Beautiful Shadow (36 page)

     While travelling she heard her first novel had failed to win the Edgar Allan Poe award – the honour went to
Nightmare in Manhattan
by Thomas Walsh – and when she arrived in Munich, she received the bad news that Harper & Brothers had, after all, rejected her lesbian novel. Apparently, the editorial board had decided that she was too close to her subject matter and that her approach was not mature enough. Yet the setbacks failed to depress her and three weeks later, on 6 July, Margot wrote to tell her that Coward-McCann had accepted the book and that they would give her $500 on delivery of the finished manuscript.

     From Munich, where she was staying at the Pension Olive, on Ohmstrasse, she wrote to her mother about her recent sightseeing trips and informed her that her health had improved – she put this down to drinking more milk and eating simpler food. Privately Highsmith wondered how many times the heart could renew itself – ‘I have been five or six people in thirty years,’ she said
⁹
– and started to ponder her mortality. On 4 July – the day the Hitchcock film opened – she lay in bed, feeling old and, quite preposterously, fat. She listened to her heart beating in her chest and was forced to confront the fact that one day she would die. She recalled Natalia Murray’s words in Capri that one didn’t start to live until one was at least thirty years old, but nevertheless the thought of death unsettled her.

     She had problems with abscesses in her mouth, which necessitated the removal of two teeth, but by August as she worked on her lesbian novel, now retitled
The Price of Salt
, and plotted ‘The Sleepless Night’, she felt creatively invigorated. ‘I have never felt so (dangerously) alive at all pores as in these last days,’ she noted.
¹⁰
‘The Sleepless Night’, later called
The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder
, ran to nearly 400 pages, and was, she said, ‘a very long straight novel . . . it concerned eight people instead of just one’.
¹¹
The book was rejected by Coward-McCann in October 1952 and then subsequently by Harper & Brothers because of its ‘disjointedness and mostly, I think, for the lack of conclusion to all of it,’ she wrote to Kingsley. ‘Some have said the triteness of the ideas.’
¹²
Although the manuscript was mysteriously misplaced in 1958, hidden away in one of the boxes at the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne lie the last ten pages of Highsmith’s lost novel, a book described by Kingsley, who read it, as having ‘nothing to do with suspense . . . It was a serious book and I thought if she went on like this she would have something’.
¹³

     The fragment – typewritten, on paper discoloured by age – reveals that the climax of the novel, set in Paris, focuses on the close relationship between two men, Gerald and Oscar. In typical Highsmithian fashion, the bond between the two male characters has homoerotic undertones.

[Gerald] would recreate him forever with love and as a brother with no doubt of why, of wherefore and without judgement. And the urgency in his fingers spread up his arms, becoming a desire to embrace the stranger behind him with a love beyond brother’s love, beyond friend’s.
¹⁴

     In the final pages, Gerald discovers that Oscar has taken an overdose of nembutol and learns that he is the sole beneficiary of his friend’s estate (an interesting parallel with the climax of
The Talented Mr Ripley
). The book ends with Gerald taking hold of his suitcase and turning away into the darkness, a solitary figure facing an uncertain future.

     Despite all her physical and emotional problems, however, in August 1951 Highsmith believed her own future could not be brighter. Walking through a Munich park in the moonlight, under the weeping willows, she felt alive to every possibility and was conscious that her imagination was soaring to new heights. ‘I am alive! (O this trip! Just enough sex experiences to keep my appetite whetted, never half satisfied. Perhaps it is creating better  . . .’
¹⁵

Two weeks after writing this in her notebook, Highsmith met the sociologist Ellen Hill, a woman who would shape her life for the next four years and to whom she would remain bonded, by a combination of love and loathing, until just a few years before her death. Ellen, like the lovers that came before her, would inspire some of Highsmith’s most powerful novels, but in her case, the resulting fictional portraits were far from flattering.

