Beautiful Shadow (20 page)

     The job enabled her, in early 1943, to move out of her parents’ into an apartment of her own – at 353 East 56th Street at the intersection with First Avenue – which she would rent for thirteen years. Later in life, Highsmith compared her little apartment to the one Carson McCullers described in ‘Court in the West Eighties’. ‘Mine happened to be in the East Fifties,’ she said, ‘but the second floor apartment looked onto a small court, and the neighbours’ window opposite or at right angles were not so far away – perhaps six metres.’
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In a letter to her god-daughter, Winifer Skattebol, Highsmith spoke of the place fondly, describing its ‘one-room which doubled as living-room and bedroom, with three-quarter bed that served as “couch”, plus a real kitchen, plus a bath with tub and shower.’
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     Wandering around Sutton Place the writer would have been aware of the striking economic differences of the district’s residents. Indeed, the area down by the dock of East 53rd Street is said to have inspired Sidney Kingsley’s 1935 play
Dead End
about the extreme contrasts between rich and poor. ‘Here drying winter flannels are within fishpole reach of a Wall Street tycoon’s windows,’ reads one entry in the
New York City Guide
, ‘and the society woman in her boudoir may be separated only by a wall from the family on relief in a cold-water flat.’
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If Highsmith walked out of her apartment and down to the East River she would have seen both the splendour of Vincent Astor’s yacht
Nourmahal
, which would often drop anchor off the dock at the end of East 52nd Street, and the squalor of the sewage outlets which spilled into the water.

     Highsmith’s first assignment at Michel was to write, in comic book form, the story of Barney Ross, the boxer and World War Two hero, which she then followed with an account of the life of Edward Rickenbacker, the World War One ace who shot down twenty-six enemy planes. Both men were enormously popular subjects during the current conflict and these stories no doubt helped raise morale. Highsmith’s position on the war was an ambiguous one; she no longer subscribed to the simplistic anti-capitalist theories of communism but neither did she feel completely at ease with straightforward patriotism. ‘We talked vaguely of the war,’ she said of a meeting with Rosalind Constable. ‘I am always vague, because I am neither communist nor reactionary.’
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     Other subjects she worked on for Michel included Einstein, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and Dr David Livingstone. ‘My work had nothing to do with literature,’ she said later of her time writing comic books, ‘but it did stimulate my imagination.’
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     The writer and critic Susannah Clapp believes that comic books were the perfect medium for the young writer. ‘Her language is not self-consciously elegant,’ she says. ‘The syntax isn’t supple. She isn’t discursive or elaborate; she worked for a time writing plots for comic strips; and their pungency must have suited her.’
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The following year, after a few months working for Michel, she switched to another publishers, Fawcett, where she produced scripts with titles such as ‘Golden Arrow’, ‘Spy Smasher’, ‘Pyroman’, ‘Black Terror’ and ‘Captain Midnight’. ‘These insane stories had to have a beginning, middle and end,’ she said later, ‘but otherwise it was a ridiculous formula, like a brush with the enemy on page two . . . It was like grinding out two grade B movies per day. I had to come up with two ideas a day.’
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     In the evenings and at weekends, however, she wrote stories of a very different kind; ones set in a world bereft of superheroes, often without happy endings. In order to help place her in a more creative state of mind, after working on what she described as ‘hack’ work during the day, Highsmith would often take a nap at six in the evening, have a bath and change her clothes. ‘This gave me an illusion of two days in one and made me as fresh for the evening, under the circumstances, as I could possibly be.’
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     She had an intuitive insight into the unseemly impulses that lurked behind the sweetest of smiles and an insatiable appetite for the horrific. She sketched out one story about two murderers, each plotting the other’s death – father and son both in love with the same woman, one’s wife, the other’s mother. The father stabs his son in his back as he bends over to kiss his mother goodnight. Another idea was to write about a homosexual man, Jack, who lives with his mother. When his diary goes missing he assumes his mother, who doesn’t know about his sexuality, must have read it and, unable to bear the shame, he kills himself. In fact, she has never read the diary and when his mother finds it she decides, out of respect for her dead son, not to open it.

