Beautiful Shadow (63 page)

     In November, Highsmith wrote once more to Stanley, stressing how she did not want to receive any more barbed epistles from her mother, whom she said would kill her in less than a year if they were to live together. In addition, she sent her parents an insurance policy originally taken out by her grandmother, Willie Mae, when Pat was in college. ‘I have nothing to do with this money,’ she said, ‘and if you send me the proper papers, I shall be glad to sign them and pass over this money ($600 or what-not) to you and to my mother.’
⁵³

     Two weeks after receiving this last letter, sixty-nine-year-old Stanley Highsmith was dead as a result of the side-effects of treatment for Parkinson’s disease. He had been in hospital for three days when an artery in his abdomen ruptured. ‘I am concerned, of course, with how my mother will make out,’ she wrote to Kingsley, after Stanley’s death, ‘not so much financially as emotionally.’
⁵⁴
Although Mary wrote her daughter an affectionate letter in December, in which she asked about her new cat, Tinkerbell, and wished her ‘Good Night and My Love – Mother’, Highsmith recognised that their relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that caring for her would be an impossibility. ‘My mother is the type who fires a shotgun and then wonders why some of the birds are killed,’ she wrote, ‘others wounded and the rest scared. “Why don’t the birds come back?” I came back several times to suffer always the same shots.’
⁵⁵

     Spiteful, recriminatory letters from her mother continued to drop through Highsmith’s letter box in early 1971, accusing the writer of treating her badly. ‘I paid all Stanley’s funeral $800 plus $65 blanket of yellow roses for the closed casket,’ wrote Mary. ‘You did not offer a cent. So I paid all of it. You did not even wire a flower. Yet you acted like you adored him.’
⁵⁶
It is clear that, at times, Mary was so incensed by the contents of her daughter’s letters that she sent them back to Pat, complete with annotations and deranged scribbles. Highsmith then used the letters like scraps of paper, noting down telephone numbers over and around the handwriting. The feud between mother and daughter obviously upset both women, yet for all their protestations to the contrary, Mary and Pat prolonged their relationship by the vicious epistolary exchange. ‘As Stanley used to say –’ wrote Mary to her daughter in February, ‘you can be wrong so fluently  . . .’
⁵⁷

Chapter 25

Name: Ishmael

1970–1971

Highsmith thought 1968 ‘shocking’ and 1969 was, she said, ‘catastrophic’.
¹
Although she was referring to her personal life, she might well have selected such words to describe the cataclysmic sequence of events being being played out in the international political arena, especially in relation to America’s increasing world dominance. The optimism of the early sixties – a promise of a new idealism – had been tainted by the continuing war in Vietnam and a sense that society, particularly in urban centres, was so divided that traditional structures might be on the point of collapse. Richard M. Nixon, the Republican who had served as Eisenhower’s vice-President and who had been elected as President in 1968 – his 43.4 per cent victory was the lowest presidential margin since 1912 – stood as a representative of an old, traditional America in frighteningly anarchic times. The counterculture – drugs, political rebellion, new sexual freedoms – threatened to topple established hierarchies as an increasing number of groups and coalitions continued to express their anger. In April 1968, a group of students occupied the office of the president of Columbia University, Highsmith’s alma mater. The following year, 448 universities across America were forced to close or declared they were on strike as students articulated their dissatisfaction with academic life by demanding sweeping changes to admissions policies and the way they were taught; in June, rioting broke out after New York police tried to raid the Stonewall gay bar in Greenwich Village. In an effort to restore order, Nixon declared that the radicals were a minority; it was the unprotesting silent majority which mattered. He maintained that drugs, crime, student revolutions, racial discord and draft resistance all threatened the old standards, even civilisation itself.

     Nixon’s public image, however, took a battering – nothing, of course, compared to the Watergate scandal which forced him to resign in August 1974 – after his decision, in May 1970, to invade Cambodia. In an address justifying the bombing of Vietnam’s neighbour, Nixon told the world that America was a strong nation; that the country had never been defeated in its 199-year history and that it would succeed in both Cambodia and Vietnam. America would not be humiliated, he said, nor would it act like a pitiful, helpless giant. Not surprisingly, Highsmith did not believe such empty rhetoric. ‘The American picture is so appalling, it defies comment,’ she wrote to Ronald Blythe on 24 May.
²
Although a Gallup survey concluded that half of all Americans backed the invasion, with 35 per cent against, the student population and radical elements in the US were furious. National Guardsmen, employed to contain a demonstration at Kent State University, accidentally killed four students, including two women as they were walking to class. The news only served to inflame the already volatile mood of the nation: 400 campuses shut down and two million students announced they were on strike. ‘Really, at last they are holding up IMPEACH NIXON placards,’ wrote Highsmith to Ronald. ‘He’s the most unpopular president we’ve had since Hoover – who had the misfortune to lead USA into depression in 1929.’
³

     It was in this climate of unrest and rebellion that Highsmith started work on one of her most overtly political novels,
A Dog’s Ransom
, set in New York. The plot focuses on the repercussions of the kidnapping of a black poodle, Tina, owned by a well-to-do Manhattan couple, Ed and Greta Reynolds, whose student daughter, Margaret, was killed in a shooting accident in a Greenwich Village bar. The kidnapper, Kenneth Rowajinski, an unemployed ex-construction worker with a limp, and a writer of poison pen letters, demands a $1,000 ransom for the safe return of the dog, money which the Reynolds’ agree to give him. But, unknown to them, the poodle is dead; Kenneth hits its head with a rock and then dumps its body in a refuse bin. The case attracts the attention of a twenty-four-year-old New York patrolman, Clarence Duhamell, a graduate of Cornell, who tracks down the sociopath to a squalid basement flat on West End Avenue and 103rd Street. Rowajinski dupes Clarence into believing that if Ed and Greta give him another $1,000 he will, after failing to do so the first time, finally return the poodle to them. Highsmith confessed she had modelled Greta after her friend, Lil Picard.

