Beautiful Shadow (55 page)

     The country, for all its exoticism, failed to make her forget her difficulties back in England; rather, she found her new environment gave her the opportunity in which to think freely. Standing next to the white walls of the Arabic houses she felt, she said, naked, as if her problems had been stripped of all their complexities; she reworked this observation, first recorded in her notebook, into the third chapter of
The Tremor of Forgery
. From Tunisia, Highsmith wrote X a letter outlining how she could not endure any more of her ‘nonsense’. The week before their fourth anniversary, Highsmith wrote a vicious poem which articulated the psychological battle that was raging between them, a four-line stanza peppered with military metaphors. The passion and affection of their early days had now been replaced by indifference and hatred. Highsmith acknowledged that although she did admit to a strong masochistic streak, she did not believe X’s accusation that she was destructive to all human relationships. Instead she blamed her lover, citing her request that Highsmith encourage her husband’s presence at the cottage as one of the main contributory factors in the breakdown of their affair. ‘It is a curious request from a lover,’ she wrote to Alex Szogyi, ‘to insist upon the presence of a person who inevitably separates us.’
⁵³

     From Tunisia, Pat and Elizabeth sailed to Naples, from where they travelled to Alpnach, Austria, arriving home in August. The next month she was on the move yet again, this time to Nice, where the director Raoul Lévy wanted her to help work on the script of her novel,
Deep Water
. The trip was not a successful one, as she suffered from a range of what she described as neurotic symptoms, including exhaustion, inability to sleep, lack of appetite and fear of failure. Even though Highsmith wrote a ninety-three-page script, the film never got made, as Lévy shot himself in St Tropez later that year. ‘Alas, I never liked him,’ wrote Highsmith in her notebook of Lévy, ‘and obviously he did not like himself.’
⁵⁴

     While in the south of France, Highsmith met the photographer and artist Barbara Ker-Seymer, and her partner Barbara Roett, women she came to regard as two of her closest friends.

     ‘Pat was best at friendship at a distance,’ says Barbara Roett. ‘I got that feeling from her that she could not sustain relationships, she didn’t even try. She was strange with me, she used to talk to me as though I were another man, and she had no idea about what other women were feeling and thinking. In fact, there could have been something hormonally strange about Pat. She had the most beautiful hands, but they were really not a woman’s hands – they were strong, large and square, but absolutely did not belong to a woman. She made half-hearted concessions to womanhood – for instance, she’d put on a necklace almost apologetically – but she was happiest when she had on her blue jeans and checked shirt. I remember Pat had thick black hair and she would stare at the ground with her hair falling forward and then suddenly a black eye would peek out and pin you to the wall. She did, however, have a very good brain – considering, that is, how imbalanced she was in other ways.

     ‘When I first met her, I suppose it was her vulnerability that I found appealing. She really did seem to be drinking herself to death, I felt sort of protective towards her and thought, “If only she could meet a nice person.” Eventually I saw what a monster she could be in any relationship so I quickly changed that view. Having said that, I still liked her a great deal, much better than I liked a lot of more balanced people. She was a natural eccentric and she had a tremendous talent.’
⁵⁵

     Back at Bridge Cottage, Highsmith’s relationship with X reached crisis point one night in mid-October. Highsmith came up to bed five or ten minutes after her lover and then, in what Pat thought was a ‘silent huff’, the other woman walked out of the bedroom. Highsmith couldn’t bear it any longer. She took hold of X’s overnight bag and threw it into the next room. The next morning Pat saw that she had spent the night in the guest room, with one pink blanket for warmth. ‘I told her in the morning I had had enough huffs and was finished, and she left at 4PM,’ noted Highsmith.
⁵⁶

     And with that their four-year relationship came to its end. It was, she said, ‘the very worst time of my entire life’.
⁵⁷
Mozart, her composer of choice in moments of utter hopelessness, came to Highsmith’s aid in the immediate aftermath of the split. She had chosen to listen to his music rather than take a sedative at other times of crisis and she hoped he wouldn’t let her down. ‘With Mozart’s courage, I could face lions,’ she said.
⁵⁸

What Highsmith tried, but failed, to achieve with
A Suspension of Mercy
– the creation of a suspense novel that did not feature a murder – she succeeded in doing with her next book,
Those Who Walk Away
, which she dedicated to one of her ‘more inspiring friends’ Lil Picard. The book opens in Rome, with the attempted murder of Ray Garrett, the twenty-seven-year-old son-in-law of painter Ed Coleman, whom the older man blames for the recent suicide of his only child, Peggy. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the two men – as with Rydal and Chester in
The Two Faces of January
– are locked in an intense symbiotic relationship, each of them drawing out of the other previously repressed internal feelings. Rather than flee, Ray follows Ed to Venice, where his father-in-law is wintering with his girlfriend, Inez, and the setting for the unsettling game of cat and mouse that follows. ‘There are no more genuine agonies in modern literature than those endured by the couples in her books,’ wrote Julian Symons of Highsmith, ‘who are locked together in a dislike and even hatred that often strangely contains love.’
⁵⁹

