Beautiful Shadow (91 page)

     If one reads
Small g
like other Highsmith novels one is bound to be left feeling disappointed – after all, there is little suspense, the characters are thinly drawn, and, for the most part, it is thematically barren. There is, it has to be said, an air of insubstantiality about the book. Yet if one approaches it as the extended fairy tale it so obviously is, one can reap greater rewards. Willi is compared to a ‘sinister figure in a fairy-tale’;
⁸
Renate is described as an ‘old witch’,
⁹
and Luisa, a ‘fairy-tale queen, all beauty and shining eyes’.
¹⁰
When Luisa looks at a black and white drawing of a castle with a spire, the image transports her back to her innocent childhood, ‘looking into picture books when she could believe in them’.
¹¹

     In previous novels, Highsmith had investigated the negative effects of fantasy – its power to distort the mind, a psychological warping which often resulted in delusion, violence and ultimately murder – but in
Small g
, she seems to be suggesting that life as experienced within the boundaries of the imagination is not so harmless after all. The characters in
Small g
may inhabit a fantasy world of their own creation, but apart from the gullible and simple-minded Willi and the mean-spirited, repressed Renate, most of them come to no harm. Indeed, the fantasies actually help them survive. Luisa’s love for Petey, whom she knew to be a gay man, was nothing but a ‘dream’,
¹²
but perhaps such a non-threatening relationship enabled her to come to terms with the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather? Similarly, Rickie’s infatuation with Teddie, who is described as ‘a creature of dream’,
¹³
may have helped him recover from losing Petey. Teddie sometimes goes by the name of Georg, so as to ‘feel like another person’; the descriptions of his recent experiences that he writes for a newspaper under a pseudonym tell of encounters such as ‘his first date with a pretty girl, who, like Cinderella . . . had to be brought back
before
eleven.’
¹⁴
His columns have a certain ‘naivety’,
¹⁵
and, like
Small g
itself, are invested with a quaint, unreal quality. Just as Petey’s murder gives way to the romantic attachments of Jakob’s clientele, so tragedy is displaced by comedy and the action is bathed in a gentle summer glow, a celebration of life reminiscent of a late play by Shakespeare. It can hardly be a coincidence that Highsmith, albeit in a rather bathetic manner, alludes to
A Winter’s Tale
in the scene when Lulu, Rickie’s dog, dances with her owner at Jakob’s. As Rickie glides across the dance floor, with his dog on his shoulders, people point at the creature thinking it to be a statue, before realising that it is, in fact, alive. ‘Lulu was still as a white statue, however, her expression calm. She was doing her work.’
¹⁶

     The novel ends on an optimistic note. Luisa, once a prisoner, is freed from her bondage; neither Rickie nor his policeman lover, Freddie, are HIV-positive; Freddie’s wife, Gertrud, accepts her husband’s unconventional relationship, while Teddie seems happy to share Luisa with Dorrie. Sexual ambiguity triumphs, yet one is reminded that the summer idyll cannot last for ever. Happiness is precarious and, Highsmith suggests, romance should be embraced, experienced and enjoyed to the full. Love, as she knew all too well, was not so much the meeting of minds as the intermeshing and entanglement of fantasies. The point was far from a new one – as we have seen, this idea underpinned all her fiction from the very beginning of her writing career – yet it is the form and tone of the novel which is striking. As Highsmith wrote, she was conscious that she did not have much time left and, at the end of her life, she chose to switch genres, from crime to something approaching romance or the pastoral. ‘With
Small g
one got the feeling that, while it is not a very good novel,’ says Craig Brown, ‘she had reached a point where she experienced something like happiness.’
¹⁷
Small g
, for all its limitations, stands as an intriguing insight into a writer trying to make peace with herself. ‘If it can be read as a final utterance, Patricia Highsmith died having made peace with her demons,’ wrote James Campbell in the
Times Literary Supplement
. ‘Good triumphed over bad. Too bad for her readers.’
¹⁸

From the very beginning Highsmith had doubts about the novel. She started writing it in the spring of 1992, completing ninety-two pages by 22 May. However, she felt dissatisfied, describing what she had written as, ‘Slow, unfocused,’
¹⁹
something which would necessitate a ‘rethink’.
²⁰
The problem, as she saw it, was that the basic story was not ‘easily believable’ and she would only pull it off if she wrote it well.
²¹
While researching the book, she turned to Julia Diethelm for information about the couture business. ‘I remember her asking me all these questions on apprenticeship,’ says Julia, who once owned a dressmaking business. ‘She was extremely good on details and although most of her research was done very seriously, often you hardly noticed. She would ask you something in a conversation, “Oh, by the way, what happens when a person dies in Zurich? Can an apprentice inherit a business?” She was very grateful for these details because she wanted authenticity; she didn’t want to make believe.’
²²
She dedicated the novel to her friend Frieda Sommer whom she asked about the Zurich gay scene.

     While working on the novel, Pat also found time to write pieces for
The Oldie
– a feature on Venice, complete with a set of her illustrations, and another on Greta Garbo, ‘Thank you for your films, your style, your beauty’, she wrote
²³
– and a review of Patrick Marnham’s biography of Simenon for the
Times Literary Supplement
, which she also nominated as her book of the year in a
TLS
round-up. On 23 April, a chauffeur drove her from Tegna to Peter Ustinov’s house in Rolle, near Geneva, where the two writers were due to meet for a question and answer interview for German
Vogue
. Highsmith admired the oil paintings on the walls and made a note in her diary of Ustinov’s informality and friendliness. ‘ “He is a very appealing, warm-hearted man, Ustinov,”’ she told Liz Calder.
²⁴
After lunch, Highsmith left for Geneva, where she had made an appointment to meet the accountant Marylin Scowden, who had agreed to help with her US tax return. Over time the two women became friendly.

