Beautiful Shadow (80 page)

     In October, Highsmith conceived the idea for the short story, ‘The Button’, about a couple with a Down’s Syndrome child. ‘The husband kills maybe a stranger on the street,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘because he has so often been tempted to kill the child.’
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After writing the story, which would be published in the 1985 collection,
Mermaids on the Golf Course
, Highsmith sent it to Vivien De Bernardi, who was then an educational therapist friend of Ellen Hill’s and a fellow resident of Ticino. When Vivien read the tale with what she thought of as its unrealistic portrayal of the child, Bertie – with his swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth, his eyes lolling about in his head and his incessant drooling – she felt outraged. She voiced her concerns about the story – that, in her experience, no Down’s Syndrome child would ever make such horrific, guttural sounds – and after that initial meeting the two became close friends. Vivien’s first impression of Highsmith was of an oddly dressed figure wearing ill-fitting clothes, khakis, a men’s trenchcoat and a badly tied scarf around her neck.

     ‘But what I loved from the very beginning was a softness, a peace, a tranquillity about her,’ she says. ‘Although she wrote about violence she was a very gentle person. I loved being with her, because there was this sense of quiet. One thing that interested me was that she chose me as a friend, not the other way around. She wrote to me, called me, encouraged me to come and see her when I was working part-time and raising two small children. It wasn’t as if I had an empty space to fill. But I would meet her and return refreshed – seeing her was like diving into a pool of cool water – and I would come home, my thoughts clearer, able to see things in a new light. However, I didn’t like to be with her when other people were around because she behaved like an unruly child, saying the first thing that popped into her head. It was as if she didn’t seem to have any inner control mechanisms. She was incapable of not saying what was in her mind. For instance, one day I introduced Pat to a friend of mine who was overweight. A few minutes into the conversation, Pat suddenly said that being fat was like going into a supermarket with a bag with “Eat everything you can see” written on it. As soon as she said this, there was a stunned silence. I couldn’t believe it. But Pat didn’t even realise she had been rude, she just spat out the first thing that came into her mind.

     ‘In hindsight, I think Pat could have had a form of high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome. She had a lot of typical traits. She had a terrible sense of direction, she would always get lost and whenever she went to the hairdresser’s she would have trouble parking even though she had been with me lots of times. She was hypersensitive to sound and had these communication difficulties. Most of us screen certain things, but she would spit out everything she thought. She was not aware of the nuances of conversation and she didn’t realise when she had hurt other people. That was probably why her love affairs never lasted very long, because she couldn’t overcome these difficulties in communicating. Although she didn’t really understand other people – she had such a strange interior world – she was a fantastic observer. She would see things that an average person would never experience.’
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     It was this seemingly endless capacity to surprise – Highsmith’s startling originality of perspective – which fascinated her new friend Jonathan Kent, who came to stay at her Aurigeno house in December. ‘I assumed that we would buy some lovely Italian or Swiss delicacies, but after picking me up from the station, we stopped off at Kentucky Fried Chicken for some chicken nuggets, which we ate back at her house,’ he says. ‘I remember the house was in the shadow of the mountain and the central heating was turned on high. Her cats were completely punch-drunk from the heat, and one cat had sucked all its fur from its tail, like it was suffering from some kind of heat dementia. I remember that she slept in her workroom and would write at night. I woke up at four or five in the morning to hear the World Service playing in her room. One day she took me to see Ellen Hill – a neat, bourgeois woman with reddish-brown hair – and we went out for a pizza. I got the impression that Pat fell out with people – she could be quite difficult and surly – but nevertheless I thought that she was a marvellous, fascinating woman.

