Beautiful Shadow (44 page)

     By the autumn of 1958, Highsmith’s affair with Mary Ronin had moved out of the realms of the imagination into reality. On 5 November, Pat recorded in her notebook that her new lover had called her ‘darling’ for the first time, after three months. She also wrote a poem to the woman whom she credited with sweetening her summer. Letters from Mary – signed with a lower-case ‘m.’ – which Highsmith preserved in the pages of her notebook and which the author later dated as October or November 1958, reveal the romantic passion which underlined their affair. In one letter Mary talks about her love of Schoenberg’s ‘Transfigured Night’ – ‘Somehow it now reminds me of us!’
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– and describes Highsmith’s physical characteristics according to the range of colours set down by Abraham Werner in his 1821 book,
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour
. According to Mary’s trained eye, Highsmith’s hair was not simply black, rather it could be compared to Werner’s Scotch Blue, Throat of Blue Titmouse and Blue Copper Ore. Continuing with the allusions, she went on to describe Highsmith’s lips – minus lipstick – as a mixture of Aurora Red, Vent Converts of Pied Wood-Pecker, Red on the Naked Apple and Red Orpiment, while her skin was a blend of Celandine Green, Phaloena Margaritaria, Back of Tussilage Leaves and the mineral Beryl. Towards the end of the letter, after making an error in spacing, she comments, ‘The above skipped line should prove to you that people in love do not make ggood [
sic
] typists.’
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From the letters it can also be gathered that Highsmith sent her lover a flower in the midst of a snow flurry and that Mary rapturously described Pat as having ‘a beautiful figure and legs like a thorobred’.
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Highsmith thought her lover possessed an intriguing combination of innocence and wisdom – not only was she as impulsive as a teenager, but she seemed to be generous and open-hearted. How, Highsmith asked herself, could she have remained so fresh and seemingly uncorrupted by the disappointments of life? ‘Or has she had so few?’ Highsmith asked. ‘Perhaps she did not repeat mistakes over and over, as I did.’
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     Pat started writing
This Sweet Sickness
at the end of September. Five and half weeks later she had written nearly half of it, but as she took a break from work she became acutely conscious of the creative process. She compared it to watching a performance at a theatre during which the stage machinery was exposed revealing the clumsy mechanics behind the magic. The realisation – the glimpse into the dark heart of creation – left her frightened, scared of ‘this abyss in the middle of myself’.
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Intriguingly, Highsmith went on to draw parallels between the black hole inside herself – clearly a symbol of her creativity – and the concomitant need for that space to be filled by an ‘innocent victim’.
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There was, she said, surely no sensation like falling in love – the blend of mental and physical feelings could transport one completely, give one a brief flash of heaven. Even if she was seventy-five and knew she did not have much longer to live, she would still believe in the metamorphic power of love; if she could no longer feel its influence, she said, she would surely remember its effects.

     Despite the affair with Mary Ronin, Highsmith continued to live with her copywriter girlfriend. The couple moved into a larger house together in nearby Sparkill in late September, but by the end of 1958, their relationship had broken down. In early December, Pat returned to New York City, into an apartment at 76 Irving Place, where she lived alone. After living with her girlfriend for two years, she enjoyed the sense of isolation, happy that there was nobody around to interrupt her flow of consciousness, yet she was also more aware of her irrationality – her fear of insanity – than before. During January, she worked on a second draft of the novel, and on 12 February she wrote to Kingsley that she had ‘just quickly written a book I am quite pleased with, appropriately entitled
This Sweet Sickness
’.
²⁸
After submitting the novel to Joan Kahn, her editor wrote back to her, on 8 May, with a critique of the book. Her main worry was the accepting behaviour of the characters who surrounded David Kelsey, the feeling that, ‘people’s reactions to him and his dual role, etc. are too often not real enough so that the reader feels, Oh, it’s all so easy on him.’
²⁹
She followed this up with a list of minor editing queries, but concluded, ‘I think the book is so good that I want everyone to share my enthusiasm for it.’
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     Yet during early 1959, Highsmith realised that her affair with Mary Ronin, once suffused with romance, now seemed slightly soiled. It had became obvious that the illustrator was involved with another all along, whom Highsmith only identified by the initials R.B. On 18 February she wrote in her notebook that she had had her ‘faith shaken in the girl who inspired the book’.
³¹
However, this was not Mary’s fault; it was Pat’s own fickleness which was to blame. As her mania flared up once again, her libido peaked and she said she felt like making love ten times a day. ‘And it is surprising how the girls come!’
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In March, Pat and Mary quarrelled when the artist misunderstood her lover, assuming that Highsmith had presented her with an ultimatum: if she did not choose her, the writer would end their relationship and take another. During the encounter, Mary’s composure crumpled – she sat staring silently at the floor and Highsmith said that she looked like she had suddenly aged by fifteen years.

