Beautiful Shadow (66 page)

     ‘I also remember one day, when Barbara and I were in the bedroom and Pat was in the garden, we were in the middle of chatting when suddenly we heard this thump. A dead rat had been tossed into the bedroom. Pat had swung it from its tail and thrown it from the garden through the window into the bedroom. She probably liked Barbara the best out of all her friends, and I thought if this is how she treats her, God knows how she behaves with other people.

     ‘Pat did really love animals, but I must admit I used to worry about her cat as she would put the creature in this kind of hammock in a towel and swing her around the room. I said, “You’re going to make that poor thing giddy,” and indeed when the cat got out of the towel it would stagger dizzily around the room. She didn’t know how to be gentle with it and that was towards something that she really cared about. It was hard to gauge her normal behaviour, because she was never normal around people.’
⁷⁵

     During the hot summer of 1971, she typed up the final draft of
A Dog’s Ransom
, wearing a pyjama top soaked in cold water, and sent the manuscript off to Heinemann on 5 August. Yet as soon as she had stopped work, she felt purposeless and quite at a loss about what to do with herself. ‘There is no real life except in working,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘that is to say in the imagination.’
⁷⁶
It was in this state that she observed that only one situation would drive her to commit murder – being part of a family unit. Most likely, she thought, she would strike out in anger at a small child, felling them in one blow. But children over the age of eight, she surmised, would probably take two blows to kill. The reality of socialising with
anyone
, no matter how close, she said, left her feeling fatigued. After a visit from Daisy Winston at the end of September and then, in October, following a week-long trip to Vienna – where she stayed with her friend Trudi Gill, wife of Irwin Gill, the American ambassador to Panama – Highsmith felt tense and on edge. ‘Is it because of the phoneyness?’ she asked herself. ‘I wasn’t particularly phoney. It’s my own inward tension.’
⁷⁷

As she was putting the finishing touches to
A Dog’s Ransom
, Highsmith started to think about a number of film projects. In April 1971, while in London, she met the film producer Elliott Kastner, who asked her to think up an original storyline for a thriller; her ‘flicker’ of an idea centred around a man who assumed a woman’s identity, killed his victim and then disappeared. During the same visit she also had a meeting with the film-maker Tristram Powell, son of the novelist Anthony Powell, about scripting a documentary for the BBC based on the French chateaux- and church-robbing gang headed by Xavier Richier. ‘She was so keen on the project that she wrote a very lengthy treatment for the film,’ says Tristram Powell. ‘She was so generous because she never seemed to bother about payment, her only interest was the work.’
⁷⁸
Yet for all Highsmith’s efforts, neither film came to fruition.

That autumn, Highsmith worried about how
A Dog’s Ransom
would be received by her publishers. Earlier in the year she had decided to switch to a new US publisher, Knopf, instead of Doubleday, as the latter, she told Koestler, had ‘done not a thing for my reputation in the past – five books’.
⁷⁹
Finally, she heard that Knopf had accepted her, and in December her new editor Bob Gottlieb requested a few minor revisions, as he considered her style, she said, ‘pebbly’.
⁸⁰
Although she agreed with most of the changes, which were, she said, done to try and smooth out her sentences, she later resented making some of them. Janice Robertson at Heinemann also asked her cut down the novel as a large part of it seemed to drag, while Alain Oulman thought it ‘good’, but one which ‘might gain by a certain tightening here and there’.
⁸¹

     When the book was published the following year, it was met with mixed reviews. Mary Borg, writing in the
New Statesman
, thought it lacked invention, that its characters were unconvincing and that she could not believe in the ‘glaring unlikeliness’ of its plot.
⁸²
The reviewer in the
Times Literary Supplement
expressed similar disappointment, adding that the novel ‘belongs in what is becoming a depressingly substantial sector of her total output – it is a mechanical exercise in self-pastiche, employing all her familiar devices and rehearsing most of her familiar obsessions, but with none of the vigour, inventiveness or intensity which in her best work makes those devices and obsessions seem so rivetting’.
⁸³
Such reviews compelled Graham Greene to write to Highsmith expressing his disgust at the stupidity of the critics and admiration for the book itself, noting that it was ‘one of the best and most complex of all your novels’.
⁸⁴
His opinion was shared by Diane LeClercq, writing in
Books and Bookmen
, who observed how the various elements of the plot neatly dovetailed together,
⁸⁵
while the critic from
The Times
celebrated her subtle analysis of irrationality in the novel: ‘Out at the edge Miss Highsmith flings back for us the new mirrors she finds there.’
⁸⁶
In the
London Magazine
, Reg Gadney praised Highsmith for her understated narrative style and commended her for the way the novel dealt with contemporary issues. ‘Technically,
A Dog’s Ransom
is a considerable achievement; as a comment on the morality of American respectability, law and order, and the blurred edges of decency – in the best sense of the word – it is brilliant.’
⁸⁷
Brigid Brophy, writing in the
Listener
, believed that the book was not only a virtuoso piece of suspense writing, but a serious analysis of the complex relationship between an individual, violence and society. ‘Sociology and reporting, with their wide scatter, can set out contradictions in moral attitudes:
A Dog’s Ransom
performs the indispensable function of fiction by taking the reader deep into the ironies of his own ambivalence.’
⁸⁸

Chapter 26

What are the odds of cat versus person?

