Beautiful Shadow (57 page)

     The book stands as a complex exploration of the intersections between life and its ever-reflecting imitations and an autobiographical expression of the writer at work. The novel functions, as Tunisia affects Ingham’s consciousness, like a ‘wavy mirror or a lens that inverted the image,’
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constantly undermining the accepted and the fixed, subjecting everything to an unsettling ‘fuzziness, or inversion of things’.
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The Tremor of Forgery
is also one of Highsmith’s most political novels, set as it is during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of June 1967. In chapter two, news of the start of the hostilities is relayed by an unnamed Western man who had just heard on television that the Israelis had started to blast several Arab airports. By chapter three, the war is over – the Israelis had secured a victory – but the conflict continues to resonate throughout the novel. Highsmith was decidedly anti-Israeli later in life – she boycotted the country from 1977 and despised Ariel Sharon. ‘I think the Jewish lobby, on the Middle East, is pulling Congress around by the nose,’ she told Ian Hamilton in 1977. ‘These little Congressmen are afraid of losing their jobs, frankly, if they don’t send money and arms to Israel . . . I don’t know why America should support a country that is behaving like that.’
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     Yet the portrait of the conflict which emerges from the novel is an uncertain one. Several of the characters, living in an Arab country, express strong anti-Arab feelings, including the Danish-born homosexual Jensen, who is not averse to a spot of sexual exploitation and whom a reader might expect to hold more liberal opinions. After the disappearance of his dog, Hasso, which he presumes to have been killed, he says to Ingham, ‘But I’ll tell you one thing, I hate the thought of Hasso’s
bones
being in this goddamn sand! Am I glad the Jews beat the shit out of them!’
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Similarly, Francis Adams – also known as OWL, an acronym for ‘Our Way of Life’ – whom one might think would proffer more pro-Israeli sentiments, criticises the Jewish state for its arrogant nationalism, ‘ “which was the hallmark of Nazi Germany, and for which Nazi Germany at last went to her doom”’.
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Ingham’s reaction is interesting because, against all expectations, he agrees, at least in part, with Adams’ beliefs, but he chooses to keep his opinions to himself. It just wasn’t worth it, he reasons, as the problem was not his – a lethargy suggestive of Ingham’s gradual collapse of his self. His lack of action after attacking the Arab with his typewriter could, in the same way, be seen as a symbol of the moral apathy at work in the world at large.

     After finishing the novel, in February 1968, Highsmith mused on the nature of evil, believing that fundamentally it was rooted in jealousy, adding that she was living through what she described as the ‘Age of Hypocrisy’. ‘This is the age of knowing – thanks to first hand witnesses, reports, television, photographs – how everyone else everywhere is living and just what kind of corruption is being practised by various parties.’
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Highsmith reflected the growing dissatisfaction with politics, a realisation that Robert Frost’s hope of a ‘golden age’ – words written at the same time as John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration – had come to naught.

     While writing
The Tremor of Forgery
she commented that she wanted the novel to reflect the ‘general sadness and futility of much of the world’, particularly Vietnam.
²⁴
Although the Vietnam War started in 1954, it wasn’t until America’s backing of the South against the communist North, in 1961, that the world began to take notice. By 1969, 550,000 American troops had been dispatched to the area, and by the end of the conflict, in 1975, with the communist North emerging victorious, 50,000 Americans had lost their lives, in addition to 900,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese and 400,000 South Vietnamese. High-profile names such as Martin Luther King, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, Robert Lowell and Benjamin Spock all voiced their protest against America’s actions. Highsmith was vehemently anti-war and in July 1968 she wrote to her friend Barbara Ker-Seymer telling her how she had penned a letter to the Barnard magazine attacking another alumna for what she saw as her whitewashing of Vietnam. She later told Ian Hamilton of the shame Americans felt over the Vietnam debacle. ‘Vietnam was exporting rice before we set foot there,’ she said. ‘Now they have to import it.’
²⁵