     Their relationship was a tortured one from the very beginning. ‘Ellen was like a governess,’ says Kingsley. ‘They had a love-hate relationship.’
¹⁶
‘She was quite brilliant, very intelligent, but a little bit snobbish,’ says Peggy Lewis, who knew both women.
¹⁷
‘She was one of the most unpleasant women I have ever met,’ says Peter Huber, Highsmith’s friend and neighbour in Tegna. ‘But for some reason, even though they tormented one another, there was some sort of bond between them. I remember that Pat made her an ashtray and, enjoying the word play, inscribed it with the word “Forellen”, which means “trout” in German, and decorated it with three fish. Ellen didn’t like it, so Pat kept it.’
¹⁸

     Pat and Ellen met in Munich in early September 1951, via a mutual friend. Ellen, when arranging what to do on their first date together, asked Pat whether she preferred rococo to baroque castles. The couple drove to Tegernsee, the lake outside the city, where they had coffee and wine before lunch. Highsmith noted that the slight, well-groomed forty-two-year-old was ‘sharp, rather humourless, very polite’,
¹⁹
and she found her mildly attractive. Two days later, Ellen invited her back to her apartment on Karl Theodorstrasse where the two women listened to poetry and a music programme on the radio. Then Pat asked Ellen to come and sit by her on the sofa. Ellen’s hands and body reminded her of Virginia Kent Catherwood’s and it was this similarity that she responded to when they slept together. ‘Ah, she is much like Ginnie,’ Highsmith wrote in her diary. ‘Tonight was the only wonderful sensation – blotting out everyone who’s been between Ginnie and her.’
²⁰

     Ellen told Pat that not only was she the best lover she had ever had, but better than any she had ever heard or read about. ‘Ellen Hill told me that Pat was a marvellous lover,’ says Kingsley.
²¹
But Ellen, who was fiercely intelligent, also realised Highsmith had an impulse to invest lovers with imaginary characteristics; she knew that this tendency was not concomitant to a happy relationship. The older woman provided the writer with an accurate summary of exactly what was wrong with her. ‘She says, I fit the person to my wishes, find they don’t fit, and proceed to break it off,’ Highsmith noted. ‘So she analyses my past pattern.’
²²

     Unfortunately this pattern was about to repeat itself. Both women knew the risks, but neither of them was prepared to end the relationship. Pat felt herself to be passionately in love – she couldn’t sleep or eat, and her waist was shrinking to almost doll-like proportions – even though, or precisely because, Ellen was so obviously bad for her. She found Ellen’s lack of warmth astonishing and the snobbish attitude she showed towards her friends mortifyingly embarrassing. ‘ “I hate the common man,” ’ Ellen told her,
²³
a view which obviously did not alter over time. ‘I often talk with a sociologist friend,’ Highsmith told an interviewer in 1981, ‘and her opinion is that most people are quite ordinary, that universal education hasn’t brought the happiness and beauty that people had hoped.’
²⁴

     Ellen complained that since they had met a month ago, she had never had a decent night’s sleep; that Pat drank too much; she was sloppy, careless and absent-minded. If Highsmith so much as spilt a little milk, this was enough to send Ellen into paroxysms of rage. Six weeks after meeting, Pat noted that living with Ellen, whom she described as a harpy, upset her digestion. ‘She loves to dominate me, I feel,’ Highsmith said, ‘by ordering my life to give me a sense of helplessness and dependence upon her.’
²⁵

