Beautiful Shadow (27 page)

     Tzvetan Todorov, in his influential book on the fantastic in literature, shows how modern detective stories have replaced the ghostly tales of the past. Indeed, many of Todorov’s statements defining the fantastic could be seen to apply directly to Highsmith’s fiction. All works of fantasy literature, he says, share a number of common elements: fractured identity; the breakdown of boundaries between an individual and their environment; and the blurring of external reality and internal consciousness. These features, he concludes, ‘collect the essential elements of the basic network of fantastic themes.’
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Highsmith’s characters, like Dostoevsky’s, occupy a paraxial realm, one described by Mikhail Bakhtin in the following terms. ‘In Dostoevsky the participants in the performance stand on the threshold (the threshold of life and death, truth and falsehood, sanity and insanity) . . . “today’s corpses”, capable of neither dying, nor of being born anew.’
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Highsmith compels the reader to align his point of view with the hero, whose task it is to sail us, like Charon, across the dark waters to the otherworld of Hades. ‘We know that the reader begins his reading by identifying himself with the hero of the novel,’ says Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Thus, the hero, by lending us his point of view, constitutes the sole access to the fantastic.’
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Highsmith also felt a personal empathy with Dostoevsky. Like him, she realised that she was to some degree in love with suffering and at times exposed herself to situations she knew would hurt her. While reading a biography of the author in 1959, she noted that she too often wanted to suffer humiliation, to be ‘personally degraded, cursed, spat upon,’ for her ‘finest emotions’.
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She traced her fascination with duality and ambiguity back to her own childhood, acknowledging that the strands of love and hate which were woven through her character had their roots in her early relationship with her parents. Yet she knew that such dark, murky territory was a fertile breeding ground for her fiction. ‘Out of this, I shall create, discover, invent, prove and reveal,’ she said.
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     Those close to her, particularly her family, often commented on how Highsmith’s vision of reality was a warped one, however. In April 1947, she transcribed into her notebook what was, presumably, a real dialogue between herself and her mother, in which Mary accused her of not facing the world. Highsmith replied that she did indeed view the world ‘sideways, but since the world faces reality sideways, sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective.’
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The problem, Highsmith said, was that her psychic optics were different to those around her, but if that was the case, her mother replied, then she should equip herself with a pair of new spectacles. Highsmith was not convinced. ‘Then I need a new birth,’ she concluded.
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     Stanley Highsmith had finally adopted his stepdaughter in November 1946, at an official hearing of the surrogate’s court in Westchester County, New York, which Pat said was done so as to secure a passport. There, Pat made a formal oath to the effect that she had lived with Stanley since her mother’s marriage to him in 1924. During that period, she looked upon him ‘with daughter-like love and respect and desire now to make him my foster father in the eyes of the law as well.’
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She added that she had gone under the name of Mary Patricia Highsmith both professionally and socially since she was a child, and now wished to change her name legally from Plangman to Highsmith. The statement, ‘That for the past 21 years we three, my mother, Mr Highsmith and I have lived together as one closely knit family,’ was, perhaps, the most galling for her to utter.
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In the gap between the initial inspiration and the plotting and writing of
Strangers on a Train
, Highsmith started work on yet another book, one she called
The Dove Descending
. She began writing it in the summer of 1946 and named it after a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘Little Gidding’ from
Four Quartets
, which is suggestive of spiritual redemption. The incomplete manuscript runs to only seventy-seven pages and eight chapters, but she worked out the whole story in her notebook. The novel was narrated in the first person – a style she was not at all comfortable with – by a young, repressed girl, brought up by her aunt after the death of her architect father from tuberculosis and her mother in a car accident. The girl, called Leonora in the synopsis, but referred to as Marcia in the surviving draft, bears a strong resemblance to Highsmith herself. ‘Dark-eyed’ and ‘thin faced’, she attends Briarley Academy, an all-girl college and, like Highsmith at Barnard, studies English.

     In the synopsis, the girl’s affections are divided between her childhood sweetheart, Martin, who is a kind, but conventional man, and the wild anarchy of alcoholic Carl, a sculptor in Mexico. She travels to Mexico with her aunt, where she elopes with Carl. But in Acapulco there is a terrible storm and Carl drowns. His death, however, is not in vain, as it forces the girl to undergo an emotional reawakening, and, rather than settle for the safety of Martin she opts for the more spirited qualities of another man, Cappie. The plot is somewhat contrived, and even though she thought the eight pages a day, which she tapped out on her typewriter, read well enough for a first draft, she still remained dissatisfied, comparing her feelings to those suffered by a lover who has failed to pleasure his mistress.

If Highsmith believed in the creative and transformative powers of love, as she suggests, surely one of her greatest muses was the woman she starting seeing in June 1946. Her name was Virginia Kent Catherwood.

