Beautiful Shadow (18 page)

     Highsmith sent the story off to a number of magazines, but received nothing but rejections. Even
Barnard Quarterly
turned down the chance of publishing ‘The Heroine’; the tale, it seemed, was judged to be too horrific and might even encourage vulnerable young women to copy Lucille’s bizarre behaviour. However, she eventually sold it to
Harper’s Bazaar
, which published it in its August 1945 issue, and a year later the story was anthologised in the prestigious
O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1946
.

     Increasingly, Highsmith had become fascinated by what psychiatrists at the time called ‘deviancy’. ‘Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown,’ Highsmith wrote in her notebook in 1942. ‘It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially “unlike” man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.’
⁴⁰
Her own behaviour, she recognised, was far from conventional but her bohemianism was tempered by other, more stabilising qualities such as her strong work ethic and her tendency to suppress her feelings. Her heart she likened to a dammed-up river, which one day would flood its banks, the water washing away all traces of ugliness. She felt compelled to drive herself forward, setting herself new challenges, ones she knew were impossible to meet. At times she felt in need of punishment and these masochistic impulses expressed themselves through tortured poetry; one poem she wrote at this time begins, ‘I am too much master of my self.’
⁴¹

     Towards the end of 1941, the stark difference between the targets she set for herself and her actual achievements left her feeling on the verge of suicide. Why wasn’t she better? More successful and creative? ‘Passed my first suicide moment this evening,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘It comes when one stands confronted with work, empty sheets of paper all about, and inside one’s head, shame and confusion.’
⁴²

     One of the problems, as she saw it, was the fact that creative people like her were born without protective barriers. Depression – or, in her terms, melancholy – was a result of letting oneself be blown about like grass in the wind, sometimes beaten and broken and trampled underfoot and this blackness, this overwhelming sense of despair, was reflected in her work. She would never be able, she said, to write about apple-blossom faces, Valentine cards, roaring kitchen fires and old-fashioned bedsteads, and there was little point creating work which affirmed man’s status quo. She was not interested in these well-worn clichés; rather her approach was to dismantle and subvert normality until the comfortable and the conventional took on a more dangerous, sinister edge. After all, there was too much wrong with both the individual and the world.

On 7 December 1941, the Japanese made their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, precipitating America’s entry into the Second World War. Highsmith had often analysed the causes of the war in Europe – in June of that year she had had an argument with her stepfather about its origins, he blaming ‘inherent wickedness’, she citing the machinations of profiteers. Since the mid-thirties, America had been committed to the principles of isolationism set down in the Neutrality Acts of 1935–1937, but after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Roosevelt attempted and failed to repeal the legislation so the country could offer financial assistance. Although the laws were finally relaxed after the German invasion of Poland, and Congress rubber-stamped FDR’s appeal for a $7 billion ‘lend-lease’ in 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor forced America to abandon to its position of neutrality in favour of a full-scale aggression on the enemies of democracy. Historians have singled out the attack – articulated by FDR as ‘a date which will live in infamy’ – as the moment that America lost its innocence. There is no doubt that the mood of the nation was deeply affected by Pearl Harbor, but the bombing brought about not so much a transition from innocence to experience as a realisation that American arrogance – an unshakeable belief in its own strength and impenetrability – had been well and truly punctured. The age of anxiety – the era of paranoia which could be traced back to the late thirties and Orson Welles’ 1938
The War of the Worlds
radio broadcast – had been crystallised by a defining historical event.

     To help the war effort, Barnard arranged courses for students to learn the basics of first aid, map reading and aerial photographic interpretation, while from March 1942, Highsmith regularly joined Kingsley at training sessions where the young women learnt how to identify enemy planes. Dean Gildersleeve was adamant, however, that her students should not be used as mere pen-pushers. ‘The brains of its young people are among the most precious assets of our country . . .’ she wrote at the time. ‘We must not, therefore, waste on the lower, simpler types of work minds which might become chemists, economists, mathematicians, social workers, educated secretaries . . . Many more of them are needed to help win the war.’
⁴³

     However, it is obvious that Highsmith was, at this time, much more interested in affairs of the heart than the implications of international conflict. Her diary tells of a short, but intense relationship with another Barnard student, Helen, who was, by all accounts, heterosexual and engaged to a young man. In fact, the unavailable straight woman was a type which would attract Highsmith throughout her life. In her diary she confessed her desire for Helen, comparing her attraction to how she felt towards ‘all the straights I was so violently in love with when I was younger’.
⁴⁴
On the first day in college after news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor broke, the two women took a walk down to the Hudson River and then, over a glass of beer, the writer confessed her love to Helen. Since the beginning of their relationship in October of 1941, Highsmith had treated her new dalliance badly – flirting with other women in front of Helen and at times regarding her with indifference. Yet, fearing that Helen finally might pledge herself to her sweetheart about to be called up to fight, Highsmith felt unable to keep her feelings to herself any longer. The scene was a poignant one with Highsmith crying and Helen asking, ‘What do you want me to do, Pat?’ Helen felt that she could not send her boyfriend off to war in such circumstances and she wrote a letter to Pat, telling her that she would have to end their friendship, while relations between the two women deteriorated even further when Helen discovered that Highsmith had been telling fellow students that she would soon make her lover forget ‘her little boyfriend’.
⁴⁵
In her cahier, at this time, Highsmith wrote, ‘Love is a monster between us, each of us caught in a fist,’
⁴⁶
a line she would rework into her 1952 novel,
The Price of Salt
, to describe the souring of the relationship between Therese and Carol. Highsmith obviously had high hopes for her friendship with Helen and although they carried on seeing one another throughout the first half of 1942, the relationship with the woman she once described, in typically romantic language, as ‘a slice of heaven walking around on earth’,
⁴⁷
failed to develop.