     Pat was constantly anxious. She worried that her pet cats might be hit by a passing car or one day fall out of the window of her Manhattan apartment – a feeling which was, she said, a projection of the guilty feelings which festered inside her, emotions brought about as a by-product of involving herself with another woman’s lover. ‘I worry, subconsciously, about the responsibility of M. and myself, and my guilt feelings in regard to R.,’ she wrote in her notebook. But why should she care about hurting another person? ‘Because I doubt my reliability . . . It is an endless chain, going back into the unconscious, the little shames best left buried.’
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     Although Highsmith did not document how her relationship with Mary Ronin ended, by June she noted that, after eight months together, the ‘fire of love dies down’.
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The writer hoped that Mary would accompany her on a trip to Greece, but in October, while she was in Paris, she learnt the disappointing news that her lover would not meet her after all. Her future, she saw, would comprise yet another foreign city experienced alone; a tiny room in a hotel, the glinting lights of a nearby restaurant where she would dine by herself. ‘Out of these things come my stories, books, and my sense of life,’ she wrote.
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‘Things were not so good in the late fifties when I was broke,’ Highsmith said, referring to the state of her finances,
³⁶
and it was time, she thought, to do something about it. At the end of 1958, soon after moving into her new apartment in Irving Place, Highsmith severed contact with her agent Margot Johnson. From 1953, Highsmith had expressed doubts about Johnson’s ability – she believed she just wasn’t working hard enough to sell her books and raise her advances. In late 1958, she also felt confident enough to start asking her French agent Jenny Bradley, of the William A. Bradley Literary Agency, to push for more money. She had been disappointed when, in October 1957, an offer of $10,000 for the film rights to
The Talented Mr Ripley
had been withdrawn after the producers failed to find a
metteur en scène
. But one year on she thought it only appropriate to ask for more. On 29 December 1958, she wrote to Jenny Bradley, telling her, in a friendly manner, that she would like $12,000, perhaps even $15,000, for the film rights of
The Talented Mr Ripley
– ‘one can always come down in price, if necessary,’ she said.
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(The producers Robert and Raymond Hakim bought the book in early 1959, using it as a basis for the sumptuous
Plein Soleil
starring Alain Delon and directed by Réné Clément.)

     In early 1959, after sacking Johnson, she appointed Patricia Schartle, a partner of the of New York-based agency Constance Smith Associates as her American agent. ‘At the time when I asked Highsmith direct [why she had left Margot Johnson], she said that she was disappointed in sales,’ says Patricia, who subsequently married the novelist Anton Myrer, and who represented Highsmith for twenty years.
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Schartle – who was head of the book department and who would take Highsmith with her when Constance Smith retired and the business was merged with McIntosh & Otis, where Schartle was appointed president – remembers how difficult it was selling Highsmith’s, and many other suspense writers’, work. ‘In the early fifties, the lending library market in America totally disappeared almost overnight, where suspense and mysteries had received their support,’ she says. ‘Publishers panicked and declined mysteries despite [the] efforts of agents and booksellers, who always believed the market . . . would again flourish. But only [Agatha] Christie and Mickey Spillane were selling and it was not until P.D. James that the broad market recovered. Highsmith suffered at that time, in the late fifties, and sixties.’
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     Schartle believes that Highsmith experienced ‘two almost perfect flashes of brilliance’
⁴⁰
in her career: the idea behind
Strangers on a Train
and the characterisation of Ripley. ‘There had been rascals before in suspense writing, of course, but her sense of amorality or evil was particular in Ripley – not always as consciously as some critics thought perhaps; she often showed contempt for human beings.

     ‘My first impression of her was a loneliness, a sadness in one so young (we were both in our early thirties) with absolutely no sense of joy or balance. Gauche to an extreme, really physically clumsy as well as boyish, it was almost impossible to put her at ease. It was as if she felt a deep distrust of everything. She was totally secretive about her past – I asked a few questions about Texas, which she refused to answer. She really didn’t want anyone to know about her American origins and always avoided it. She tried to assume a superior European view even in that first meeting, which was rather pathetic. Highsmith had absolutely no grace – poor woman, she thought having an espresso machine made her sophisticated.

     ‘What I did like about her was her openness about her lesbianism, although we never once discussed it. I had the feeling that she had gone abroad so often . . . because she was more at ease in France, Germany – boring Munich seemed great to her . . . But she had the courage, after the success of
Strangers on a Train
to come out of the closet in days when it was not easy to do. One felt she had consciously decided to make a career virtue of it and to live abroad and be appreciated. She thought it made her more interesting as a writer. But she had never read Colette or Stendhal or George Sand at that point. I did respect her work ethic – she kept to a good regular working schedule daily in an almost Germanic sense.

     ‘What did I dislike? Slyness, a certain meanness. She showed no interest really in other serious artists in any field, unless they were hugely famous, and she was curiously bourgeois – a mixture of contrasts that must have cost her emotionally. The very things I personally disliked, I also recognized probably helped her to achieve a certain individuality as a writer: misanthropy, malice, which I think ran deep in her nature.’
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The only time she can remember Highsmith laughing was when the writer saw ‘a poster-ad in the New York subway where some creep had gouged out the eyes of the child’.
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Chapter 18

A lurking liking for those that flout the law

1959–1960

Towards the end of 1959, Highsmith wrote in her notebook that there was one thing that interested her more than morality
per se
– the collapse of moral structures and the sense of despair which was clouding the post-war era. ‘We have to doubt the “reward of virtue”, certainly in the next world, and also its power to bring happiness here,’ she said.
¹
She was echoing the views of a number of social commentators who had been quick to articulate the new sense of moral relativity which had wormed its way through Eisenhower’s America.