Beautiful Shadow (43 page)

     This last telling statement was soon to manifest itself not only in her work, with the creation of her next novel,
This Sweet Sickness
, but also in her life. As we know, the two were so intertwined it was often difficult to tell them apart.

Chapter 17

This sweet sickness

1958–1959

Highsmith’s
This Sweet Sickness
– published in 1960 – tells the story of David Kelsey, a chemist and chief engineer at a fabric company in the fictional New York town of Froudsburg, who is unable to forget his former girlfriend, Annabelle Stanton. After Annabelle rejects him she marries another man, Gerald, but Kelsey refuses to accept what he refers to as ‘the Situation’, reasoning, ‘I am incomplete without you.’
¹
Kelsey is so obsessed with his ex-lover that he creates another identity – that of William Neumeister – through whom he feels able to satisfy his repressed desires and live out his dreams of domestic bliss with his fantasy image of Annabelle.

     The name of the protagonist’s alter-ego – translated literally from the German it means ‘new master’ – was an apt one for a writer interested in exploring Nietzschean themes of power, guilt, repression and the concept of the superman. Highsmith had first read Nietzsche’s
Ecce Homo
in 1939, while she was a student at Barnard. It was, she found, a book which articulated many of her most pressing concerns. ‘Studies should come to answer a personal need, and for no other purpose,’ she noted at the time.
²
Nietzsche’s autobiography, written in 1888 and published posthumously in 1908, with its radical reassessment of morality, daring dismantling of traditional power structures and playful spirit of subversion, sparked Highsmith’s imagination.

     The famous nihilist, who spent the last eleven years of his life in a state of complete mental collapse – Nietzsche’s last letter to Cosima Wagner read, ‘Ariadne, I love thee. Dionysus’ – influenced Highsmith throughout her career. Indeed, Bruno in
Strangers on a Train
, Ripley in
The Talented Mr Ripley
and subsequent Ripley novels, and Vic in
Deep Water
could each be classified as a Nietzschean
Ubermensch
. Yet David Kelsey who literally transforms himself into a ‘new master’ must surely be the most fully realised embodiment of the superman in Highsmith’s fiction. ‘Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum “know thyself”,’ wrote Nietzsche in
Assorted Opinions and Maxims
, ‘but as if there hovered before them the commandment:
will
a self and thou shalt
become
a self.’
³

     Kelsey’s will to create another self is initially staggeringly successful. Reluctant to face up to the uncomfortable truth of rejection, he escapes into not so much a fantasy life as another parallel reality. Although Kelsey pretends to his friends and fellow residents at his run-down boarding house that his weekends are taken up by visits to his invalid mother in a nursing home, in fact each Friday evening he discards his monotonal existence in favour of the rather more colourful life of William Neumeister, who believes he does indeed live with his paramour in a large, luxurious house in the New York countryside.

     ‘With the new name came to some extent a new character,’ Highsmith writes, ‘William Neumeister, who had never failed at anything, at least nothing important, who therefore had won Annabelle.’
⁴
The split between the two selves – between the lonely, sordid, Hopperesque urban existence of Kelsey, and the glamorous, sophisticated, but ultimately fantastical, rural dream of Neumeister – can be read as a fictional reworking of Nietzsche’s exploration of the ‘will to power’. ‘Not necessity, not desire – no, the love of power is the demon of men,’ he said.
⁵
So strong is this urge, Nietzsche argues, that some men actually seek out a way of punishing themselves so as to regain a sense of self-control, as Kelsey does by immuring himself during the week at his drab boarding house.

     Nietzsche outlined the concept in
Human, All Too Human
. ‘For certain men feel so great a need to exercise their strength and lust for power that, in default of other objects or because their efforts in other directions have always miscarried, they at last hit upon the idea of tyrannizing over certain parts of their own nature, over, as it were, certain segments or stages of themselves . . . Thus a man climbs on dangerous paths in the highest mountains so as to mock at his fears and trembling knees . . . This division of oneself, this mockery of one’s own nature, this
spernere se sperni
of which the religions have made so much, is actually a very high degree of vanity . . . In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.’
⁶

     The two sides of Highsmith’s Nietzschean hero fall into such a dialectical pattern. So pure is Kelsey that fellow residents at his boarding house nickname him ‘The Saint’; he seems to show no interest whatsoever in women and all his weekends, so it is generally believed, are taken up by visiting his sick mother. His more diabolical self, however, in the assumed identity of William Neumeister, is dedicated to pleasure, indulging in bottles of Pouilly-Fuisse and Frascati, endless Martinis and imported mustards, and is rather partial to a good steak. His taste in interior design, in stark contrast to the ugly yellow walls of the rented room in Froudsburg, with its worn carpet and shabby, brown-coloured double bed, is impeccable. The house near Ballard – his temple to Annabelle – is fitted out with brown and white cowhide rugs, comfortable sofas and all the aspirational trappings of the post-war American suburban dream.

