Beautiful Shadow (42 page)

     Arriving back in Sneden’s Landing in March – the same month ‘A Perfect Alibi’, the first of her many stories for
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, was published – Highsmith started work on
A Game for the Living
. But two months later, after writing fifty-eight pages, she remained dissatisfied with what she had produced. She did not see the character of Theodore fully and thought she had made him too comic a figure, while Ramon’s emotional history was still unclear. ‘Don’t know where I’m going,’ she said, ‘resulting in static effect.’
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Reading Kierkegaard, however, helped crystallise Ramon’s motivation and by 27 July, as she told her editor Joan Kahn, she had written 285 pages and was within twelve pages of finishing.

     ‘To me it is a “different” book, I mean for me, but may be considered the same old stuff by reviewers . . .’ she wrote. ‘I am prepared for a rejection, having imagined all this in the weeks past. I do think I can pull it off, which I wasn’t sure of at first.’
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     Her agent, however, thought otherwise, labelling the book a ‘crashing bore . . . without suspense and with too much talk’.
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After reading through the novel again, Highsmith agreed with her assessment and immediately started the arduous task of rewriting. As she did so, perhaps she followed the tips she set down in her notebook at the end of September for an article which would eventually be published in
The Writer
magazine and then reworked for her 1966 non-fiction book,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
.

Privacy. An expensive thing in the modern world . . . Take yourself seriously. Set a routine. Once you are alone, relax and behave as you will . . . While you are writing a book, you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional changes – you have no room for another stage.
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     The same month she read Colin Wilson’s influential study of literary and artistic alienation,
The Outsider
. The subject matter of the book – an examination of the works of writers and artists including Blake, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche – had always intrigued her both on a personal and intellectual level. ‘The enigma of consciousness, of self, of destiny,’ she wrote, ‘which has fascinated me, specifically since I was seventeen, when I asked myself no longer why but how I was different from other people. The book stirs my mind to the murky depths (emotional depths) in which I lived my adolescence like van Gogh and T.E. Lawrence trying to “gain control” by fasting, exercise, routines for doing everything.’
³¹

     The book, published in 1956, analysed the links between the outsider figure and creativity, drawing on an enormous range of literary and artistic references to flesh out the characteristics of the twentieth-century everyman, a figure who has all the attributes of a Highsmithian anti-hero. The outsider, concludes Wilson, sees ‘too deep and too much’
³²
(quoting from Henri Barbusse’s novel
L’Enfer
); feels as if he ‘had died already and am now living a posthumous existence’
³³
(Keats, in a letter to Browne just before his death); finds his identity fracturing into splinters, observing how he is ‘dividing into parts’
³⁴
(T.E. Lawrence,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
); and is plagued by a deep sense of nausea – ‘The nausea is not inside me; I feel it
out there
, in the wall, in the suspenders; everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café; I am the one who is within it.’
³⁵
(Jean-Paul Sartre,
The Diary of Antoine Roquentin
.) The emotional anaemia, indifference to life and the horror that one might be controlled by a hidden aspect of the self, complete the outsider’s profile. It could be argued that each of Highsmith’s novels explores the theme, articulated by Blake and quoted by Wilson in
The Outsider
, that ‘Each Man is in His Spectres power’.
³⁶
The phrase captures the Jungian archetype of the shadow. ‘The shadow,’ wrote Jung, ‘personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly – for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.’
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Now that Highsmith was, to some degree, in control of her life – she was in a settled, and seemingly happy, relationship – it is ironic that the writer produced work which could be said to rank as the weakest of her oeuvre. In November she started writing what she envisaged as a ‘political satire, in the manner of Voltaire’,
³⁸
entitled ‘The Straightforward Lie’. The completed, but wisely unpublished novel, focuses on the experiences of George Stephanost, a twenty-one-year-old engineering student who is chosen by his country as an informal representative on a trip around the world. While the theme of this picaresque novel is the cultural specificity of morality – and in particular a critique of American values – Highsmith’s satirical touch is so heavy that she leaches the tale of humour. Halfway through the novel, a four-foot-tall figure appears to George and tells him that he can read his mind and that the student has evil, selfish thoughts. Prompted by his encounter with this dwarf-like creature, on his return home George informs the government officials of the shocking sights he has witnessed around the world. ‘Truth is evil, evil is truth,’ he concludes, inverting the Keatsian phrase. ‘There is some good, but it is hard to find. If anybody doubts this, he should make a trip around the world . . . Now repeat after me our creed. Truth is evil –’
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The government, however, doesn’t take kindly to their fledgling diplomat’s discoveries and the novel ends with George being confined to an asylum.

