Beautiful Shadow

To

Kate Kingsley Skattebol

and

Charles Latimer

(1937–2002)

Contents

        Introduction        1

  1   The forever seeking 1921 and before        11

  2   Born under a sickly star 1921–1927        23

  3   A house divided 1927–1933        33

  4   Suppressions 1933–1938        46

  5   The taste of freedom 1938–1940        63

  6   A trail of unmade beds 1940–1942        77

  7   The dungeon of thy self 1942–1943        90

  8   A carefully nurtured bohemianism 1943–1945        103

  9   The strange, subtle pluckings of terror 1945–1948        117

10   How I adore my Virginias 1945–1948        126

11   Yaddo, shadow – shadow, Yaddo! 1948        139

12   Instantly, I love her 1948–1949        151

13   Carol, in a thousand cities 1949–1951        160

14   Two identities: the victim and the murderer 1951–1953        173

15   Pat H, alias Ripley 1953–1955        186

16   Each Man is in His Spectres power 1955–1958        200

17   This sweet sickness 1958–1959        211

18   A lurking liking for those that flout the law 1959–1960        220

19   The ultra neurotic 1960–1962        229

20   A freedom from responsibility 1962–1964        243

21   Love was an outgoing thing 1964–1967        259

22   This shimmery void 1967–1968        275

23   The false, the fake and the counterfeit 1968–1969        289

24   An equal opportunity offender 1969–1970        299

25   Name: Ishmael 1970–1971        311

26   What are the odds of cat versus person? 1971–1973        327

27   The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot 1973–1976        340

28   Your kisses fill me with terror 1976–1978        356

29   A girl who allows me to dream 1978–1980        370

30   People who knock on the door 1980–1982        380

31   A strange interior world 1982–1983        390

32   Work is more fun than play 1983–1986        402

33   No end in sight 1986–1988        414

34   A face accustomed to its ghosts 1988        425

35   Art is not always healthy and why should it be? 1988–1992        436

36   I hesitate to make promises 1992–1995        447

        Epilogue        460

        Notes        466

        List of Illustrations        513

        Acknowledgements        514

Introduction

‘The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself.’

 
– Kierkegaard quoted in Highsmith’s 1949 journal
¹

When Patricia Highsmith looked up at the luminous face of the clock at the entrance to Pennsylvania station, New York, she would have seen two stone-sculpted maidens flanking the extravagant timepiece. One figure stared out across Manhattan to signify day; the other, with eyes closed, symbolised night – an appropriate double image for Highsmith herself, a writer fascinated by the concept of split identity. On that particular day – 30 June 1950 – the twenty-nine-year-old novelist was in pursuit of her antithesis: a blonde, married woman she had cast as a mannequin in a romantic drama of her own creation. She was going in search of the woman who had, unwittingly, inspired her lesbian novel,
The Price of Salt
.

     In December 1948 – a year and a half before Highsmith found herself walking through Pennsylvania station – she was working, temporarily, in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s when into the store walked an elegant woman wearing a mink coat. That initial encounter lasted no longer than a few minutes, yet its effect on Highsmith was dramatic. After serving the woman, who bought a doll for one of her daughters, leaving her delivery details, Highsmith later confessed to feeling ‘odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision’.
²
At the end of her shift, she went home and wrote the plot for
The Price of Salt
, published in 1952 under a pseudonym and, in 1990, re-issued under her own name as
Carol
. A few days after the meeting she came down with chickenpox; one of the runny-nosed children in the toy department must have passed on the germ, she said, ‘but in a way the germ of a book too: fever is stimulating to the imagination’.
³

     The Bloomingdale’s woman had done nothing more than buy a doll from a shop assistant in a department store, yet Highsmith had infused the encounter with greater significance. She could not forget the blonde woman and on that day in the summer of 1950 she walked through Pennsylvania station with the intention of catching a train to the woman’s home in New Jersey. She was going to seek her out, to spy on her.