   
The Tremor of Forgery
explores the contradictory responses towards Vietnam by the use of two opposing characters, Francis Adams, who is pro-war and Ingham, very much against it. For Adams, ‘OWL’, the action in Vietnam is simply an extension of the American way, a conflict which he hopes will result in the Vietnamese believing in God and democracy. To Ingham, as to Highsmith, the war represents something more sinister, ‘introducing the Vietnamese to the capitalist system in the form of a brothel industry, and to the American class system by making the Negroes pay higher for their lays’.
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Adams may preach the message of universal democracy and global Christianity as the twin virtues which lie at the foundation of modern morality, but Ingham asks how a country can call itself Christian when it arms itself with nuclear weapons. In one of the tapes he plays to Ingham, Adams – who broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain under the name Robin Goodfellow, ‘an ordinary American citizen’ – addresses the issue of propaganda and asserts the moral superiority of capitalist society. Ironically, as Ingham realises, the clumsiness of his approach could actually have the opposite effect and culminate in an increase in anti-American feeling. Ultimately the real danger lay in American foreign policy. ‘The harm OWL did (and he might, by his absurdity, and by making nonsense of the Vietnamese War, be doing some good) was infinitesimal compared to the harm done by America’s foreign policy makers who actually sent people off to kill people.’
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     In November 1967, as Highsmith was near to completing the novel, she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer of her ambivalent feelings for the book, telling her friend that she was at once ‘pleased and doubtful about it’,
²⁸
while in January of 1968, she voiced her concerns in her notebook. She was worried, she said, that ‘its themes are not great enough, that it is not as “great” a book as I had wished’,
²⁹
and afraid that it wouldn’t be anything more than a popular success. Yet she was heartened by the opinions of Daisy Winston, who visited Highsmith over Christmas, who regarded it as a serious novel, and her agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, who asked Doubleday for a $3,000 advance, rather than Highsmith’s usual $1,500. Larry Ashmead, her editor at Doubleday, believed it to be one of her best books. ‘When I received
The Tremor of Forgery
I started to note down certain things from the book so I would know who was doing what and when and although it was so very complex, it all fell together beautifully,’ he says. ‘She was what I call a real caviar writer.’
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Highsmith was delighted by the news that Doubleday would publish it not in their Crime Club series but as a straightforward, non-genre novel, yet dismayed by the fact that her American publishers had problems with the title. According to Highsmith, Doubleday complained that ‘it sounds too much like a suspense book – so this is a slight pain to me, and I think I will argue about it and keep the title,’ she wrote to Alain Oulman. ‘It is
not
a suspense, etc. book, and you know how categorized the Americans are.’
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Although Highsmith was keen for the book to be taken seriously she was also conscious that it should appeal to as wide a readership as possible. While working on the novel she read Iris Murdoch’s
The Sandcastle
and
The Severed Head
, Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
and Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake
. She dismissed Joyce’s epic as too stylistically experimental for its own good – ‘A writer cannot write for his own pleasure alone and expect to be admired, loved, respected,’ she said
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– and later, in a letter to Alain Oulman, she described Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
as ‘lively and funny in spots . . . a bit insane and too full of whimsical humor . . . without form’.
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     When
The Tremor of Forgery
was published by Heinemann, complete with a dustjacket Pat thought ‘boring . . . all black, a drawing of Arab houses in white penline, and a sun which resembles a frying egg with orange yolk,’
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some of the reviews were, in Julian Symons’ words, ‘obtuse’.
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However, Symons, for one, was sure the novel was Highsmith’s most accomplished yet, precisely because ‘nothing much happens’.
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Janice Elliott, writing in the
New Statesman
, commented on the ambiguous nature of the prose, observing that Highsmith was in the process of almost creating a whole new novelistic form. ‘Thriller addicts can seize on it to prove that Crime has grown up to become Art,’ she wrote. ‘In fact, I doubt if there was ever this distinction in Miss Highsmith’s mind; so closely are the two elements fused, enriching each other, that a third genre is created . . . Miss Highsmith’s dry simplicity conceals a labyrinthian complexity it is a challenge and a pleasure to entangle.’
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Nearly twenty years later the novel was still attracting attention; in 1988 the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar expressed interested in filming it, while Terrence Rafferty, writing in
The New Yorker
, explained that he regarded the novel as Highsmith’s best. The author, he said, conjured her narrative as a series of mirages which disappear on closer inspection. ‘In this shimmery void, the only real movement is internal,’ he wrote.
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Early in 1967 Highsmith’s agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were ‘too subtle’, combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. ‘Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone,’ Highsmith replied. ‘My last books may be about animals,’
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an observation which presaged her 1975 book of short stories,
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murders
.

     The resentment that had simmered inside her ever since she was a child, combined with the bitterness she felt at having suffered nothing but broken relationships, was now resulting in an increasing intolerance towards the outside world, a misanthropy which was made only slightly more palatable by its accompanying black humour. In her notebook, she wondered whether a use could be put to the growing number of what she described as ‘morons’. ‘How about training them as casual servants, people who empty ashtrays, polish brass, made beds, wash dishes and generally go about picking up? . . .’ she wrote. ‘This idea would give the morons a home, not an institution, and a form of family life. (Best not to get a moron fond of fires.)’
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She directed her hatred towards other targets including babies, whom she thought could be ‘killed early, like puppies or kittens’
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so as to solve the problem of overpopulation, and the Vatican, which she hoped would be destroyed by American bombs. ‘I propose a toast to the Pope,’ whom she hated for his resistance to birth control. ‘ “I wish you, eternal pregnancy!” . . . “May your vagina be torn to pieces!” ’
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Her loathing of particular institutions and hypocrisies would later from the basis of her short-story collection,
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
, published in Britain by Bloomsbury in 1987 and in America by Atlantic Monthly Press two years later.

     Counterpointing this splenetical streak was her tendency to romanticise the past, forever fantasising about the return of lost lovers. Throughout the writing of
The Tremor of Forgery
she had been sustained by the memory of her relationship with Virginia Kent Catherwood – whom she recast as Lotte, Ingham’s ex-wife, in the novel – who had captured her heart twenty-two years before. During this time, she also had recurring dreams of Lynn Roth, her girlfriend from 1953. She dreamt that she was lying on a grassy sward reading a newspaper and next to her lay Lynn. Then a honeysuckle started to grow out of the top of the paper, from which the two women proceeded to suck honey. Lynn, she said, was the joy of her life and in December she noted in her diary, after another dream, that, ‘I am still in love with Lynn Roth and always will be.’
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