Beautiful Shadow (37 page)

     There’s no doubt that the venomous emotions expressed in
The Blunderer
had their roots in real life. In the idyllic setting of the Amalfi coast, with its sparkling blue waters, paradisal views, and citrus-blossom scented breezes, the two women waged a psychological war. Again, Ellen accused Pat of interrupting her sleep and whenever the writer wanted to read, she was forced to retire to the bathroom, where she would sit on the lavatory, the door shut, sweltering in the heat. A simple purchase of a couple of bottles of gin and vermouth was enough to send Ellen crazy and she accused Pat of drinking when her back was turned. Sex between them was non-existent and Ellen behaved towards her like a sour governess might towards a rather slow-minded charge.

     Like Walter, Highsmith felt a prisoner in an unhealthy relationship. Suffering from toothache and low blood pressure, she felt drained of energy and depressed. Logically she knew she should leave Ellen, but emotionally she still felt bound to her and ‘a persistent fear of violent consequences prevent me from breaking off.’
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     At the end of July, Highsmith paid a visit to W.H. Auden at his home in Forio, where she found him barefoot and tended by what she described as a young Italian pansy. ‘I was prepared to talk of poetry,’ Pat wrote later to Kingsley, ‘and all he spoke of was the cheaper prices of things there.’
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     In September, after trips to Ascona and Munich, the two women moved to Paris, where Ellen was due to start her job with the Tolstoy Foundation. The change of scene, however, did not improve the relationship and on 10 September, in the middle of the night, Ellen woke Pat, and in a fury, launched herself at her younger lover with her fists. The argument raged on for an hour, centring around Ellen’s determination to extract from Pat how many evenings she wanted to spend out socialising; if Pat did meet friends, she wanted to know how many times a week this would be. Ellen, now hysterical and playing the martyr, said she would be prepared to kill her dog to please her. ‘How can I stand it,’ Highsmith noted. ‘It is worse than being married.’
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     They moved into an apartment together at 83 Rue de l’Université, but the arguments continued and Highsmith started to think about the possibility of fleeing to Florence and living alone. ‘The horrible flaw in my make-up is that I never have cared for the artistic type like myself,’ she told Kingsley, ‘so that sooner or later, one comes upon that shoal (to mix my metaphors) and there is a shipwreck. A fundamental incompatibility.’
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     The situation reached crisis point when, in early November, Ellen reached across the bed in a bid to be affectionate. ‘I struck at her,’ Highsmith noted in her diary, ‘had to, to ward her off. By Christ, I do believe she is insane.’
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Pat refused to accompany her on a short trip to Geneva and the next morning, she awoke to find that Ellen had gone. Highsmith made up her mind to leave. She bought a plane ticket back to Florence, went out to the Le Monocle, where she danced with several girls, none of whom she found attractive, and wrote Ellen a farewell poem.

     On Ellen’s return from her trip to Switzerland, the two women tried to talk logically about their relationship. But, once again, Ellen broke down, threatened to commit suicide if Pat left and pleaded with her to make a date – for Christmas Eve in Venice – when they could sleep together once again. ‘She said I was the first and last person she’d want to sleep with,’ Pat wrote in her diary.
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Highsmith refused. The next morning, looking worn out and miserable, Pat and Ellen parted at the Gare les Invalides. As she looked out of the aeroplane’s window and saw the snow-capped Alps below, Highsmith felt suddenly liberated.

That late November, in bitterly cold Florence, Highsmith booked herself into the Pensione Bartolini. With its maze of dark corridors, bleak rooms and rather primitive plumbing system, the cheap pensione seemed a strange place for such a sophisticated young woman, according to fellow guest, the British writer and sports journalist Brian Glanville, then twenty-one. ‘The Bartolini was hardly right for her,
Studentesco
, the Italians would have called it, and indeed it was full of students and painters,’ he said.
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She was, remembers Glanville, ‘much fuller in the face than in the grim photographs of her declining years, high cheekboned, with a touch of what one then would have called Red Indian.’
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The two became friends almost immediately. In the evenings they would meet at the bar of the Excelsior Hotel, where John Horne Burns, author of
The Gallery
, was slowly drinking himself to death.