     Virginia, whom she had first met at a party of Rosalind Constable’s in November 1944, could not have come from a more different background from Highsmith. Born in 1915, she was the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia inventor and radio manufacturer Atwater Kent. The young Virginia Tucker Kent attended finishing school and studied sculpture in Paris and, in 1933, was presented at court to King George V and Queen Mary. Her debutante ball, in late December 1933, was the most lavish party Philadelphia had seen since before the Depression. Atwater Kent hired a sixty-piece orchestra to play at the grand Bellevue-Stratford Hotel – the music alone cost between $5,000 and $10,000. ‘Not in years has anyone had the temerity to engage such a colossal orchestra for a private party,’ commented a Philadelphia reporter.
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     Virginia was also a favourite of the gossip columns; in January 1935 her name was linked with Franklin Roosevelt Jr, but in April of the same year, she married the wealthy banker Cummins Catherwood. On her wedding day, at the Church of the Redeemer, Bryn Mawr, Virginia wore a ‘shimmering white satin’, high-waist dress, with a train of five and a half yards and close-fitting sleeves. ‘Her veil of tulle,’ gushed the extensive newspaper description, ‘is arranged with a close fitting cap of tulle, and a satin bandeau over the forehead fastened at the sides with tiny clusters of orange blossoms. Of three widths of tulle, seven and a half yards long, the veil completely envelopes the satin train. White satin pumps complete her costume. She will carry a bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley.’
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     On return from their honeymoon, the couple leased a country estate in Bryn Mawr, then valued at $200,000, with twenty rooms, a gardener’s cottage, garaging for four cars, and a swimming pool. But the romantic idyll did not last long and on 4 April 1941 the couple were divorced in Blaine County, Idaho. The circumstances of the divorce remain unclear, but according to Ann Clark, who had a relationship with Highsmith in the late 1940s, the relationship broke down because of Cummins Catherwood’s discovery of his wife’s lesbianism.

     ‘Pat only told me the story once, but apparently Virginia lost custody of her child after a recording made in a hotel room and exposing a lesbian affair was played in court. Of course there is something of this tale in
The Price of Salt
.’
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     Highsmith herself acknowledged the similarity. ‘I worry that Ginnie may feel Carol’s case too similar to her own,’ she wrote in her diary in 1950, ‘though Ann knows another woman in the same predicament now.’
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Later, Highsmith would write about how Virginia occupied a central position in her imaginative landscape and how she would repeatedly use her in her work. ‘Where is Ginnie – without whom the Price of Salt would never have been written,’ she wrote in her diary in 1968, two years after Virginia’s death, age fifty-one. ‘How I adore my Virginias. She is “Lotte” in
The Tremor of Forgery
– the woman whom my hero will always love, with his body, with his soul also.’
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     Two weeks after embarking on her relationship with Virginia, Highsmith wrote in her notebook about the importance of a lover in her life, someone who was able to cast light on all the wonders of the world. Without their presence, she said, she was a mere shadow. Love, she observed, acted rather like lubricant on machinery, performing as a catalyst sparking off new reactions. Certainly, the rich, glamorous socialite gave her a ‘oneness’ and a ‘timelessness’ that allowed her to enter a creative state of mind.
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She was the ‘other half of the universe’ and ‘together we make a whole’.
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She compared herself and Virginia to the negative and positive components of an atom, halves which could not exist singly, only in conjunction; this desire to search out a defining doppelgänger figure reveals itself as a prominent theme in her writing.

     But just as she was beginning to sample the possibility of happiness with Virginia, she heard the news, in September 1946, that her former lover, the painter Allela Cornell, had attempted suicide by drinking nitric acid. The effects of the acid were not immediate and, although Allela was in a great deal of pain, she remained conscious in her hospital bed for two weeks. Tragically, during this time she realised she did not want to die. She talked about what she would do when she regained her health, telling one of the doctors, ‘I want you to pose for me, and I’ll never have to look for a model again.’ She believed that she would be discharged from the hospital within a month – a hope that made the doctor put his face in his hands and cry – but then, on 4 October, she slipped into a coma and died.

     It seems the reasons Allela took her own life were nothing to do with Highsmith. ‘Allela was lonely,’ says one of her friends, Maggie Eversol.
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‘Pat played no part in her suicide.’
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‘Allela was involved with another woman who treated her appallingly,’ says David Diamond. ‘She came back from a disastrous trip to Alabama with this woman – Allela was in love with her, while this woman clearly did not feel the same way – and a few weeks later drank an entire bottle of nitric acid.’
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     Yet Highsmith did, to a certain extent, blame herself. She asked herself why Allela had ever loved her, as it was inevitable she would drive her mad. She called herself an ‘evil thing’,
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read through Allela’s love letters and as she looked back over their time together, felt guilty at the way she had treated her. She said that in comparison to the angelic Allela, she, together with the rest of the living, were mere weeds, feeding on the waste products of the earth.

     In the midst of mourning for Allela Cornell, Highsmith also became aware that Virginia Kent Catherwood was in danger of being snatched away from her by her excessive drinking, just as the painter had been stolen from her by death. The attack of paralysis suffered by Bruno in
Strangers on a Train
, brought on by his alcoholism destroying his nerve tissue, was clearly inspired by the terrifying physical breakdown suffered by Virginia in May 1947 when she lost her voice and couldn’t feel her fingers. The scene Highsmith describes in the novel runs as follows.

He gasped. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t move his tongue. It had gone to his vocal chords . . . He gestured towards his mouth with his crazy hands. He trotted to the closet window. His face was white, flat around the mouth as if someone had hit him with a board, his lips drawn horribly back from his teeth. And his hands! He wouldn’t be able to hold a glass any more, or light a cigarette. He wouldn’t be able to drive a car. He wouldn’t even be able to go to the john by himself!
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