Beautiful Shadow (60 page)

     Ripley behaves like the author of his own narrative, inventing characters and scenarios, manipulating the plot-line of his life like a piece of fiction. Tom creates the back-story of the novel – the impersonation of Derwatt’s work by Bernard Tufts after the artist’s suicide – and constantly reorders events, fictionalising them and presenting them as truth, so as to escape punishment. After killing Murchison and disposing of his body into the Loing, he follows Bernard to Salzburg, where he forces the forger, depressed and spiritless, to commit suicide, an act which Ripley regards as a ‘curious murder’.
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Tom’s refiguring of Bernard’s suicide, and his subsequent story that Bernard’s remains are those of Derwatt, read like an author’s attempt to smooth out the narrative blips in a particularly tricky plot. Interestingly, throughout his imaginings Ripley sees himself in the third person, as one of the characters in the dramatis personae, and at the end of the fictional rewriting of reality, he concludes, ‘The story, so far as it went, began to fall into place.’
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After burning Bernard’s body and smashing up his skull and teeth, Ripley returns to his hotel room at the Goldener Hirsch – the same hotel Highsmith stayed in while she was in Salzburg researching the novel – and prepares himself for the inevitable questions from the police. ‘He was imagining conversations with Bernard and Derwatt in various Salzburg Bier and Weinstubl.’
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He tells the inspector that Derwatt killed himself by first taking an overdose and then throwing himself off a cliff; Bernard and he then burnt his body and Bernard disappeared, presumably having committed suicide by throwing himself in the river.

     The audacity of the narrative – its sheer pace and drive – is, at times, almost too bewildering, yet Highsmith maintains the level of suspense until the very last sentence. Would Ripley be caught for his actions – for dreaming up the Derwatt forgery plot, for killing Murchison, for driving Bernard to suicide, for pretending Bernard’s remains were those of Derwatt? On the last page, the telephone rings in ‘Belle Ombre’. The caller is the inspector, Ripley thinks.

Tom’s hand stopped in the act of reaching for the telephone – only for a second, but in that second he anticipated defeat and seemed to suffer it. Exposure. Shame. Carry it off as before, he thought. The show wasn’t over as yet. Courage! He picked up the telephone.
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     Although it is a compulsive read, the novel can also be seen as an exploration into the nature of aesthetics. In a more self-consciously literary novelist, the critic from
The Times
argued, an examination of such a subject would no doubt be bogged down with ponderous, overly written speculation. Highsmith, however, examines the subject with verve, weaving it naturally into the narrative. ‘This is Miss Highsmith’s secret,’ said the reviewer. ‘By her hypnotic art she puts the suspense story into a toweringly high place in the hierarchy of fiction.’
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     When Highsmith was working on the book she told an interviewer from
The Times
that it was ‘more intellectual, curiously enough’
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and indicated that her inspiration for the novel came from the notorious Dutch painter, Hans van Meegeren, who for years duped the art world into thinking that his forgeries, such as
Christ at Emmaus
, were the work of Vermeer. ‘I like the way he stood up for himself,’ commented Highsmith on van Meegeren, ‘saying his paintings were damn good anyway so why not like them?’
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In the novel, Ripley brings up the subject of forgery in his conversation with Murchison, observing how it is possible to enjoy and appreciate a fake just as much as the ‘real’ work of art. ‘Van Meegeren’s forgeries of Vermeer had finally achieved some value of their own . . .’ writes Highsmith, ‘aesthetically there was no doubt that van Meegeren’s inventions of “new” Vermeers had given pleasure to the people who had bought them.’
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In Tom’s world the false, the fake and the counterfeit always triumph over the true, the real and the authentic. In Ripley’s living room, it is one of Bernard’s forgeries, rather than his real Derwatt, that takes precedence, situated in the prime spot over the fireplace and, whatever form Tom assumes – whether it be disguising himself as the bearded, D.H. Lawrence-like Derwatt, or taking on false identities such as Daniel Stevens, William Tenyck or Robert Fiedler Mackay – the fictional always seems more truthful than his ‘authentic’ self, whatever that may be. Indeed, Ripley’s sense of self now seems so dislocated and fragmented, he can hardly be said to have any essence whatsoever. It is clear that Ripley is just one of many personalities which jostle beneath the surface of the man, as is illustrated by Highsmith’s use of language in the following sentence, indicating a split between his self and his name: ‘On impulse on Thursday afternoon, Tom bought a green raincoat in Athens, a raincoat of a style he would never have chosen himself – that was to say, Tom Ripley would never have touched it.’
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     Although Ripley’s loss of self enables him to commit the most heinous acts without disturbing his conscience, the impersonation has devastating consequences for Bernard, the forger. After years of painting as Derwatt he no longer has a style that he can call his own. In fact, whenever Bernard does try to work as himself, ironically it feels as though he is faking it as opposed to the working on his ‘authentic’ paintings as Derwatt. Bernard is so denuded of his true identity that he fashions a dummy of his self, complete with trousers, and hangs the effigy from a noose in Ripley’s house – ‘ “It is Bernard Tufts that I hang, not Derwatt,” ’ reads his ‘suicide’ note.
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After believing he has killed Ripley, he travels to Salzburg, where Tom haunts him, finally driving him to commit suicide for real. When Tom tells his wife of Bernard’s death, relating the events so Heloise knows what to say to the police if she is questioned, he tells her that the events should be easy to remember because they are true. ‘Heloise looked at him askance, a little mischievously. “What is true, what is not true?” ’ she replies.
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The question articulates the underlying theme of the book: the slippery nature of reality and its representation in art.

