Beautiful Shadow (41 page)

     ‘I want to explore the diseases produced by sexual repression,’ wrote Highsmith in her notebook, as she plotted out the novel. ‘From this unnatural abstinence evil things arise, like peculiar vermin in a stagnant well: fantasies and hatreds, and the accursed tendency to attribute evil motivations to charitable and friendly acts.’
⁸

     Like so many of her heroes, Vic is trapped by a fantasy. He deliberately starts a false rumour saying he has killed one of Melinda’s lovers, McRae, but the idea of murder soon becomes a reality, a reality which appears like a dream – ‘like something he had imagined rather than done’.
⁹
He is incapable of perceiving the magnitude of his violent acts and, as a result, feels no guilt. He waits for the terror to creep across him, darkening his conscience, but instead all he experiences is a bland memory from childhood of when he won a prize in geography for making a model Eskimo village out of eggshells and spun glass. The act of murder frees him from his repression and after drowning a man in a swimming pool at a party, Vic feels remarkably liberated. The characterisation certainly impressed Anthony Boucher who, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, called the book ‘a full-fleshed novel of pity and irony’.
¹⁰

     Ironically, the crimes also make Vic feel vastly superior to the common man and in the last paragraph of the novel, he believes himself to be an ‘überman’, a Nietzschean superhero whose intellectual skills single him out from the crowd. Unlike Ripley, with whom he shares quite a few characteristics, Vic is caught at the end of the novel. Significantly the man who brings about his downfall, Don Wilson, is a writer of detective novels, and the final paragraph of
Deep Water
can be read as a self-referential statement about Highsmith’s transgressive methods, a measure of just how disruptive her anti-heroes were to the genre of crime fiction.

     Vic has been brought to justice by a crime writer – a man working in a fictional form which was famous, pre-Highsmith, for restoring order and bolstering up morality – but he is resistant to the neat narrative closure imposed upon him. He cocks a knowing snook to the well-worn ending of the traditional suspense story and curses the mediocrity of conventional morality. Murder, he believes, has made him a great man. Like an eagle, he is capable of flying over the mass of little birds without wings.

     The novel does make a moral point of sorts. Surely, Highsmith believes, modern society must share some of the blame for the deadening of an individual’s soul, together with the topsy-turvy morality promulgated by the media that persuades us to regard murderers as heroes. Vic’s six-year-old daughter, Beatrice, or Trixie, is the typical product of post-war society: ‘in that little blonde head was no moral standard whatsoever, at least not about a matter as big as murder,’ Highsmith writes.
¹¹
Although she wouldn’t dream of stealing so much as a piece of chalk from school, murder was something else. ‘She saw it or heard of it in the comic books every day, saw it on television at Janey’s house, and it was something exciting and even heroic when the good cowboys did it in Westerns.’
¹²

     Highsmith is so skilful at immersing the reader in the abnormal psychology of her anti-heroes, it’s easy to forget that she was also a political writer.
Deep Water
contains references, albeit subtle ones, to the Cold War, H-bomb shelters and the paranoia surrounding communism. As Vic says, ‘ “If the Americans go over to the Reds, they call them ‘turncoats’. If the Reds come over to us, they’re ‘freedom-loving’. Just depends from what side you’re talking.” ’
¹³

     Academic Russell Harrison believes that Highsmith’s use of these oblique references reflects the suppressive politics of Fifties’ America. ‘Because this displacement mimics the displacement the Cold War effected in American life . . . it is more profound and harder to see,’ he writes. ‘As sex is everywhere in Highsmith’s novels, though not necessarily treated directly, so the political is similarly pervasive, if even more invisible. Although her novels from the late 1960s on dealt more directly with social and political change in the United States, the earlier novels were products of (the suppression of) politics that constituted Cold-War America.’
¹⁴

Towards the end of 1955 Highsmith and Ellen Hill parted, this time for good. Although they would remain friends, of sorts, until a few years before Highsmith’s death, their intimate relationship was now over. Pat moved back to New York, to her small apartment on East 56th Street, where she finished the first draft of
Deep Water
. In mid-December she analysed, yet again, why her relationship with Ellen was doomed to fail. It was, she concluded, because they were both fundamentally pessimistic. From now on she would, she added, only ever ally herself with women with more sunny dispositions.

     As the new year began, she felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. ‘I can feel my grip loosening on my self,’ she wrote. ‘It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.’
¹⁵
She wished there were a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply ‘depression’. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, ‘Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over’.
¹⁶

     In the midst of her depression, she had an idea about the gaseous after-effects of a bomb, which had the power to wipe out the memories of an entire population – the resulting story, ‘Blackout’, was apparently thrown away in December 1974. The hellishness of the city was a theme which obviously concerned her at this time, and in February 1956, she thought of another story which expressed the malaise. The story was inspired, she said, by an incident several months previously when Highsmith had walked into her first floor apartment to find a group of five or six boys hunched over her desk. She had left one of the windows open and the boys had, it seemed, entered via the fire escape. When they saw her they rushed out, but they had daubed a suitcase with paint which then had to be removed with turpentine. Months later she was reminded of the experience when, sitting at her desk, she heard the sound of shouting coming from the fire escape, and, automatically, retreated into the corner of her room like a frightened rat.

