Beautiful Shadow (81 page)

     The characters in the novel behave like the protagonists in Jack’s illustrated book,
Half-Understood Dreams
: a New York couple with two children, ‘all of whom had dreams and expectations that they could not and maybe did not want to disclose to the rest of the family or to anyone else. So the dreams and fantasies were half-understood by the dreamers, and half-enacted in real life, and were misunderstood or unnoticed by the others.’
³⁸
The self-referential sentence could serve as a neat summary of the imaginative territory which Highsmith made her own: the unsettling nexus between mind and matter, the treacherous interplay between the allure of fantasy and the inevitable undercurrent of reality.

The summer of 1983 was an oppressive one in the Ticino as the area suffered from a stifling heatwave. In August, Highsmith said that she had found the last couple of months ‘shattering’.
³⁹
Although her reserves of energy were low, she refused to countenance cancelling her public engagements, such as an invitation to the Locarno Film Festival. During the festival, she enjoyed an evening out with its director, David Streiff, whom she had first met in 1982. ‘She seemed to enjoy the evening at the Grand Hotel,’ says Streiff, now director of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, ‘but not the rather sophisticated menu. She asked for a pizza, which I guess had been deep frozen because it was not on the menu, but she only ate the topping not the dough. I will never forget her wonderful cat-like way of looking at you, nor her simplicity, modesty and shyness.’
⁴⁰

     That summer, her busy schedule included a few days in London to attend an advance screening of Hans Geissendörfer’s
Edith Tagebuch
. based on her novel
Edith’s Diary
– the German director simplified the story into a ‘neat Freudian mother-son love relationship’,
⁴¹
and she thought the film, starring Angela Winkler, was ‘obvious and a bit vulgar’
⁴²
– and trips to Zurich, Venice, San Sebastian, Barcelona and Madrid. While in the Spanish capital, in September, Highsmith was quizzed by a student writing a dissertation about her work. As she tried to explain her process of writing she felt frustrated that she could not come up with more a concrete explanation for the foundations of her fiction. ‘These thesis students,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘try to make an organised discipline or science out of my writing, and I feel they are disappointed when I tell them my ideas, therefore my thoughts and thought processes, even, come out of nowhere.’
⁴³

     Occasionally, however, her ideas were rooted in reality. Highsmith conceived the idea for the story, ‘The Mysterious Cemetery’, about the sinister growth of mushroom-shaped excrescences in a graveyard used to bury cancer victims, in August, soon after hearing about the experiences of Anne Morneweg, who in 1981 had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Anne remembers telling Highsmith the story of how, after having a mastectomy, she had been walking in the gardens of the hospital with a fellow patient when she saw a chimney with smoke streaming out of it. ‘I told Pat the smoke was all that was left of our burnt breasts, adding the resulting energy was used to wash our sheets,’ recalls Anne. ‘Pat, who appreciated black humour, of course found this very funny – she was not at all sentimental. I told her this before she wrote the story about the remains growing from the graves.’
⁴⁴

     Highsmith conceived ‘The Mysterious Cemetery’ as the first in a series of stories exploring the various environmental, political and social horrors of the modern world – apocalyptic nightmares including the threat of global extinction, the third world war, atomic destruction and pollution; described by the critic Peter Kemp as ‘Greenpeace Gothic’.
⁴⁵
Within a few days of setting down the idea for the first story, she had thought of another one. ‘Moby Dick II,’ she wrote in her notebook on 27 August. ‘He bounces off missiles . . . he is a dangerous missile himself.’ Or ‘The Missile Whale’.
⁴⁶
Highsmith scanned her favourite newspaper, the
International Herald Tribune
, together with
Time
magazine, looking for appropriately grotesque reports. Friends such as Charles Latimer also supplied her with scandalous titbits, such as the allegation that the American government had paid for a football stadium to be built in a university town in the Midwest, under which was stored secret nuclear waste; an idea which she used as the basis for ‘Operation Balsam; Or Touch-Me-Not’. The stories in the collection, which she wrote between 1983 and 1987, reminded her, she said, ‘of the spoofs I wrote of school subjects at ten and eleven, then again at fourteen for my classmates’ amusement. But I trust the content here is more important. I found an
embarras de richesses
of “catastrophes” that the human race has, almost, learned to live with at the end of the twentieth century.’
⁴⁷

In November 1983, just before Highsmith planned to fly to New York on a research trip for
Found in the Street
, she contracted the flu and had to postpone the visit by one week. Before she travelled, she was also needled by a sense of anxiety, a feeling that she had simply too much to do before her departure. She arrived in New York on 25 November and stayed in America until 12 December, a trip which comprised of a stay at Charles Latimer’s house in East Hampton and two ‘jaunts’
⁴⁸
to New York. Her Manhattan hotel, she observed, housed two cockroaches which lived in the medicine cabinet in her bathroom, ‘but that’s normal in New York,’
⁴⁹
; perhaps they inspired her second cockroach story, the truly grotesque ‘Trouble at the Jade Towers’, one of the
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
.