     Highsmith also played with the possibility of writing about the frustrations and hatred felt by an ordinary woman, who, as she is cleaning up after her husband, fantasies about killing him by taking hold of a rock and crushing his skull. ‘I might see the dark red blood gush out like a great river, watch him bleed and bleed and bleed,’
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imagines the woman. For many, Highsmith’s horrific snapshots of contemporary life were just too sickening to stomach – one reader at
The New Yorker
described one of Highsmith’s unsolicited stories, ‘These Sad Pillars’, about a man and woman who try to make dates by scribbling on the pillars of a subway platform, as ‘sordid’
³³
– but the young writer was determined not to let rejection get her down. After all, she reminded herself, America’s greatest writers, men such as Melville, Poe and Whitman, went unrecognised during their lifetimes. ‘They wrote in a vacuum – of themselves,’ she said.
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     In December 1942, she started to experiment with satire, a style she would later use to great effect in collections of short stories such as
Little Tales of Misogyny
and
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
. She dreamt up the plot for a modern-day morality story about a man, Roderick, who is obsessed with saving. He adores and fetishises money to such an extent that he takes to hoarding it in his rafters, but eventually the roof collapses, kills him and his body has to be dug out of half dollar pieces. The moral? ‘If you hate money, then stay away from it and if you like it, spend it. And if you save it, at least don’t keep it hanging over your head.’
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This is advice Highsmith herself could have benefited from later in life; friends testify that as she aged, she became increasingly obsessed with not spending money. ‘She was pathologically stingy,’ says her friend Peter Huber. ‘I could go on for hours about how stingy she was.’
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     Highsmith wasn’t interested in writing about healthy, happy, well-balanced people; as she saw it, contentment equalled stupidity. Madness, rather than being seen by psychiatrists as something that should be curbed and normalised, should, she believed, be celebrated. ‘I believe people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappinesses,’ she wrote in her journal in 1942. ‘Mad people are the only active people, they have built the world.’
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     The difference between the inner self and the facade which one chose to show to the outside world intrigued her. The people who could successfully paper over the cracks between the two selves were, in her opinion, dishonest, while those who were not even aware of this fundamental philosophical problem were unperceptive. She admired only the men and women who were unable or unwilling to hide these psychological fissures. ‘I like people in whom the wrestlings are visible,’ she said.
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     She read William Blake avidly, noting down his words, ‘Active evil is better than passive good’,
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and in September 1942 she stated, somewhat chillingly, ‘Perversion interests me most and is really my guiding darkness . . . I love to write of cruel deeds. Murder fascinates me . . . Physical cruelty appeals to me mostly. It is visual & dramatic. Mental cruelty is a torture, even for me, to think of. I have known too much of it myself.’
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Two weeks after recording this in her journal, she acknowledged that her own prose was ‘psychopathic’.
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     It was in this state of mind that she started to plot out the story that would eventually form the basis of her first, albeit unpublished and unfinished, novel,
The Click of the Shutting
.

     She looked back through her old notebooks and diaries for source material, hoping that by reading them she could encourage her unconscious to create a suitable story, ‘merely trying to distil the murk of emotions inside me’.
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She felt her creativity growing and stirring within her: ‘My time is coming like a pregnant woman’s,’ she said.
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She would look to her own life to provide the emotional core of the book and even, in an early version of the manuscript, went so far as to base the characters on herself and the young women she had loved. Alex would be Judy Tuvim – the schoolfriend at Julia Richman High School who went on to become the actress, Judy Holliday; Christina was modelled on Virginia, and Gregory, a writer and the novel’s hero, would be an extension of herself.

     Yet she knew the matter of transforming homosexual women into sexually ambiguous men – a technique of transposition of the sexes she had gleaned from Proust – was not as straightforward as simply providing her real life characters with fictional male names. The expression of homosexuality was, of course, a taboo subject and if she stripped her characters of this fundamental quality she would be left with odd, etiolated creatures, personalities robbed of the very quality which defined them – their sexual difference. If she was to write of characters who were ‘abnormally inhibited . . . this makes, generally, a sexual weakling, a schizophrenic, an inhibited suppressed person of a vigorous one.’
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     Whatever decision she made regarding her fictional dilemma over the gender and sexuality of her characters it was clear that, to a certain extent, the central figure, Gregory, whom she would follow from adolescence to maturity, would be based on herself. Gregory ‘often amused himself before falling asleep by finding . . . sensations of being another person – someone of course he did not know’.
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Highsmith was likewise obsessed with ‘the insolvable problem of what am I?’
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; not only did she practise losing herself so she could inhabit the world of her imaginary characters, but, at times, she genuinely felt that her identity was slipping away from her.

     Another preliminary sketch for the novel introduces a character called Michael, Gregory’s friend and idol; the psychological and sexual tension between them is something she would go on to explore in greater depth in novels such as
Strangers on a Train
and
The Talented Mr Ripley
. In one scene, Gregory, who feels a strange sexual attraction to Michael, mentions to his friend that many of history’s greatest men were, in fact, homosexual; a segment which bears strong resemblance to the homo-erotic relationship between Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf in
The Talented Mr Ripley
.

     ‘It is at all times essential to Gregory to have a hero,’ Highsmith recorded in her journal. ‘He is nothing in himself . . . He knows all about the study of homosexuality and once to Michael when they were walking . . . told to Michael all the list of names, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar . . . who were homosexual.’

     Michael rejects him with the words:

‘Crap! . . . How do you know they were homos?’

     (The word sent a thrill of shame down Gregory’s spine  . . .)
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Homosexuality, its theory as well as practice, informed all of Highsmith’s writing. In each of her cahiers she would introduce her observations on the subject under the heading, N.O.E.P.S. – Notes On Ever Present Subject. When she was nineteen she stated that relations between people of the same sex would always be transitory and never ultimately satisfying because each person always thought they would be happier with another. The problem with homosexuals, she declared a year later, was that they unconsciously associated expressions of emotion with secrecy, thereby censoring in themselves even the most warm and positive feelings. Most gay women disgusted her. Not only were the majority of them, she believed, stupid and dirty but socially they were beneath her. Expanding on the negative aspects of her own sexuality, she went onto say that while homosexual males sought out intellectual equals, lesbians were merely would-be men who never expected to meet their match.