     It’s no coincidence that Highsmith chose a quote from Wilde as an epigraph for the book. Throughout her career, she found herself attracted both by his work and his extraordinary life; according to Kingsley, Highsmith read all his plays, poems, letters, essays, as well as
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. While at Barnard she copied Lord Alfred Douglas’ sonnet, ‘The Dead Poet’, into her notebook, and five years before her death she felt moved by Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography, describing reading about Wilde’s life as a truly cathartic experience. Highsmith took particular notice of Wilde’s epigrammatic remark, that the Americans, as great hero-worshippers, always took their heroes from the criminal classes, transcribing it into her notebook in September 1962, two months after visiting Wilde’s grave. Like Highsmith, Wilde believed, that ‘to be a criminal takes imagination and courage’.
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     Perhaps it is not too surprising then to discover that Ripley, Highsmith’s most famous criminal-hero, has more than a touch of the Wildean decadent about him. According to Wilde’s Dorian Gray – the beautiful, aristocrat who stays forever young while his portrait grows old – ‘man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion’.
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Dorian constantly desires to lose himself and take on another’s identity; like Ripley he believes, ‘Perhaps one never seems so much at ease as when one has to play a part.’
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Dorian proceeds to murder Basil Hallward, the man who captured his bewitching image, stabbing the artist in the neck and blackmailing a friend to dispose of the body, but he eventually suffers from an attack of conscience, a psychological crisis which results in his own death. Unlike Dorian, Highsmith’s gentleman-killer is immune to the effects of guilt. Just before murdering Murchison, Highsmith writes of the split in Ripley’s reasoning. ‘He saw the right and the wrong. Yet both sides of himself were equally sincere.’
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But Ripley, like Dorian, can be seen as one of the protégés of Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton, who believes in the notion of individualism – a concept which, in the twentieth century, transformed itself into the cult of existentialism – precisely because of its rejection of mainstream morality. As Lord Henry says, ‘ “I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.” ’
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Books which are called immoral, says Lord Henry later in the novel, are simply works which show the world its own shameful image.

     The mask of respectability and seemingly ever-youthful beauty is one worn by both Dorian and Ripley, creatures who surround themselves with aesthetically pleasing
objets
in the belief that surface and style are more important than substance. ‘He has a sense of aesthetics,’ Highsmith said of Ripley, ‘and he likes handsome boys and good looking men . . . he likes good clothes.’
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The sickly style of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
– its endless lists of perfumes, embroideries, art works, elaborate decorations, jewels and fabrics – was influenced by Huysmans’
À Rebours
or
Against Nature
, a book which Highsmith also read. A distant echo of both works can be discerned in the semiotic overloading that occasionally weighs down the usually bare and transparent sentences of Highsmith’s prose, particularly her descriptions of food and wine, the layout of rooms and the details of personal appearance and dress. After all, in Dorian’s, as in Ripley’s world, ‘manners are of more importance than morals’.
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     Wilde, too, was fascinated by the idea of forgery, particularly the work of Thomas Wainewright and Thomas Chatterton, men who symbolised the triumph of artifice. Wainewright, according to Wilde, writing in his essay, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, was a ‘young dandy’, an art critic, poet, painter and poisoner, who, rather like Ripley, ‘sought to be somebody, rather than to do something’, a man who ‘recognized that Life itself is an Art’.
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Chatterton, the eighteenth-century poet who used his genius to forge Jacobean plays and who even staged his own death by penning a pretend suicide note, was the subject of one of Wilde’s lectures in 1888. Wilde believed him to be a great artist because of his ‘yearning to represent and if perfect representation seemed to him to demand forgery he needs must forge. Still this forgery came from the desire of artistic self-effacement.’
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     Men like Wainewright and Chatterton were, Wilde believed, works of art in themselves and, similarly, Ripley can be read in this way. Emptied of his essence, he is the perfect embodiment of modern man – self-created, self-determined, a constantly changing, protean personality existing in a world where, as Wilde said, ‘lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’.
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The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a ‘living’ work of art. A return to the ‘real life’ after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard’s quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt’s notebook: ‘ “There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the Self.” ’
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Chapter 24

An equal opportunity offender

1969–1970

Highsmith was often accused of having a negative attitude to women in her work. The charge was levelled at her by critics after the publication of her book of short stories,
Little Tales of Misogyny
, firstly in German in 1975 and then its English language edition two years later. (The book did not appear in America until 1986.) After reading the collection, the critic and poet Tom Paulin attacked Highsmith for what he saw as her ‘thin collection of failed fables in which various hairy, possessive or over-fecund women are murdered by their mates’.
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Paulin felt that Highsmith took a perverse delight in describing the brutality with which the women in her stories were killed, adding that it would be ‘wrong to read these stories as indirectly feminist satires on dependency’.
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