Beautiful Shadow (49 page)

     In March 1961, she moved from her house in Old Ferry Road to another rented property in New Hope, at 113 South Sugan Drive, a three-bedroom, two-storey building with views overlooking a brook. In the summer she embarked on a relationship with thirty-nine-year-old Daisy Winston, who at the time worked as a waitress in New Hope. ‘Daisy had black hair and was of small build,’ says Peggy Lewis. ‘I remember her as being very bright and lively.’
⁶²
Daisy’s best friend was New Hope woodworker and craftsman Phillip Powell, who settled in the town in 1947. ‘Pat was quite a character, very dour but my first impression of her was her shyness and it was clear that she needed booze to keep her going,’ he says. ‘Daisy never admitted that her relationship with Pat was an intimate one. New Hope was very free but she was a very private person. There was no question about the nature of their short – but intense – relationship, yet it remained unspoken.’
⁶³

     In August 1961, Highsmith, ever the romantic, composed a love poem for Daisy, in which she said that she pledged herself to her new lover, her ‘Little jewel of black and gold.’
⁶⁴
Daisy, in letters she wrote later to Highsmith, recalls how, in 1991 she found a batch of Pat’s notes, ‘some very dear, some humerous [
sic
] but all brought back very fond memories’,
⁶⁵
written to her thirty years before. ‘But you never brought me flowers – oh well – I won’t hold that against you,’ she added. ‘But fear not – it all went up in smoke.’
⁶⁶
Highsmith’s intimacy with Daisy lasted less than a year, yet their emotional attachment was deep and long-lasting and she dedicated
The Cry of the Owl
to her. When Highsmith was living in Europe, Daisy, who called herself Pat’s ‘adopted daughter’, would send her packages containing chillies, Campbell’s split pea soup and shoes – US size nine – from America, while Highsmith, who later developed a reputation as something of a miser, would think nothing of lending her friend money to cover her bills. In fact, in 1967, Highsmith made a will, one which she would subsequently rewrite, bequeathing half her ‘wordly’ goods to Daisy. ‘What a charming Freudian mistake,’ Pat wrote to Kingsley, correcting herself. ‘I mean, of course, wordly . . . and I have done it again. I mean, of course, worldly.’
⁶⁷

A cold winter night, December 1961. Highsmith is dreaming of murder again. She takes hold of an axe and slowly raises it above her head before bringing it down on a defenceless old woman, splitting her face open. Blow after blow reduces the woman to a bloody mass. The murder is without motive, but nevertheless the police have no doubt who committed the crime and arrest her soon after. The dream, she said, ‘was representative of guilt and of a deep fear that I might someday do this. In a fit of drunkenness or anger. But the victim in my dream was unknown to me, and ergo the murder had no objective. So much the more a crime of sheer brutality, wantonness, insanity, even.’
⁶⁸

In March 1962, Highsmith drew up an advertisement to sublet her house in New Hope. Her relationship with Daisy was over, she planned a three-month European trip and needed someone to pay her $150 monthly rent and feed her two cats. Before she left, she said her goodbyes to her friend Alex Szogyi whom she had met in the spring of 1960, when he was a French professor at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; later she would dedicate her short-story collection,
Eleven
, to him.

     ‘I thought she was just wonderful,’ says Alex. ‘She was quite beautiful then, but her face became quite tortured and unfortunately most people remember that and not the beauty of her earlier years. At the party when I first met her we talked for hours and we became close immediately – she told me she wanted me to be a friend of hers for the rest of her life. I was just so honoured that she liked me. I could have been the brother she never had. She was an only child as I was and we both had difficulties with our parents. I know that had she remained here I probably would have had her with me, because I was bisexual. It probably would have happened, but it never did because she went away, she was no longer part of my life and I was very shy. Before she left, she gave me her writing desk, which I still have.

     ‘She was never happy, not that I know of, but she was curious and interested in people and very loyal to her friends. Yet some of my friends were afraid of her – she wanted to really find out their essence, I guess; she had a mind of an inquiring novelist. She was a wonderful prober. Pat was always going to the very depths of experiences. There was never a dull moment with her and I do believe that she is a major American writer. Later in life, however, she became very possessive, controlling and jealous and eventually our friendship soured.’
⁶⁹

     Highsmith arrived in Paris in mid-May, where she stayed for ten days, after which she took a flight to Rome, travelling on to Cagliari, Sardinia. Her companion for the summer would be Ellen Hill. From Sardinia, the two women took a boat to Naples, and they arrived at the house they had rented in Positano at the beginning of June.

     Within moments of settling in at the house at 15 Via Monte, the psychological battle between the two ex-lovers resumed. Ellen started to hark back over what she thought was Pat’s ill-treatment and neglect of her and, in response, Highsmith reminded the older woman of her own hellish behaviour and suicide attempts. Highsmith decided that she would never share a house with another person again (a vow she would subsequently break); she could not bear the thought of being told what to do or the idea that someone was dominating her. ‘I have a real knack for finding people who do this,’ she wrote, ‘apart from this, my past associations have left me either emotionally or financially bankrupt, and the prospect of another such abyss and of hauling myself out of it utterly dismays me. I am to [
sic
] old to have that kind of courage any more.’
⁷⁰