     Highsmith recorded the incident – in almost photographic detail – in her diary. As she stepped on to the train bound for Ridgewood, she felt as guilty as a murderer in a novel and on arrival at the suburban station she had to drink two rye whiskeys in order to steady her nerves. At Ridgewood station, she climbed on board a 92 bus, but after a few minutes, worrying that she was going the wrong way, she asked the driver whether he had already passed by Murray Avenue, the woman’s home. ‘Murray Avenue?’ said the other passengers, as they all started to shout the correct directions at her. Blushing, she stepped down from the bus and started walking through the neatly planned, suburban streets towards the woman’s house.

     When Highsmith reached North Murray Avenue, a small lane backing onto woodland, she felt so conspicuous and overwhelmed by guilt she decided to turn back. But then an aquamarine car eased its way out of a driveway and headed towards her. Inside was a woman with blonde hair, wearing a pale-blue dress and dark glasses. It was her.

     Already fascinated by the intertwined motives of love and hate, Highsmith wrote in her journal: ‘For the curious thing yesterday, I felt quite close to murder too, as I went to see the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December, 1948. Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, too, a way of gaining complete and passionate attention, for a moment, from the object of one’s attentions?) To arrest her suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant cool and rigid as a statue.’
⁴

     On her return to New York she noticed that strangers eyed her with suspicion, as if they could see the traces of her guilt smeared across her face. Although the two women did not meet that day in Ridgewood, within six months Highsmith felt driven to try and see her again. In January 1951, as she was writing
The Price of Salt
, which details a love affair between two women – Therese, a shopgirl in a toy department and Carol, a customer, who is married with a child – Highsmith made another trip out to New Jersey. This time she noted how the woman’s house, with its black turrets and greyish towers, looked like something out of a fairy tale. She closed her eyes and imprinted the image in her memory, before watching the woman’s children at play, observing how little they resembled their mother. ‘Yes, I am delighted my Beatrice lives in such a house,’ she wrote in her diary.
⁵

     Highsmith projected a complex array of emotions onto the woman, so she became both the model for Carol in
The Price of Salt
and an externalised embodiment of past lovers, an incarnation of her drives, desires and frustrations. Highsmith could ‘be called a balladeer of stalking,’ wrote Susannah Clapp in
The New Yorker
. ‘The fixation of one person on another – oscillating between attraction and antagonism – figures prominently in almost every Highsmith tale.’
⁶
Specifically, she used the women in her life – a quite dizzying parade of lovers – as muses, drawing upon her ambiguous responses to them and reworking these feelings into fiction.

     Like many a romantic, she was, at times, promiscuous, but her bedhopping was an indicator, rather than a confutation, of her endless search for the ideal. To paraphrase Djuna Barnes’ novel
Nightwood
– a book given to her by one of the women she worshipped – in Highsmith’s heart lay the fossils of each of the women she loved, intaglios of their identities. ‘All my life work will be an undedicated monument to a woman,’ she wrote in her diary.
⁷
Highsmith herself recognised that these women held the key to understanding her personality and her fiction. ‘O who am I?’ she asked herself in the early 1950s. ‘Reflections only in the eyes of those who love me.’
⁸

     Publicly, however, Highsmith was reluctant to talk about her writing, precisely because she knew its source was often so very close to home. ‘She was the least forthcoming of authors, and hated talking about her work,’ says Craig Brown, who interviewed her on a number of occasions.
⁹
‘She seems to favour two answers to journalistic questions,’ wrote Janet Watts in the
Observer
in 1990. ‘One is “true”; the other, “I don’t understand the question.” . . . She smiles, but her hand, when I shake it, feels like a reluctant paw, withdrawing from contact.’
¹⁰
When Watts quizzed her about the inspiration for
Carol
and her relationships with women, Highsmith responded, ‘I don’t want to say. People’s emotional life . . . I think it’s all accidental, and not planned. It is very hard to talk about.’
¹¹

     It wasn’t only journalists who had a problem getting close to her. Daniel Keel, her literary executor and president of Diogenes Verlag, the Zurich-based publishing company, says it took Highsmith twenty years before she trusted him enough to share her thoughts and feelings. ‘Before that it was simply “yes” or “no”,’ he says. ‘There were great holes in the conversation.’
¹²
Another friend, the writer and art collector, Carl Laszlo says, ‘She was a writer, not a speaker – one always had the idea she concentrated so as
not
to say anything,
not
to give anything away.’
¹³