Beautiful Shadow (72 page)

     ‘She was very strange. I remember once when we were invited around to Mary McCarthy’s apartment in Paris, Pat was so furious because Mary did not know who Tom Ripley was – McCarthy thought he was a rock star. When we left the house, Pat was so offended that she banged her forehead on a wall. After that incident, I did not want her to go home in such a state, so she came back to my apartment. I made some warm milk for her with bread and she went home the next day.

     ‘She loved gin, which she mixed with water, Scotch, and beer, which she would swig from the bottle like a tram driver. She would start drinking before breakfast and then with breakfast she would have a small glass of whisky. I told Pat never to hide it from me, but I was very worried. She always said to me, “Poor darling, married to a drunk.” ’
⁵⁶

     Drink did not, however, prevent Highsmith from writing. Throughout 1975, she worked on
Edith’s Diary
together with a number of short stories. Even the news of her father’s death from cancer on 14 May – she chose not to attend Jay B’s funeral – failed to interrupt her creative flow. The only thing that did interrupt her routine was the intrusion into her life of journalists and television crews. Being interviewed, she said, was like stepping into the dentist’s chair, and afterwards she felt ‘shattered and exhausted’, unable even to write a short story.
⁵⁷

     In September, Highsmith – along with novelists Stanley Middleton, the winner of the 1974 Booker Prize, and Michael Frayn – was invited by the Swiss Association of Teachers of English to a hostel in the mountains near Hostein, Switzerland, to participate in a week-long series of seminars. Her task was to talk about
The Glass Cell
, its origins and problems. It was there that she met Peter Huber, one of the students on the course, who later became one of her close friends. ‘My first memory of her is of her being very shy,’ says Peter, a retired teacher. ‘She stood there at the front of the classroom, with her head slightly to one side, with very square shoulders and very strong-looking hands. As she spoke she had this punching movement which she did to emphasise a certain point.

     ‘I had read other novels by her, such as
Those Who Walk Away
, and I think she liked that. She really picked me out of the group and I think I was her favourite. Pat was much more interested in men, in general, and so our friendship was rather instant. On our one free afternoon we went into Basel, where we had tea at my aunt’s and went to see a Marx Brothers’ film,
A Night at the Opera
. After that we started to correspond and she answered, as they say, as the post turned.

     ‘I was, I must admit, rather flattered that she was famous and she seemed to be interested in me. But I genuinely did like her a great deal. We would talk for hours and later when I went to her house in Moncourt, and then when she bought the plot of land next to our house in Tegna, we would spend long evenings together sitting and talking by the fire.’
⁵⁸

     One of the other students attending the masterclass was English teacher Frieda Sommer, who Highsmith named as one of the executors of her will and who enjoyed a close friendship with the writer until her death. ‘Pat would shift her affection between Frieda and me,’ says Peter, ‘and usually only one was in favour at any one time. Pat could say very snide or really nasty things about the one who was out of favour. The more I got to know her the more I realised that she could really only get rid of her nightmares by writing.’
⁵⁹

     Pat returned from Switzerland feeling a little more confident, knowing that she wasn’t the only person to feel crippled by shyness. ‘Maybe a realization that other people can suffer as much,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘It really makes me happier.’
⁶⁰
During the last months of 1975, Highsmith also made short trips to London, Stockholm and Copenhagen, from where she wrote a short note to Marion, ‘saying that she missed her cat, milk and me’.
⁶¹

     The relationship continued to be a passionate and loving one – in a letter Marion wrote to Pat on 29 December, the younger woman pledged her fidelity and for the writer’s fifty-fifth birthday on 21 January 1976, she gave her four presents, including a Bach harpsichord recording, a gift she knew would be appreciated. However, only four days later, Marion wrote to Pat once again, referring to Highsmith’s recent dip in spirits. Pat, it seems, was downcast because of her lover’s behaviour – Marion had been haunted by a series of dreams predicting the end of their affair. Most recently, she had been disturbed by one nightmare in which she had watched Highsmith fall in love with a young blonde woman. When Marion, in the dream, questioned Pat about why she was breaking her vow – she had, after all, pledged to stay with her for ever – Highsmith replied that she wasn’t to blame and, after all, such promises were often made in the midst of love’s madness. Marion’s dream would prove to be strangely prescient.

Chapter 28

Your kisses fill me with terror

1976–1978

In the first few months of 1976, Highsmith’s thoughts turned to the issue of inheritance. She was particularly keen to sort out her affairs in the event of her death – she was only fifty-five, but the loss of her stepfather and father, and the continuing mental deterioration of her mother, forced her to think about a matter which, she said, although difficult to write about, she knew had to be addressed. In February she drew up her will, leaving all her stocks and shares to Yaddo, while pledging her literary papers – including her notebooks and copyright – to Kingsley. ‘You would be free to make an arrangement with someone else, to do a biography, or some such, assuming I warrant that signal honor,’ she wrote to her friend.
¹
Not only had Highsmith decided to leave her mother out of her will, but she went to the trouble of listing and naming nine first cousins ‘for purposes of elimination’.
²

     Fascinated by the theme of legacy – financial, emotional and familial – in August, she wrote to Kingsley again about her plans for another Ripley novel, a book which, she said, would focus on the story of a sixteen-year-old boy who pushes his rich grandfather over a cliff so as to avoid benefiting from his will. She continued to plot the novel, which she thought of calling ‘Ripley and the Inheritor’ or ‘Ripley and the Money Boy’, and which was published, in 1980, as
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, in her notebook during September, October and November. But instead of embarking on writing the book straightaway, she let the ideas swim around in her head for months; it would be a further two and a half years before she was ready to send off the manuscript to the publishers.

