Beautiful Shadow (32 page)

     She had first been invited to make the transatlantic crossing by Lil Picard in September 1948, and although she turned down the offer, she decided that travelling to the Continent was one of her most pressing ambitions. She saved money from comic-book writing and in May 1949, booked her ticket. She felt optimistic about the trip – after all, on 20 May, only a fortnight before she was due to sail on the
Queen Mary
, her agent told her that Harper & Brothers wanted to publish her novel, the as yet untitled
Strangers on a Train
. That same night, over a bottle of champagne, she and Marc Brandel decided to get married on Christmas Day. ‘Three high points in my life – definitely!’ she wrote in her diary.
¹⁶

     Before she left for Europe, she had lunch with her editor at Harper & Brothers, Joan Kahn, who would work closely with Highsmith for the next thirteen years. Pat was nervous before the lunch, but Joan told her that the book was a fine first novel. On 4 June, Marc, Rosalind and her mother came to see her off. Pat was disappointed that her cabin, which she had to share with three other women, was on the D deck and that she had to travel tourist, instead of first class – she blamed her therapist for her lack of funds. Noel Coward was on board, but as she was sailing ‘below deck’, she had no way of orchestrating a meeting. The meals, she said, were thrown at the passengers and then quickly snatched away. ‘No one attractive in tourist class,’ she sneered.
¹⁷

     Aboard the liner she slept, bashed out comic stories on her typewriter and imagined the life she would return to in America. But the more she thought about the prospect of marriage to Marc, the more she dreaded it. Domesticity, she said, repelled her and the idea of a life of babies, cooking, false smiles, vacations, movies and sex, particularly the latter, disgusted her. By the time she had docked at Southampton on 10 June, she had decided wedded bliss was not for her. She took a first-class carriage up to the capital and was met at Waterloo station by her London hosts – Dennis Cohen, the wealthy founder of the Cresset Press (which would publish
Strangers on a Train
,
The Blunderer
and
The Talented Mr Ripley
in Britain), and his wife, Kathryn. The couple drove her to their rather grand house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, in a Rolls-Royce and laid on a superb lunch, complete with Riesling wine. Highsmith had first met the Cohens at a party of Rosalind Constable’s in New York, on 10 March, that was also attended by the writer Mary McCarthy and her husband.

     Pat was captivated by the beautiful Kathryn Cohen who worked as a doctor at St George’s Hospital in London. American by birth – her maiden name was Kathryn Hamill – she had spent the first part of her life working as an actress, appearing in Cochran’s
Revue Sketches
, Farjeon’s
Nine O’Clock Revue
, and had met her husband, Dennis, while she was starring with the Ziegfeld Follies. After working for a brief period as Aneurin Bevan’s secretary, Kathryn enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, to study medicine.

     Kathryn played the part of the sophisticated – and well-connected – hostess to perfection. She invited Pat to lunch with the actress Peggy Ashcroft, took her to the Tate Gallery, and accompanied her on a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they saw Diana Wynyard as Desdemona. Quickly the two women became close and, during her two-week stay at the Cohen’s house, Pat felt able to talk in detail about her complicated emotional life. She also asked Kathryn’s advice about the hormone deficiency that still worried her. ‘If you were added up,’ Kathryn told her, ‘I think you’d have a little more on the male side – from your reactions to men I mean.’
¹⁸

     On 25 June, Highsmith took a train from Victoria, a boat across the Channel and then another train to Paris. The distractions of the city, which Highsmith described as ‘bold, squawking, dirty, magnificent in a thousand places’
¹⁹
– she frequented the louche nightclubs of the Latin quarter, including the notorious Le Monocle – should have been enough to take her mind off Kathryn. But she still yearned for the kind of emotional intensity not provided by instant sexual gratification. ‘No such dissolute three days in all my life before,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I am lonely. I need Kathryn, or Ann!’
²⁰
While in Paris, she visited the Louvre, where she saw the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the headless Grecian statue which she later described as the perfect embodiment of courage and female beauty and which she would use in
The Price of Salt
to describe Therese’s attraction to Carol. ‘Carol’s beauty struck her like a glimpse of the Winged Victory of Samothrace,’ she wrote.
²¹

     A few days later, after travelling south to Marseille, where she was staying with a family friend, Highsmith decided for her health that it would be better if she took Eva Klein’s advice and shunned any emotional attachments for the foreseeable future, and she wrote to Marc temporarily breaking off relations. From Marseille, she travelled by bus to Genoa, where she discarded a pair of pyjamas, the ‘horrors’, given to her by her fiancé. The next day, in Milan, she visited the cathedral at dusk, where she was mistaken for a prostitute. She then journeyed on to Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome. Two days after arriving in Rome, she felt ill and was confined to her hotel bed, thinking that nobody would care if she were to die alone. She wired Kathryn in London, who telephoned her the following day. Yes, she said, she would come out and meet her in Naples; immediately Highsmith’s spirits rose.

     Pat fell in love with Naples, the capital of the
mezzogiorno
, as soon as she arrived on 24 August. Standing in the filthy streets she could hear the ringing of church bells, the spit and hiss of the espresso machines, the constant barking of dogs, the honking of car horns, the clatter of dishes and the plaintive echo of American songs on street radios. Beggars loitered everywhere and the city smelt of stale sweat, rotten fruit, urine and faeces. It was here that she felt inspired to start writing the novel based on her experiences in Bloomingdale’s.