     ‘I found her very charming and she had a wonderful sense of humour,’ says Glanville. ‘But she never talked about her sexuality and there were no indications that she was a lesbian. But I could tell she was unhappy and quite lonely. She had little, or no confidence, and would often show me extracts of the novel which would eventually become
The Blunderer
. I thought it was clumsy and naive, quite poor, but of course I did not say so, and she subsequently scrapped this version.’
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     After a few days alone in Florence, Pat began to yearn for Ellen. One night, at 2 a.m., unable to sleep, she phoned and told her how she felt. Highsmith could not bear to stay away from her tormentor any longer and in December, after receiving a letter from Ellen, she took a train from Florence to Geneva, where they met in a hotel. From there they travelled back to Paris, before setting out again to Basel, St Moritz, Venice and eventually Trieste, settling at 22 Via Stupavich, in January. For Highsmith, Trieste should have held a special resonance, conscious as she was of its literary history – Freud and Joyce had both lived there, the latter writing
Dubliners
,
A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
,
Exiles
and draft sections of
Ulysses
while in the city. ‘And Trieste, ah Trieste ate I my liver!’ Joyce wrote in
Finnegan’s Wake
. The port city on the Adriatic, spread out on terraces, rising from the gulf up towards the Carso Hills also bristled with symbolic associations representative of fractured identity. Immediately after the Second World War, Trieste looked set to be a source of conflict between East and West – it was liberated by both Yugoslav and Anglo-American troops – until a settlement was finally reached in 1954, partitioning the land between Italy and Yugoslavia. Yet Highsmith did not warm to Trieste, finding it gloomy and depressing. Via Stupavich was, she wrote to her French agent, Jenny Bradley, of the Paris-based William A. Bradley literary agency, who had taken her on in early 1951, not a particularly pleasant-sounding street name, but the house she and Ellen shared was quite pretty and she looked forward to the summer when the bone-chilling ‘bora’ would cease blowing in from the east. Although she assumed she would stay in Trieste for at least a year, her time in the city was limited to a mere four months, a miserable interlude during which she came down with a bout of flu and was plagued by toothache; she often dreamed about her bad teeth and in fact thought she would be quite a different person if she had a perfect set.

     No doubt her perception of the city was shaped by her life with Ellen. Their arguments were just as heated and intense as before and Ellen continued to criticise the younger woman: the drawers in the bedroom were not straight; she did not tip adequately; she left a stain on the kitchen table. The constant bullying left Pat feeling depressed and shaken. The inequality in their incomes also caused a problem and Highsmith realised that she would not win Ellen’s respect unless she made some money. She tried her hand at writing a lesbian pulp novel, which she called ‘Breakup’, and applied for a job teaching English, which would net her $45 a week, but nothing came of either plan. By March, Highsmith was in such a low state that she declared herself a nervous wreck. She told Ellen the relationship was over. Predictably, Ellen took the news badly, breaking down in tears and, as always when Pat attempted to finish it, she tried to win her back with the promise of sex. Their life together had become impossible. Nevertheless, in April 1953, instead of splitting up, they travelled from Trieste to Genoa, then sailed to Gibraltar and toured southern Spain, before journeying by boat together to New York, arriving on 13 May. As the ship sailed by Long Island and towards Manhattan, the early morning fog cleared and the sun came out, wrapping the city in a warm glow.

