Beautiful Shadow (46 page)

     Other friends point out that, later in life, she could be ridiculously repressive – and terribly moralistic – in her view of how other people should lead their lives. ‘There was one woman [who lived nearby] who had been living with a man for five years and Pat would go on and on about this relationship, about “her latest lay”,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘I said once, “Pat, how many years do they have to be together before this gentleman goes on to a higher level than ‘her latest lay’?” But Pat did not approve. She was very judgmental about people’s sexual inclinations, which is kind of funny when you think of her own. I think it represented the flip side of her idealisation of the intellect – up there she had created an altar to logic, but accompanying this was a tremendous disgust for copulation. I said to her, “Jesus, could we not find something in the middle? After all, there are limits to what you can do with a very logical mind. People sleep together, Pat – human beings do that.” ’
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‘Highsmith was amoral, but only vicariously,’ adds Kingsley. ‘As a person she could be quite conventional, but she bought into the prevailing idea at the time that as an artist one was outside the norm.’
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     Her notebook entries reveal similar contradictions. As early as 1942 she wrote of how she found it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile conventional morality with the quirks of her personality. She frequently located herself outside the confines of generally accepted, popular notions of right and wrong, noting that she occupied a marginalised position on the fringes of society. In 1954, she wrote:

There is no moral to my life – I have none – except:

‘Stand up and take it’.

The rest is sentiment.
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     Yet, she clearly knew when she fell short of her own expectations. In October 1950, she was so ashamed of her own behaviour – her drunkenness, her promiscuity, her lack of control – that she wrote in her diary of her self-disgust. ‘And I feel I sink as low morally as any of the Village, wastrels of whom I have heard, have known, all my life, without suspecting I could ever be like them.’
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Writing a diary, she said in June 1955 – a year after abandoning the exercise to avoid Ellen Hill’s snooping – had helped keep her on the right moral pathway. It’s certain that she did not believe in moral platitudes – her sharp intelligence could easily see through the pretensions of bogus emotion – yet Highsmith, for all her aspirations towards amorality, had some standards that grounded her. One’s moral foundations, she told one interviewer, were laid down in the first five years of life: if a child was raised in a ‘decent’ home then the likelihood was he or she would grow up to be a good person, but if a youngster was the product of a broken home or similarly unstable environment then they were more likely to face the temptations that could lead them into crime.

     Like the fifties themselves, Highsmith had a paradoxical attitude towards morality and it is these contradictions, revealed by the very real wrestlings of conscience she documents in her notebooks, that are reflected in her work. As she said, each of her books, far from being a clear moral statement, was an argument with herself. It is this indefinability – an ambiguity that she claims, in
A Game for the Living
, as ‘the secret of life, the very key to the universe’
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– which invests her work with such power.

     ‘It is very, very difficult for me to know what to forgive among people’s vices (mine, too),’ she wrote in her notebook in 1959.
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How was it possible to make a value judgement about the morals of others or even oneself? At what point, she asked herself, did one no longer believe in the innate goodness secreted within each individual? She was certain that Europeans were brought up with a clearer idea of right and wrong than Americans and, as a result, they could at least find a position for themselves on the sliding scale of modern morality. Not only was she an American, but she also believed that, ‘only out of personal chaos and failure and humiliation can truth and real character come,’ and consequently it was, she said, ‘twice as hard for me’.
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Ultimately, she realised, it was impossible to lay down any fixed laws regarding morality because of the difficulties inherent in discerning motivation and the fact that interpretation of behaviour was not a science, but an art. ‘It is because of its flexibility that it torments me,’ she said.
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Highsmith boarded a plane in New York, bound for Paris, arriving in the French capital on 28 September 1959. Accompanying her on her trip – a publicity tour – was her mother. The two women checked into their hotel, the Hotel du Quai Voltaire, where, a few days later, Highsmith was due to be interviewed by a couple of journalists. On the agreed day, the writer was waiting in her room, wondering why the reporters were late, when the telephone rang. ‘The journalists told me that my mother was downstairs and for five minutes or more had tried to convince them that she was me,’ Highsmith wrote in a letter to her cousin, Dan Coates. ‘They took a snap of her to please her.’
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She went on to say that if she or Dan were to mention the incident, Mary would deny it ever happened or dismiss it as a silly joke. ‘I think a psychiatrist would put another meaning to it,’ she said.
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     Highsmith had worried about the state of her mother’s mental health since the mid-1940s, when her parents had moved to Hastings-on-Hudson. When Marc Brandel met Mary in 1949 he told Pat that he thought her mother ‘weird’,
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while the following year she wrote in her diary of the older woman’s anxieties and neuroses, psychological problems which she thought might drive her to commit suicide. By 1959, it was obvious that there was something seriously wrong with Mary and while in Paris, Highsmith noticed the terrifying resemblance between her sixty-four-year-old mother and her late grandmother, Willie Mae, at a much older age. It seemed, she said, as though Mary was suffering from a form of dementia – not only was she absent-minded, but she repeated herself incessantly and would often puncture the conversation with remarks Highsmith regarded as ridiculous and self-aggrandising. ‘My mother seems already to have entered anility,’ she wrote in her notebook, before adding, ‘It’s inevitable, too, to think that there go I in another twenty-five years.’
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     Mother and daughter spent just under a month together in Paris, before Pat waved her off, with an overwhelming sense of relief, on a flight to Rome. It had been a long time since she had been so repulsed by anything as her mother’s behaviour in Europe, she said. Detailing these feelings in her notebook, she expanded from the personal to the general and mused on how she might be able to explore such a personality – seemingly passive and feminine but in reality scheming and selfish – in her fiction. ‘Her unconscious is more intelligent than her conscious,’ she noted.
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     From Paris, Highsmith took a week’s break in Marseille, before returning to the French capital in November. In early December she travelled to Salzburg with a friend and then on to Greece, arriving in Athens at the end of the month. ‘Christmas will find me drinking ouzo, probably, instead of egg nog,’ she wrote to Joan Kahn before the trip.
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She was not overly impressed by Athens, finding the city a dusty mass of yellowing, flimsy buildings and its people primitive and ill-mannered. She spent the first day of the new year in Napflio, the elegant fortified town on the Peloponnese which was the fledging capital of modern Greece. From Heraklion, she wrote a cheery postcard to Jenny Bradley telling her French agent how much she was enjoying the holiday, although she was finding daily existence rather primitive, yet her notebook entries for the same period reveal a despondency she chose to keep to herself. As she gazed at the cold, turquoise waters of the Mediterranean it’s likely she would have looked back to the blissful holiday she had spent with Kathryn Cohen in the summer of 1949. Indeed, Kathryn had haunted her thoughts before she had left for Greece and in late September 1959, while in Paris, Highsmith had a dream that she was a man, coughing up blood the colour of pale lavender into a pristine white napkin. A doctor examined the evidence and diagnosed a fatal condition. Analysing the dream, Highsmith believed that she associated lavender with Kathryn, and her stay with her in London ten years before. The dream proved to be bad omen; over the New Year weekend of 1960, just as Highsmith was travelling through Greece, fifty-four-year-old Kathryn Cohen committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates at her house in Chelsea. ‘death of a ziegfeld girl’ screamed the
Daily Mail
headline on 5 January 1960. Highsmith never recorded how or when she heard the news – she did, however, keep the newspaper reports of the death – but on 3 February she wrote about how wretched she felt in her journal. ‘One interesting thing is that a stage is reached when nothing hurts any more . . .’ she said of her depression. ‘Things cannot become any worse, finally, for the one who is really depressed . . .’
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The same month she also noted how easy it was to hate the whole human race. ‘I cannot figure out how I must live,’ she added.
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Chapter 19