     ‘I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them,’ she said. ‘It is a vicious emotional cycle.’
¹⁷
The experience inspired ‘The Barbarians’, a story anthologised in her collection,
Eleven
, about a man, Stanley Hubbell, who enjoys painting on Sundays, but whose hobby is interrupted by the noise of a group of baseball players below his flat. Highsmith purged herself of the hatred she felt for the boys outside her own apartment by having Stanley take hold of a large stone and drop it on to one of the rowdy men’s heads.
¹⁸
But the reader is left with the unsettling question: who is the greater barbarian?

     As spring warmed the city, Highsmith’s spirits received a well-needed boost by the start of a new relationship with a thirty-four-year-old female copywriter who cannot be named. By May of 1956, Highsmith had started dedicating poems to her and then in June, after a trial period of living together in New York, they moved to the countryside. With them came a new chrome and black Ford convertible, a boxer dog and a pair of Siamese cats. Highsmith kept her East 56th Street apartment for the summer, but vacated it at the beginning of September.

     Their house, a converted barn in four acres of land, was situated in Sneden’s Landing, Palisades, an hour’s drive from Manhattan. Domestic life, it seems, was idyllic; each night Highsmith set her alarm for seven in the morning, her girlfriend drove into the city to work, while she spent the summer finishing off the still untitled
Deep Water
. ‘The trust in the eyes of a girl who loves you,’ she said. ‘It is the most beautiful thing in the world.’
¹⁹

     Yet only four months after the start of their relationship, Highsmith was already feeling uncomfortable with the situation. It was, she said, too easy, too comfortable, too safe for her. ‘The danger of living with somebody, for me, is the danger of living without one’s normal diet of passion,’ she noted at the end of July.
²⁰
Life with Ellen Hill had been full of passion, she recalled, precisely because the older woman’s behaviour made her so angry and resentful she could not fail to feel stimulated. Her new lover, however, was simply too nice. A new piece of furniture, an extra pet, or an amazingly sophisticated labour-saving device could not satisfy Pat’s spiritual and emotional cravings. Perhaps the fault lay with her subject matter; writing about hatred, sexual repression, murder and violence left little room for the expression of love, ‘and it is necessary for me to express love,’ she said. ‘I can do this only in dreaming, it seems.’
²¹

     A friend suggested therapy, but after her experience with Eva Klein, she felt reluctant to rush back on to the psychotherapists’ couch. The best solution, she reasoned, was to express herself through her writing and drawing. ‘And when all’s said and done, the final comment will be (from me at least) so what? I’ll live with my neuroses. I’ll try to develop patience, with my handicapped personality. But I prefer to live with my neuroses and try to make the best of them.’
²²

In June 1956, Highsmith started to make notes for what would become her sixth novel,
A Game for the Living
. It would, she said, focus on two men, dark-haired Ramon and the more Germanic-looking Theodore, both in love with the same woman. In addition to the genre-driven quality of suspense appropriate to such a book, Highsmith wanted the novel to explore deeper, philosophical issues, particularly existentialism. While working on the book, she read Kierkegaard, transcribing into her notebook one of her favourite quotations; which she would use at the beginning of the published novel. ‘Faith has taken all chances into account . . . if you are willing to understand that you
must
love, then is your love eternally secure.’ Next to this, Highsmith wrote in her notebook, ‘This illustrates the appeal of Kierkegaard for the neurotic of our time.’
²³

     But Highsmith’s attempts to fuse the whodunnit form with philosophical inquiry were not wholly successful. Whereas in her previous novels, she had skillfully managed to convey her ideas through character dynamics and subtle narrative patterns, in
A Game for the Living
the themes are signposted in such a self-conscious way that the result seems forced. ‘He believed the world had no meaning,’ Highsmith writes of Theodore in the novel, ‘no end but nothingness, and that man’s achievements were all finally perishable – cosmic jokes, like man himself.’
²⁴

     The setting for the book was inspired by a two-month-long trip she made to Mexico with her copywriter girlfriend at the beginning of 1957, stopping in Mexico City, Veracruz, and Acapulco. Sitting on the terrace of her hotel in Acapulco, Highsmith opened her artist’s pad and sketched the breathtaking view that stretched itself out around her. Clearly, the process of transforming what she saw into art gave her a sense of order – it helped her to assimilate what she perceived and to make sense of her emotional life.

     ‘Order in my life,’ she wrote in her notebook on 20 February. ‘It has to be an internal order, of course. To make a sketch of a view from my Acapulco terrace conquers the muddled scene in front of me . . . The veil comes between me and the person I am supposed to love, also. This I do not like but cannot help. It will be so with any individual with whom I am in love or with whom I live.’
²⁵

     While in Acapulco she analysed herself using Riesmanian terminology; since 1951 she had, she said, moved from a state of being what she called ‘inner-directed’ – defined by the fact that she was ambitious, idealistic and self-driven – to a person who was more ‘other-directed’. This had manifested itself by a certain carelessness with money, the abandonment of her daily exercise regime, laziness, an over-tolerance of mediocrity and ‘a general lowering of sights in my themes’.
²⁶