Beautiful Shadow (67 page)

     While in the early stages of plotting the novel, Highsmith wrote in her notebook that ‘the chief reason for this book is to come to terms with the fear of death which we all have’.
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In May 1970 she composed a poem about the mystery of death and then the following year she observed how, ‘Every problem in life can be somehow solved – except the problem of death.’
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Jonathan’s illness serves as a constant reminder of his transient existence; during a fainting spell he imagines what it would be like to move from being to nothingness, comparing death to a ‘wave sweeping out from a shore, sucking hard at the legs of a swimmer who’d already ventured too far, and who mysteriously had lost his will to struggle’.
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Highsmith extends the watery metaphor to describe Jonathan’s experience of death, his implosion of consciousness, following a shooting incident. Looking back on his thirty-four years. Jonathan realises that his life has been meaningless, nothing but an absurdity. ‘He had a grey vision of a sea running out – somewhere on an English coast – sinking, collapsing.’
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As Jonathan feels the energy ebb out of his body, he sees Tom, who is convinced Trevanny shielded him from the onslaught of Mafia bullets, at the wheel of the car taking him to hospital: ‘Tom was driving the car, Jonathan thought, like God himself.’
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With the corruption and death of an innocent, the transgressive deification – the transition of Ripley from self-invented man to amoral omniscient – is complete. Like one of the superheroes Highsmith created as young writer of comic books, Ripley’s existence is seemingly eternal.

     Not surprisingly, Highsmith’s latest celebration of amorality divided the critics. The
Spectator
lauded her for the ‘creation of an ambience – perhaps superior to that of the early Eric Ambler novels’,
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but Tony Henderson in
Books and Bookmen
condemned Highsmith’s creation of Ripley for the very reasons why so many readers liked him – the fact that he is a ‘monstrous paranoiac’.
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Henderson believed that while Highsmith should rightly be applauded for the ingenious plotting and the surprising psychological insight of her first novel
Strangers on a Train
, her latest offering was too much to stomach. ‘Something very sad is happening to the talented Miss Highsmith,’ he said, ‘and unless she hardens her heart and puts an end to her horrible brain-child, for whom she appears to have conceived an inexplicable affection, the fate of Baron Frankenstein will be hers also.’
¹⁷

Two days after she started writing
Ripley’s Game
, Highsmith made a note in her thirty-second cahier of an idea for a short story about a Siamese cat, Ming, which is jealous of his owner’s new lover and which proceeds to kill him by pushing him off a yacht. In the final version, ‘Ming’s Biggest Prey’, the lover, Teddie, tries to edge the cat overboard while sailing off the coast of Acapulco, but Ming avenges him later in the day when the couple return to their villa. As Teddie, who has been drinking, tries to capture him and throw him over the terrace, Ming jumps on to his shoulder and Teddie falls to his death. ‘Ming was pleased, as he was pleased when he killed a bird and created this smell of blood under his teeth,’ Highsmith writes. ‘This was big prey.’
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     After sketching the bare bones of the entertaining tale, Highsmith had an idea for a book of short stories, perhaps called ‘The Beastly Book of Animal Murderers’, ‘Beastly Murders for Animal Lovers’, or, the title she finally settled on,
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
. Each story, she said, could show a creature or pet – horse, monkey, goat, elephant, dog, even hamster – taking their revenge on the human world, an environment which Highsmith believed was often more bestial than the animal kingdom. ‘Victims will be hateworthy,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer, ‘and the animals acting out of righteous instinct.’
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Just as she had sublimated her contradictory responses towards women in her collection of stories,
Little Tales of Misogyny
, so she redirected her feelings of anger towards the human race in these revenge sketches about animals. Every time she re-read one of her stories, she had to admit that the experience left her doubled up, with tears of laughter rolling down her face. Some critics, however, took a decidedly po-faced stance. Marghanita Laski, for example, wrote in the
Listener
in November 1975, ‘I used to be the only person I knew who loathed Patricia Highsmith’s work for its inhumanity to man, but our numbers are growing and will be increased by [
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
], short stories about animals killing or mutilating people, with a strong flavour of being motivated less by pity for animals than by distaste for men.’
²⁰