A true understanding of the problems of the twentieth century, Highsmith believed, could only be achieved by a person who rejected the concept of the normal, someone who was able to approach societal and individualistic complexities from a marginalised position. In order to present the truth of the situation, it was necessary, she said, to strip away the protective patch of normality to reveal the festering wound underneath. Highsmith said that writers interested in representing the truth of the times had a duty to scrape away at the red raw skin and journey down to the rotten core of the problem, and, switching metaphors, she likened the artist who successfully represented this reality to a spider spinning a web from within itself. She decided she would use her sense of strangeness, her own psychological quirks as a basis for her peculiar fictional fantasies. In order to create it was necessary to exploit the self and as such she looked to what she thought was the most important force in her life: sex. ‘Yes, maybe sex is my theme in literature – being the most profound influence on me – manifesting itself in repressions and negatives.’
⁴⁸

     In January 1942, she plotted out a short story about a woman alone in a room who hears scratching in a chest. Terrified of mice, she opens one of the drawers and sees nothing unusual, only the bodice of her wedding dress, but a few days later, when the noise has ceased, she finds a little mouse, dead and stiff, lying on the lace. Two months later, Highsmith had a moment of inspiration when she realised that the time was right ‘for a good, classic, beautiful prose thriller like Collins’
Moonstone
. . . which might even contain the metaphysical’.
⁴⁹
She looked back at the story she wrote as a teenager, ‘Crime Begins’, and realised that suspense was her forte. ‘The morbid, the cruel, the abnormal fascinates me,’ she said.
⁵⁰

     An effective method of writing such a book, Highsmith decided, would be to cloak the fantastical subject matter with a realist style, ‘The tone of verisimilitude made by realism’.
⁵¹
The archetypal twentieth-century man, its true Everyman, would be the psychopath. ‘The abnormal point of view is always the best for depicting twentieth-century life, not only because so many of us are abnormal, realizing it or not, but because twentieth-century life is established and maintained through abnormality. I should love to do a novel with all the literary virtues of
Red Badge of Courage
about one abnormal character seeing present day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end, the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might well be himself.’
⁵²

     This notebook entry, written six years before
Strangers on a Train
and twelve years before
The Talented Mr Ripley
, is a neat summary of her basic literary method and a clue to why her novels and short stories are so haunting. Highsmith’s world is seen through the distorted perspective of an ‘abnormal’ man, but the style of writing is so transparent and flat that by the end the reader aligns himself with a point of view that is clearly unbalanced and disturbed. In Highsmith’s work the tension between the forces of the conscious and unconscious mind is articulated in such a seamless manner that the reader is gradually drawn into empathising with the illogical, the irrational and the chaotic, but this skewed perspective is normalised by virtue of her monotonal style.

     Highsmith challenged herself to dream up a plot every night while under the shower, and she already felt drawn to the theme which would distinguish her novels: the ambiguous feelings of attraction and repulsion experienced by two very different men. ‘A strong character – appears weak when pulled equally in an opposite direction,’ she noted.
⁵³
At this stage she considered the possibility of writing a novel with a lesbian theme, but quickly rejected it and, in a way, there was no need, as, she said, ‘it comes out well enough in other themes as well. One can’t help it.’
⁵⁴

     Imagining what she would be like in the future, she realised that, essentially, her character would not change. She could see herself becoming more disciplined, but still only able to create by means of her unconscious. She would have a tendency to be even more addicted to alcohol and cigarettes; would still be shy when it came to expressing her emotions and disturbed when feeling was displayed. And she would be forever prone to falling in love but always happiest when alone.

     Like one of Dante’s wandering souls she said she would be destined to live neither for God nor the Devil, but for herself. ‘Mercy & Justice scorn them both,’ she wrote in her notebook, quoting from Canto III of
The Inferno
. ‘Without praise or blame, with that ill band of angels mixed, who nor rebellious prov’d, Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves were only.’ It would be the motivation for many of the characters she created. And, as the note she added next to the quotation testified, this was a ‘terrifying thought’.
⁵⁵

Chapter 7

The dungeon of thy self