Beautiful Shadow (52 page)

     Writers, like criminals, live outside the confines of the conventional, creating a environment which frequently transgresses so-called ‘normal’ moral perspectives. As she was working on
A Suspension of Mercy
, Highsmith scribbled in her notebook, ‘It seems natural that a writer will tend to write about the “same kind” of hero – with the intellectual associations that he has himself.’
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Charles Latimer, who met Highsmith in the early sixties when he was the advertising manager at William Heinemann and who later became one of her closest friends, remembers how the writer prepared herself for work. ‘Pat liked to act out things to see what they felt like,’ he says. ‘I remember she buried some snails in the woods behind her cottage to give her some ideas or emotions for
A Suspension of Mercy
. Similarly, when I stayed with Pat at her house in Tegna, Switzerland, I remember seeing her prowl around the house late at night on several occasions. She was a night owl. The house would be in pitch darkness and Pat, wearing blue- and white-striped flannel pyjamas and a khaki, terry-cloth dressing gown, would walk cautiously through the rooms, shining her torch in all directions, sometimes stepping outside for a moment or two. I imagined her wondering what it would be like to find an intruder in the house, or perhaps she was thinking what it would feel like to be an intruder.’
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According to Charles, Pat hated to be thought of as an intellectual. ‘She loathed the term, and she told me she did things by instinct,’ he says. ‘As she wrote, she became the characters in her books.’
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     Ronald Blythe recalls how, on occasions, he would cycle back from Bridge Cottage to his house in Debach, feeling upset and uneasy. ‘Sometimes when I was with her, we strayed without words into this world where you did what you liked, so you were free as if you were a criminal,’ he says. ‘Although I didn’t understand the psychopathic side that shows itself in her novels, now and again this despair and distress would overcome me; all we were doing was sitting together in a room. I don’t think she was connected to what most people see as the “real world”. She was cut off from what we think of as ordinary life, cut off by her genius.

     ‘I remember one day I went over to her house for supper. We were just beginning to eat when a plop of water fell on to the table. I looked up and saw that the lightshade, one of those glass bowls, was full of water, which was pouring in from the ceiling. Although she said she had asked someone to come and fix it, I knew nobody would venture out on a Saturday night and told her I would do it. “Leave it,” she said, but I ignored her. I left the table and went upstairs to the bathroom. The ball cock in the lavatory was bent and so I fixed it, pulled the chain and stopped the overflow. I came downstairs, cleaned everything up, but she didn’t talk to me for hours after that. She was annoyed, I suppose, because I had disobeyed her.

     ‘Yet there was a warmth about our friendship, which was affectionate and very caring, and she struck me as an intensely truthful person. She would stay over at my house if I thought she had had too much to drink and I would stay over with her because sometimes she was rather unhappy, but she wouldn’t say why. I thought she was rather attractive in a strange way, so unlike anyone I’d ever met before. She had beautiful manners and a low voice and she smoked incessantly. She didn’t walk or behave in a butch way at all, she was well-bred and had a kind of elegance. Yet her loneliness showed in her face – a cloudiness, an ugliness really – which would go when she laughed, a strange, low chuckle.

     ‘We would sleep in the same room and talk; she needed some kind of closeness. We weren’t lovers, but we did sleep together once or twice. We talked about gay love and the unsatisfactory nature of some of our romantic friendships – she knew all about my sex life – but we never analysed our relationship, whatever it was. Sex with her was like being made love to by a boy. Her hands were very masculine and big and she was hipless like an adolescent boy. She wasn’t at all repelled by the male body, she was intrigued by it.’
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     Perhaps Blythe reminded her of Rolf Tietgens, the homosexual photographer whom she had felt drawn to in 1942? In November 1966, Highsmith wrote a letter to Blythe outlining her thoughts on men and women in which she mentions her relationship with Rolf. The photographer had a Freudian complex about the opposite sex, a real fear of them, said Highsmith, and she was the first woman – ‘if I can call myself that’
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– of whom he was not afraid.

     ‘It was unsettling finding myself being intimate with her, but she just wanted some warmth and it was never referred to again,’ says Blythe. ‘I was associated with things like the village church and although I’m far from a puritan – quite the reverse – I felt like she didn’t have the same discipline or rules in her life that I had been brought up with. She had a psychological freedom.’
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     Highsmith was aware of the anarchy of her inner world, of the sense that her writerly imagination was raw and unfettered, but at least the act of fashioning a novel or short story imposed a semblance of order upon it. She was all too aware of the games she played. ‘No use asking if a crime writer has anything of the criminal in him,’ she wrote in her notebook in December 1958. ‘He perpetuates little hoaxes, lies and crimes every time he writes a book. It is all a grand masquerade, a shameful deception in the guise of entertainment.’
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A Suspension of Mercy
reads like an exposé of the crime writer at work, a literary hall of mirrors in which reality and fiction are constantly reflected and, ultimately, confused. Although Highsmith would never have analysed it in these terms, it could be said to rank as the author’s most postmodern novel, a book which constantly toys with the genre of crime fiction to tease out some of its most ridiculous stereotypes and tropes. This playfulness of spirit, however, results in an atypical lack of intensity, a lightness of touch which Highsmith later admitted lent the book a ‘rather flippant tone’,
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and which was picked up by the critics. Julian Symons, usually a fan, declared that this was not one of Highsmith’s best books, finding it unconvincing and contrived and the ending implausible.