     Highsmith started to plot the book in May 1970, writing in her notebook of the ‘saddest, meanest thing in the world – “poison pen” letters’.
⁴
She toyed with having the dog owner think about the possibility of having sex with the poodle, an idea which both repelled and disgusted him, but she rejected the idea. By 11 June, she had started to type out the first few paragraphs of the novel and by the middle of August she had completed 258 pages. There were, however, problems. She had not been clear about the book’s theme when she started writing, but after working on it for two months she realised she would have to rework the front section of the novel. ‘Usually my books romp along – as to plot,’ she wrote to Alex Szogyi. ‘Maybe a bad sign that this one doesn’t. My plot idea is all right, but it doesn’t romp in the writing.’
⁵
She also admitted that she was creating a book which featured a New York cop without having met one and confessed that she knew nothing about technicalities such as gun calibres and the workings of police precincts. She wished she could find a friendly cop, so she could ask him questions by letter and send ‘a handsome present later for the information’.
⁶
By February 1971, she had written the bulk of the novel but felt anxious about shaping the conclusion. ‘I wish some explosion would happen in my head so that I could come to a decision about the rest of the action,’ she told Ronald Blythe.
⁷

     In addition to being an entertaining novel of suspense, the book can be read as an exploration of class relationships, the immigrant experience, and the instability of the law. In August, she wrote to Ronald Blythe of her vision of Clarence as someone ‘caught between being square and far-out or anti-Establishment’.
⁸
She visualised him as being anti-Vietnam, but far from supportive of all civil rights, ‘not really pro the blacks who raise hell in USA courts’
⁹
– a position more or less analogous with her own. Of course, she added, one could not lecture about these points in a novel – didacticism was anathema to Highsmith – but nevertheless she intended the book to serve as an analysis of contemporary American society. Highsmith, like Clarence, thought that New York was a ‘disgusting city’,
¹⁰
and believed, as Ed did, that it was nothing more than ‘a conglomeration to make money’.
¹¹

     Clarence Duhamell’s downfall stems from his contradictory attitude towards power. Whereas his girlfriend, Marylyn, a freelance typist, believes in anarchy and disorder – she loathes the police – Clarence positions himself as a moderate, somebody who, although against the Vietnam War, subscribes to the view of the necessity of the law. While studying psychology at Cornell, he spoke at anti-war rallies, yet refused to accompany a group of protesting students who planned on wrecking the faculty’s offices and library. Motivated by a sense of idealism, he entered the police force with a hope of bettering the world and, equipped with the knowledge gleaned from reading Freud, Dostoevsky, Proust and Krafft-Ebing, embarked on what he assumed would be a rewarding and satisfying career. ‘A policeman today was in a unique position to make contact with his fellow men,’ he believes, ‘and to steer wavering individuals and families back into a happier path.’
¹²
When Rowajinski accuses him of pocketing $500 of the second lot of ransom money, Clarence, who is resented by the rest of the police officers for being a college boy and immune to the common practice of kickbacks, begins to disintegrate. Thrown out by Marylyn, who has been pestered by Rowajinski, and, infuriated by the fact that his fellow officers, particularly Manzoni, seem to believe his guilt, he vents his anger on a passing drunk by knocking him out. ‘The act exhilarated Clarence, as if it were some kind of triumph’,
¹³
an attack which prefigures his frenzied murder of Kenneth. Initially Clarence feels little guilt for the killing of ‘the Pole’ – when he hears the news of his death on television all he thinks about is how he has no appetite for his mother’s lemon pie – but he soon realises that he has failed in every sense and contemplates suicide. As Highsmith was working out the climax of the novel, she wrote to Ronald Blythe about the implosion of Clarence’s character – although he does not confess to the murder, ‘he is in a sense ruined and weakened by inevitable guilt feelings. It is this that is so hard (now) for me to illustrate.’
¹⁴

     The book ends with the shooting of Clarence by Manzoni, another attack motivated by frustrated power relations. As he begins to lose consciousness, Clarence thinks of what might have been – his relationship with Marylyn, his love of Ed and Greta: ‘
I had wished for so much better
.’
¹⁵
As a representative of the law, Clarence not only commits murder, but is killed by one of his own, suggesting chaos and anarchy at the heart of the justice system. The novel highlights the suppressed tensions and contradictions which bristle under the surface of a modern ‘civilised’ society and implies how difficult it is to simply exist as an individual in a capitalist system, an opinion articulated by Marylyn in her view of the police: ‘they were
all
tough, corrupt, fascist, and not above persecuting individuals if they could gain anything from it.’
¹⁶
Although some try and change the world through political intervention – both Marylyn and Greta attend regular protest meetings, at which Greta plays the piano and sings Vietcong lyrics and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ – Highsmith questions whether such actions actually make any difference. How is it possible to subvert the world order when so many – like the Reynolds’ friend, Eric, who observes the unfolding dog-kidnapping drama ‘as if he were watching a TV show instead of being present at something real’
¹⁷
– are disconnected from it? What is the use of political statements if the general populace is apathetic? Although Highsmith still took a keen interest in world affairs – in France she read the
International Herald Tribune
, the
Sunday Times
, the
Observer
and a number of weekly news magazines – she was aware that she was far from a political idealist as she had been in her youth. ‘At twenty and thirty, boycotting stinking countries (like Spain then, like Greece now) had a point,’ she wrote in her notebook, referring to the military coup of 1967 and the rule of Papadopoulos.
¹⁸
Yet in early January 1970 she contemplated travelling with Rosalind Constable on a cruise around Greece the following summer, a holiday which never materialised.