Beautiful Shadow (48 page)

     The book comprises the letters and diary of Juliette Tallifer Dorn, a forty-one-year-old Philadelphia-born teacher, living in Geneva with her husband, Eric, an electrical engineer and their seventeen-year-old son, Philip John. Juliette is staying in the fictional town of Gemelsbach for the summer, where for two hours a day she sits down and writes the history of her homosexual affairs for the benefit of her husband. ‘Should I do my life first or tell about the First Girl?’ she asks herself. ‘My life being not the facts that you know, but the trail, the chain of crushes and loves, amounting to nothing but memories – but such memories!’
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     Her first love dated back to childhood, when she was six and the other girl, Marjorie, was ten. ‘The important fact is that she was a girl, a female,’ Highsmith writes.
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Then, aged ten, she had a crush on another girl, Helen, although neither of them touched one another. ‘I knew so well the pleasure, through imagination, knew through its intensity and through some sense I cannot give a name to that it was tabu, unnatural, that I would be punished for it if caught, and possibly scorned by the object of my affection, if I made any advances to her. This was enough to keep me in check.’
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     Juliette recounts how at eleven, she was browsing in the psychology section of the local library when she came across the word ‘lesbian’; the term sent a chill of fear through her body. Three years later, age fourteen, she caught a glimpse of a girl and immediately fell in love with her, an infatuation which lasted for three years. Then, when she was sixteen, she attempted to make love with a nineteen-year-old man, an indifferent experience she didn’t particularly want to repeat. By the time she was seventeen, and her parents had moved to Switzerland, she knew that she was odd. Like Highsmith, Juliette refused to eat, a condition which eventually resulted in low blood pressure and anaemia. At boarding school, she met another girl, Veronica Miniger, who had a long history of sleeping with other women. But although their affair lasted three years, the relationship came to an end when Veronica’s mother discovered the truth about her daughter. The short novel ends with a return to the present and a series of letters from Juliette’s latest love interest, Penelope Quinn, a twenty-three-year-old ballet dancer.

     The book, although fictional, obviously had its base in Highsmith’s own life. In fact, throughout the first quarter of 1961, she looked back on her past affairs for inspiration, noting down the initials of her various lovers and how her life had been affected by them. The heroine herself would be based on none other than Ellen Hill, ‘with many of her attractive qualities and few of her faults’.
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The novel, she said, would draw on her friendships with a range of women including her first girlfriend, Virginia; Helen (the girl at Barnard); Allela Cornell; Virginia Kent Catherwood, ‘the inevitable Lilith. Physical pure and simple’;
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and possibly Chloe, with whom she had travelled to Mexico, ‘although she gave me no roots, and I could not write of her as a love with any feeling’.
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The objective of the book would be, she said, ‘to depict the mature woman (in every sense) who cannot keep herself from practising homosexuality, even if for social reasons she would wish to’.
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     Highsmith, however, only wrote fifty-nine pages of this lesbian novel. In April 1961, just as she was splitting up from Marijane Meaker, she felt compelled to write a story which had even greater resonances for her own life –
The Cry of the Owl
, part of which is set in Lambertville, just across the Delaware River from New Hope. The novel takes as its subject matter the warped relationship between a stalker, Robert Forester and his victim, Jenny Thierolf. The opening scene, in which Highsmith describes the thrill Robert experiences as he gazes at Jenny in her fairy-tale style house – it bears a remarkable similarity to the Ridgewood home of Kathleen Senn, the woman Pat had served in Bloomingdale’s – one gets the impression that Highsmith was writing about her own voyeuristic pleasures eleven years previously.

Whenever Robert looked at her of an evening, for the first time in two or three weeks, he felt struck or smitten in a way that made his heart jump, then beat faster for a few seconds . . . What he felt, what he had was like a terrible thirst that had to be quenched. He had to see her, had to watch her.
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     Indeed, at the end of May, while Highsmith was working on the outline of the novel, she wrote to Kingsley, ‘I am writing something out of my system, which is not so therapeutic as it sounds; all my books come out of my system, but this one more so. I only hope I have the real distance, which makes for art not therapy. I only know that I must do it before I do anything else. It is really only a character which is from “my system”, the story is of course totally invented, and not from real life.’
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     In the middle of June, Pat found that she couldn’t abide light and noticed that she was feeling unusually nervous. Then, spots began to pepper her stomach, back and upper arms – she had developed a case of German measles. The symptoms were physically painful – in addition to the spots, she developed tender, swollen glands in her neck and her face flushed roseate – but, as when she developed chickenpox and conceived the plot of
The Price of Salt
, she found the measles beneficial to her imagination. During the illness she settled on an ending to her novel. By 7 July she had written 263 pages of her first draft. ‘Good books,’ she said, ‘write themselves’,
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and, sure enough, by the beginning of February 1962 she had finished it.

