Beautiful Shadow (65 page)

     Gary Fisketjon, Highsmith’s editor first at the Atlantic Monthly Press and then at Knopf in the US, recalls how, for many years, she was almost invisible as a writer in America. ‘She defied categorisation, but was temptingly close to fitting into the category of mystery and she had a cynicism about human transactions that wasn’t particularly user-friendly,’ he says.
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The fact that she kept flitting from country to country also didn’t help, he says, ‘as she presented a moving target both in her life and her work – nobody could quite fix on her’.
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Larry Ashmead believes there was a division between her high critical opinion and her poor US sales figures, which he estimates never peaked above 8,000 for each novel. ‘Her books were invariably well-received in the US and often in important journals and by important critics,’ he says. ‘She certainly had her fans but the core audience was consistently small . . . She didn’t appeal to the mass market because her books were dark, often terrifying and the reader had to pay careful attention . . . Finally she wasn’t agreeable to promoting her books and she was hardly mediagenic . . . It all added up to wide and serious review attention but minimal sales. All very frustrating at least to me because I considered her a singularly fine writer, and original voice and one of the best authors I’d ever published.’
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     One publisher who recognised Highsmith’s worth – and perhaps did more than any other to push her as a serious literary writer – was Daniel Keel, founder of the Swiss company Diogenes Verlag. Keel first became aware of Highsmith while watching Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train
in a small Zurich cinema in the early sixties. He was so intrigued by the film that he stayed in his seat to watch the credits to find out whether it was an original screenplay or whether it had been adapted from a novel. ‘It said, “Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith”, and that’s how I found her,’ says Keel.
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Although Rowohlt had published several of her novels in German – starting with
The Talented Mr Ripley
in 1961 – Keel persuaded Highsmith to switch to the Swiss firm for the publication of
Those Who Walk Away
in 1967. ‘I was willing to do a hardback at once, so I acquired Highsmith’s rights and eventually the world rights,’ he says.
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     It may seem odd that Highsmith – writing in English – should want to appoint a Swiss publisher as her representative, but there’s no doubt that she respected and admired Keel, described by Fellini as a man who ‘knows how to surround himself with creative forces. He loves his work and allows his artists to flourish and develop’.
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Pat thought him ‘very friendly’,
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‘a darling’
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and, according to Kingsley, she ‘owed him a lot, he made her so to speak’.
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Keel acted as Highsmith’s champion, promoting her name not only in German-speaking countries – the publisher included her in his distinctive black and yellow paperback series, launched in 1974, a list which also featured novels by H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and which became known as the ‘
crème de la crème
of crime literature’ – but also around the world. ‘Highsmith is an American classic who could be up there with Edgar Allan Poe one day,’ he says.
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As she approached the age of fifty, Highsmith’s misanthropic vision burned with an almost Swiftian intensity. On 5 January 1970 she wrote in her cahier of how she felt eaten up by resentment, acknowledging that if she did not check herself she would find herself slipping into paranoia and insanity. ‘I dislike the adrenalin in my veins,’ she added.
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One of the targets of her irrational hatred was black people, a prejudicial attitude totally at odds with her view of herself as a liberal – she professed to loathing fascists and would later define herself politically as a ‘Social Democrat or something’.
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She was vehemently opposed to the introduction of Black Studies into American colleges – she felt it ignored, as she wrote in a letter to Alex Szogyi in June 1969, what she saw as the harsh reality, ‘a few unpleasant facts such as the absence of a written language (save for a bit among the Zulus) and the fact that their own Black chieftains were very helpful in herding the slaves on the boats.’
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She also blamed the entry of black people and Puerto Ricans into universities for the collapse of the US educational system. ‘They enter college without high school diplomas now, and when they take one look at those books . . . they say to themselves cripes, I’ll never make it!’ she wrote to Ronald Blythe in August 1970. ‘So they attack the professors and so on and so on. It’s a hell of a way to cover up lack of brains.’
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Her views are echoed in
A Dog’s Ransom
, as Clarence muses on the chaos of Manhattan and its crime rate. ‘A pity that New York had been overrun by blacks and Puerto Ricans instead of by some more advanced race that might have improved things.’
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Before the novel was edited, Highsmith used the word ‘superior’ instead of ‘advanced’ in this sentence – it was Alain Oulman, her editor at Calmann-Lévy, who requested she tone it down as he thought it sounded ‘dangerously like a racist’s opinion which I know you are not’.
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In her defence, Highsmith wrote back to Oulman, stressing that these were Clarence’s thoughts, not necessarily her own. However, she did add: ‘But not by any stretch of the imagination could the blacks and Puerto Ricans be deemed assets to the community in New York at the moment.’
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     Her vision of the New York of the future is an apocalyptic one, a view shaped by what can only be interpreted as racial prejudice. She imagined life in New York in fifty years time when she would see, ‘coons hanging from 50th story windows, plugging their neighbours (other coons) before taking the lift down to fleece their pockets,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer. ‘It has already happened to Newark, New Jersey – which is now almost cleared of whites; they have a black mayor, even, and the highest crime and dope and welfare rate in all the USA.’
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Highsmith had long nurtured an irrational hatred of Jews and now this too started to find expression in her notebooks. She observed how Jewish men said a prayer every morning thanking God that they were born male and not female. ‘The rest of us give thanks that we were not born Jews,’ she said. ‘If the Jews are God’s chosen people – that is all one needs to know about God.’
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     During the oppressively hot summer of 1971, Highsmith’s already black humour began to take on an even darker hue. Since dogs and cats now ate horsemeat, why, she wondered, shouldn’t the foetuses of aborted babies be used to feed animals? In fact, as humans already consumed tripe, sweetbreads and bulls’ testicles – the ‘little maids’ of Mexico – why couldn’t waste foetal matter be served up to people as a delicacy? ‘After all it is protein, which is becoming increasingly scarce as the world population increases,’
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she wrote in her notebook in an entry anticipating her 1987 collection of stories,
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
. Later in the year she would also play with the idea of writing a novel about a character obsessed with the detritus of modern living – waste material including abortions, the contents of toilets, bedpans, diapers, hysterectomies. ‘I need a character obsessed with all this,’ she said. ‘I’ve got one, myself.’
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As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realised that both systems of survival were, however, fundamentally illusory. She wrote, she said, quoting Oscar Wilde because, ‘Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality.’

