Beautiful Shadow (68 page)

‘Work is the only thing of importance or joy in life,’ Highsmith wrote in her notebook on 4 April 1972. ‘Trouble begins when one pauses to consider what one has done.’
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She told Ronald Blythe that the previous month she was happy, as her writing –
Ripley’s Game
and the short stories – seemed to be going well and, for the most part, she spent the majority of her time alone, accepting only one date for drinks in the last thirty-five days. Then, however, on 2 May she attended a cocktail party at W.H. Smith’s, in Paris, hosted by Penguin, the British company which republished her novels in paperback. She described the event as being full of ‘French notables of the book world, also English’, including Edna O’Brien, ‘looking quite radiant’, but, disappointingly, no Graham Greene.
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Soon after the party, Highsmith had to steady herself for the arrival of her friends Daisy Winston from America and Lil Picard from Hamburg. The strain was too much for Highsmith and Daisy told her that she found her ‘more tense, anxious about things that are not worth being anxious about’.
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Highsmith was astonished at Lil’s aggressive behaviour, especially when she attacked Pat for being pro-Nixon, a description totally at odds with her views. By the time the two women left, Highsmith admitted she was left feeling frazzled, confessing to Barbara Ker-Seymer that it took her a fortnight to get over the interruption, as ‘half-insane people jangle me terribly, in a very inner way’.
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     During the summer, she entered what she described as a manic phase – a state which she said was actually beneficial to her creative imagination – which was soon followed by its inevitable, and cruel, counterpart, a crushing depression. Hester Green, who worked for the London literary agency A.M. Heath, visited Pat with a friend that summer. She remembers how even the most trivial of incidents seemed to push Highsmith over the edge.

     ‘Everything seemed to be a terrible psychological effort for her,’ says Hester. ‘I remember that we went around for lunch with her neighbours, Mary and Desmond Ryan, and all of a sudden, as we were sitting around the table, she put her head down on the table in a sort of terrible psychological state. I can’t remember what precipitated it. Similarly, there was one occasion when she planned to have a barbecue, but it went wrong, I think because of the weather. She got into a terrible state about it, flung her arms around my neck – it really was a gesture of despair – and said that she was so sorry. It was only a little thing that had gone wrong, most people would have laughed it off, but to her it was a major drama.’
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     Yet more barbed letters from her mother did not help Highsmith’s state of mind, missives which stand as evidence of Mary’s mental disintegration. Throughout the year, Mary took pleasure in denying her daughter the only two objects she knew Pat wanted from her – the watch she had given her stepfather when she was twelve or thirteen, together with an accompanying chain she had given him nine years later. Although the watch was a thing of beauty, she did not crave it purely for its aesthetic value; rather it represented, she said, a time in her life when she was utterly depressed, the year she spent with her grandparents in Fort Worth after being abandoned by her mother. As such, the watch, which she had bought after saving up the money given to her by her grandfather for cutting the lawn, became a symbol for her strong work ethic and a sign of just how much she had achieved.

     Highsmith was so horrified by her mother’s latest machinations that she wrote to her father, Jay B, asking him if he knew of a lawyer in Texas who could draw up a document legally separating her from Mary. Highsmith also wrote to one of Mary’s friends asking her to inform Mary that she did not want to inherit anything from her when she died. Jay B, after being released from hospital following a kidney ailment, wrote his daughter a letter outlining the legal situation regarding parents and children. ‘Regarding the request for a lawyer to draw up a legal separation paper,’ he said. ‘This is not necessary as under the law you are an adult of twenty-one years of age and a parent has no legal ties or control of your business or financial affairs or activities.’
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     Emotionally, however, Highsmith would always be tied to her mother, even though she repeatedly tried to erase her from her memory. Each letter she received from Mary upset her for several days, during which she found it difficult to work and if this one, written in June 1972, is anything to go by, it is hardly surprising. ‘You’ve treated me like a dog for 30 years,’ Mary wrote to her daughter. ‘That’s why you look like you do.’
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In the same letter, the issue of Highsmith’s name once again came under discussion. Why, the writer had asked previously, did Mary enter her at school under ‘Highsmith’ when the name on her birth certificate clearly said ‘Plangman’? There was a simple reason, Mary responded. ‘The teacher did & the principal – they approved of the Highsmith name,’ she wrote. ‘Everything I did was in consideration of you . . . We wanted you to choose your name when you were old enough.’
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     In October, Highsmith wrote to her friends to tell them how, the previous month, she had felt she was on the edge of another nervous breakdown and how she had been so depleted of energy that she couldn’t work for six weeks. Once again, she fantasised about a move away from France, where she had now lived for just over five years, possibly to Switzerland. She wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer, cursing France for what Koestler described as its ‘bloody mindedness’,
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and in a letter to Ronald Blythe, she outlined her hatred of its bureaucracy and red-tape. She did not need to lead a blissful existence, she said, neither did she need a lover in order to be happy. ‘It’s impossible to justify my hopping about geographically, I know,’ she wrote. ‘I have been sustaining myself for the past two years by telling myself, “It isn’t any better anywhere else, so why not stay?” I am not sure this is true.’
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After finishing
Ripley’s Game
in the early part of 1973, Pat considered taking a four-month break travelling around Japan or Sri Lanka. She felt the need to ‘get away from this solitary existence’,
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and, as money wasn’t a problem, there was no reason why she shouldn’t jet off on an extended holiday. Yet, fatigued by another bout of flu, toothache, and a swollen left cheek, Highsmith felt at a loss. Although she was initially heartened by the possibility that Marlon Brando might play Vic in a Hollywood film of
Deep Water
– Universal Pictures bought the film rights in 1972, but the movie did not progress beyond its planning stages – for the most part, Highsmith felt lonely and wretched during the first few months of the year. A horoscope plotted by Alex Szogyi suggested that she was passing through a period of great confusion, a point Highsmith expanded on in a letter to her friend. ‘I feel disorganized,’ she wrote to him at this time, ‘as if I am no longer the captain of my usually tight-run ship.’
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     Despite this, she was buoyed up by her black humour and her relish for the childish and the perverse. On 28 March, while waiting for a plane to take her back to France, after a trip to London to film the television book programme
Cover to Cover
, she was enjoying half a pint of bitter at Heathrow airport when she heard an announcement requesting that Messieurs Shit, Marchand and Shittal proceed to the information desk. Later in the year she would also be amused to see a typographic error in a French newspaper which read, instead of ‘Travels with My Aunt’, referring to the book by Graham Greene, the rather more ribald, ‘Travels with My Cunt’. ‘This sent her into gales of laughter,’ says Charles Latimer. ‘She clipped it from the paper and showed it to her friends. Pat had a raucous, earthy and quite unsophisticated sense of humour . . . She did not react to wit and any attempts at repartee with her were always deflated because she would usually admit that she didn’t get the point of it. For example, it would have been futile to have taken her to a Noel Coward play. Yet her laugh was unexpected because as a rule she was very soft-spoken and had a fairly low, quietly modulated voice which was beautifully articulated. So when the laugh came out it was loud and uncontrolled, a bit what you might call thigh-slapping.’
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‘Pat’s laugh was a hoot, a guffaw, a snort,’ recalls Vivien De Bernardi. ‘Not at all ladylike. She’d kind of lose control and let it come up from the bottom of her belly in a deep throaty escape.’
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Sir Michael Levey recalls one occasion when he and his wife Brigid Brophy met Pat for lunch in Paris. As they walked down a street, past a shoe shop, the couple observed Highsmith laughing to herself. ‘ “Did you see that notice?” she said, pointing out its wording: “Pour pieds sensibles”. Tiny and trivial as the incident is, it somehow conveys a flavour of Pat’s wry humour.’
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She also delighted in telling Brigid that, as her initials were PH, she had the Greek letter f (‘phi’) tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, a spot normally concealed by her watch strap. Although it was small, Highsmith joked that at least one day it might serve to identify her if she died in a plane accident and her severed arm was found at the crash site.