     She walked around the streets of Greenwich Village, the setting for
Found in the Street
, noting how Morton Street was still as shabby as it was when she lived there more than forty years before. The rubbish problem in Manhattan was shocking, she thought; such a contrast to the gleaming spotlessness of Zurich streets. ‘It is impossible to imagine someone dropping a Kleenex on a Swiss street,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer, on her return from America.
⁵⁰
‘Without a doubt, Pat was very orderly and could, at times, be very critical,’ says Kingsley. ‘She didn’t like the fact that sometimes I ate standing up – it always had to be sitting down with knife and fork. And if you moved an ashtray in one of her houses, she would immediately put it back in the same place.’
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     While in Manhattan, she also met Anne Elisabeth Suter, who had formerly worked for Diogenes Verlag and continued to represent many of the Swiss publishers’ clients in America. ‘One always felt that Pat surrounded herself by a camouflage of shyness, of retreat,’ she says. ‘Yet our relationship, when I was based in New York, was not without storm. She told me where to place her stories and grew angry when that didn’t happen. But she didn’t know that I protected her from the rejections.’
⁵²
One possibility Highsmith investigated during her stay in New York was the sale of her books through The Mysterious Press, a small publishing house run by Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. After attending a book signing at the store on West 56th Street, Penzler presented her with a copy of Stanley Ellin’s,
The Dark Fantastic
, a novel published by his company and one she said she liked. ‘As I gave her the book, I told her that I would love to do something like this for her, as it was beautifully produced novel by a wonderful writer,’ says Otto. ‘Highsmith was not a terribly successful writer commercially in America – she moved from publishing house to publishing house and companies dropped her because she did not sell. But I really admired her work.’
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Although Penzler would publish, for the first time in America, six of her books – one novel,
People who Knock on the Door
, and five collections of short stories, all between 1985 and 1988 – the relationship between publisher and author would soon break down, degenerating into barbed attacks and accusations of betrayal.

Chapter 32

Work is more fun than play

1983–1986

In 1983, Highsmith had been contacted by an English movie producer about the possibility of filming her novel,
The Blunderer
. The project would be financed by Goldcrest and Home Box Office and would star John Hurt as Walter Stackhouse and Mario Adorf as Melchior Kimmel. Highsmith had signed the contract in December while she was in New York and by February 1984, the film producers had started to look around for a writer. Had she any thoughts who could adapt her novel for the screen? The name Highsmith put forward – that of Marc Brandel – was, perhaps, a surprising one, as the relationship between the two writers had imploded more than thirty years before. Highsmith and Brandel, who in addition to his novels had established himself as a television scriptwriter, even adapting
The Talented Mr Ripley
for US broadcast for Studio One in January 1956, had started to correspond in late 1979, after he had paid a visit to her house in Moncourt. Within a few months of their reunion they had become close friends once more. Highsmith signed her letters to him, ‘With much love, Pat’, and Marc, in turn, was touched by Pat’s kindness. ‘It was terribly sweet of you to recommend me for the adaptation of
The Blunderer
,’ he wrote to her on 29 March.
¹

     Although Brandel was initially passed over in favour of another writer, in May 1985 he and his second wife, Edith, visited Highsmith at her house in Aurigeno to discuss the project further. Edith remembers meeting Highsmith for the first time. ‘When I met Pat I was surprised by her looks,’ says Edith. ‘Marc had always told me how stunning she had been, but when I saw her she was no longer beautiful. She looked very skinny and drawn, considering she wasn’t that old. I never had the impression that she was a happy person – I think she was always dissatisfied with herself.’
²
The following month, Highsmith learned from HBO that they had rejected the draft version of the first screenplay, prompting the novelist to ask Brandel if he could take it on.

     ‘I’d love you to do the script . . .’ Highsmith wrote to Brandel once more. ‘Please tell me if you could do, because I think I could arrange this.’
³
The deal between Highsmith and Goldcrest/HBO collapsed at the end of June, but, despite this, Highsmith was still keen for Marc to write the film. In November 1985, contrary to her somewhat miserly reputation, she sent Brandel a cheque for $8,000 as a retainer on
The Blunderer
, money she paid out of her own bank account as ‘Diogenes decided Friday last that it would be “very unusual” to advance a writer money on a property not sold.’
⁴
Marc was moved by the gesture, writing in a letter of 22 November, ‘It gave me a wonderful feeling about you and your friendship.’
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Brandel started work on the script in January 1986; another producer was found and the film was still under discussion in 1988, yet nothing came of the project. Highsmith, however, did not ask for the money back.

Another dream. Highsmith’s mother, consumed with anger and murderous thoughts, cuts off the head of Tabea Blumenschein. ‘You will have to help me get rid of the body,’ says Mary to her daughter, before coating the head with transparent wax. Highsmith is left feeling shocked and utterly paralysed with horror; on awakening she wrote in her notebook, ‘I do not know what happened to head and body.’
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On 15 June 1984, Bettina Berch arrived at Highsmith’s house in Aurigeno to interview her for a feature she hoped to place in a magazine or journal. Before the interview, Highsmith took her guest out for a pizza, accompanied by the indomitable Ellen Hill, whose poodle sat on her lap throughout the meal. ‘It was awkward because I think Ellen, who looked very ladylike, was annoyed that I was there and she was kind of snappy,’ says Bettina. ‘There was, however, one sweet moment which passed between them, when Ellen called Pat “teacup”. I thought that was very sweet. Pat struck me as a very imposing character. She was wearing black loafers, like men’s shoes, which I thought was kind of odd, and a man’s jacket. It was probably the best look for her because it was comfortable and she wasn’t a femme sort at all.’
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