Beautiful Shadow (78 page)

     Highsmith felt so compelled by this idea that in January 1981 she travelled to America to research the phenomenon. After a stay in New York, where she had lunch with her editor Larry Ashmead – who had moved from Doubleday first to Simon & Schuster, which published
Edith’s Diary
and then Lippincott & Cromwell, American publisher of
The Boy who Followed Ripley
– Highsmith flew to Indianapolis. Over the course of the next week, while staying with Charles Latimer and Michel Block in Bloomington, Highsmith immersed herself in Born-Again propaganda. ‘Pat became fascinated by the revivalist preachers who were on American television, so she came over specially to do research, and that formed the basis of the book,’ says Charles. ‘She couldn’t get enough of those awful revivalist programmes. Pat was really riveted by them.’
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Highsmith described the TV evangelists in her notebook as, ‘these people are all insane, smiling, saying words they surely don’t believe, or in order to advertise some product.’
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While in Bloomington, Pat also met Charles’ next-door neighbour, sixty-four-year-old Marge, manageress of a university cafeteria, whom she would use as the basis for the character of Norma Keer in
People who Knock on the Door
. ‘I remember we used to go over to Marge’s house and have drinks before dinner,’ says Charles. ‘I was pleased that my crazy alcoholic neighbour Marge got a little role in that book.’
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     Highsmith enjoyed her three weeks in the States, and, after Bloomington, she travelled on to Texas and Los Angeles, before flying back to France. At the end of February, she moved into her new home in Aurigeno, where she started work on the book. By 21 April she wrote to Charles Latimer again to tell him that she had decided to model the fictional town of Chalmerston on Bloomington, Indiana, and by June she had written 215 pages. By April of the following year, she had finished it, complaining that she thought the novel was peppered with too much dialogue and not enough straight prose, a stylistic imbalance which she thought ‘Horrid’.
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     The novel opens with seventeen-year-old high school student Arthur Alderman reflecting on how an afternoon of lovemaking with his new girlfriend, Maggie Brewster, had changed his perception of the world. After throwing stones into a pond, he cycles home to his father, Richard, a life insurance and pension salesman, his mother, Lois, and his younger brother, Robbie, who subsequently develops a bad case of tonsillitis and a life-threatening fever. After Richard prays for Robbie, he believes that his son’s recovery is due, not to modern medicine’s techniques and drugs, but because of Christ’s miraculous intervention. ‘So that Sunday became, in Arthur’s mind, the day his father found God, or was “reborn” as his father put it.’
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As Richard becomes increasingly obsessed with Christian fundamentalism – he subscribes to a number of creationist magazines – so the gulf between him and Arthur, who wants to study biology or microbiology at college, deepens. The crisis occurs when Maggie tells Arthur she is pregnant. The couple, together with her parents, rationalise the situation, deciding that an abortion would be the best solution, but Richard thinks otherwise and does everything in his power to convince his son and her girlfriend about the sinfulness of their actions. The abortion is arranged, Richard throws his elder son out of his family home and brainwashes Robbie into believing that sex outside marriage is a sin. While away at college, Maggie falls for another student, and although Arthur is initially distraught, he attempts to get on with his life, the minutiae of which Highsmith details with a near-documentary preciseness. When violence erupts towards the end of the novel – Robbie shoots and kills his father after discovering that Richard has impregnated a fellow church member, Irene, a mentally unbalanced ex-prostitute – Highsmith describes the horrific act in the same clinical, quotidian tone. ‘His jaw and neck were red with blood, as was the top part of his striped shirt . . . The front part of his father’s throat looked torn away and also part of his jaw. Blood flowed into the green carpet. Spatters of blood on his father’s desk caught Arthur’s eye as he straightened . . . Now Arthur noticed that his father’s blue trousers were damp between the legs.’
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     The murder, instead of acting as an agent of familial destruction, invests the Aldermans with a renewed sense of vitality and the book ends on a happy note. Immediately after Richard’s death, Lois and Arthur visit their next-door neighbour Norma, where they have something of a jolly party, complete with a delicious spread of food, iced tea and beer. Arthur fulfils his ambition of studying at Columbia, his relationship with Maggie looks set for a revival and the family sell their house and move to the east coast. Yet the future is not so bright for all the characters. Although the surviving members of the Alderman family escape the town, which for them has become something of a prison, there is the suggestion that Irene’s daughter – presumably Richard’s child, who is born at the end of the novel – will be brought up by the fundamentalist church, an organisation which Highsmith portrays as hypocritical, self-serving, in fact downright evil, an institution which has more in common with a Jim Jones-like cult than a religious order.

     What particularly alarmed Highsmith was the unsettling union between the Born-Again movement and right-wing politics in America. ‘I think the religious fundamentalism in America now is frightening because it’s now attached itself to Reaganite politics,’ Highsmith told one interviewer in 1986.
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Throughout the book, Highsmith makes references to this unholy alliance, one which she believed resulted in a corruption of the democratic process. The narrow-minded and bigoted Richard Alderman used to be a Democrat, but now he is a Republican and like most of the congregation of his church, a supporter of Ronald Reagan, elected President in 1981, a leader known for his cuts in education, increased spending on defence and anti-abortionist views. Highsmith told Bettina Berch that she couldn’t bear Reagan, adding, in another letter that he was ‘abysmally stupid’.
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Later in the eighties, Highsmith would satirise Reagan in ‘President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag’, one of the stories in her 1987 collection
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
, which culminates in not only his death but an apocalyptic nightmare. The spectre of far-right religion, Highsmith suggests, would continue to haunt the civilised world for decades to come. Highsmith could neither bear ‘people who believe in an after-life and try to persuade other people to believe in it’,
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nor those who were driven by profit alone. For her, moral absolutism was just as distasteful as moral blankness.