In the doldrums that always settled over her after finishing a book, Highsmith looked for ways in which she could fill her time, sorting through her accordion files and busying herself with projects around the house, none of which she found as satisfying as writing. Although she thought of some more story ideas for
Little Tales of Misogyny
and
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
, she admitted she felt uncomfortable with her excess leisure time. On 12 July she travelled to Hamburg, where she stayed for five days with her German translator Anne Uhde, before journeying on to Berlin alone. ‘I must say I could not like or even understand Berlin,’ she wrote on a postcard to Koestler.
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Although she would learn to love the city, she initially felt distinctly uneasy as she thought Berlin had no discernible centre, an experience she likened to ‘looking at a painting whose frame should have right angles, but has not’.
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     On 19 July she took a trip to East Berlin, costing 15DM, which involved a close examination of her passport and a series of questions, including how many Deutschmarks she was carrying. ‘At Checkpoint Charlie, a delay of at least 25 minutes,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘while the grey-green polizei do God knows what . . . The Wall is in sight, looking like grey cement about 11 feet high. Dreary little cement huts about, all containing officials . . .’
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While in Berlin she also visited the Schloss Charlottenburg and the zoo; the latter inspired an idea for a story about the animals taking over and placing their captors in cages, where the zoo-keepers would be ‘forced to defecate and make love in the presence of spectators who laugh, point and stare  . . .’
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     On Highsmith’s return to France, in late July, Heather Chasen and a friend visited the writer in Moncourt. Chasen recalls Highsmith as a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn’t particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature. ‘I remember she always dressed very butch in jeans, but would wear beads around her neck as well, which gave her a slight feminine air,’ she says. ‘I think she was fond of me, and I was fond of her, but I felt desperately sorry for her. She wasn’t a happy soul and needed friends. When I read her books later, I was astounded by her insight into human psychology – when I was with her she seemed so uninterested in people and what was going on around her. I think all her material came out of her head. As well as the aggression and vitriol that seeped from her – there weren’t that many people whom she spoke well of – there was also an element of vulnerability and a sweetness about her.’
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     The following month, Francis Wyndham wrote to Highsmith to ask whether she would be willing to write a piece for the
Sunday Times Magazine
entitled ‘First Love’. Her first reaction was to turn down the commission – for which she would be paid £350 – but then, after a little thought, she realised that she could write about the experience she had had as a six-year-old girl. Highsmith’s article, published in January 1974, is a masterpiece of equivocation, cleverly avoiding the names and gender of those she had loved. When Daisy Winston read the piece, she wrote Highsmith a letter telling her the feature had rather a stilted tone. ‘I certainly have one helluva nerve being critical of an accomplished writer,’ said Daisy, ‘but it doesn’t change the fact that I felt it lacking in a feeling I associate with love.’
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Clearly, Highsmith had to censor herself; as she told Barbara Ker-Seymer, referring to the feature, ‘Of course I could write a lot. But.’
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Nevertheless it’s obvious from reading the piece that Highsmith did not associate romance with happiness or contentment. ‘If I don’t speak of happy or successful first love, it is because I can’t imagine it easily,’ she wrote.
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