     Ray is haunted by a sense of guilt – an after-effect of the suicide of his young wife – and, well aware of Coleman’s violent intentions, repeatedly places himself in positions of danger and self-abnegation. His death wish is echoed by the eerie setting of Venice in winter, the breathy whisper of San Marco, which seems to emit a strange noise like ‘an unending exhalation of a spirit’.
⁶⁰
It is Ray’s masochism which leads him, in the early hours of the morning, to accept a lift from Coleman in a motor-boat, to take him from the Lido to a point near his hotel, the Pensione Seguso. Sailing across the lagoon, Coleman lunges towards his son-in-law and pushes him overboard, and as Ray feels the icy, black water beginning to numb his body, he says to himself, ‘
It’s what you deserve, you ass!
’
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Ray then pretends Coleman has actually killed him, a process which involves in true Highsmith fashion, the assumption of a number of false names and accompanying feelings of both exhilarating freedom and overwhelming emptiness. By playing dead, Ray begins to feel like he is invisible – like a ghost wandering through the streets of Venice. When he sees his jacket, peppered with the gunshots fired by Coleman, he views the item of clothing with a distant, and clearly disturbed, perspective, as if it was ‘a bridge between two existences’.
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     On its publication in America in April 1967, Anthony Boucher noted how the book was ‘as absorbing as it is inconclusive . . . This is a book to some extent exasperating . . . But it is often illuminating – and always compelling.’
⁶³
J.M. Edelstein, writing in
New Republic
, was correct in pointing out Highsmith’s radical decision not to include a murder in a book which seemed to bear all the hallmarks of a suspense novel. ‘The movement of hunter and hunted, and their occasional contact is seen as less the attraction of opposites, of evil and good, or evil and weakness, than it is as the attraction of like to like. The psychological truth thus implied may be a greater horror than any climatic act of violence.’
⁶⁴
After the novel’s publication in Britain, the
Times Literary Supplement
observed, in its 1 June issue, how Highsmith’s books continued to vex literary editors, uncertain whether to send out her work with the likes of Agatha Christie or the more highbrow Iris Murdoch. ‘The carpet she skilfully weaves is of popular material and in strong colours, but the pattern in it is subtle, elusive and unfinished . . . [Though] it may seem ungrateful to crab about the entertainment she offers, one wants her now to develop forms that would extend what after all the “crime novel” cannot properly comprise, the truly serious side of the novelist’s art.’
⁶⁵
The critic from the
Times Literary Supplement
failed to notice the fact that
Those Who Walk Away
was already an example of the new form which he or she was advocating. As Julian Symons noted, ‘The deadly games of pursuit played in her best novels are as subtle and interesting as anything being done in the novel today.’
⁶⁶

   
Those Who Walk Away
can be read as a novel of ideas – an exploration of the means by which individuals construct reality, a philosophical examination of the nature of identity and an analysis of the complex relationship between consciousness and art. Although Ray’s wife, Peggy, kills herself ten days before the opening of the novel by slitting her wrists in the bath, her ghost-like image haunts every page, her absence proving the driving force behind the two protagonists. Peggy thought ‘ideals were real, even indestructible, maybe the realest things on earth’
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and committed suicide because of her dissatisfaction with the external world. She wanted more than life itself could give, constantly believing that sex was something divine and repeatedly striving for a mystical experience. It is clear Peggy lived in a parallel world, a universe of dreams, full of fruit orchards and brightly coloured birds, and expected her transition to married life to be something of an epiphany, ‘like paradise or poetry – instead of a continuation of this world’.
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Peggy, a painter, ultimately felt let down by her reality; her artistic vision no longer fulfilled her; sex did not offer her an insight into the mystical universe she so craved and so she chose to kill herself. The world was not enough, she had said. ‘It might have been her death cry, Ray thought, if she had had one.
The world is not enough, therefore I leave it to find something bigger
.’
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     Just how do we construct reality? the novel asks. Is it merely the perception of one’s external surroundings or is it shaped by memory, association and expectation? How does art change our view of the world? Highsmith plays games with the notion of the Platonic ideal, the concept that art is merely an image twice-removed from true reality. In the Platonic universe, there exists perfect forms, abstracts which are then made concrete by man – for instance, God created the form of the bed, which is then copied by a carpenter into what we think of as a ‘real’ bed. If an artist were then to paint it then all he would be doing would be holding up a mirror to what was, in effect, an imperfect image of the original as conceived by God. In this way, Plato argued in
The Republic
, artists interfere with rather than encourage our perception of reality and have no place in the idealised community.

     In
Those Who Walk Away
, the characters constantly try to grasp reality through the appreciation of artistic form, a process which seems constantly elusive. Ray, like his wife, aspired to be a painter, but abandoned it at the age of twenty-four, believing he would never be good enough, settling on a career as a gallery owner, while his father-in-law, Coleman, a former civil engineer, is an artist who considers himself belonging in a ‘European’ tradition. Throughout the novel there are a proliferation of images which suggest that both characters construct reality through the medium of artistic association. Ray sees Inez standing in the dim interior of a bar, drinking a cup of coffee, a composition which suggested a work by Cézanne. As Ray lowers himself into a bath, he looks at the red, green and cream patterned linoleum on the floor, worn down in spots and revealing a dark red weaving. ‘Not beautiful, but in a Bonnard it might have been,’ thinks Ray,
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referring to the French painter whose work Highsmith saw at the Royal Academy in London in February 1966. After Coleman’s fall in a fishing boat his knee swells, something which looks like a drawing by Hieronymus Bosch.