     From Positano, the two women travelled to Rome, and at the end of June, Highsmith journeyed on to Venice, where she stayed at the Pensione Seguso, an establishment which would feature in her 1967 novel
Those Who Walk Away
, and then Paris. On 12 July she paid a visit to Oscar Wilde’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery – with its tombstone designed by Jacob Epstein – and where she read the lines inscribed on his grave, from his ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, ‘And alien tears shall fill for him/Pity’s long broken urn,/For his mourners shall be outcast men,/And outcasts always mourn.’ Highsmith had long felt an empathy for Wilde and earlier in the year had transcribed a passage from his letters into her notebook, a sentence which she would use at the beginning of
Ripley Under Ground
; it could have been an epigraph to her own life: ‘I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true . . . Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am not sorry that it is so  . . .’
⁷¹

Chapter 20

A freedom from responsibility

1962–1964

Highsmith had no qualms about using the emotional core of her experience as a basis for her work; what was more unsettling was when her novels then started to play themselves out in her life. In the summer of 1962, she met the wife of a London businessman, a woman with whom she would conduct a four-year affair. The scenario echoed the one described in her incomplete, unpublished
First Person Novel
, which was narrated by an older, married woman and took the form of an extended analysis of her lesbian relationships.

     When Highsmith met the woman, whom I shall call X, she was immediately infatuated. She wrote a poem in which she compared her new object of idolisation – who was middle-aged, middle-class and a mother – to an orchid of white crystal in a mountain cave and, as she flew back to America that summer, she pledged her undying love for her. For once, however, it seems that the woman’s infatuation matched Highsmith’s for intensity; in her letters X described how after Pat left England she felt as though her oxygen supply had been cut off.

     Back in New Hope, Highsmith tried to concentrate on work, but all she could think about was the woman who had recently captured her heart. In a piece Highsmith wrote for the
Sunday Times Magazine
in 1974, she recalled how, at forty-one, she sat on the edge of the sink in her house in New Hope in the early hours of the morning thinking how wonderful it was to be in love. ‘ “What a pleasure just to exist!” ’ she thought. ‘ “Why haven’t I ever realised this before?” It really seemed to me then that I hadn’t thought of it or felt it before.’
¹
Highsmith felt frustrated because she knew her letters might be read by X’s husband. Was there, she asked, a place where she could send her notes so that she could tell her exactly how she felt? Unfortunately not, the other woman replied. But the quantity – eight in five weeks – and the depth of feeling expressed in the letters she sent over from England helped ease Highsmith’s anxiety.

     Highsmith felt desperately in need of her. ‘I am nearly sick,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and must get hold of myself or crack up.’
²
Her friends counselled her to find a love within fifty miles of New Hope, rather than a woman on the other side of the Atlantic, and although Highsmith knew she should follow such logical advice, she was, like one of her characters, motivated by a totally irrational and irresistible desire. ‘I am so much in love – obviously,’ wrote Highsmith, ‘that I cannot see anything else.’
³

     When X suggested that, as she was staying in Paris for a week that autumn, Pat should fly over and join her, Highsmith did not hesitate. The writer flew from Idlewild airport to Paris, meeting her lover off the London train at the Gare du Nord the next day. According to Highsmith, their initial awkwardness at seeing one another was soon replaced by passion and, after dinner, while walking along St Germain, the two women kissed, Pat losing an earring in the process. ‘She is quite aware of her charms,’ wrote Highsmith in her diary, ‘and melts into my arms as if she were smelted by Vulcan expressly for that purpose.’
⁴

     The two women travelled separately to England – Pat by plane, her lover by train – but in London they met at Highsmith’s hotel and at X’s house. They talked about whether they should tell X’s husband about their relationship, but Highsmith cautioned against it. As it was, the woman said, her husband was behaving extremely oddly, telling his wife of a strange dream he had had seemingly based on Ibsen’s play,
The Master Builder
, remarking that ‘the women with strange names enter people’s lives and destroy them’; apparently he thought that Highsmith’s name had an odd ring to it.

     Highsmith flew back to America in November, and on arrival in New Hope she once again found it hard to focus on work. In her diary she wrote of how her lover made her sick with desire and the same month, in a bid to be nearer X, she decided that she would leave America and base herself at the house she rented in Positano. When interviewers asked Highsmith why she left the United States for Europe – she made the permanent move in early 1963 – the writer replied that she was ‘bored with going backwards and forwards and I thought that Europe was more interesting’.
⁵
The statement no doubt contains a grain of truth, but it does not reflect the driving force behind the transition – her love for the woman who would soon push her to the edge of reason.

In September 1962, Highsmith started to plot the book which would eventually – after heavy rewriting and a final rejection from Harper’s – be published, by Doubleday in America and Heinemann in Britain, as
The Glass Cell
. She had first had the idea of setting a book in a prison in 1961 when she received a letter from a thirty-six-year-old inmate of a Chicago penitentiary convicted for forgery, breaking and entering and parole busting, telling her how much he had enjoyed
Deep Water
. ‘I don’t think my books should be in prison libraries,’ Highsmith said later.
⁶
Prisoner and author stuck up a correspondence and Highsmith asked him to describe a typical day for her. The resulting three typewritten pages – details of his meals, his work in a prison shoe factory, his relationship with his cell mate and the sounds that echoed around the building after lights out – was, she said, ‘the kind of information one cannot get from any book’,
⁷
and, inspired by her epistolary communication with her new pen-pal, she became increasingly fascinated by the subject. ‘A few months later . . . I read a book about convicts, a non-fiction book, which told the story of an engineer imprisoned unjustly, a man who was strung up by the thumbs by sadistic guards, and afterward became a morphine addict because of his constant pain . . .’ she wrote. ‘Here was part of a story ready-made.’
⁸
Indeed,
The Glass Cell
centres around the experiences of such a man – Philip Carter, an engineer serving a six-year sentence for a fraud he didn’t commit and who is strung up by the thumbs for two days and becomes addicted to morphine while in the prison hospital.