     Although ‘The Straightforward Lie’ never found a publisher, she did, at least, manage to put the title to good use, selecting it as the name of the book Theodore is due to illustrate for his writer friend, Kurt Zwingli, in
A Game for the Living
. In that novel, Theodore describes the book in his journal as, ‘A satire of modern life. A young man who never existed – like those in the exercises of old-fashioned grammar books who stay at
pensions
in London in order to learn the language . . . travels around the world today and finds everybody dubious about the good and value of everything, cynical and pessimistic.’
⁴⁰

     Highsmith herself realised that her powers were not at their peak. Perhaps, she asked herself, this was because of her comfortable relationship with her new girlfriend? The situation was only compounded when, in November, she was reminded of what she was capable of when the news arrived that she had won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policíre for
The Talented Mr Ripley
. Three days into the new year of 1958, Highsmith opened her notebook and tried to analyse just what had gone wrong. She looked back upon her old self – what she called her ‘adolescent-adult status quo’ – when she spent a greater proportion of time alone, and acknowledged that the swing between elation and depression produced some of her best writing.

If my new book,
A Game for the Living
is well received, my mind will be set at rest insofar as worldly opinion goes, but not so far as my own mind goes  . . .

     My present house is not big enough for two people, especially if one is a writer . . . The interesting thing is why I endure it. Is it not a further and more serious dissipation under the guise of the bourgeois, the healthy, conventional, comfortable and orderly? It is no guise to me. I have always consciously hated it.

     Perhaps what it comes down to is that I have had about enough, perhaps spoilt my last book effort. I am trying to save myself! Like Gide, I can exist, and of course grow, only by change, a challenge to which I have to make an adjustment, an upsetting, of course, which in the end is beneficial, though in the course of it I may lose an eye or a leg. What proffiteth it a man, however, tranquility and orderliness, if thereby he lose his soul?
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     On 14 February, Highsmith received the news she had been half expecting – Joan Kahn’s five-page analysis of exactly why
A Game for the Living
was so flawed. Having Salvador, a boy from the streets, as the murderer of Leila, was just not convincing, she said. ‘The boy gets two lines on page seventy-one – and is not mentioned again until page 202 . . .’ Kahn wrote. ‘The strength of the suspense novel, and the strength of any novel, is that the author does not introduce personalities and incidents, however interesting, that have no particular bearing on the particular book the author is writing . . . as is obvious from all the above, I hope you will consider changing the ending.’
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     After suffering what she described to Joan as a ‘brief attack of nervous indigestion’
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prompted by the letter, Highsmith replotted the novel, finishing another draft by the middle of March. Kahn agreed that Pat had improved the ending, but, as the stern taskmaster she so clearly was, she requested further work on the book, including the addition of more detailed character descriptions within the first few pages. In September 1958, in an attempt to garner some publicity for the novel, Joan Kahn sent off the galleys to a number of influential figures, including Alfred Hitchcock, Katherine Anne Porter and the celebrated mystery novelist Dorothy B. Hughes, author of
In a Lonely Place
. On 9 November, Hughes wrote back apologising for her late response and her inability to supply Kahn with a pithy quote, confessing her dislike for Highsmith’s novels, ‘and I particularly did not like what (to me) was her lack of empathy to the Mexican nationals in this, although her scene was a good one’.
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Kahn admitted that Highsmith wasn’t ‘everyone’s meat’.
⁴⁵

     Later, Highsmith came to regard
A Game for the Living
, published in November 1958, as one of her worst novels. ‘The murderer is off-scene, mostly,’ she said, ‘so the book became a “mystery who-dunnit,” in a way – definitely not my forte.’
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She concluded that the book, which she said was ‘the only really dull book I have written’,
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lacked the elements which she thought were vital in her novels – ‘surprise, speed of action, the stretching of the reader’s credulity, and above all that intimacy with the murderer himself . . . The result was mediocrity.’
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     As a form of light relief from the intensity of novel-writing, Pat turned to her sketchpad, first knocking off a couple of drawings which she thought might suit
The New Yorker
– unfortunately she found the literary journal so intimidating she failed to do anything with them. Then she concentrated her artistic efforts on a children’s book,
Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda
, written with her friend Doris Sanders. Highsmith would do the illustrations, while Doris would provide the captions such as, ‘A tinkling bell on a gazelle’. ‘Some myrtle on a turtle’, ‘A monk and a skunk and some junk on an elephant’s trunk’, and ‘A veil on a snail’. The book was accepted for publication by Coward-McCann and published later in the year.

     As Highsmith worked on the children’s book, her relationship with her girlfriend started to deteriorate. Highsmith found the atmosphere of the house in Sneden’s Landing claustrophobic and in June she wrote in her notebook of how much she dreaded not so much the rows but the resulting reconciliations. ‘Give me fantasies any day! Fantasies of making love to an attractive friend who is unavailable  . . .’
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