     When
People who Knock on the Door
, a novel which occupies similar territory to
Edith’s Diary
, was published in Britain it received good reviews. ‘With her usual skill Highsmith produces an apparently clinical, though in fact richly imagined, study of human frailty,’ wrote Holly Eley in the
Times Literary Supplement
,
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while H.R.F. Keating, in
The Times
, highlighted the rancid air of apprehension, an unsettling vagueness, which seemed to cloud its pages. Keating picked out one of the final sentences of the novel, uttered by Arthur: ‘ “There really is more money in streetwalking,” ’ noting that it was, ‘perhaps the only explicit statement of what the book is about – and they’re [the words] not that explicit. But they do say to us, a hard saying, that life is like the casualness of streetwalking, its dangers, its dubious pleasures, its never-ending uncertainties. This is what the whole novel says too . . . Miss Highsmith builds up her large portrait of a world at the mercy of the irrational, the casual. It is not a nice view of things. It will not please every reader. Not those of us who want there to be happy endings, as in Barbara Cartland. Or Mozart. But it has its truth, and truth makes you free.’
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     Despite the praise it received in Britain, the novel was rejected – as was her short-story collection,
The Black House
– by her American editor Larry Ashmead, who had recently moved from Lippincott & Cromwell to Harper & Row. The rebuff left her with no publisher in the US. ‘That was the one book I didn’t like,’ says Ashmead of
People who Knock on the Door
. ‘I don’t think her sales ever got up to more than seven or eight thousand copies in America; I think I would have continued publishing her if sales hadn’t have been so bad. I had just moved here from Lippincott and it seemed like an apt time to stop publishing her. We just didn’t continue a relationship after that – I’d send her a book or ring up for a quote and I don’t think she ever responded.’
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Highsmith tried to adopt an indifferent approach to the news. ‘I really don’t care much if my books are published in USA or not,’ she wrote in 1982. ‘I’ve never lost or changed a publisher because of my demanding a big advance, it’s that the USA publishers do not take chances, there’s no loyalty – and maybe not much loyalty among readers in USA.’
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The village of Aurigeno, which when Highsmith lived there had a population of only 105, lies in the Maggia valley under the shadow of the Dunzio mountain. It is, as she said, a place full of ‘old houses, simple people, some tourists in summer’.
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Highsmith’s new home was a two-storey grey granite structure built in 1680 as a summer vacation house, with one-metre thick walls and two cellars, one of which, with its arched ceiling of old stone, she thought looked like ‘a dungeon out of
The Count of Monte Christo
or something’.
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Barbara Skelton described the house as ‘small and dark with tiny windows’, noting the fact that it did not have a garden, while from the upstairs room one could see ‘snow-capped mountains and a church with a clock that chimed on the hour’.
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After being redesigned, the house, which had been left empty for twenty years, comprised of a large living room, which was dark but cool, a kitchen and spare room on the ground floor and two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a plan devised by the Swiss architect Tobias Ammann. ‘I was contacted by Ellen Hill, who asked me to find a house in the area for her friend Patricia Highsmith,’ says Ammann. ‘Before I met Highsmith, Ellen told me that she was very closed and she didn’t like to have too much contact with people. Yet generally I found it a pleasant experience to work with her. Although we never had problems, sometimes she would have trouble with various workmen and how much they charged and she would quibble over the bills.’
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     Ena Kendall, who interviewed Highsmith for ‘A Room of My Own’ in the
Observer
noted her tasteful, but slightly quirky stylistic touches: the fireplace with its chestnut surround; the candlesticks fashioned out of branding irons; a stool and a polished pine coffee table, both products of her woodworking; and a ‘surreal-looking owl she made from a scrap of wood and old nails’.
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     Although life in Aurigeno was quiet, Highsmith did not feel lonely and on 14 June 1981, she invited nine people to her house for a drinks party, where her guests enjoyed devilled eggs and canapés. As Ellen Hill lived only ten kilometres away, the two women started to see a great deal more of one another, but their relationship was far from smooth. ‘There were problems with Ellen Hill because she was always coming around to boss Pat – when Pat was with her she was like a little mouse,’ says Anne Morneweg.
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‘Ellen behaved like a governess around Pat, always telling her what to do,’ says Christa Maerker. ‘I remember once at the train station, Pat said, “Let’s have some coffee,” and proceeded to order a beer. Ellen, who happened to be in the same café, shouted in a stentorian voice across the room, “But Pat, not in the morning!” After that, the famous writer did not touch a drop of her beer, but simply retreated behind the curtain of her hair.’
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Peter Huber, who with his wife Anita split his time between Zurich and the Ticino, remembers how Ellen gave him a copy of
The Tremor of Forgery
, inscribed with the words, ‘For Ellen – Maybe you will like this one better than most – Love, Pat’.
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‘But Ellen didn’t care for Pat’s work at all and she gave me the book, saying, “Since you like all this rubbish, you may as well have it.” ’
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The pattern of dominance and submission which had in the past defined, and yet ultimately destroyed their love for one another, would eventually bring about the collapse of their friendship. ‘Pat knew it would be hell on earth living near Ellen Hill,’ says Monique Buffet, ‘but she went ahead and did it anyway.’
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