Beautiful Shadow (34 page)

     Marijane Meaker, who would later have a relationship with Highsmith, was a secretary at Fawcett at this time. After an editor asked her about homosexuality at boarding school and college, she wrote
Spring Fire
under the pseudonym Vin Packer, published in 1952. At the end of the novel, one lesbian converts back to heterosexuality while the other ends up in a mental institution. Meaker was told by her editor to make the ending an unhappy one, ‘otherwise the post office might seize the books as obscene’.
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‘In the end,’ says Jaye Zimet, author of
Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949
–1969, ‘the lesbian gets her due . . . marriage, insanity or . . . suicide.’
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In August of 1950, Highsmith went to the cinema alone to see John Huston’s
The Asphalt Jungle
, the adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s novel about a gang of thieves who fall apart after robbing an upmarket jewellery shop. Not only did Highsmith enjoy it on a superficial level, but she was also impressed by the way it forced the viewer into identifying with a criminal perspective. As she walked up Third Avenue, her eyes looked into shadowy corners and dark alleyways seeking out the strange and the forbidden. The fictional exploration of criminal psychology, she mused, was a natural subject matter for the post-war sensibility. ‘If I could but gather all the chaos of the world today and of my own soul and shape it to a story!’ she said,
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significantly locating the source of her work not only in the world around her, but also in her frighteningly anarchic emotional landscape. So tangled was Highsmith’s personal life that, in the winter of 1949 and throughout 1950, she noted that at times she felt like she was losing her grip on reality. She defined herself as basically ‘polygamous’
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and was conscious of the fact that her free-form sexuality, together with her tendency to lose herself in those close to her, could easily result in a complete mental breakdown. The world that spun from the web of her imagination was manifestly more real to her than what she saw before her. It was as if, like her fiction, she inhabited a paraxial region, an area which, like one of the working titles for
Strangers on a Train
, could be said to lie at ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’.

     In January 1950, after a driving trip with a friend from New York to Fort Worth and back again, Pat wrote in her notebook of her fear of insanity. It wasn’t as if she had a series of irrational thoughts; rather it was like ‘the entire structure of one’s information slipping’,
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as though the earth’s fixed points, such as the North and South Pole, had suddenly swapped places. At the same time, she sketched out the plot of a story in which a woman living alone in New York hears scratches in her apartment at night. Eventually, she realises that her fear is not caused by an external monster, but something located within her, ‘in some part of her life she knows not’.
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Later, this horror would articulate itself in her disturbing tales such as ‘The Empty Birdhouse’ and ‘The Terrors of Basket-Weaving’.

     In April, just after she had written a letter to Marc, informing him that she finally wanted to break free of him – a decision which she failed to stand by – she received a note from Kathryn Cohen politely refusing any further emotional involvement. Although what the two women had experienced in Italy had been based on a deep mutual attraction, it was obvious from the tone of the letter that she thought they had no future together. The irony was almost too much to bear, as Marc must have received her letter the same day as she opened the one from Kathryn. ‘Thus we both get it in the neck the same day.’
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     Bruised by the latest rejection, Highsmith retreated into her imagination and lost herself in the fictional world of Therese and Carol. She compared the process of writing the novel to documenting her own birth and although she found the process agonising, she predicted that, once completed, it would be her finest book, an opinion shared by her mentor Ethel Sturtevant, to whom she showed one chapter. Sturtevant read the first half of a page, looked up at her former pupil and exclaimed, ‘“But this is love!”’ Pat, still somewhat ashamed of admitting the true nature of Therese and Carol’s relationship, tried to convince her it was nothing more than a misplaced yearning for the maternal, but Sturtevant was having none of it. ‘ “That’s a sexual awakening,” ’ she countered. ‘ “It’s fascinating.” ’
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     Highsmith’s identification was total and, like Therese, she found herself falling for Carol. ‘I live so completely with them now,’ she said, ‘I do not even think I can contemplate an amour (I am in love with Carol, too).’
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Reality and imagination were now dangerously close and, in June, the melancholy of the past few months was replaced by a state resembling mania. She felt deliriously happy, due in part to the feelings of ecstasy she experienced when she dreamt of Carol. ‘I want to be faithful to her,’ she said.
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Sinus problems forced her to see a doctor who diagnosed her condition as nervous strain, she was prescribed sedatives and after a dramatic falling-out with Rosalind Constable – in which the older woman accused her of being eccentric, lazy and promiscuous, nothing but ‘a bum’ – she was left feeling vulnerable and shaken.

     Having taken her own experiences and transferred them into art, Highsmith now found herself behaving like a character in one of her books. On 30 June, she took the train out to Ridgewood, New Jersey, to spy on Kathleen Senn. ‘Today, feeling quite odd – like a murderer in a novel, I boarded the train for Ridgewood, New Jersey,’ she wrote in her diary.
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On returning to New York, Highsmith wrote a poem for the stranger, detailing the love she felt for her, love which she compared to a faint, but permanent stain on her heart.
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     Although she fantasised about placing her hands on the woman’s throat, and squeezing until she was as still and cold as a statue, she was motivated not by hate, but love. It was essential she found someone to give her love to; if there was no one near, she would seek out a woman who could play the role. It didn’t matter that her feelings were not reciprocated, as ‘The gesture is the thing! The thought, the privilege of that dedication!’
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‘To all the Virginias’, reads the dedication in
Strangers on a Train
, which was published on 15 March 1950. Although Marc Brandel had played a crucial role in fashioning the novel, prompting her to rewrite the final chapter and even providing her with its title, Highsmith chose not to grace the first page of the book with his name. Instead, she decided to dedicate it to the women she had loved, her first girlfriend, Virginia, and Virginia Kent Catherwood.