     Yet after the book was published – by Harper’s in 1962, and by Heinemann in Britain the following year – Highsmith considered
The Cry of the Owl
one of her weakest books, describing the hero as ‘rather square . . . a polite sitting duck for more evil characters, and a passive bore’.
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Critics, however, thought it one of her most powerful novels. ‘As Sophocles hit on the incest, so Miss Highsmith hits on the murder which is in the unconscious and will out,’ commented Brigid Brophy. ‘
The Cry of the Owl
builds up Websterian tragedy.’ She went on to praise the novelist for tackling ‘what Dickens more than once approached but veered away from, the psychology of the self-elected victim’.
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In 1967, Brophy would tell an interviewer from
The New York Times Book Review
‘I think, in the last twenty years, there have been five or six novels that have been very good, and that is all one is entitled to expect. Two that I think of are Patricia Highsmith’s
The Cry of the Owl
and Nabokov’s
Lolita
.’
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     Underpinning the novel is an unsettling nexus of voyeuristic compulsions and delusional fantasies. Robert is driven to spy on Jenny because the sight of her cooking in the kitchen or pottering about her home, makes him, on one level, feel undeniably happier and calmer. Jenny represents idealised domesticity and, like Annabelle in
This Sweet Sickness
, an unreal image of femininity – ‘To Robert, she was all of a piece, like a properly made statue.’
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Watching her also seems to satisfy an unconscious need in him as Jenny reminds him of ‘a picture or a person he already knew from somewhere’.
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     The discovery of a strange man lurking in the bushes could, in a lesser novelist’s hands, have been reduced to a melodramatic scene full of horror and disbelief. But when Jenny sees Robert watching her she does not behave hysterically or call the police, perhaps the ‘logical’ reaction in such a situation. Rather, she invites the prowler into her house and offers him a cup of coffee. ‘ “I suppose you think I’m insane, asking you to come in,” ’ she says.
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Her irrationality, like Robert’s, stems from a feeling that the stranger is representative of a larger symbol, one she does not yet fully understand. It is the recognition of this emotional blueprint, rather than the personality, intellect or physique of Robert Forester, that Jenny falls in love with. As Robert gradually loses interest in her – the reality of her is just too much for him to bear – so Jenny becomes increasingly obsessed with her one-time stalker.

     Jenny’s fiancé, Greg Wyncoop, also develops an unhealthy desire to spy on both his girlfriend and love rival, Forester, thereby completing the voyeuristic matrix. ‘ “I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn’t keep watching to see what everybody else did, we’d all go beserk.” ’ Robert tells his therapist. ‘ “Left on their own, people wouldn’t know how to live.” ’
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     Written in Highsmith’s distinctive, cool, detached style,
The Cry of the Owl
, juxtaposes the everyday and the extraordinary, the pathetically banal and the genuinely tragic. For instance, Robert’s friend from his days in army service, Kermit, was killed not in the Korean War, but by a freak accident involving a catapult while training in Alaska. Throughout the book, incidents which run the risk of tipping over into excessive melodrama are undermined by being grounded in the mundane and the ordinary. When Robert and Jenny are in the middle of a heated argument about whether he should admit to the police about his fight with Greg, Highsmith introduces a line about cooking frozen chicken pies for supper. ‘These chicken pies won’t be done in half an hour,’ says Jenny, before worrying about whether they are cooked all the way through and when they should be eaten – before or after the visit from the police.
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Conversely, everyday objects are posited as strange and otherworldly – a bank of used cars is described as looking like ‘a vast army of dead soldiers in armor’,
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while the cry of an owl in the wood becomes symbolic of death.

     When Greg disappears and an unidentified corpse is found downriver. Jenny jumps to the conclusion that Robert is responsible for her fiancé’s death and, in a disturbed state of mind, realises the symbolic meaning of the man who used to watch her from the woods. Robert is, like the cry of the owl, representative of death. The chapter in which Highsmith describes Jenny’s unsettled mind as she prepares to kill herself must rank as one of the most compelling and convincing suicide scenes in fiction as it documents the sordid reality of the act, while at the same time capturing the stream-of-consciousness images which flit through a despairing and dying mind. Jenny walks outside, into the garden where she first met Robert, drowsy from sleeping pills, carrying a sweater she was knitting for him. There she lies down and cuts her wrists. ‘It was too dark to see, or her eyelids were closing, but she could feel warm blood flowing down her raised forearm  . . .’
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     The final climax of the book is, as Brigid Brophy suggested, reminiscent of the last act of a Jacobean tragedy set in suburban America. The scene – a confrontation between Robert, his ex-wife Nickie and Greg – is awash with blood and gore; a wound is described as ‘like a little mouth with bright blood jetting from it’,
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while the red stain on one of the characters’ shirts is likened to a strange flower ‘blossom’.
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     Reading the book can be likened to taking a hallucinogenic drug, one that alters one’s perceptions and uncomfortably shifts the basis of reality. It’s hardly surprising then that Joan Kahn, after reading the manuscript, described the novel, in a letter dated 8 February 1962, as, ‘a strong drink, and may not be everyone’s curl-up-with choice . . .’
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A few days later a contract was drawn up promising an advance of $1,500. Kahn, the fierce task-mistress, was, as Highsmith knew only too well, not easily pleased, but she was astounded by the novel’s intensity. ‘You’ve done an amazing job,’ she added.
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After a spate of disastrous affairs, Highsmith was understandably anxious about entering into another relationship. Flicking through old diaries, she came to the conclusion that her personal life had been, so far, ‘a chronicle of unbelievable mistakes’.
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Why did she keep repeating the same patterns? What lessons could she learn? Would she ever be happy? Although in the future she resolved to try and avoid women who were fundamentally sadistic in temperament, the problems were, she realised, so deeply ingrained in her personality that it was unlikely anything would change. ‘I avoid nothing,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘I show everything I feel, even without speaking. I play nothing cautiously, and last of all will I ever save myself in an emotional situation.’
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