1971–1973

At the end of October 1971, Highsmith started to have ghostly ideas for her third Ripley novel. In her notebook, she jotted down a series of possible plot outlines – some of which she would reshape and use in the finished book,
Ripley’s Game
, some of which she would reject out of hand – sketches which functioned as an extended ‘what if?’ Ripley hears of a rumour that he has only six months to live; he receives a request from right-wing elements in the USSR for him to assassinate a liberal Russian leader, which he refuses because of his desire to protect political freedom; Tom carries out a number of revenge killings on behalf of a sixty-year-old poet, a scenario that Highsmith envisaged as, ‘A dialogue with myself. Wishful thinking become a reality.’
¹
By 24 November, she had settled on the main narrative line: that Ripley would spread a rumour that an acquaintance – who at this early stage she called Teddie Barnes, but who would finally be named Jonathan Trevanny – had only six months to live so he could be persuaded to commit murder on behalf of Reeves, Tom’s ‘fence’. She toyed with the idea that the victim should at first be one of Reeves’ rivals, but then wondered whether a better target might not be the Mafia. After all, such a death would present ‘no moral problem’.
²
The story, she said, would have to be presented from two points of view – Tom’s and Teddie’s – a major break from the claustrophobically privileged perspective of previous Ripley novels. Although such an approach would certainly be interesting, she felt anxious as it would inevitably result in, as she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer, ‘a diminution of intensity, or Ripley’s kind of madness, amorality’.
³

     Initially the book, like previous Ripley novels, seemed to write itself. By 12 January, she had thought of her first sentence, finally published as. ‘ “There’s no such thing as a perfect murder.” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlour game, trying to dream one up.” ’
⁴
She started writing the novel on 27 February, dashing off 140 pages in two weeks. Yet in June she experienced a setback and wrote to Ronald Blythe of how she felt she had to rack her brain to work out the last half of the novel. She finished it in 1972, typing up a clean manuscript in January and sending off the final corrections to her publishers in June.

     The book begins six months after the Derwatt affair described in
Ripley Under Ground
and centres on the relationship between Tom Ripley and Jonathan Trevanny, an English picture framer who is suffering from myeloid leukaemia and who knows he has only six to twelve years to live; a surreal foreshadowing of the blood disorder, aplastic anaemia, diagnosed in Highsmith twenty-two years later, in 1994.

     When the two men are introduced at a party, Ripley senses Trevanny’s dislike of him – Jonathan says, ‘ “Oh yes, I’ve heard of you” ’, in a sneering manner – and, prompted by Reeves’ request for a man to assassinate a member of the Mafia, Tom dreams up the rumour of the picture framer’s imminent demise. Perhaps if Trevanny, who lives in Rue St Merry, Fontainebleau – Highsmith’s home for a couple of months in the summer of 1967 – believes he has only six months to live he will be more likely to take on the gruesome task, especially since he would be rewarded with a $96,000 fee, money which would help his French wife, Simone, who works in a shoe shop, and young son, Georges. The premise had grown out of an idea Highsmith had had in August 1970 about a central character who, soon after meeting a stranger, falls ill. ‘The stranger is not death,’ said Highsmith, ‘but the hero believes he is.’
⁵

     As in the previous novels in the series, Ripley spins the story out of his imagination, viewing those around him as nothing more than characters in the book of his own creation. Acting like a malevolent off-stage Prospero, Ripley manipulates the action, crafting the scenes of his amoral drama and shaping the lives of his characters as if they were mere puppets in a toy theatre.

     Highsmith’s cruel humour runs through the book like a rancid underwater stream, disturbing one’s expectations of the genre by a series of violent, but hilarious, images. She seems to take delight in telling us that when Gauthier, the local art supplier, was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver, his glass eye flew out of its socket. ‘Jonathan could see clearly Gauthier’s glass eye on the black tar road, maybe crushed by a car wheel by now, maybe found in the gutter by some curious children.’
⁶
The murder scenes in
Ripley’s Game
are described with such relish that it is, perhaps, surprising to learn that Highsmith would do almost anything – chores in the kitchen, daydreaming, pottering around the house or garden – rather than write them. On a train Ripley attacks Marcangelo, one of the Mafiosi, in a toilet, killing him by strangling him with a garrotte. Highsmith describes the victim’s death in detail – the gurgling in his throat, the tongue protruding from his mouth – and then, with a deft touch, she adds that, during the murder, Marcangelo’s bottom set of false teeth clattered on to the floor. The scene is almost Jacobean in its comedic horror. ‘Tom picked up the teeth, and dropped them into the toilet, and managed to step on the pedal which dumped the pan,’ Highsmith writes. ‘He wiped his fingers with disgust on Marcangelo’s padded shoulder.’
⁷
After assaulting another bodyguard and then proceeding to throw Marcangelo’s body from the moving train, Ripley then sits down to a comforting bowl of hot goulash and a refreshing Carlsbad. Ripley kills Angy Lippari, another Mafia man, by bashing him over the head, first with a piece of firewood and then the steel butt of a rifle, yet seems more worried about the state of his carpet in ‘Belle Ombre’ than any moral concerns. ‘ “Mind the rug with that blood!” ’ he tells Jonathan,
⁸
and a few seconds later he doubles up with laughter at the thought of attacking another intruder. He watches the car burn, containing the bodies of the two Mafia men, while whistling a jaunty Neapolitan tune, and as he hits another Mafiosi, trying to storm Jonathan’s house, he slams a hammer into his forehead, ‘straightforward and true, as if he had been an ox in a slaughter-house’.
⁹