     At the beginning of February 1952, Ellen and Pat drove from Munich to Paris, and then to Nice, Cannes, Le Perthus, Barcelona, before sailing to Mallorca. As the trip progressed, their relations steadily worsened. Highsmith became increasingly resentful of Ellen’s dog, to whom she had to give half her steak one night at dinner. This hatred of the animal caused her to analyse the source of her animosity and, perhaps pushing the psychoanalytic parallels too far, she found similarities between her feelings for the dog and her stepfather’s attitude towards her and her mother when she was a little girl. In addition, Ellen, she felt, did not respect her as a writer and treated her as if she were of low intelligence. In Mallorca, they slept in separate beds and didn’t even kiss one another goodnight. In March, back in Cannes-sur-Mer, where they rented a three-storey house together for a month, costing $35, Pat wrote a poem which articulated the mutual sense of loathing that, in a way, held them together. She contemplated leaving Ellen, but her feelings veered wildly between utter hatred and a sense that she would go insane without her. In April the couple took a house in Florence for a couple of months, and while Ellen looked for a suitable job, Highsmith tried to finish her novel,
The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder
. But she found work almost impossible with Ellen around, as she was constantly interrupted by her incessant nagging about domestic details. ‘She could not be sabotaging it more effectively – unless she burnt the manuscript,’ noted Pat.
²⁶
They argued during the day, and made love at night – ‘Ellen’s last effort (always) to hang onto me.’
²⁷
The atmosphere between them was, she said, so putrid that it threatened to poison the spring blossom on the trees.

A warm Florentine night, June 1952. Highsmith is dreaming. She is in a room with Kathryn Cohen and a naked girl who resembles herself. Highsmith is overcome by a desire to set fire to the girl and orders her to stand in the bath. She gives her a small effigy, a doll of her grandmother, and sets the girl alight. As the flames begin to dance and lick around her, Kathryn starts to cry, resting her head on her shoulder. She tells Kathryn not to forget that the girl asked them to set her on fire, it was she who wanted it. At that moment, the victim’s lips begin to move and she turns her head in misery, avoiding the cruel flick of the flames. As Highsmith watches her burn, she is horrified by her own actions, but then as the girl stands up and steps out of the bath, she realises she is unharmed except for a few singes that darken and brown her skin. She feels guilty, worries that the girl will report her for this terrible crime, but then she wakes up. Musing over the dream, Highsmith has the feeling that the girl in the bathtub somehow represented herself. ‘In that case,’ she wrote in her journal, of this disturbingly vivid dream, ‘I had two identities: the victim and the murderer.’
²⁸

From Florence, Pat and Ellen travelled to Positano, the fishing village on the Amalfi coast, vertiginously spread up a hillside, set by the glistening azure blue of the Mediterranean. It was here, while staying at the Albergo Miramari Hotel, that one morning, at about six o’clock, Highsmith walked out onto her balcony and saw a young man strolling along the beach – the man who would be later be born in her imagination as Tom Ripley.

     ‘All was cool and quiet, the cliffs rose high behind me and were out of sight then, but visible to right and left . . . then I noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach from right to left . . . I could just see that his hair was straight and darkish. There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. And why was he alone? . . . Had he quarrelled with someone? What was on his mind? I never saw him again. I did not even write anything in my cahier about him.’
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     She would return to this image two years later when she started to write
The Talented Mr Ripley
. During that summer of 1952, however, she started to channel her creative energies into another novel, a book based on her love-hate relationship with Ellen Hill. The basic idea was about a man who murdered by imitation. ‘A model of brevity, with good humor, and tragedy in the hopelessness of his unhappy marriage,’ she wrote in her diary on 4 July, ‘which I shall create from the worst aspects of mine.’
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Reading that novel – which had working titles of ‘A Man Provoked’ and ‘A Deadly Innocence’, but which was eventually published in 1954 as
The Blunderer
– at the same time as Highsmith’s diaries is a chilling experience as she based Clara, the highly strung, manipulative, domineering wife of Walter Stackhouse, on Ellen Hill. Like Ellen, Clara seems more in love with her dog, Jeff, than with her partner, an affection that fosters resentment. ‘ “If you have fish again,” ’ Clara tells her husband one night in a restaurant, ‘ “Jeff gets
nothing
today!” ’
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Not only is she anti-drink, and anti-sex, like Ellen, but Clara hates Walter’s friends. ‘He was married to a neurotic, a woman who was actually insane in some directions, and moreover a neurotic that he was in love with.’
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When Walter reads in a newspaper the case of a woman’s body found in Tarrytown, New York – the wife of Melchior Kimmel, who really did commit murder – he begins to fantasise about killing Clara.