Beautiful Shadow (64 page)

     Although the novel has its faults – its conclusion is unrealistic, the use of coincidences is too clumsy and occasionally the dialogue is far from believable –
A Dog’s Ransom
, with its atypical use of multiple perspectives, offers a wide sweep of contemporary American society, a portrait of bleakness which serves as a prologue for Highsmith’s later dystopias. It’s hardly surprising that Gore Vidal, who later corresponded with Highsmith, called her one of the most interesting writers of this dismal century. ‘My bad temper about our times quite fitted hers,’ he says.
¹⁹

In an essay she wrote on the subject of her favourite authors, Highsmith selected Saul Bellow as her chosen ‘all round good and probably great writer’
²⁰
and his 1970 novel
Mr Sammler’s Planet
as his best work. Highsmith praised the novel for its portrayal of ‘a man and his family who come from Europe to settle themselves in America – a sophisticated, extended Jewish family who experience cultural shock, tragedy and think a thousand thoughts on the subject of life . . . For depiction of the contrast between European and American values,
Mr Sammler’s Planet
can scarcely be topped.’
²¹

     Both Bellow and Highsmith represent a world proliferating with a surfeit of signs and symbols, but the excess of messages is ultimately without meaning. Individuals try to escape their spatial-temporal prisons, but constantly meet with failure. People quest for the acquisition of the material and in doing so lose whatever spiritual life they once had. Man is at once a killer and yet possesses a moral nature, a contradiction that can only be resolved by insanity. Highsmith admired Bellow, as she did Conrad too, for his ‘moral attitude’, for the fact that he cared about the degeneration of society and the individual. Ultimately this was her intention: ‘sometimes a novelist can combine his own genius with a comment, as did Dickens frequently,’ she said. ‘So maybe this is what I hope for.’
²²

     As Highsmith read
Mr Sammler’s Planet
, she identified a number of intellectual obsessions that she shared with Bellow. How was it possible to retain a sense of individuality in an increasingly consumerist world? What did it mean to connect to reality? Could one ever understand how the unconscious shaped our behaviour? And how could one survive as a European in an environment dominated by America, where, as one of the characters in the novel says, ‘ “the whole world is now U.S.” ’
²³
? Highsmith empathised with Artur Sammler, the central character of Bellow’s novel, as she too felt distinctly at odds with an increasingly vulgar world, ‘separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed – severed not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote’.
²⁴

     Highsmith’s awareness of herself as a marginal figure found expression in the beginning of her thirty-first cahier – which covers the two years between 1969 and 1971 – where she wrote the words, ‘Name: Ishmael’,
²⁵
a reference to the Biblical figure described in Genesis as ‘a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him’, and the narrator of Melville’s
Moby-Dick
. Highsmith first read the novel when she was fourteen and, like Bellow’s
Mr Sammler’s Planet
, she counted it as one of her favourite books. She particularly relished the ending in which  Ishmael survives the whale’s destruction of the Pequod by clinging on to a coffin. ‘Maybe Melville’s perverse turn of mind (saved from drowning by a wooden coffin) influenced me in my plotting for my books,’ she said.
²⁶

     In addition to the thematic similarity of
Moby-Dick
to her own work – the constant allusions to male-male shadowing, the power of obsession, the elusive search for meaning and the mysteries surrounding the nature of consciousness – Highsmith felt a bond with Ishmael. She had adored books about the sea since she was a young girl and, like the disaffected sailor, she viewed the ocean as symbolic of escape and self-renewal. In a letter she wrote to Janice Robertson, her editor at Heinemann in London, she said, ‘I am feeling unusually depressed this evening, without knowing why and I wish I were on the high seas  . . .’
²⁷

     She admired Melville, as she did Poe and Hawthorne, because he was, as she explained in a 1942 undergraduate essay, ‘synonymous with literary rebellion and independence’.
²⁸
The phrase could almost describe her own position: like Ishmael, Highsmith was both a teller of tales and an exile. In 1954, nine years before her permanent move from America to Europe, Highsmith described the United States as ‘a second Roman Empire’, and noted that as it was not in her nature to align herself with the ‘top dog’, she would one day have to leave.
²⁹
According to Frank Rich, she ‘made a life’s work of her ostracization from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’.
³⁰
She was an American citizen who had absented herself from the US and who adopted a European sensibility; a writer who employed many of the tropes and devices of suspense fiction only to then subvert its conventional form; a woman whose sexuality was neither easily codified nor well-defined.

