Beautiful Shadow (50 page)

     While researching the novel, Highsmith also read John Bartlow Martin’s
Break Down the Walls
, a non-fiction analysis of the 1952 riots at the State Prison of Southern Michigan in Jackson, described by the author as ‘the most dangerous prison riot in American history’.
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The influence of the book on Highsmith is clear, both in terms of its subject matter and its documentary style. Martin writes of ‘The Hole’ – a name Highsmith borrowed for her book to convey the hell of the solitary confinement quarters – describing in detail the solid steel doors, the bare wooden bench for sleeping, the absence of wash bowl, bed, and light bulbs. Martin goes on to trace the roots of the Jackson riots – and explores the history of the prison system, debating the reasons for its failure and suggesting solutions to the problem of crime and punishment. In
The Glass Cell
, Highsmith is quite clear in her condemnation of the prison system, serving as it does only to corrupt an innocent man, Philip Carter, and opinion which reflects Martin’s bold statement at the end of his book: ‘The American prison system makes no sense. Prisons have failed as deterrents to crime. They have failed as rehabilitative institutions . . . Prisons should be abolished . . . Prison is not just the enemy of the prisoner. It is the enemy of society.’
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     Highsmith was keen to see inside a prison for herself and on 19 December 1962, together with an American criminal lawyer, she visited one in Doylestown, near her New Hope home. ‘He [the lawyer] could not get me past the bars, but at least I could wait in the lobby just outside and see the prisoners walking freely in and out of cells whose doors stood open . . . and I watched them for perhaps forty minutes.’
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Although she had researched the novel carefully and admitted that it would be a ‘challenge to my imagination, a difficult job to do well’,
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she could not have foreseen the trouble she would have with the book.

     Originally she conceived the story in allegorical terms, envisioning the prison as representative of the world, but soon realised that such a heavy-handed approach would be unfeasible. She thought she was ready to start writing the novel in mid-December, just before her visit to the prison in Doylestown, but she missed X in London, a feeling of wretchedness which threatened to unbalance her. She wrote in her diary, ‘Such unhappiness and loneliness as I felt today must be counteracted by work, or I shall go mad.’
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By 11 January 1963, she had written forty pages, but the book was interrupted by ill-health – in early February a doctor diagnosed exhaustion and prescribed Vitamin B12 shots together with the advice that she should eat more liver – and the move from New Hope to Positano. She sailed across the Atlantic in February, stopping in Lisbon and arrived at the house at 15 Via Monte at the end of the month, just as Positano was in the grip of a cold spell. As she tried to settle down to work she received a telegram from London asking her to call X – she was upset and could no longer hide the truth about her affair with Highsmith from her husband. According to Highsmith, although her lover’s husband had guessed the truth of the situation, he did not bear the couple any ill-will and even thought that Pat’s presence in London might help lift his wife’s spirits. ‘It seems I’ll never have the tranquillity or the time to work again,’ wrote Highsmith in her diary. ‘The prison book is in my head, but however to get it on paper?’
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The next day, the writer took a taxi to Naples, a train to Rome and then a flight to London. Over the next few days, X’s mood gradually improved until she felt well enough to accompany her husband out socially. Meanwhile, Highsmith stayed home alone. Later, in 1968, after the relationship between the two women had failed, Highsmith wrote in her diary of her stupidity for being fooled by her lover’s sudden recovery. ‘I should put her in a book one day,’ she concluded.
¹⁵

     While in London, Highsmith did a couple of interviews to help publicise
The Cry of the Owl
, due for its British publication in May, including a radio broadcast with literary journalist Francis Wyndham. ‘I remember both of us were so nervous we needed a drink,’ says Wyndham, ‘but her hands were shaking so much that the sound of ice in the glass blocked out her voice. I liked her immediately. She was very unpretentious and did not behave like she was a great writer – she talked about how much her books sold and things like that. I could tell that she was shy and reticent, a woman with deep feelings, someone who was affectionate, but also difficult. I don’t think she was a very happy person. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she was attractive. She was like a certain sort of American woman who wears slacks; there was nothing feminine about her at all. Some of her books are terrifying and I soon realised that she couldn’t
not
have a dark side.’
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Wyndham followed up the interview with a piece in the
New Statesman
, the first article in a British newspaper or magazine to analyse Highsmith as a serious novelist rather than as an author of genre fiction. Highsmith liked the critique so much that she wrote to Wyndham from Positano to thank him. ‘Guilt is her theme,’ wrote Wyndham, ‘and she approaches it through two contrasting heroes. These may be simplified as the guilty man who has justified his guilt and the innocent man who feels himself to be guilty.’
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Her 1955 novel,
The Talented Mr Ripley
, he believed ‘sheds more light on “the problem of identity” than many solemn approaches to a fashionable subject.’
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Although the reviewer thought Highsmith in
The Cry of the Owl
was ‘writing well below top form,’ nevertheless ‘she still maintains an exciting pitch of narrative tension . . . Miss Highsmith’s plots are often praised for being ingenious, but they are never tidy; chance, coincidence, silly misunderstandings play their part, as they do in life. She knows that people do not always act in their own best interests, and that their motives are more obscure than psychological novelists often care to admit.’
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Wyndham’s acute observations on Highsmith’s work also offer a prescient insight into the writer’s life: for all the self-analysis contained in her cahiers and diaries, her motivation was often just as self-destructive, irrational and opaque as that which drove many of her characters.