The ultra neurotic

1960–1962

On her return from Europe – she arrived at her New York apartment in February 1960 – Highsmith was greeted by the favourable reviews of
This Sweet Sickness
, published the same month. ‘The singular Patricia Highsmith has a cool affinity for aberration,’ wrote James Sandoe in the
New York Herald Tribune Book Review
. ‘Her treatment is internal, not clinical, and this makes for a sharp immediacy rather than a case history . . . It’s not so much that Miss Highsmith makes these proceedings plausible as that she makes them unquestionable. I think the world of Miss Highsmith because while she has me in her firm grasp, she is quite simply the world.’
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     Back at her desk, Highsmith started to muse on how she could transform the sights and sounds of Europe, particularly her out-of-season trip to Greece, into fiction. ‘I remembered a musty old hotel I had stopped at in Athens, where the service was not very good, where the carpets were worn out, in whose corridors one heard a dozen different languages a day, and I wanted to use this hotel in my book,’ she said. ‘I wanted also to use the labyrinthian Palace of Knossos, which I had visited.’
²
She also recalled, from the same trip, feeling ‘slightly rooked by a middle-aged man, a graduate of one of America’s most esteemed universities’; she thought she could use him as a basis for a character, a con-man. At the beginning of May she wrote in her notebook the idea for a ‘comic-tragic novel’
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focusing on the experiences of Chester MacFarland, who has embezzled $35,000 by selling shares in non-existent properties, and his arrival in Athens. This plot would eventually, after a great deal of heartache, form itself into her 1964 novel,
The Two Faces of January
.

     She worked on the book throughout 1960 and by mid-July she wrote to Jenny Bradley to tell her she was halfway through the as yet untitled novel. At the beginning of September she moved from New York to Pennsylvania, into a light, two-storey house set in the middle of a large field, on Old Ferry Road, ten miles from New Hope, where she lived for six months with the writer Marijane Meaker (aka M.E. Kerr, Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich) and where she continued work on the novel. ‘I began a book in the heat of this summer . . .’ she wrote to Joan Kahn on 6 September, ‘one of those books which midway necessitated some re-thinking, which I did during this rather colossal moving from city to country. I am going to plunge in again in this quieter atmosphere, and I expect to have it done before Christmas.’
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In October, she wrote to Jenny Bradley of the difficulties she faced reconciling the necessary, but time-consuming, chores of country living with the fact that she would have to expend most of her energy writing her novel. She confessed she had not yet resolved the matter.
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     As she wrote, she noted how the writer, by the very nature of his or her profession, was without a fixed personality, as ‘he is always part of his characters’.
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By November, after toying with ‘The Power of Negative Thinking’ – a title she would later use as the name of one of Howard Ingham’s novels in
The Tremor of Forgery
– and ‘Rydal’s Folly’ she settled on calling her new novel
The Two Faces of January
, appropriate for the Janus-faced, flux-like nature of her protagonists. On 7 December she wrote to Jenny Bradley to inform her that she had finished the novel. Her editor, Joan Kahn, however, thought otherwise and later Highsmith had to admit that it was ‘quite a mess in its first version’.
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