     Surrounding himself with possessions, he is able to slip into his new identity and forget the truth of the Situation. ‘In this house, his house, he liked to imagine himself William Neumeister – a man who had everything he wanted, a man who knew how to live, to laugh and to be happy.’
⁷
As the reificator he so obviously is, Neumeister casts Annabelle as one of the many beautiful objects in his country home and, like a modern-day Pygmalion dreaming about his Galatea, comes to believe in the fantasy rather than the reality, in her presence, rather than her absence. ‘He behaved as if he were with her, even when he meditatively ate his meals,’
⁸
Highsmith writes. The frisson he gets when thinking of Annabelle is unmistakably erotic and when he goes to bed he fills the empty space next to him with a vision of the object of his adoration. ‘Her head lay on his arm, and when he turned to her and held her close, the surge of his desire had more than once reached the summit and gone over with the imagined pressure of her body  . . .’
⁹

     As Kelsey retreats further into fantasy, so Neumeister the superman comes to dominate his character. ‘Overcome, you higher men,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘the petty virtues, the petty prudences, the sand-grain discretion, the ant-swarm inanity, miserable ease, the “happiness of the greatest number”.’
¹⁰
As if obeying Nietzsche’s command, Kelsey rejects the ordinary world of the boarding house and posits himself as a man superior to the mass of mediocrity which surrounds him. He compares Gerald’s underlip to a ‘monkey’s behind’,
¹¹
regards Annabelle’s life without him as unbearably ‘dreary’,
¹²
her new partner as ‘another nobody . . . another second rater’,
¹³
and snobbishly dismisses her wedding ring as ‘one of those plain bands of gold, solid and convex, that had become too common in the world for David’s taste’.
¹⁴

     His final gesture as an
Übermensch
occurs after he nihilistically articulates the bleakness of the universe, commenting that, ‘Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.’
¹⁵
On the run from the police after he has accidentally killed Gerald in a fight, Kelsey becomes trapped on a window ledge of an apartment block eight storeys above Manhattan. Unable to accept the thought of being punished by laws not made by himself, he chooses to step into nothingness. As he lifts his foot away from the solidness of the stone, all he sees is ‘a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it’.
¹⁶
The denouement is a perfect Nietzschean moment.

     ‘Is a state of affairs unthinkable in which the malefactor calls himself to account and publicly dictates his own punishment . . . that by punishing himself he is exercising his power, the power of the lawgiver? . . .’ Nietzsche wrote. ‘Such would be the criminal of a possible future, who, to be sure, also presupposes a future lawgiving – one founded on the idea “I submit only to the law which I myself have given, in great things and in small.” ’
¹⁷

The general idea of a love affair conducted purely within the confines of the imagination had intrigued Highsmith for years – she had written the sketch for such a story as early as January 1947 – but her thoughts on fashioning the subject into a book started to take shape in the summer of 1958. The novel was born after her copywriter girlfriend, with whom she still lived, suggested she write about a man who ‘creates a second character, another man whose life he leads at certain times’.
¹⁸
After metaphorically ‘killing off’ his invented persona, the man, Barry, is suspected of murder after his fingerprints are found at the scene of the crime. The first draft, which at this stage she called ‘I Thee Endow’, could have turned into a rehash of
The Talented Mr Ripley
had it not been for the entrance into her life of the woman whose shadow haunts every page.

     In Highsmith’s journals for 1958, the inspiration for the book is only mentioned by a coded capital letter – M. But from the clues scattered throughout her unpublished notebooks, together with fragments gleaned from other sources, it is possible to piece together a picture of the woman – the artist and illustrator, Mary Ronin – who, like those who came both before and after her, served as a muse for Highsmith’s fiction. On 12 August 1958, Highsmith wrote in her cahier of the parallels between her feelings for her new ‘lover’ and the emotions she was experiencing while plotting her latest book, which she had now entitled
This Sweet Sickness
. What appealed to her was the fact that, in each case, her love affair and her book existed only within the perimeters of her imagination; she could preserve the purity of her relationship by circumscribing its limits and, at the same time, relish the thrill of anticipation she knew she would experience as she retreated from everyday reality and stepped into the world of fiction. Just as David Kelsey fantasised about his non-existent relationship with Annabelle Stanton, so Highsmith conducted an imaginary love affair with Mary Ronin, whom it seems she met in July. Without her, as Highsmith admitted in a cahier entry dated 5 November, ‘it would have been quite a different book’.
¹⁹

     Mary Jane Ronin was born on 18 December 1912 in Sycamore, Illinois, to Jas Ronin, a horsetrainer and his wife Blanch Darling, and spent her childhood in Nebraska. After studying art at Omaha University, she arrived in New York, age twenty-five, and in June 1938 started work in the advertising art department of Bloomingdale’s – the same Manhattan department store Highsmith would work in ten years later. ‘I drew everything they sold,’ she said. ‘Pots, pans, shoes, furniture – everything.’
²⁰
From Bloomingdale’s, she moved to Young and Rubicam, where she took a position as an art director, one of the first female art directors in New York. After seven years with the advertising agency, she took a sabbatical year in France, returning to Manhattan in 1953 to freelance. Photographs show her, glasses in hand, sitting at her drawing board; a slim, elegant woman with delicate features and a stylish dress sense. She described her home in Westport, Connecticut, situated on a wooded hillside, as ‘a Hansel and Gretel house’,
²¹
while her studio appeared almost alive with colour, packed as it was with sketches, watercolours and art books.