     ‘I adored her instinct for the subversive and her dark sense of humour. I remember telling her this story about my grandmother who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. My mother had taken her a bunch of daffodils, but my grandmother thought the flowers were an advancing army and ate them. I thought it was quite sad but Pat could not stop laughing – she was screaming with laughter. She made me retell the story and each time she would be doubled up with laughter. I kept expecting it to be used in a short story or a book.’
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     Highsmith had very definite ideas of what she did and did not like. On the list of favoured objects and pursuits she composed for Diogenes Verlag in March 1983 she included Bach’s St Matthew Passion; old clothes; sneakers; the absence of noise; Mexican food; fountain pens; Swiss army knives; weekends with no social commitments; Kafka and being alone. Things she disliked, which she detailed on another list for her Swiss publishers, ranged from the music of Sibelius to the art of Léger; live concerts; four-course meals; television sets; the Begin-Sharon regime; loud-mouthed people and those who borrow money; being recognised by strangers in the street; fascists and burglars. To this list, she could have added suicide, an act she regarded as cowardly. Those who threatened to kill themselves should, she wrote in a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer, ‘carry their coffins along with them, and crawl into them by ways of illustrating to the public – what martyrs they are.’
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     The last person Highsmith would have expected to commit suicide was Arthur Koestler. She was shocked to discover that, on the evening of 1 March, Koestler, who was suffering from leukaemia and Parkinson’s disease, and his wife Cynthia, killed themselves at their house in Montpelier Square, London. Highsmith heard the news when she was in Zurich. ‘I know that “sitting-room” so well, and can fully imagine it,’ she told Alain Oulman.
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‘My first thought was that he had gently persuaded her; my emotion plain anger,’ she wrote to Kingsley.
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‘I do remember when Arthur died, Pat was inconsolable in a way that I had never seen before,’ recalls Kingsley. ‘She was absolutely distraught.’
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‘The only time I ever saw Pat morally outraged was when she talked about the deaths of Arthur and Cynthia Koestler,’ says Jonathan Kent. ‘She felt that Koestler had persuaded Cynthia to kill herself and that was immoral. As she talked about it her face blackened, she was very angry. She said that she would never forgive him.’
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     In April, Highsmith travelled from Aurigeno to Paris, where she endured a round of interviews to publicise the French edition of
People who Knock on the Door
. Although she found the city ‘poorer and dirtier’,
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she did enjoy an evening with Mary McCarthy and her fourth husband James West at their apartment in Rue de Rennes. On her return to Aurigeno, she was visited by Christa Maerker. ‘She picked me up from the station, but driving with Pat was like a kamikaze mission,’ she says. ‘She didn’t know where the key was and when she found it she didn’t know where to put it. As we set off, the window wipers would come on and during the journey she pointed out the spot where her car had once been hit by a train. Whether she was joking or not, I don’t know.’
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Highsmith had not been joking. One night, at ten o’clock in the evening, she was driving near her home in Aurigeno when she crossed into the path of a slow-moving train, wrecking the front of the car, but escaping injury herself.

     From June, Highsmith started to correspond with Bettina Berch, author of
The Endless Day: The Political Economy of Women and Work
and then professor of economics at Barnard College. Berch initially wrote to her about her time at Barnard for an article she was writing for the alumnae magazine. Was it true, Berch asked her, that Highsmith had written a book under the name of Claire Morgan? ‘The less said about Claire Morgan the better, esp. in print,’ Highsmith replied.
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Indeed, when Naiad Press bought the rights to reissue
The Price of Salt
later that year, Highsmith was determined for the book to be published under her pseudonym rather than her own name.

