Beautiful Shadow (51 page)

     Alone in Aldeburgh – X tended to treat the house more as a holiday home than a permanent base, visiting only at weekends – Highsmith was at a loss about how to rework
The Glass Cell
. Her confidence was lifted, however, with the news from Patricia Schartle just before Christmas that her seventeen-month ‘jinx’ as she called it, had finally come to an end. Doubleday would publish
The Two Faces of January
in America if she cut thirty-two pages, while
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
had bought her short story ‘Who is Crazy’, which she had written in October. On 13 January of the new year she came up with a strategy – she would rework the prison novel from page 120 – and at the end of the month she conceived a new ending for the book.

     She finished the heavy rewrite by 22 March, and in June she heard that Heinemann planned to publish it early in 1965. She also submitted the manuscript to Doubleday, which accepted it on condition that she cut forty pages, and which published the book in December 1964. ‘After all my cuts,’ she said, ‘first in black and then in red for the second round, some of the pages had only three lines left.’
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     On the novel’s publication, some reviewers admitted they were baffled by it. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of Miss Highsmith’s book,’ said the critic from the
New York Times Book Review
.
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Others attacked Highsmith for her stark portrayal of a world in which good men can be corrupted by the so-called civilised justice system, go on to kill and remain unpunished at the end of it all. ‘There are not many nastier fictional worlds than Patricia Highsmith’s, and soon they sicken, worlds for sadistic voyeurs who get their kicks from seeing the poor worms hooked and squirming,’ wrote a reviewer in the
Times Literary Supplement
. ‘There is not much else to do with her new anti-hero, Philip Carter, but pity him or enjoy his pain, and the first without any kind of catharsis soon comes to feel very like the other.’
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He concluded, however, that the book was well-structured and well-written and, ultimately, any objections ‘must be moral, not technical’.
³⁴

Highsmith often drew inspiration from her surroundings, jotting down details about cities and countries in her cahiers under the special heading of ‘Places’; journeying to foreign countries, she said when still a teenager, was surely the ‘most desirable thing on earth’.
³⁵
In 1947, she wrote how travelling was one of the activities – along with ironing, sewing and receiving dental treatment – which helped her in the act of creation. She later recalled how, as a young woman, she adored prowling around strange foreign cities, seeking out new places with an ‘indiscriminate curiosity’.
³⁶
In a piece she contributed to the
World Authors
series, she wrote of how since leaving New York she had had a ‘rocky time geographically’, but confessed, ‘the fact is, I do like travelling and making acquaintance with new scenes. I always use them.’
³⁷
After a trip to Mexico she wrote
A Game for the Living
; on returning from Greece and Crete she plotted
The Two Faces of January
; a holiday in Venice resulted in
Those Who Walk Away
, and a journey to Hammamet, Tunisia, was used as backdrop for
The Tremor of Forgery
. Most of her novels set outside the USA feature Americans cast adrift in foreign settings. Such locations, noted Julian Symons, ‘often give the Highsmith characters a freedom of action, springing from what they feel is a freedom from responsibility, which makes them do strange – but, in the context of place and person, convincing – things’.
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     On 26 April 1964, Highsmith bought Bridge Cottage, Earl Soham, Suffolk, a seventeenth-century, three-bedroom, pale pink cottage. The house, she told Arthur Koestler, was ‘very good for working, due to extreme English quietude’ and the fact that for 90 per cent of the time her lover was in London.
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In a letter Highsmith wrote to Kingsley, just before moving into the property, she described the house, formed by knocking together two workers’ cottages, and boasting a black weathervane, as ‘so picturesque it is rather unbelievable’.
⁴⁰
Outside there was a reasonably sized garden, stocked with old-fashioned roses and camelias, at the bottom of which ran a stream. The writer Ronald Blythe, whom Highsmith met in January 1964 and who lived nearby in the village of Debach, was a frequent visitor to Bridge Cottage. ‘It was very clean and comfortable, orderly and warm, but there was, as they say, nothing “good” in it,’ he says. ‘It was as if she had just gone out and got the basics. She wasn’t at all a good hostess – she was rather bad at it really – but she liked to invite me over for supper. After a while, however, it was obvious that she wanted her life back to herself again, to go back to her typewriter and work. That was her reality more than anything else – the act of writing made her happy, gave her something that nothing else could.’
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     Ten days after moving into her new home, she wrote in her cahier the plot outline for a book set in Suffolk. The result was
A Suspension of Mercy
(published as
The Story-Teller
in America), and its opening description of the Suffolk countryside was obviously inspired by the land near Highsmith’s new home. ‘Since I had been living in Suffolk . . . I wanted to use this new ground and atmosphere and set the book there,’ she said.
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Yet there is nothing high-blown or purplish about the prose; if anything the portrait of the place veers towards the quotidian.

