Beautiful Shadow (39 page)

     She had an infected tooth, her possessions were scattered across the country and her lover had just left her, but nevertheless there was something inside her – which she described as a strength – which kept her going. The breakdown of her relationship with Lynn Roth did give her a spiritual setback and she looked at the collapse of that affair as being symbolic of all past liaisons, ‘which have and always will be beset with disappointment’.
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Instead of wallowing in self-pity, however, Highsmith started to flesh out the plot of a book which would become one of her most powerful and celebrated novels. Early titles included, ‘Pursuit of Evil,’ ‘The Thrill Boys’, and ‘Business is my Pleasure,’ before she eventually settled on
The Talented Mr Ripley
.

The Talented Mr Ripley
, the first of Highsmith’s five Ripley novels, was written at speed in 1954, taking only six months. ‘It felt like Ripley was writing it,’ she said later, ‘it just came out.’
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Highsmith’s novel centres on Thomas Ripley, an insecure young American enlisted by the rich father of an acquaintance to travel to Italy and bring back his estranged son, Dickie Greenleaf. Tom falls in love with Dickie’s lifestyle (and a little with Dickie himself), but when he realises that he will never, ultimately, be able to be one with him, Ripley kills him and assumes his identity.

     The story is a dark reworking of Henry James’
The Ambassadors
, which she read in 1940, and which she thought was rather overwritten and overlong. In case the reader is left in any doubt about the parallels between the two novels, Highsmith alludes to
The Ambassadors
– in which Lambert Strether is sent by Mrs Newsome to find her son, Chad, in Paris and return him back to his home in America – twice. The first mention is when an amused Herbert Greenleaf asks Tom whether he has read a particular work by James. The second is when Ripley requests a copy of the book in the library on board the liner taking him from America to Europe.

     The central theme of
The Talented Mr Ripley
– the flux-like nature of identity and the difference between appearance and reality – was one which had, as we know, concerned Highsmith from an early age. ‘Pretences when begun early enough become true character . . .’ she wrote in 1949. ‘And the curious truth in human nature, that falsity becomes truth finally.’
²⁵
She also suffered the agonies of desiring the unattainable and realised that such a subject was perfect for fictional exploration. ‘Frustration as a theme. One person, in love with another whom he cannot attain or be with,’ she noted, again in 1949.
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     She started plotting the novel at the end of March 1954, just before the split with Lynn Roth, when she jotted down some initial thoughts about the central character, a young American man living in Europe. The portrait she sketched out, although significantly different from the Ripley of the finished book, bears traces of both the amoral but charming psychopath and his victim, and love object, Dickie Greenleaf. At this point she imagined her hero to be an amateur painter, half homosexual, with an adequate private income, who found himself caught up in a smuggling plot. As the story progressed, she envisioned him discovering that he had a talent for – and took a pleasure in – killing, and, as a result, he is used by a gang to carry out their dirty work. ‘Like Bruno, he must never be quite queer – merely capable of playing the part if need be to get information to help himself out of an emergency . . .’ she wrote. ‘His name should be Clifford, or David, or Matthew.’
²⁷

     Highsmith thought back to the young man she had seen in Positano in 1952, the isolated figure strolling down the beach at six in the morning. She focused on this image, split it in two in her imagination like a scientist dividing a cell under a microscope, and came up with another of her powerful male–male dynamics to create the characters of Richard – or Dickie – Greenleaf and Thomas Ripley.

     ‘Or Richard Greenleaf – the boy on the beach at Positano,’ she mused. ‘Tom . . . is the other, a perpetually frightened looking, vaguely handsome young man who has at the same time the most ordinary, forgettable face in the world.’
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     One of Highsmith’s early plot scenarios for the book had Dickie’s father travelling to Positano, where the two young men murder him by pushing him off a cliff. Then Ripley lures Dickie to the same spot and watches him fall, believing him to be dead. But Dickie survives, returns to the house, and talks Ripley into taking part in a smuggling operation. Another possibility was to have Tom involved in smuggling from the start. Mr Greenleaf turns up at the house in Positano, orders Tom to leave, and Tom in revenge kills the father, whose body is then, quite ludicrously, used to transport opium.

     The idea, like so much of Highsmith’s fiction, had a root in her own life. She started writing the novel while living in a rented cottage near Lenox, Massachusetts, which she had rented for the summer of 1954. Her landlord was an undertaker and she became fascinated by the minute details of his job, particularly the tree-shaped incisions he made in corpses before he opened them up and the material he used to stuff the bodies (sawdust was his secret).

     ‘I was toying with the idea of having Ripley engaged in a smuggling operation . . . during which Ripley would escort a corpse that was actually filled with opium,’ she said later. ‘This was certainly a wrong tack, and I never wrote it that way.’
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     Thankfully Highsmith relegated this
grand guignol
plot to a comic episode in the final version, transforming it into Tom’s suggestion that he and Dickie travel in coffins, accompanying a real corpse stuffed with drugs from Trieste to Paris and used the incident to symbolise the souring of the relationship between the two men. Ripley takes Dickie’s dismissal of this idea as a personal rejection, an indicator of their essential difference, and as such it becomes a motivating factor which leads directly to the murder.