     ‘She was such an odd character, she was so reserved. I suppose I felt she was a typical artist, in that she was eccentric. I went to see her for the occasional weekends, but she wouldn’t let you get close to her. I got the impression that she was very unhappy and that’s why she drank so much. She started drinking beer from when she got up in the morning and then she moved on to Scotch in the evening, but she never slurred her words or anything, as she developed such an immunity to alcohol. She tried to be very hospitable and, as she often worked in the evenings, she worried that I would be bored. She ordered a couple of videos, one of which was
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but she didn’t watch it with me. Sometimes she would cook, but because she didn’t eat, she would let things sit in the refrigerator and they would go bad; she would only ever have a couple of bites. There were so many things we didn’t talk about – I tried to ask questions, but she wouldn’t respond. She was so secretive.’
²⁵

     Back in Tegna, Highsmith was appalled to learn of the Los Angeles riots, in which more than fifty people died and 2,000 were injured, following the acquittal of the police officers accused of the Rodney King beating. In the forthcoming presidential election she said she intended to vote for Ross Perot, the Texan-born billionaire and founder of the Reform Party, as opposed to the mainstream candidates George Bush and Bill Clinton; such a move was, she said, a protest. In the last election, she had voted for Bush; even though she loathed him – all he cared about was, she said, ‘the rich, plus his golf games’
²⁶
– she hoped he ‘would take a more realistic stand about the situation in Palestine’.
²⁷
She had been proved wrong. ‘Instead of that they keep issuing more money to those people there, the Israelis.’
²⁸
Even though Perot was defeated in the election – he received 19 per cent of the votes – she admitted to feeling pleased when Clinton became President later that year.

     In October, Highsmith travelled to America on a publicity tour for
Ripley Under Water
, published by Knopf. In New York, where she spent nine days, she read an extract from her new Ripley novel at Rizzoli’s in Soho, and met Donald Rice, chairman of Yaddo’s board of directors. Highsmith wanted to bequeath her Tegna home to the writers’ and artists’ colony, so the corporation could use it as a little Yaddo in Switzerland. Rice knew of the impracticalities of such an arrangement – the house, with its two bedrooms and bathrooms was simply not large enough – but did not discourage her as he hoped she might think of another way in which Yaddo could benefit from her generosity. ‘She had this wonderful, gruff, chain-smoking, tough-guy way of speaking, and she was someone who I took to immediately,’ says Rice. ‘I’m a tax lawyer and one thing I find with people who have money is that they generally like to control other people. I think Pat was quite expert in being manipulative. I am not saying that critically, I think it was something that she took great delight in.’
²⁹
Rice remembers the intrigue which surrounded his dealings with Highsmith – the ‘telephone calls from phone booths, cryptic correspondence, continually changing documents, hiring and firing of professional advisers, cock-a-mamey schemes . . . How I miss that husky voice, and the scent of a smoldering Gauloise cigarette mingled with a whiff of Scotch whiskey.’
³⁰
Rice’s patience certainly paid off: in July 1994, Highsmith sent Yaddo – anonymously – a cheque for $27,500; in December of the same year she ordered her bank to dispatch another contribution for $300,000, and in her will she named the corporation as her sole beneficiary. ‘Pat Highsmith’s bequest is an expression of everything she stood for,’ says Rice. ‘She was an artist to the core, whose work was her life and vice versa.’
³¹

     While in New York, Highsmith also met the author Neil Gordon, who was writing a critique of her work for the literary journal, the
Threepenny Review
. The two writers met in the lobby of her midtown hotel. ‘Highsmith showed up late and rushed, just back from a signing,’ says Gordon. ‘She was a shortish and very plain woman, gracious and very unpretentious. Perhaps my overwhelming impression was a kind of cognitive dissonance on three levels: that this mild and polite woman was the author of some of the grisliest murder I’d ever encountered; that this rather bigoted woman was the author of what I consider one of the most politically radical bodies of contemporary fiction; and finally that such an amazing distance existed between the complexity of her work and the simplicity of her own view of it. She denied, for example, any suggestion that Ripley was homosexual – suggesting that he was ‘lukewarm toward women’. But the question of Ripley’s homosexuality is so key to unlocking the radical complexity of those books, and even if you don’t want to get all psychoanalytic about it, you just have to watch the movies made about Ripley to see how hard directors have worked to come to terms with his elusive sexuality, and how much it has affected their efforts to adapt those books to the screen.

     ‘None of this was without meaning to me: to me, Ripley’s homosexuality is key simply because these are books about the adaptation to the unbearable reality of bigotry. To me, the same psychotic split that allows Ripley to kill so easily is clearly articulated by Highsmith as the same necessary adaptation that allowed him to exist in the horrendous homophobia of ’50s America. Just as Ripley consistently denies, in the context of ’50s America, the unbearable reality of his homosexuality, he denies the fact of being guilty of murder. It was, therefore, fascinating to see a very similar psychotic split in Highsmith herself, where she in effect denied the central thematics of her own work, as well as its key radicalism.’
³²