     ‘Pat was worried that being known as a lesbian would damage her reputation as writer of mystery novels,’ says Barbara Grier, the publisher of Naiad Press. ‘She suffered from internalised homophobia. She lived a very isolated life, shunned contact and I got the impression that it was agony for her to have even a brief conversation. We did everything we could to please her – each time we reprinted the book she would change a word here or a comma there and there must be five feet of files documenting all of that. Talking with her was like pulling teeth. She was not comfortable in her own skin, she was not happy with herself and, of course, this was reflected in her work.’
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     In late 1983, Highsmith was promised a $5,000 advance for
The Price of Salt
on condition that she agree for the novel to be released under her own name and a mere $2,000 if she insisted on using a pseudonym, an offer she politely turned down. Although she wasn’t overly keen for the book to be published in Europe, one advantage of doing so would be to prevent piracy and, in April 1984, she signed a contract with Calmann-Lévy, maintaining that the novel go out under the guise of Claire Morgan. However, when the novel was published, as
Les Eaux dérobées
, in May 1985, and despite the fact that Calmann-Lévy did everything they could to keep her identity a secret, the French critics rumbled her, having ‘found a Highsmith touch’.
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Some critics, quite bizarrely, ‘thought the book was by Enid Blyton’, while others believed it to be the work of Françoise Mallet-Joris, but, as Alain Oulman wrote to Highsmith, ‘the majority by you’.
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Highsmith started plotting her next novel,
Found in the Street
, in June 1983. The book, which she dedicated to Kingsley, centres around two men, a ‘New York eccentric’
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– security guard Ralph Linderman, an atheist who lives with his dog, God, in a sordid apartment on Bleecker Street – and Jack Sutherland, a wealthy Princeton graduate, freelance artist and illustrator, who lives with his wife Natalia, and their five-year-old daughter, Amelia, on the more gentrified Grove Street, the Greenwich Village street where Highsmith herself had lived over forty years before. (‘The doorway was just the same and the mail boxes were in the same place,’ observed Highsmith after revisiting the street while on a research trip to New York.
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) One night, while out walking his dog, Ralph finds a wallet, which he returns to Jack, complete with $263 in cash, photographs and cards. Coincidences such as finding a wallet in the street, Highsmith knew, were frowned upon by some novelists, but as she believed strange, irrational events were actually part of life, she saw no reason why they should not be reflected in fiction. ‘I am very fond of coincidences in plots and situations that are almost but not quite incredible,’ she said.
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‘I always had the idea of someone finding a wallet and returning it,’ she said. ‘I never did, but I’d like to, it would be
such
a pleasure.’
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     When planning the novel, Highsmith said that she wanted the book to be suffused by a ‘Faustian atmosphere of virginity and lust – equally male and female’.
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Certainly, Highsmith does seem to be attempting a more direct analysis of relationships which sit outside the strict parameters of traditional heterosexuality and in September 1984, while still in the process of writing the book, she told Barbara Ker-Seymer that, ‘Half the characters in it [the novel], are gay or half-gay.’
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     For all his attempts at behaving like a thoroughly modern man – allowing his wife an extraordinarily free rein, encouraging her independence, enduring her affairs – Jack ultimately finds himself occupying a similar psychological position to the moralistic, sexually frustrated Ralph. Both men reconfigure Elsie, the twenty-year-old waitress and model, in their imaginations according to their own desires, shaping her personality to fit the blueprint which exists only in their fantasies. For Ralph, Elsie represents innocence and virginity, a girl who has to be protected from the sordidness of New York City and its squalid inhabitants. ‘He’s a prudish kind of fellow and not terribly intelligent, he hasn’t a real insight on himself,’ said Highsmith of Ralph. ‘He means well, he’s certainly honest and he is very puritanical, he’s worried about the girl’s morals and he doesn’t want her to meet the wrong kind of people. There’s something comical about him, I think, because . . . he gets the wrong signals, he mistakes what he sees.’
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Jack is intelligent and sophisticated enough to realise that Linderman had fashioned Elsie into ‘an abstract, a symbol of all women’,
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yet he does not possess sufficient self-awareness to deconstruct his own misreading. When he first sees Elsie he sees in her not a real woman, but a perfect embodiment of an imaginative character; she has similar features to Suzuki, ‘the fantasy girlfriend of the adolescent boy’,
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featured in the book
Half-Understood Dreams
, which he is illustrating. After drawing Elsie, Jack feels creatively invigorated, almost in love, yet his feelings seem to relate to the image of her he has fashioned on paper, rather than the girl herself. For both men, Elsie becomes a ‘dream girl’
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and when Jack finally manages to declare his love for her, he does so when she is asleep, in the dim light looking like a fantastical character, ‘flying in space’.
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As he stares at the photographic shots of Elsie culled from stylish magazines he realises that the vision he has of her in his head is much more real than the external image, yet ultimately Jack ‘had loved to admire Elsie from a distance, as if she were a good painting or a drawing’.
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The novel ends with both Ralph and Jack imagining catching a glimpse of the enigmatic Elsie, before finally, and painfully, realising the truth – that the girl spun from their imaginations is dead.