The land around Sydney and Alicia Bartleby’s two-story cottage was flat, like most Suffolk country. A road, two-laned and paved, went by the house at a distance of twenty yards. To one side of the front walk, which was of slightly askew flagstones, five young elms gave some privacy, and on the other side a tall, bushy hedge provided a better screen for thirty feet. For this reason, Sydney had never trimmed it  . . .
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     The book also grew out of the working relationship between Highsmith and aspiring writer Richard Ingham, then teaching mathematics at Woodbridge School. In the spring of 1964, she set time aside from her schedule to work on an idea for a television ‘cliffhanger’,
It’s a Deal
, with Ingham. Like Sydney and his writing partner Alex in the finished novel, she would plot the synopsis, while he would bash out the words. In the script Lucy Lucas is having an affair with Robbie Vanderhof.
⁴⁴
Each Friday afternoon the couple meet for regular lovemaking sessions, an arrangement Lucy finds increasingly sordid. As she tries to convince her lover of her need for a greater level of commitment, Robbie lashes out and hits her, leaving her sobbing. When Lucy’s husband, Joel, returns home and finds his wife surrounded by evidence of the fight, he kills her, planning to frame Robbie for the murder. Dressed in the kind of gardening clothes favoured by Robbie, Joel buries the body under one of the newly planted trees in the nearby forest. In the middle of digging up the earth, Joel is caught in the act by a young girl, Elinor, and as she cannot see his face, he confesses to the crime. Joel reports his wife missing and, after Elinor reports the crime to the police, investigators subsequently find the corpse under one of the trees. Robbie is found guilty and, in the last scene, just as Joel is about to celebrate his wife-free status, his sluttish neighbour, Betty, turns up at the house and makes an announcement. She knows that it was Joel, not Robbie, who killed Lucy and unless he agrees to marry her she will inform the police. ‘It’s a deal,’ says the horrified Joel.
⁴⁵

     ‘
It’s a Deal
is rather slight and unconvincing,’ admits Ingham, ‘but I think it reflects Pat’s view that, be as clever and resourceful as you may, life will screw you in the end.’
⁴⁶
Later, in a letter to Ronald Blythe, Highsmith confessed how she had transplanted the character of Richard Ingham from life into fiction. ‘I “used” Ingham as the . . . writing partner in
A Suspension of Mercy
,’ she wrote in 1969.
⁴⁷

     The gestation of the book – which had a working title of ‘A Lark at Dawn’ – also had its roots in an idea she had once had to rework the clichéd body-in-a-carpet trope. What would happen, she thought, if there was nobody inside? What if the person carrying the carpet was seen acting in a suspicious manner and was suspected of carrying out a murder? She combined this idea with another one about a writer who becomes increasingly confused about the difference between the plots inside his head and his external reality. ‘This kind of writer-hero, I thought, could be not only amusing – and I mean in a comic sense – but could explore the rather harmless, everyday schizophrenia which everywhere abounds – yea, even in thee and me,’ she wrote in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
.
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In a letter to Kingsley, on 27 July, in the middle of writing the novel, she expanded on the point, drawing even closer parallels between the hero of her latest book, Sydney Bartleby, an American living in Suffolk, and herself. ‘He is a writer, who gets life a little mixed up with his plots. Something that may happen to me. I think I have some schizoid tendencies, which must Be Watched.’
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     Originally, she said, she wanted the writer in her story to commit no murder at all, only to be suspected of the crime. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. ‘Sydney does at last commit an odd murder, which he thinks of as a temporary “suspension of mercy” on his part,’ Highsmith said. ‘He kills his wife’s lover by forcing him to take an overdose of sleeping pills. But Sydney is only slightly suspected of this, and nothing can be proven.’
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     The correlation between writing and criminality is one of the most striking aspects of Highsmith’s work. Many of her criminal-heroes – particularly Ripley – have imaginations that enable them to forget their immediate reality and live out the fiction inside their heads. But in Sydney Bartleby, Highsmith created the first of her writer protagonists, later joined by Howard Ingham (a novelist) in
The Tremor of Forgery
; Edith (a freelance journalist) in
Edith’s Diary
; E. Taylor Cheever (a sub-editor turned aspiring, but failed, author) featured in the short story, ‘The Man who Wrote Books in his Head’; Stanley and Ginnie Brixton (husband and wife novelists and critics) in ‘Something You Have to Live With’; and Elinor Sievert (a freelance journalist) in ‘The Pond’ (the three stories can be found in the 1979 collection
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
). In an interview with Diana Cooper-Clark, published in 1981, the author was asked about the connection between the artist and the criminal. Did she agree with George Bernard Shaw’s idea that the two occupations bore some striking similarities? ‘I can think of only one slight closeness,’ Highsmith replied, ‘and that is that an imaginative writer is very free-wheeling; he has to forget about his own personal morals, especially if he is writing about criminals. He has to feel anything is possible.’
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In the same interview she explored the point further, adding that the criminal, ‘at least for a short period of time is free, free to do anything he wishes’.
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The issue was taken up by the writer Bettina Berch, who interviewed Highsmith in 1984. Did her writer protagonists function as alter egos? ‘Yes, in the case of Sydney, definitely,’ Highsmith replied, referring to
A Suspension of Mercy
. ‘Because I was interested in the fact that I don’t understand murder, or the very instant of one person, for instance, taking away the consciousness of another person – taking away the life – this very phenomenon or event I really don’t understand  . . .’
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