it. This stinging realisation is one Highsmith would explore throughout her fiction. Indeed, Ripley in
The Talented Mr Ripley
, murders Dickie partly because of the shock of discovering that he could not be one with him or anybody else.

     The sense of strangeness – of alienation, separateness and despair – felt by Ripley articulates the existential nausea expressed by Sartre. One of the ways man could free himself was by writing and reading, as Sartre explained in his seminal book,
What Is Literature?
, which Highsmith read in January 1948. Literature, instead of serving as a mere exercise in escapism, could act as an agent of liberation, a catalyst of real change enabling man to move towards personal freedom. Such a book was Albert Camus’
L’Étranger
, first published in French in 1942 and read by Highsmith in the spring of 1946. ‘People told each other that it was “the best book since the end of the war”,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in February 1943. ‘Amidst the literary productions of its time this novel was, itself, an outsider.’
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     The book, narrated by Meursault, opens with, ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.’
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Meursault, like one of Highsmith’s heroes, is a man dislocated from reality. He kills an Arab in self-defence, but at his trial he is so indifferent to his fate that he refuses to play by society’s unspoken rules and, as a result, is condemned to die for it. ‘Gentleman of the jury,’ the prosecutor says in his summing up of the case, ‘I would have you note that, on the day after his mother’s funeral, that man was visiting a swimming pool, starting a liaison with a girl and going to see a comic film. That is all I wish to say.’
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     His greatest virtue – his honesty, his refusal to say what is expected of him – is also his downfall and as he waits in his prison cell he realises that life is unreal; only now, faced with death, can he contemplate freedom. Albert Camus, in a preface to an edition of the book published in 1955, describes Meursault, as a man driven by the passion for truth. ‘He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately threatens. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him.’
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     When Highsmith read the book she described it as an example of the ‘twentieth century’s annihilation of the individual . . . It is a tour de force. It is a piece of brilliant impressionism.’
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Like Camus, she was interested in exploring what she thought was the saddest aspect of her generation, ‘the absence of personality’.
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Just as the French novelist’s anti-hero meandered through the novel in an emotionally anaemic daze so Highsmith started to think about writing about ‘a man to whom events become progressively less real’.
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One day, late in 1945, Highsmith was walking by the Hudson river with her mother and stepfather when she had the idea of writing a novel about two men who exchange murders. On 16 December, she opened her notebook, and wrote the outline of a plot which would eventually form itself into her first published novel,
Strangers on a Train
. The original plot centred around, two men, Alfred and Laurence, both of whom wanted to kill women they no longer loved.

     ‘An exchange of victims would clear us both by eliminating all possible motivation,’ thinks Alfred, whose name Highsmith later changed to Bruno. ‘Yes, we shall each let ourselves be caught for the crime, but the police will find no motivation. We shall go free!’
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     Alfred goes through with the murder, but initially Lawrence cannot reciprocate and begins to hate his doppelgänger. Finally, however, he kills Alfred’s wife and is arrested. It is guilt that has destroyed him. The characters and their motivation would change many times over the next four years, but the central theme of the double murder would remain the same. Highsmith put the idea on hold until the spring of 1947 when the plot fired her imagination once again.

     Her favourite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible. Her position, she noted, would be almost foetal and, indeed, her intention was to create, she said, ‘a womb of her own’.
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Later, in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
, Highsmith revealed that in order to write she often deliberately thought herself into a different frame of mind, by pretending she was not herself, moving herself ‘into a state of innocence’, free of the day-to-day worries and anxieties of life. ‘I suppose it’s a measure of how professional one is, how quickly one can do this,’ she said. ‘The ability does improve with practice.’
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     She started writing
Strangers on a Train
on 23 June 1947 and in her diary outlined her vision for its beginning. ‘I want a brief first part, in which the two young men and the possibility of the murders are presented,’ she wrote.
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She worked intensely and, less than a month later, she had produced eighty pages. Ben Zion Goldberg, her one-time boss, admired the first chapter, judging it to be an ‘excellent story’, while the black poet and writer Owen Dodson, whom she met in August, praised her for her economy of style. She found the experience of writing therapeutic and described the book as ‘a too open description of my feelings, of the mystery of my self’.
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Goldberg also pointed out to her that the theme of novel, ‘the relationship between two men, usually quite different in make-up, sometimes an obvious contrast in good and evil, sometimes merely ill-matched friends’
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was one she had also used as a basis for
The Click of the Shutting
. As she explored the relationship between the two male characters – psychopath Bruno and the target of his corruption, who at this point she called Tucker, later to be called Guy – she realised she was falling in love with the amoral killer. ‘I am so happy when Bruno reappears in the novel,’ she said. ‘I love him!’
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