     Back in New York, Highsmith arranged to rent an apartment from a friend for two months for $150 a month. She was initially optimistic about her future with Ellen and wrote in her diary of how she dreamed about sharing a house with her. But the day after recording these thoughts in her diary, she saw the photographer Rolf Tietgens, the homosexual man to whom she felt strangely attracted, and after a steak supper, went to bed with him. The liaison wasn’t wholly successful but the best yet, and she, at least, enjoyed it. ‘In my system of morals,’ she added, ‘I do not feel this in the least unfaithful to Ellen.’
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     Writing her new suspense novel left Pat feeling physically and emotionally exhausted and in June she felt gripped by a depression just as deep and as black as the one she suffered during the winter of 1948–49. In New York Ellen’s jealousy reached monstrous proportions – she could not understand why Pat didn’t want to spend every evening with her. During one argument about a party – Highsmith wanted to go along, Ellen, as usual, forbade her – Ellen became so angry she ripped her lover’s shirt from her back. On 1 July, Highsmith decided she had finally had enough. She decided they would have to separate, once and for all. Ellen became hysterical and, after downing a couple of Martinis, knocking them back like water, she threatened to take an overdose of veronal. ‘I love you very much,’ said Ellen, sitting naked on the bed as she swallowed eight pills. Highsmith, sickened by the sight of her, left the apartment, called on Kingsley and her husband, Lars, before going to have a supper of hamburgers with a friend. She arrived back at home at two in the morning to find Ellen in a coma. On the typewriter, Ellen’s suicide note read, ‘I should have done this 20 years ago. This is no reflection on you . . .’ Coffee and cold towels were no good so Pat had to call a doctor, who tried to pump Ellen’s stomach. Still Ellen was unconscious, so she was forced to call the police and then Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital.

     The next day, however, Ellen showed no sign of coming out of the coma. The doctor at Bellevue gave Ellen a fifty-fifty chance of survival, but rather than hang around her bedside, Pat took her lover’s car and drove up to Fire Island with a friend for the Independence Day holiday weekend. ‘I am escaping from hell,’ she wrote.
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She sunbathed on the beach at Cherry Grove, posed for some pictures, and forced herself to work, ‘believing Ellen is dead at this point’.
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In the evening, after drinking heavily, she picked a fight with a bunch of girls who turned on her and beat her up.

     Ellen had half-heartedly tried to commit suicide before – in June 1952, after reading Highsmith’s diary – but it was this second, more serious, attempt that Highsmith used as a basis for the incident she describes in
The Blunderer
. Clara, the neurotic wife, threatens to take an overdose of veronal, but Walter, her husband, ignores her and, like Highsmith, deliberately leaves the house so as to let her kill herself. ‘Walter could not escape the fact,’ Highsmith wrote in the novel, ‘that he had known she was going to take the pills.’
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Walter wonders whether his actions could be considered to be a kind of murder, and, in a way, Highsmith’s ruthless decision to leave Ellen, knowing she was going to swallow those pills, could be seen in the same light. ‘The suicide & Ellen’s character in the book,’ Highsmith wrote in her diary, ‘I find very disturbing & too personal.’
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     After the weekend in Fire Island, she returned to Manhattan and found that Ellen had survived. At the hospital, Pat held the older woman in her arms for nearly an hour; Ellen wanted her back, it was obvious, but Highsmith was undecided. ‘I am very unhappy – because of sheer indecision . . .’ she wrote. ‘So I drink.’
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Chapter 15

Pat H, alias Ripley

1953–1955

‘My personal maladies and malaises are only those of my own generation and of my time, heightened,’ Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1950.
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Highsmith’s absence from America had sharpened her powers of perception and on her return in 1953, she viewed the country from an outsider’s perspective, shocked at the mood of paranoia which was sweeping the USA. The Korean War, which rumbled on between 1950 and 1953, a battle between the communist North, backed by China, and the non-communist South, supported by America, symbolised the ideological battle which was raging in the United States. By the time a settlement had been reached – in July 1953 – over five million people had died, but to the vast majority of Americans who were convinced that sending troops to a far-flung land actually helped guard their security and protected themselves from communist aggression, it was a worthwhile sacrifice. President Eisenhower, inaugurated in 1953, even discussed the use of atomic weapons in order to try and settle the conflict.