They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them  . . .
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     The central premise of the book – one man losing his identity as easily as a snake sheds its skin – also had a real-life inspiration. On 16 April 1954, Highsmith picked up a copy of the
Herald Tribune
and read the headline: man ‘buried’ as fire victim seized as murder suspect. The story concerned Albert Paglino, of St Louis, who was presumed dead after the discovery of a charred body, which police took to be his. The man, however, was spotted drinking after his ‘funeral’ and he was arrested. Highsmith cut the piece from the newspaper and pasted it into her notebook, where it helped feed her imagination.

     ‘I did not turn loose of my main idea,’ she said, ‘which was of two young men with a certain resemblance – not much – one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity. This was the crux of the story.’
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     She started the book in what she described as a ‘bucolic’ mood. Certainly her life was more relaxed after the emotional turmoil of the last few years. In Lenox, she went to the local library, read de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
and flicked through an Italian grammar, but she found this somewhat serene attitude out of kilter with her frantic subject matter. After writing seventy-five pages she decided her prose was too flaccid. She scrapped the lot, made a mental and physical effort to sit on the edge of her chair, and started again.

     ‘It became a popular book because of its frenetic prose,’ she said, ‘and the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself. By thinking myself inside the skin of such a character, my own prose became more self-assured than it logically should have been. It became entertaining.’
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     It was, however, not difficult for her to think like Tom Ripley. Not only had the character had a long gestation, but the timbre and tone of his voice were remarkably similar to Highsmith’s own, as she later recognised. After the publication, in Britain, of her second Ripley novel,
Ripley Under Ground
, in 1971, she gave a copy of the book to her friend, Charles Latimer, with the dedication, ‘For Charles with love – April 2 – ’71 from Tom (Pat).’
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     ‘After Pat’s death, John Mortimer wrote a tribute, saying he thought she was in love with Mr Ripley,’ says Charles Latimer, ‘but actually she
was
Ripley, or, I should say, she would have liked to have been him.’
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     When she spoke of Ripley in her later years, ‘she would talk about him like he was a person who was very close to her,’ says Bettina Berch. ‘She’d defend him and think about what he would say about a certain situation. He was very real to her.’
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At the end of a letter to her friend, the photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, Highsmith signed herself ‘Pat H., alias Ripley.’
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     The painter Peter Thomson, now living in New York, remembers how in Positano, in 1963, he was coming off the beach after an all-night party when Highsmith, at the time a resident of the fishing village, walked up to him and said, ‘You remind me of Tom Ripley.’ ‘It was,’ recalls Thomson, ‘as if she was talking about somebody she knew.’
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     Knew him she did, for Ripley was an embodiment of her creative imagination at work, a representation of her unconscious and a shadowy symbol of her repressed, forbidden, and occasionally quite violent, desires. ‘EVIL’ she wrote, in capital letters, next to the heading ‘Subject’, at the beginning of her twenty-third cahier, the one she used as a notebook for
The Talented Mr Ripley
. She had been fascinated by the allure of evil as a subject matter for fiction ever since she started to keep her notebooks and in 1942, she observed that she felt herself strongly drawn it. While plotting the novel, in October 1954, she noted, ‘What I predicted I would once do, I am doing already in this very book (Tom Ripley), that is, showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too. Thus the subconscious always proceeds the consciousness, or reality, as in dreams.’
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     Ripley is not an author by profession, but there is a suggestion – in the first novel of the series at least – that, with his uncanny mimetic skills and his dynamic creative imagination, writing could be the greatest of his talents. After all, what else is fiction but an elaborate confidence trick? ‘His stories were good,’ Highsmith writes about Ripley, ‘because he imagined them so intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.’
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     Early in the novel, while Ripley is sailing to Europe – first class courtesy of the Greenleafs – he sits down to write what is, at first, a polite thank-you note for providing him with such comfortable accommodation. But his imagination takes over and the letter turns into a fantastical account of life with Dickie, whom in fact he has not yet met, in the village of Mongibello (the name is a knowing reference to Mount Etna, as described by Dante in Canto XIV of
The Inferno
). After detailing the fishing, the swimming, and the cafés, Ripley writes about how Dickie is not really romantically interested in Marge, together with a complete character analysis of her character, ‘until the table was covered with sheets of paper’.
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     Ripley’s chameleon-like personality – his ability to take over the identity of those around him, so essential in a writer – also expresses itself after he sees Dickie kissing Marge. In disgust, he pretends to be Dickie – he even goes so far as to step into a complete outfit of his clothes – and acts out a grotesque
tableau vivant
where he, still as Dickie, takes hold of Marge and strangles her. ‘ “Marge, you must understand that I don’t
love
you,” Tom said into the mirror in Dickie’s voice  . . .’
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