     Two days after publication, Highsmith hosted a party, attended by friends such as Kingsley, Rosalind Constable, her editor, Joan Kahn, and a smattering of journalists. Djuna Barnes was due to attend, but called Highsmith to say that she couldn’t make it as she had sprained her back. Later, Highsmith recalled her thoughts on seeing her first novel in print. ‘I remember opening the carton [of books] on the floor in my apartment in New York, and my first thought was, “These are taking up a lot of space in the world.” There it was – a sort of cube – and it was funny that that should have occurred to me. I didn’t feel particularly proud . . . but I thought, “these take up space”. ’
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She could still remember the sense of embarrassment she felt years later, as she told Ronald Blythe in 1971. ‘I thought, “How have I got the nerve to stick my neck out like this, to assume I can entertain the public, to assume I’m a writer – like Dickens or – or Graham Greene?” ’
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     Yet the reviews of the book were positive. ‘There is a warning on the jacket that this book will make you think twice before you speak to a stranger on a train,’ wrote an unbylined writer in
The New Yorker
. ‘This is unquestionably the understatement of the year . . . A horrifying picture of an oddly engaging young man, who has all the complexes you ever heard of. Highly recommended.’
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The
New York Herald Tribune Book Review
said that the novel was, ‘one of this year’s most sinister items. It has its obvious faults. It is not always credible, and the characters are not entirely convincing. Nevertheless, it is a highly persuasive book . . . as one reads it page by page throughout a full-length novel, one is held by an evil kind of suspense. It becomes more believable than one would suppose – a rarely perceptible study in criminal psychology.’
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     Within a few days of its publication,
Strangers on a Train
attracted interest from film-makers keen to turn the novel into a movie. On 22 March, her agent turned down an offer of $4,000, before finally accepting one of $6,000 (for rights in perpetuity) plus an additional fee of $1,500 for any work on the script. The successful bidder was Alfred Hitchcock, who only revealed his identity after Margot Johnson had finalised the deal – on 17 May he wrote to the publicity director at Harper & Brothers, Ramona Herdman, thanking her for sending him the novel and telling her that he was using it as the basis for his next movie.
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(In 1961, Hitchcock would buy the television rights to Highsmith’s novel
This Sweet Sickness
for transmission in November of the following year – ‘Of course Hitchcock has all the rights now, and until “perpetuity”,’ she wrote in a letter to her French publisher Robert Calmann-Lévy in 1967.
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) Although Highsmith would later vent her anger at the amount of money Hitchcock had paid for
Strangers on a Train
, she also acknowledged, ‘That wasn’t a bad price for a first book. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.’
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In September, while Highsmith was holidaying with Ann Clark in Provincetown, Hitchcock telegraphed her, requesting her presence on the set, but the writer refused in spite of the fee he promised. ‘I was surprised because I felt Pat had such a drive for money at that time,’ says Ann.
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Yet Highsmith obviously felt enormously proud of the fact that she had sold her first novel to the director as, according to the writer Brian Glanville, who met her in Florence in 1952, ‘She carried with her the letter from Alfred Hitchcock telling her, in little more than a couple of lines, that he had decided to make her book
Strangers on a Train
his next film.’
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     Adapting Highsmith’s novel for the screen proved to be a troublesome experience for Hitchcock, who in July enlisted the services of Raymond Chandler at $2,500 a week. ‘I’m still slaving away for Warner Brothers on this Hitchcock thing . . .’ Chandler wrote to Bernice Baumgarten on 13 September. ‘Some days I think it is fun and other days I think it is damn foolishness. The money looks good, but as a matter of fact it isn’t.’
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Chandler completed the script on 26 September, but after sending it off to Hitchcock, via his agent, the writer received a curt telegram telling him he had been sacked. The director subsequently appointed Czenzi Ormonde to rewrite it. ‘The great difficulty of the story always was to make it credible to an audience that Guy should behave in the damn-fool way in which he did behave,’ wrote Chandler in a letter to Hitchcock, which he never sent,
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concluding that the film had, ‘No guts. No characters. No dialogue.’
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‘A Hitchcock picture has to be all Hitchcock,’ he wrote to his literary agent. ‘A script which shows any sign of a positive style must be obliterated or changed until it is quite innocuous.’
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     In an introduction to a book about Chandler, Highsmith wrote of her admiration for the creator of Philip Marlowe and the difficulties he encountered while adapting her novel for the screen. ‘A book of mine called
Strangers on a Train
gave Chandler fits during his Hollywood scriptwriting period, and from his grave Chandler has given me tit for tat,’ Highsmith said in 1977. ‘It is difficult to sum up Raymond Chandler . . . Chandler wrote in a letter, “I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.” That sounds indeed like a writer, not funking the job, honest according to his own lights, and willing to work his heart out – maybe in two senses of the phrase.’
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