     Highsmith may have learnt her trade by writing for comic books, but as a novelist she refused to write to order or tailor her inspiration to meet the demands of genre publishing. ‘I cannot continue in a certain vein unless a real idea comes to me,’ she told Lucretia Stewart. ‘It will not come to me just because someone says it’s a good idea to carry on in a particular vein. That’s what troubled me with
Strangers
[
on a Train
], or rather it didn’t trouble me: my agent said, “Write another now, follow it up,” like a one-two in a boxing match, and I didn’t have the inspiration. I felt like writing
Carol
so I did. And then after that I had no more ideas in that vein.’
³¹

     Although Highsmith strove for stylistic simplicity and easy readability, she refused to allow her work to be corrupted by the brash forces of commercialism and she was frequently broke, she claimed, at the ages of twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-three and thirty-seven. Highsmith loathed the suggestion that she should make her novels less psychological and put more sex into her books to boost their sales: ‘I think a novel
is
psychological . . . and I’m not going to throw in sex just to sell a book.’
³²
She hated the aggressive marketing of popular fiction, rejecting bestselling novels such as
Jaws
and
Roots
as ‘temporary fads’ and ‘rubbish’.
³³
She was not above writing stories which, in her opinion, were a little ‘gimmicky’ (‘You Can’t Depend On Anybody’) or ‘a bit flippant, and by no means literature’ (‘Home Bodies’),
³⁴
but it would be wrong to say, as some critics have suggested, that Highsmith wrote ‘unashamedly for the marketplace’
³⁵
just because her stories appeared frequently in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
. As she told Alain Oulman, her pieces of short fiction would often make the ‘rounds of well-paying magazines in USA’
³⁶
before they were finally accepted by
Ellery Queen
, ‘the last resort’,
³⁷
for around $300 each. Stories such as ‘Not One of Us’ and ‘The Terrors of Basket-Weaving’ were, she believed, perfect for
The New Yorker
, but publication by the literary magazine eluded her during her lifetime. ‘Irony of ironies!’ says Kingsley. ‘Try as she might, Pat was never able to get a story published in
The New Yorker
. It was only after she’d gone that the magazine ran one of her unpublished stories.’
³⁸

     The narrow-mindedness of the publishing industry was also to blame for her relative lack of success in America, according to Gore Vidal. ‘Our American book-chat deals only with categories so she was never really reviewed until European critics instructed Americans that Highsmith – or [Georges] Simenon – could be taken as literature,’ he says.
³⁹
When
Edith’s Diary
was due to be published in America, Highsmith wrote to her agent asking whether she should bother to fly over for a publicity tour. ‘It’s only worth it in the United States if you get yourself on TV,’ Highsmith said. ‘And my agent wrote back, it’s only junk books that get on TV, quirky books such as
Jaws
, the bizarre, sex books, how to feel good . . . Truman Capote has always been excellent at that [publicity]. But I’ve never bothered to be in America when a book was coming out in order to try and push myself. I didn’t bother enough.’
⁴⁰
As Craig Brown commented, whereas Capote spent his life cultivating the image of a writer, Highsmith spent hers writing. ‘The recognition awarded by the world is probably unfairly distributed,’ he said.
⁴¹

     Despite this, none of her editors remember her complaining; in fact, they testify to Highsmith’s meticulousness, professionalism and dedication to her craft. ‘She was a brilliant storyteller, a splendid stylist and she left no loose ends untied’ says Larry Ashmead.
⁴²
‘There was never any problem about putting a small error right,’ adds Janice Robertson. ‘But it was not a creative partnership – Pat knew what she wanted to say and wrote it meticulously. So the script came to Heinemann very much as she wanted it to be. It’s interesting that when she wrote to me in March 1972 that she had no idea where the new Ripley would go, I had no sense, then or now, that this was a request for help.’
⁴³
Robertson remembers how Pat would type her own manuscripts on her old Olympia, a workmanlike process which was integral to her writing. ‘I should like to be the kind of writer (Simenon!) who could have [
sic
] a MS to a typist, but I’m just not,’ Highsmith wrote to Janice in February 1973.
⁴⁴

     ‘She was extremely good company, quirky and very generous,’ adds Robertson. ‘I remember when I left Heinemann she gave me a Gucci purse. Lots of authors said that they would really miss me, but nobody else gave me anything. She was not in the least ostentatious, but she gave me this lovely gift, which I still have. She wrote in a genre of her own; she was an individual in every respect.’
⁴⁵

     When Roger Smith took over from Janice Robertson as Highsmith’s editor at Heinemann in 1972, he recalls feeling proud that he was connected to her as she was regarded as one of the company’s most respected authors. ‘I felt that if it was necessary to make radical suggestions, I wouldn’t have got very far,’ he says. ‘She was grateful for careful editorial reading – I would suggest a little rephrasing or the correction of minor inconsistencies – but I remember once, when she submitted a manuscript, she said to me, “I hope there won’t be too many twiddly things.” That made me laugh, as I had spent my life doing these “twiddly things”. She did not have a great love of America, she was a difficult person to promote there and, to be honest, we found her the same in Britain.’
⁴⁶

     Sales figures from Heinemann show that
The Tremor of Forgery
sold 6,760 copies in 1970 and
Ripley Under Ground
6,345 between the book’s publication in January 1971 and October.
⁴⁷
The Heinemann memo also reveals that for
A Dog’s Ransom
, Highsmith received an advance of £1,500 and that the board decided to print 8,000 copies of the book.