     Kathryn arrived in Naples on 3 September. Initially the two women were somewhat timid with one another; Pat wanted to kiss Kathryn good night, but did not dare, for fear of being rejected. Like the character of Tom Ripley she thought herself shabby next to her object of adoration and felt self-conscious about her bad teeth, unkempt hair and untidy shoes. On 7 September, the two women drove with a friend of Kathryn’s to Positano, the magical village on the Amalfi coast, which would be recast in
The Talented Mr Ripley
as Mongibello. Highsmith found the place enchanting. ‘I love the name,’ she said, ‘and down to the sea, an ideal rock bordered cove  . . .’
²²

     From Naples, Kathryn and Pat took a boat to Palermo, Sicily. Sitting out on deck, under the moonlight, the writer observed how, as the ship gained speed, white crested waves formed at the prow and the lights of the boat flashed like a strange silver forest fire. ‘At night, sitting in the soft wind on the top deck . . . a happiness and promise suffuses one like an enthusiasm, a spell cast by the gods, and one falls in love with whomever one is near, one is filled with giving.’
²³

     During the days that followed the two women became lovers, but as they travelled back on the night boat to Naples, they realised their time together was limited. Kathryn was due back in Britain and Highsmith’s summer jaunt had come to an end. On 23 September – ‘the horrible day’ – Highsmith closed the door to their hotel room feeling utterly dejected. Kathryn, as a parting gift, gave her a pink and blue scarf which she had bought in Capri. Highsmith travelled to Genoa from where she would sail back to America.

     Looking back at her trip, she realised that her three and a half months in England, France and Italy had stimulated both her senses and her literary imagination. ‘It widens one’s interests again,’ she said of Europe, ‘makes [one] more diverse as at seventeen.’
²⁴
As her ship sailed through the wine-dark sea, Highsmith pondered her future. Her affair with Kathryn had been intense and passionate, but Pat realised that she had, essentially, a flighty nature and could not sustain a relationship for longer than two or three years. ‘But at least the two years are worth it, worth anything,’ she concluded. ‘I can envisage England & Kathryn for two years  . . .’
²⁵

While in London, Highsmith had purchased a Kierkegaard anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, into which she scribbled the words, ‘Truth is subjectivity’, a neat summary of the Danish writer’s philosophy. After reading the anthology, Highsmith referred to Kierkegaard as her ‘master’, the same term she had applied to Dostoevsky; indeed the two writers explored similar themes – irrationality, loss of identity, and the fragmented nature of consciousness – motifs which worm their way throughout Highsmith’s work. In Kierkegaard’s
The Sickness Unto Death
, written in 1849, the philosopher wrote about a man desperate to lose his identity. ‘Such a despairer, whose only wish is this most crazy of all transformations, loves to think that this change might be accomplished as easily as changing a coat . . . he recognizes that he has a self only by externals.’
²⁶
The words sum up the underlying motivation that governs many of Highsmith’s anti-heroes, particularly Tom Ripley in
The Talented Mr Ripley
.

     Although Søren Kierkegaard died in 1855, readers of English had to wait until the 1930s and 1940s for the publication of his complete works in translation. This ‘tardy recognition’, in Bretall’s words
²⁷
was due not only to the fact that Kierkegaard wrote in a so-called ‘minor language’, but also to the sheer modernity of his ideas, concepts which seemed to have a greater resonance for the twentieth century than the nineteenth. Indeed, Kierkegaard has been seen as the father of existentialism – freedom, he believed, lies not in choice itself, but in the decision to choose whether to choose. ‘It is, therefore, not so much a question of choosing between willing the good or the evil,’ Kierkegaard wrote, ‘as of choosing to
will
, but by this in turn the good and the evil are posited.’
²⁸
The only truth, as Kierkegaard saw it, was ‘subjectivity, inwardness’,
²⁹
the flux-like irrational state of mind Highsmith hoped to capture in her writing. If she knew she was going to die, what, she asked herself in her notebook in November 1950, would she like to have achieved in her work? ‘Consciousness alone, consciousness in my particular era, 1950,’
³⁰
she wrote.

     Highsmith also found parallels between the work of Kierkegaard and Proust, especially in their writings on the nature of love. Only by believing that one had a duty to love, by seeing the object of one’s affections as a fixed and static being, was it possible to make that love last. ‘For in that love which only has continuance, however confident it is,’ wrote Kierkegaard, ‘there is still an anxiety, an anxiety about the possibility of change.’
³¹
It is not hard to see why Kierkegaard’s notion of love appealed to the romantic in Highsmith.

Chapter 13

Carol, in a thousand cities

1949–1951

If Highsmith thought her adventures in Europe would sort out her unresolved emotional life she was wrong. If anything, the trip only made the situation worse. After docking at Philadelphia, Highsmith took a train to New York, arriving in Manhattan on 15 October 1949. Four days later she had dinner at her apartment with Marc, who told her that he was still keen on marriage and that he was sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. They started sleeping together again, but she only wanted Kathryn. ‘I feel I am in love with her, really,’ she wrote, ‘as I have not been with anyone, anything
like
this, since Ginnie.’
¹

     Each day she waited for a letter from Kathryn. Pat sent her lipstick, butter, figs and chocolate bars – still rationed in post-war Britain – but was too timid to dispatch the letter she had written confessing her love. Inspired by the agony of waiting for a word from Kathryn, at the end of October she had an idea for a story about a man suffering from the same inner torment. The story opens, ‘Every morning, Don looked into his mailbox, but there was never a letter from her.’
²