     In October she travelled into Paris for a book signing of
Ripley et les Ombres
, the French translation of
Ripley Under Ground
, published by Calmann-Lévy. While in the French capital, she attended a dinner party hosted by Alain Oulman. Her dining companions were Colette de Jouvenal – the daughter of Colette, whom she had met the previous year and who was accompanied by her Siamese cat – and the writer James Baldwin, whom she described as a ‘rather hysterical revolutionary character . . . Jimmy assures all us whiteys we shall soon be murdered.’
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A few days after the dinner party, she was invited to Zurich for a ball organised by Diogenes, which was attended by 800 people; although she tried to enjoy herself, she found it insufferable. Daniel Keel remembers how much Highsmith hated noise.

     ‘Once we were in a restaurant and at the next table was a group of young girls, who were very pleasant, but who were laughing. I didn’t think they were making a lot of noise, but Pat looked at them with hatred, then picked up her copy of the
International Herald Tribune
and brandished it at them, before using the newspaper as a screen, a barrier, between the two tables.’
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If more than two people were talking in a room, Highsmith often found it difficult to hear, even if they were speaking English. In early 1971, she wondered whether she could have been going slightly deaf, or whether these symptoms were psychological. ‘I remember Pat once going to La Scala in Milan and hating it,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘She came back and told me that she could not bear the sound levels, she thought she would die. She had been invited by her editor in Milan, who thought that it would please her and although she loved classical music, Pat loathed the experience as she was particularly sensitive to noise.’
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     Yet for all her spleen, one of the reasons why Highsmith moved from Montmachoux to Moncourt was to be nearer the people she liked. She eventually settled into her new house on 14 November 1970: Colette de Jouvenal lived in Beamont, fifteen miles away, her translator friends Jeannine Herisson and Henri Robillot were only five miles from Moncourt, while Mary and Desmond Ryan lived next door. ‘Thus I hope to pull myself out of this eremitic existence,’ she wrote to Ronald Blythe.
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Her new home, situated at 21 Rue de la Boissiere and which cost her 340,000 new francs, was one of a semi-circle of seven former farm cottages, situated by the Canal du Loing. When journalists asked her why she moved here, she had to admit that she didn’t know, except that the house and her immediate neighbourhood was quiet, yet it was only one hour from Paris by car or train. The front of the house faced on to an unpaved courtyard, complete with a clutch of trees, and an old, redundant water pump. From the back windows she overlooked a garden, with an eight-foot-high stone wall covered with a mass of white grape vines, at the end of which was a wooden door which opened on to the banks of the canal, a waterway used by barges, carrying coal, oil, wood and sometimes cars and even the occasional yacht. When the writer Joan Juliet Buck visited Highsmith in 1977, she described the house as ‘a low two-storey cottage of the type the French call
pavillon
, it is an austere place: lived in, but empty at the same time.’
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     In March 1971, Highsmith’s twelve-year-old godchild – Kingsley’s daughter, Winifer Skattebol, to whom Highsmith would sign letters, ‘Your loving witch God-mum’ or ‘Your evil godmother’ – came from America to stay at her house in Moncourt, after which the writer accompanied her charge to London. Yet the trip was not a happy one. ‘I was not a fan,’ says Winifer. ‘She was a weird, unkind and dissolute person. She was my mother’s friend, but I did not care for her at all.’
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     Barbara Roett, who visited Highsmith in Moncourt with Barbara Ker-Seymer in June, recalls being surprised at the writer’s attempts at playing the perfect hostess, a role she had never associated with her before. When the two women arrived from London, Highsmith told them that she would take them to a wonderful market nearby, overflowing with delicious vegetables, meats and cheeses. That evening she would make, she said, a ratatouille. ‘We’d never seen this side of Pat before and Barbara, who was a very good cook, well, her eyes lit up,’ she says. ‘Anyway, when we got to the market, we saw Pat make a beeline for this dark doorway which led to a very dingy bar. She said, “I’m just going to have a quick beer,” but she never reappeared until Barbara and I had bought all the shopping. I know she didn’t really care about eating – she only ever ate American bacon, fried eggs and cereal, all at odd times of the day – but it was obvious that she had this fantasy about cooking.