     Sydney is a man seduced by fantasy – the imaginative game of killing his wife, Alicia, carrying her body out in a rolled-up carpet and burying her in a field. Running parallel to this, Sydney dreams up the idea for a television series called ‘The Whip’ – a rather dashing character who bears a striking similarity to Highsmith’s own Ripley. ‘The Whip would be a criminal character who did something ghastly in every episode . . .’ she writes in the novel. ‘The audience saw everything through The Whip’s eyes, did everything with him, finally plugged for him through thick and thin and hoped the police would fail, which they always did. He wouldn’t carry a whip or anything like that, but the nickname would be suggestive of depraved and secret habits.’
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After months of repressed resentment towards his wife, Sydney imagines killing her, visualising the murder in detail, positioning her as a character in one of his stories.

     Sydney then acts out the murder, buries the carpet, and records the fantasy in his notebook, written from the perspective of a guilty man. As he muses on the fictional possibilities of the situation, he notes, ‘ “
The Schizophrenic We
would make a rather a good title” ’;
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this was one of the working titles Highsmith had had in mind for
A Suspension of Mercy
. Sydney, like Highsmith, is driven by the desire to understand why some people commit murder, but when – after learning of Alicia’s suicide – he forces his wife’s lover, Tilbury, to take an overdose of sleeping pills, his novelistic imagination fails him. Ironically, the self-conscious, omnipotent author, so in control of his characters, becomes a mere character himself: ‘it dawned on him that he hadn’t remembered to think what it felt like to commit a murder while he was committing it. He had not thought at all about himself.’
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     At the end of the book, not only does Sydney escape punishment, but he also receives the news that a publisher has accepted his novel,
The Planners
, a work in which the characters seek to live out self-determined destinies. Highsmith’s book ends on a triumphal note of metafictionality. On the last page, Sydney toys with the possibility of writing about the murder of Tilbury in his notebook – read by the police and viewed as merely an imaginative vehicle rather than a representation of reality – ‘the notebook was now, after all, the safest place in which to write it’.
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     Highsmith wrote the novel quickly, in under six months, completing a rough draft before a trip to New Hope at the end of September. She stayed with Daisy Winston while sorting out her belongings and packing up anything that needed to be shipped over to England. While there, she suffered from more dental problems – an extracted tooth failed to drain properly – and complained of feeling exhausted. In New York, she showed a rough manuscript of the yet untitled novel to Larry Ashmead, her editor at Doubleday, who remarked that it looked ‘very promising’.
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She arrived back home at Bridge Cottage on 7 October, where she struggled with the cold – the house did not have central heating – and tidied up the novel, which she finished typing in mid-November. The usual ‘post-natal’ depression she experienced when finishing a book descended on her once more, and, as the Suffolk winter set in, she felt plagued by insecurity, anxiety and money worries. (She noted that she would have to earn around $1,600 extra a year to keep her in cigarettes and alcohol alone.)

     ‘Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game,’ she wrote in her notebook on 15 December. ‘A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement . . . Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic . . . I am doing quite a good day’s work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.’
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Chapter 21

Love was an outgoing thing

1964–1967

Writing was always a near-mystical process for Highsmith. When journalists asked her where her inspiration came from, she tended to answer, ‘out of thin air’. Ideas came to her, she said, like birds that she saw in the corner of her eye; the challenge was to try and get a closer fix on these elusive creatures. During the bitterly cold winter of 1964–1965, Highsmith tried, once and for all, to pin down those creatures so she could work out exactly what inspired her and how she turned an initial germ of an idea into a finished book. The impetus came from The Writer Inc., the Boston-based publishing company which produced a number of how-to guides for aspiring authors. In December 1964, as she prepared a short essay on suspense, she listed in her cahier a number of writers, including Dostoevsky, Wilkie Collins, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe, whom she believed could be said to belong to the tradition; ‘remember you are in good company,’ she added.
¹
Highsmith expanded the essay into the book
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
. When the slim title was published, in January 1966, she sent Arthur Koestler a copy, with the note, ‘It could be better. It’s the product of a month’s work; my agent didn’t want me to take it on.’
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     As she worked on the guide in January and February of 1965, Highsmith dreamt of the ripe avocados, juicy oranges and warm sunlight of California, where Koestler was then living. ‘This British Isles climate,’ she wrote to him, ‘plus all-pervading gloom, is finally bothering me.’
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She kept warm by taking hold of her largest carpenter’s saw and working on a piece of wood until she started to sweat. ‘I become,’ she told Kingsley, ‘more Scrooge like with age.’
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     She began the non-fiction book with a chapter about inspiration, the germs of an idea, outlining how she had first thought of the plots of
Strangers on a Train
,
The Blunderer
,
This Sweet Sickness
,
The Two Faces of January
,
A Suspension of Mercy
, and the origin of the short story, ‘The Terrapin’. Intriguingly, Highsmith speaks of some ideas, such as the one behind
Strangers on a Train
, as forming in her mind by a process of parthenogenesis – springing to life without any external influence – while others, she admitted, needed a certain amount of cross-fertilisation to form themselves clearly in her imagination. But how did one recognise ideas when they came? She said she knew of their significance because of a ‘certain excitement which they instantly bring, akin to the pleasure and excitement of a good poem or line in a poem.’
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