     Although the narrative would change over time – Highsmith played with the possibility of the boy murdering his grandfather or uncle before settling on his disabled father as the victim – the central premise of the negative psychological effects of inheritance remained a constant. In one of her first notes on the book, in September 1976, Highsmith wrote of how the boy, whom she finally named Frank Pierson, would have a ‘mystical and unrealistic attitude toward money’, at once fascinated by it and yet terrified of its power.
³
‘I like the idea because the boy is afraid of the responsibility of having money,’ Highsmith told Ian Hamilton. ‘He doesn’t want it and he sort of hates his family for pushing it on him.’
⁴
Money has liberated Tom, providing him with enough to afford the running of ‘Belle Ombre’, a well-stocked wine cellar (one bottle of which, a good Margaux, he used to murder the overly curious Murchison in
Ripley Under Ground
), twice-weekly private harpsichord lessons, regular flights around Europe and a stylish wardrobe, yet Frank finds its influence corrupting. The boy functions as a mirror image of Ripley, committing murder not to inherit a fortune – as did Tom after his murder of Dickie Greenleaf – but so as to free himself from its burden. Frank journeys to Europe where he seeks out Ripley, whose dubious reputation he has read of in the American press, and who he sees as a man ‘free in spirit’.
⁵

     At this stage in her life, Highsmith was an unabashed individualist: she thought that, for the most part, people shaped their own lives and refused to subscribe to the notion that society was to blame for their ills. In 1971, she asked herself would she be prepared to sacrifice some of her income to improve the fortunes and lives of those who were less well off? After considering the various options, she had to conclude that she wouldn’t – not only did she think she had a right to enjoy her hard-earned money, but she felt frustrated with ‘lack of endeavour in other people, and peoples, their stupid resistance to outside help in the form of money, policing, efforts at birth control’.
⁶
As she wrote to Arthur Koestler in June 1978, she believed that individuals needed to take responsibility for their own actions. ‘(I say this as an American, bored by those who say the individual is a victim of his environment or society.)’
⁷

     Yet in
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, Highsmith seems to suggest that a lavish lifestyle funded by crime – as illustrated by Ripley’s aestheticism – is vastly superior to the grubby spoils of capitalism, embodied by the Pierson dynasty, with their enormous seaside house in Maine, the flat in Manhattan and their helicopter. Before the book starts, Frank’s father, a food millionaire, is shot by a killer hired by a rival company and left with an injury that confines him to a wheelchair. ‘ “All business, charming business,” ’ Frank says cynically, as he explains to Ripley.
⁸

     Tom, one presumes, is left of centre. He cares about the international political arena (like Highsmith herself he is a regular reader of the
International Herald Tribune
); he differentiates himself from Georges and Marie, working-class owners of the local
tabac
, who support Jacques Chirac (‘the so-called Fascist’
⁹
Prime Minister of France between 1974 and 1976); and he loathes the puritanical right-wing opinions of his architect acquaintance, Antoine Grais, who looks down on him for his leisurely existence.

     Although he cannot bear the noise of a lobster boiling in a pot, Ripley can easily kill a man without it affecting his conscience. Frank may have aspirations of amorality, but the murder of his father and subsequent loss of faith in his girlfriend, Teresa, leaves him feeling suicidal. ‘ “The fact that I killed this man – It’s not going to change my life,” ’ Ripley tells Frank,
¹⁰
but he fails to convince the boy. As the novel is confined to Ripley’s perspective – apart from a brief letter which Frank writes to Tom telling him of the murder of his father – the reader never fully understands the boy’s motivation. After pushing his father over the cliff why did Frank travel to France to seek out Ripley? Why is he so obsessed with the sophisticated older man? What binds the two together?

     Homoeroticism runs through most of Highsmith’s novels – it is implicit in the warped power relations which exist between the male figures who frequently shadow and haunt one another – yet in
The Boy who Followed Ripley
the writer chose to wrench it out of the realm of the subtextual and establish it as one of the dominant themes of the book. The boy who follows Ripley is Tom’s shadow, his secret self, an embodiment of desires which he has been forced to repress. Ripley may deny to Heloise that Frank is a
tapette
, but the implied sexual attraction between man and boy runs through the book just as Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’, with its woozy lyrics of self-transformation and sexual transgressiveness, echo through its pages. Frank was at first drawn to Ripley at the age of fourteen, after seeing accounts of the Derwatt picture mystery in the American press; he was attracted by the possibility that the older man could have killed somebody, his cosmopolitan air and his good looks. Even before the couple make their trip to Berlin – where they frequent the notorious gay bars of the city – questions of Ripley’s ambiguous sexuality arise. When Antoine questions Tom, whose night-time reading consists of Christopher Isherwood’s
Christopher and his Kind
, about the identity of his visiting friend, he asks, rather nastily, ‘ “Male or female?” ’ to which Ripley replies, ‘ “Guess” ’.
¹¹
Frank insists on sleeping on Tom’s unchanged bed sheets, is keen to polish Ripley’s shoes, and looks at the older man with an expression, ‘sometimes radiant, as if he were looking at the girl Teresa with whom he was in love.’
¹²
Lovemaking between Ripley and Heloise is infrequent, something which Tom is thankful for as a woman who demanded sex several times a week would have turned him off, perhaps even permanently.