     That spring, the writer travelled back to Italy with X, but soon after arriving in Positano, Highsmith was struck down by acidosis and vomiting, an attack which lasted twenty hours. ‘It was the most painful night of my life,’ she wrote.
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Yet she was touched by her lover’s kindness and although their relationship was far from easy – X believed homosexual relations were flawed and she was constantly torn between conventional and bohemian instincts – Highsmith was upset when she had to return back to London after less than a month away. Indeed, over Easter, after receiving no letter from X, Highsmith confessed in her diary that she could imagine ending it all. ‘I have imagined killing myself, strangely more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known . . . I set this down because for the first time suicide has crossed my mind – I think only in a romantic way . . . It is generally selfish, which is my main objection to it.’
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If her lover did leave her, she was certain she would do it. However, after a letter in which X told Pat of her continuing love for her, she felt so happy she changed her will, leaving half her estate to her mother, half to X in London, while her literary manuscripts she bequeathed to Kingsley.

     Alone in Positano, Highsmith worked on
The Glass Cell
. ‘The book still uncertain,’ she wrote on 3 May, noting that she had completed 104 pages, ‘am not in the depths yet, but reasonably confident & happier than I’ve been in many a month.’
²²
But, by the time she had finished another 150 pages, a month later, she realised that ‘at p 245 it is only now breaking into the story!’
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Most evenings she spent by herself, writing letters to X about their forthcoming summer holiday in Aldeburgh, Suffolk; reading T.E. Lawrence’s
The Mint
, Golding’s
The Lord of the Flies
and Balzac’s
Père Goriot
; and subsisting on spaghetti with meat sauce. Occasionally she met fellow resident Peter Thomson for drinks. ‘Pat was an enormously attractive person and she did not suffer fools at all,’ recalls Peter, whom Highsmith thought the most talented painter in Positano. ‘She was basically very honest and said what she felt. She was also a jolly good painter – I remember this one work she did of a gigantic cat’s head, which I thought was quite magical. Both of us were heavy drinkers in those days and her capacity for alcohol was certainly very impressive.’
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     That summer, just as she was putting what she thought were the finishing touches to
The Glass Cell
, she received a telegram from London requesting her presence; according to Highsmith, once again X was unsettled by the situation. Dutifully, Highsmith packed her bags for London, from where the two women travelled to Aldeburgh for a month’s holiday. She described the Suffolk seaside town as ‘full of the atmosphere and domestic decor which I call 1910 or Edwardian’, and recorded in her notebook that a haircut cost 2/6 and a small lobster, 5/6.
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     Highsmith returned to Positano – alone – in early August, where she conceded that her prison novel was ‘messy in spots, long in others’
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and plotted a new ending. She flirted with the possibility of wintering in Rome and although, in early October, she did rent an apartment in the Italian capital, at 38 Via Vecchiarelli, her stay was a short one. On 5 October, she wrote to Jenny Bradley telling her that she had just finished
The Glass Cell
and had sent off the manuscript to America. Ten days later, Joan Kahn wrote to Patricia Schartle, thanking her for sending her the first 188 pages of the novel. Although she thought Highsmith described the terrors of prison life in graphic detail, some of the details were rather repetitious. In addition, the pace of the book was too slow. ‘But more important – the people don’t come through . . .’ she wrote, ‘one can’t identify with the characters . . . On the basis of what’s here, I’d have to say “no contract”.’
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Patricia Schartle sent Harper’s the remaining pages of the novel, but on 13 November, Joan Kahn wrote to Highsmith, still in Rome, outlining the problem with the book. As she saw it, the character of Carter was unclear: ‘Carter before prison we know too little. Carter after prison is certainly a man in a mess – but the mess seems to us one that, though prison may have enlarged it, probably existed before . . . there isn’t enough surprise, or depth, to keep us interested – and not enough to make us care.’
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     Highsmith’s spirits were already low before she received the letter. She regretted leaving Positano for Rome and she worried about her finances – at the end of October she had estimated that her total income for the year came to $4,400, and she was sure she was spending more than she earned. On 26 October she wrote in her diary of her increasingly anxious state of mind. ‘I was quite frantic & exhausted Mon–Wed & thought I might have to go to a hospital, a psychiatrist – or whatnot – for some manner of sedation. Everything has gone wrong this year, financially, with the sole exception of Heinemann buying [
The Two Faces of
]
January
& I have not sold anything I have done in the last 15 months. Is there any wonder I am discouraged?’
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     She left Rome at the beginning of November and, after a brief spell in London, she moved into a house in Aldeburgh – at 27 King Street – which she rented for five guineas a week. It was in the Suffolk seaside town that, on 22 November, while in Jay’s Hotel, packed with Americans, she heard of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. ‘I only saw her in despair once, and that was after the murder of John Kennedy,’ says Richard Ingham, who lived in Aldeburgh at the time. ‘She came bursting into our flat . . . just a few yards along from her own house, and absolutely bellowed, “Oh, Richard, what the hell’s wrong with America?”
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In her diary, Highsmith noted how the whole world was just as shocked as America.