Beautiful Shadow (19 page)

1942–1943

Highsmith resisted literary categorisation, but if one was to search for a school which encapsulated her fictional obsessions at this stage in her life one could do no better than to call her a Greenian. Highsmith immersed herself in the work of the American-French writer Julian Green throughout the early 1940s. In September 1941, as she was working on ‘The Heroine’, she read his 1934 novel,
Le Visionnaire
, translated as
The Dreamer
, while sixteen months later she wrote in her diary of her admiration for his 1941 novel,
Varouna
, describing the book as one that gave her more than any other. In 1944, she wrote about how she turned to Green for ‘life, courage, quietness’.
¹

     Born in Paris in 1900, Green was Irish-American by heritage and French by education and culture. As a child he felt like an outsider and, like Highsmith, would draw on these feelings of isolation and dislocation throughout his life, describing his childhood as ‘the subterranean stream that runs obscurely through adult life’.
²
At fourteen, he lost his mother and, at sixteen, he converted from puritanical Protestantism to Catholicism, but also took a keen interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophies. From an early age he realised that, again like Highsmith, he was attracted to members of his own sex and subsequently acknowledged that one of his fictional obsessions was the battle between the aspirations of the spirit and the urges of the body. At twenty-eight, he decided to document the tensions within himself in a personal journal, diaries which were published, first in French and then English, from the late 1930s onwards. ‘This diary, which I intend to keep as regularly as I can,’ he writes, ‘will help me, I think, to see more clearly into myself.’
³

     These confessional documents bear a striking similarity, both in tone and subject matter, to Highsmith’s notebooks and help illuminate the myriad connections between the two authors’ works. When Highsmith read Green’s
Personal Record
in 1943, she wrote in her diary, part of which she kept in French, ‘Je sens une amitì rare avec J. Green . . . je reconnais comme mes propres pensées.’ (‘I feel an exceptional friendship with J. Green . . . I almost recognize my own thoughts.’)
⁴
Like Highsmith, Green felt wretched when he did not work, almost as if he did not exist; he admired the work of Edgar Allan Poe; sourced his creativity in his early formative experiences – ‘Everything I write proceeds in a straight line from my childhood’
⁵
– and believed in the fragmented nature of human identity. ‘I think there is in each of us, not only the two men spoken of by St Paul,’ he wrote in 1938, ‘but a good dozen persons who rarely agree among themselves and are almost always in contradiction . . . one of these persons is a lunatic . . .’
⁶
Similarly, he regarded reality as simply the projection of an individual’s thoughts – a man, he said, could travel between paradise and hell simply by the nature of his consciousness – and, again like Highsmith, was fascinated by the nature of the self. ‘Tired of always being my same old self. Has anyone ever said a word about this particular form of sadness?’
⁷
he wrote in 1940, in what could be interpreted almost as a literary
cri de coeur
from Green to Highsmith. Whether Highsmith read these words is unknown. What we do know is that she was already obsessed with exploring similar ideas in her own work.

     Green was convinced that his work stemmed from his life – from his dreams and his repressions – and claimed, rather like Highsmith, that happiness and contentment negated the writing process. ‘Writing books comforts the author for everything life has refused him,’ he wrote in 1948. ‘It might even be that an overgratified, successful life could have produced a sterile one for him. A surfeited man does not write.’
⁸

     Green’s novel,
Si j’étais vous
, or
If I Were You
, bears a remarkable similarity to Highsmith’s
The Talented Mr Ripley
. The book, published in 1947 in France and 1949 in America, investigates, according to Green, the sadness expressed by Milton in
Samson Agonistes
: ‘Thou art become, (O worst imprisonment!) the Dungeon of thy self.’
⁹
Like Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, a young man with a near-pathological sense of self-hatred, the central character of Green’s novel, Fabian Especel, is motivated by a desire to shed his own skin and take on the personality of another. Fabian could not bear the fact that, ‘all his days, his soul would inevitably stay firmly encased in the same body’
¹⁰
and so, when a stranger offers him the opportunity to change bodies with the person of his choice by the pronouncement of a magic phrase, he readily accepts.

     In the foreword to the book, Green addressed the subject that Highsmith would take as her own. ‘Which of us, after all, has never said to himself, “If I were he,” or “If I were you?” ’ writes Green. Discontent, he says, ‘arises from the perpetual sameness in which were are enveloped’,
¹¹
the realisation that each of us is eternally trapped within the barriers of our solipsistic prisons. Quoting Donne, a poet who influenced both Green and Highsmith, the French writer concludes that man was a ‘sick god’ – ‘Nothing could better describe present humanity.’
¹²

     Writing with ‘a simplicity and directness of language, a sparseness that can hardly be called “style” at all’
¹³
Green’s novels and short stories, like Highsmith’s, force the reader to suspend their critical faculties. Although it resists interpretation and analysis, his work is distinctive for its curious hybridity, its mix of two very different literary traditions: realism, passed down from Balzac and Flaubert (with whom Highsmith said she felt ‘a strong kinship’
¹⁴
) and fantasy, as embodied in the work of Hoffman and Poe. Highsmith too could be analysed in this way, a writer of unobtrusive prose who seamlessly combines the surface authenticity of detailed literary mimesis with the subversive undercurrent of the abnormal and the delusional. This would prove to be an intoxicating mix.