     Ever since she was a young girl, Pat had felt an extraordinary empathy for animals, particularly cats. The creatures, she said, ‘provide something for writers that humans cannot: companionship that makes no demands or intrusions, that is as restful and ever-changing as a tranquil sea that barely moves’.
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Her affection for cats was ‘a constant as was feline companionship wherever her domestic situation permitted,’ says Kingsley. ‘As for animals in general, she saw them as individual personalities often better behaved, and endowed with more dignity and honesty than humans. Cruelty to or neglect of any helpless living creature could turn her incandescent with rage.’
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Janice Robertson remembers how, after a particularly long lunch and a visit to Muriel’s with Heinemann’s Roland Gant, Highsmith was walking through the streets of Soho when she saw a wounded pigeon lying in the gutter. ‘Pat decided there and then that this pigeon should be rescued,’ says Janice. ‘Although I think Roland persuaded her that it was past saving, she really was distraught. She couldn’t bear to see animals hurt.’
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Bruno Sager, Highsmith’s carer at the end of her life, recalls the delicacy with which the writer would take hold of a spider which had crawled into the house, making sure to deposit it safely in her garden. ‘For her human beings were strange – she thought she would never understand them – and perhaps that is why she liked cats and snails so much,’ he says.
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     Highsmith had first had the idea of writing about animals in 1946; in a notebook entry in June of that year she wondered why writers felt obliged to always focus their attention on people. ‘What about animals?’ she asked.
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Yet the real genesis of the stories had its root in the troubled atmosphere of Rue de Courbuisson, Samois-sur-Seine, where she lived with her painter friend, Elizabeth. In a letter to Alex Szogyi in September 1967 she wrote of how her cat protected her against Elizabeth’s temper. ‘There are perhaps more brains in those Siamese tiny heads than we think,’ she said,
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while in another letter, to Koestler, she outlined a hypothetical battle situation between Elizabeth and her cat, positing the question, ‘What are the odds, I wonder, of cat versus a person?’
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     In December 1967, she told Ronald Blythe how his account of the barbarities of battery chicken farming had lingered in her mind, horrific details which, she said, might inspire her to write a story about it. After a couple of false starts, in October 1968, she finished the gruesome tale, ‘The Day of Reckoning’, one of the stories to feature in
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
, in which a profit-hungry farmer is pecked to death by the battery chickens he has driven insane, leaving him looking like ‘a fallen column of blood and bone to which a few tatters of pyjama cloth still clung’.
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     The premature death of her cat, Sammy, in December 1969, left Pat grief-stricken for months and the following summer she confessed that if she had a gun and she discovered which villager was responsible for docking the tail of a local black cat, Little Eddy, she would not hesitate in shooting them – ‘and to kill,’ she added.
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She wrote moving poems about the creatures, adored sketching them and later told Vivien De Bernardi how her favoured form of exercise was late-night ping pong games with her cats. In 1991, perhaps not entirely capriciously, she said that if she came across a kitten and a baby both of which were obviously starving, she would, without a doubt, feed the cat first if nobody was looking. The painter Gudrun Mueller remembers the sad occasion when she accompanied the writer to the vet’s to have one of her cats put down. ‘She had this very old, crossed-eyed cat which she liked very much, but which was ill,’ she says. ‘The vet gave the cat an injection and Pat stood beside it sobbing – it was the only time I saw her cry. I was really touched as it was the first time she had shown her feelings.’
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Highsmith told the writer Neil Gordon of the emotional impact of the experience. ‘This affected me very much because it was much more important than a member of my family who might die of old age or God knows what, because I had the power to do it, but I didn’t want the power . . .’ she said. ‘It’s terrifying to have that power. I don’t go to jail for it, [but] the cat is dead . . . They have a great right, these animals.’
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     Soon after penning stories about the revenge of the battery chickens and Ming, the Siamese cat, in the summer of 1972 she wrote tales about a boy’s pet ferret who kills the family’s bully of a chauffeur (‘Harry: A Ferret’); ‘Eddie and the Monkey Robberies’, about a nimble-fingered capuchin, used by a gang of burglars to open doors, who murders his owner, a female ex-convict, with a conch shell; ‘Goat Ride’, which focuses on the violent retaliation of a goat at an amusement park, and ‘There I was, Stuck with Bubsy’, about Baron, an aged poodle, who gets his own back on the brutal treatment meted out by his former owner’s gay boyfriend, the slothful Bubsy. The two stories in the collection, ‘Chorus Girl’s Absolutely Final Performance’ and ‘Notes from a Respectable Cockroach’, written in the first person – a style Highsmith rarely employed – stand as powerfully imagined interior monologues, fantastic glimpses into the consciousness of creatures that the human world, for the most part, regards as mere objects. By positioning the animals as subjects, by giving voice to their thoughts, Highsmith disrupts the Western philosophical tradition which celebrates the rationalism of man. ‘When I see some of the people here, I count myself lucky to be a cockroach,’ Highsmith writes in ‘Notes from a Respectable Cockroach’, a transgressive reworking of Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
.
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The cockroach, who lives at the Hotel Duke in Washington Square, muses on how he would answer the questions on the US census, a document delivered to the residents. ‘It was interesting to think of myself filling it out – and why not? I was more of a resident by hereditary seat than any of the human beasts in the hotel.’
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If a cockroach – that most base and disgusting of creatures – can actually feel superior to a man then what, Highsmith asks, does it mean to be human?

     Early in 1972 – after suffering from a six-week spell of lethargy, flu, toothache and depression during the winter – Highsmith wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer about Daisy Winston’s recent mid-life crisis. She related how the other woman, who was approaching her fiftieth birthday, seemed to be striving after answers as to the meaning of existence, before concluding, ‘She cannot realize life is about nothing.’
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     This bleak attitude was reflected in the stories she wrote over the next few months, tales which would be anthologised in her 1979 collection,
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
. In January she had the idea for ‘The Man who Wrote Books in his Head’, featuring an aspiring novelist, Cheever, who never commits his thoughts to paper and who dies, age sixty-two, thinking he has written fourteen books and created 127 characters. On his death-bed, Cheever, another of Highsmith’s characters imprisoned by a fantasy, believes that he will be buried next to Tennyson in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, and remembered as a writer whose gravestone marked a ‘monument to human imagination’.
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The following month, in an attempt to explore the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church – what she saw as its leaching of the individual conscience – she wrote ‘Those Awful Dawns’, about an unwanted baby battered by its Catholic parents. In May she plotted ‘The Pond’, about a four-year-old boy, Chris, and his mother, Elinor Sievert, newly settled in Connecticut after the death of Elinor’s husband, Cliff, in an aeroplane accident, who are both sucked to their deaths by malevolent vines in the garden pond of their house, a tale reminiscent of one of Poe’s uncanny masterpieces. Highsmith neatly dismantles the American suburban idyll, subverting the clichés of domestic bliss – nice neighbours, a child’s comforting glass of milk and the dream of growing radishes – with a macabre cruelty. ‘She went face down into the water, but the water seemed soft,’ Highsmith writes. ‘She struggled a little, turned to breathe, and a vine tickled her neck . . . She breathed in, and much of what she took in was water.’
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Elinor is punished for trying to poison the pond with weed-killer – the more chemicals she empties into the water, the more voracious the vines seem to grow – and as she battles against the vicious tendrils, she realises that her attempt to alter the course of nature will bring about her death. Highsmith would further explore the ecological nightmare she described in ‘The Pond’ – the apocalyptic imbalance between man and nature – in her 1987 collection,
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
. It is clear from all these stories that Highsmith had a real passion for the natural world. Detailing twenty of her favourite and least favourite things, she spoke of her joy at learning that the import of baby seal pelts had been banned from Europe, as well as her love of simple, ‘authentic’ pleasures – the sprouting of an avocado seed; carpentry; waking up without an alarm clock; the smell of old books; silence, and being alone.