Highsmith graduated from Barnard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree on the 2 June 1942. Her grandmother gave her $20, which, rather than spend on herself (apart from the small sum she set aside for a piece of wood for a sculpture), she decided to use to take her friends and family out for dinner and drinks. Money had always been in short supply, but now, desperate to leave home and find a room of her own, it was a matter of real urgency.

     Yet she set herself some standards. ‘I wanted to avoid learning anything useful,’ she told an interviewer. ‘I never learned to type properly because I didn’t want to be stuck with a secretarial job.’
¹⁵
Working in the world of magazines appealed to her and, encouraged by Rosalind Constable, she applied to
Mademoiselle
,
Good Housekeeping
,
Time
,
Fortune
, and
Vogue
. But the capacity to look as if she had just stepped out of one of the magazines’ fashion spreads was, unfortunately, quite beyond her. In early June she had an interview at
Vogue
, but two weeks later received a telegram to say that she had not been successful. Apparently, she had an image problem. ‘They said you looked like you’d just got out of bed,’ Rosalind told her.
¹⁶
Her jacket was suitable, but the white blouse she had worn to the interview was not clean and they were appalled that she had not even bothered with a hat. She was disappointed, but she reasoned ‘there’ll come a time when I shall be bigger than
Vogue
and I can thank my stars I escaped their corrupting influences.’
¹⁷

     Like many writers, both aspiring and established, Highsmith’s dream was to work for
The New Yorker
. On 16 June, she met William Shawn, then the magazine’s managing editor, and the next day followed up the visit by sending him four issues of
Barnard Quarterly
. Although later in the year she was asked to write a couple of sample
Talk of the Town
pieces, nothing came of the association and she was forced to settle for a position which she described, in a letter to Shawn, as ‘not a job to be excited about’.
¹⁸
The job was as editorial assistant to Ben Zion Goldberg, the Russian born, ex-managing editor of the
Jewish Morning Journal
, author of the book
The Sacred Fire
, and a prolific newspaper columnist. She had applied for the position at the publishing house, FFF Publishers, which supplied copy to various Jewish outlets, and in late June, after an interview, Goldberg offered her the job on a salary of $20 a week. ‘I didn’t haggle,’ she said, ‘being poor at haggling.’
¹⁹

     Her duties involved writing and editing the household section of
The Jewish Family Almanac
and compiling pieces on Jewish art and culture, cooking and interior decorating. This was, perhaps, a surprising choice considering the fact that she had held anti-Semitic prejudices since she was at school. Indeed, when, in 1993, she was asked to describe her first job in a piece for
The Oldie
magazine, she omitted the fact that she had ever worked for the Jewish firm. ‘She did not care to acknowledge her association with FFF then or later,’ says Kingsley, although Highsmith stayed in touch with Goldberg.
²⁰

     In November, after she had contributed to a book about the Jews’ historical and cultural influence on the United States, the publishing house was forced to lay her off because of lack of work. But Highsmith made sure that she put her time with FFF to good use, mining the company for characters which she could then work into fiction. She found one employee, a dumpy, pudgy little man with a limp, so fascinating that she felt inspired to write a tale based on him, ‘Mountain Treasure’, a story which, after a few drafts and rejections, was published in the August 1943 issue of
Home & Food
, under the title, ‘Uncertain Treasure’.

     The story centres on two men – Archie, the cripple, and an unnamed bookkeeper – who both spot an unclaimed bag on a station platform. What follows is a bizarre cat and mouse game around the streets of New York as Archie pursues the man for the bag. Eventually, motivated by a mixture of fear and shame, the unnamed man drops the bag. Archie takes it home to his shabby flat, where, with almost unbearable excitement, he unzips it – to find, not money as he thought, but row upon row of sweets and chocolates.

     The story is interesting not only for its own merits, but because this is one of Highsmith’s first fictional attempts to explore the theme of two men in pursuit of one another, a motif she would later develop further in novels such as
The Two Faces of January
and
Those Who Walk Away
. It is also fascinating to see how the two characters fetishise the objects that surround them, believing that the mere possession of a bag and its contents will make them happy. ‘The gold colored zipper sent a chill of pleasure through his fingers,’ Highsmith writes. ‘Its purr was a song of richness, or mechanical beauty.’
²¹

     Writing stories was all very well, but she knew that, at this stage in her career, it would not win her financial independence. In order to earn money she typed letters for magazines and, in December 1942, went so far as to take a temporary job which involved standing outside a number of department stores and asking customers a series of questions about deodorants and liver pills. ‘It was a long way from Homer’s
Iliad
, asking total strangers to concentrate for a moment on the state of their underarms,’ she said.
²²
But on 23 December she was thrilled to hear that she had been successful in securing another full-time job, salary at least $30 a week, with the producers of comic books, Michel Publishers. ‘I walked into a comic book outfit with posters of “Black Terror” on the walls and various characters who could fly in the air and rockets and all that,’ she told an interviewer. ‘It was like learning a trade . . . Four fellows were sitting there and drawing and three fellows writing the stuff, besides me.’
²³