Beautiful Shadow (86 page)

     In London, Highsmith also had to endure a grilling by the writer and journalist Duncan Fallowell, who quizzed her about her personal life. Had she ever fallen in love, he asked. ‘Yes, I think so,’ she replied after a long pause. When was the last time she was in love? ‘Nine years ago. In Germany,’ she said, a veiled reference to Tabea Blumenschein. How would she define love? ‘It’s . . . a kind of madness,’ was her response.
⁵⁰
In the interview – which wasn’t published until after her death – Fallowell described the writer, who was wearing black trousers, white socks, black patent-leather loafers and a purple silk cravat, as ‘in-turning, as if hugging an awful secret; and when a low-key humour plays about her, which it quite often does, it lends her personality a creepy fascination which may be unjustified and is perhaps simply a combination of painful vulnerability and iron will’.
⁵¹
Her face was free of make-up, her thick lips quite sensual, adding that her ‘soft brown eyes’ were ‘wary’. Obviously Highsmith loathed the experience. ‘Her manner has returned to its slow, taciturn, lizard-like self, giving only enough to dispatch the question and no more,’ wrote Fallowell. ‘I have been told that she doesn’t like to talk about her writing. And she likes to talk about her personal life even less. There is a sense of cramp about her personality, a lack of spiritual generosity, a parsimoniousness, as though every little thing must be hoarded up, reserved, meted out only in work.’
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     She also took the opportunity to see her friends Jonathan Kent; Roger Clarke; Patricia Losey; Phyllis Nagy, who coincidentally happened to be in Britain; her new editor at Bloomsbury, Liz Calder; and the literary agent Tanja Howarth, who represented Diogenes Verlag in the UK. ‘Before I met her I was terrified because I assumed that she must have a very dark side,’ says Tanja. ‘But as I got to know her I found that she was a caring and warm-hearted person. She would write to my son, always wanting to know how he was and encouraging him professionally, and because she did not really have a family, I hoped that she would regard my son Peter and me as “surrogate relations”. Every Friday I would ring her – knowing that at that point she had done her work and would have drunk some whisky – and after years of being her London link, we became friends. What I remember most about her was her
Ausstrahlung
, her physical presence, which was both strong and strange; it was incredibly powerful. If she was to walk into a room, you would never forget her. I think she was a genius who has yet to be fully appreciated.’
⁵³
‘She was one of the most sensitive, vulnerable, and insecure people I’ve ever met,’ says Phyllis. ‘After meeting her in London, she wrote to me in New York saying, “I trust you weren’t in the King’s Cross tube fire.” And that was it – she wrote to me every week from then on.’
⁵⁴
Highsmith’s generosity was ‘unstinting,’ says Phyllis.
⁵⁵
‘Pat strove to help me in any way she could when I moved to London.’ Highsmith also took great pride in Nagy’s progress as a writer, ‘in the last two years of her life, she commented on how much pleasure she had taken in watching me become a playwright . . . sending me newspaper cuttings from foreign papers about me and other young writers she’d felt connected to or proud of’.
⁵⁶

     Back in Switzerland, Highsmith wrote an essay on Jack the Ripper for Alan Hollinghurst at the
Times Literary Supplement
and the piece on Green-Wood Cemetery. Death obviously preyed on her mind – just before the close of the year she dreamt that an unidentified corpse was being passed around between a group of neighbours who were using the body to fertilise their gardens – and in order to prepare her estate, she invited Kingsley over to Aurigeno for a six-day stay to sort through some of her papers.

     ‘There I go in a few years, I thought,’ she wrote in her feature on Green-Wood cemetery, referring to the ovens in which the bodies are burned, ‘as cremation is my preferred way, ashes to be scattered any old where that is permitted.’
⁵⁷

Chapter 34

A face accustomed to its ghosts

1988

‘Ripley touches madness,’ Highsmith scribbled in her notebook on 1 January 1988.
¹
She had been thinking about writing a fifth Ripley novel for some time; at the end of 1986 she had noted down a scenario featuring art dealers or collectors and in April 1987 she had announced to her audience in Lleida that she was sure she would write another book about the amoral, but charming, killer. Her new idea, outlined in her cahier in January 1988, focused on Ripley’s breakdown, a mental collapse brought about by the stress of maintaining two separate identities – his comfortable, gentlemanly home life, painting watercolours and playing the harpsichord, and his enjoyment of the darker aspects of his existence such as forgery and murder. Yet the day after sketching these bare details in her notebook, she wrote to Marc Brandel and told him she didn’t think she was quite up to writing another book. ‘I am not enough collected as yet, unfortunately,’ she said. ‘Very uncomfortable feeling.’
²

     She let the Ripley idea sit at the back of her mind for a couple of months, taking up her notebook again in March to explore the theme of the balance between man’s aspirations towards beauty and nobleness and the concomitant desire to take pleasure in violence and degradation. The delicate equation is one of the themes she would explore in the final version of the new Ripley novel,
Ripley Under Water
, published in 1991 in the UK and a year later in America. The book starts, five years after the Murchison affair detailed in
Ripley Under Ground
, with the entry into Tom’s life of a strange American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, whom he initially nicknames the ‘Odd pair’.
³
The Pritchards proceed to shadow Tom – they take photographs of the house and, as Ripley correctly surmises, telephone him, pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf. After questioning Janice, Ripley discovers that David takes pleasure in torturing those around him and that he is his latest victim. Pritchard follows Ripley, his wife, Heloise, and her friend, Noelle, to Tangier, where he continues to haunt them. While the two men are enjoying a cup of refreshing mint tea at the cliff-top café, La Haffa, Tom roughs Pritchard up a little, kicking him in the crotch and leaving him prostrate on the ground. Ripley manages to free himself from Pritchard and he flies back to France without his stalker’s knowledge. He travels on to London where he discovers the reason why Pritchard knows so much about him: information received from Cynthia Gradnor, the one-time girlfriend of Bernard Tufts, a woman who is certain that Tom killed Murchison and that he was responsible for Bernard’s suicide. On returning to ‘Belle Ombre’, Tom is sickened to learn that Pritchard has been dredging the local rivers and canals in search, he presumes, of Murchison’s corpse. Fearing exposure of his past crimes, Ripley invites journalist Ed Banbury – one of the benefactors of the Derwatt art fraud – over to his house to help, but then, early one morning, he opens the front door to see a bundle of tarpaulin containing Murchison’s headless skeleton lying outside. In revenge, Ripley and Ed deposit the bones in the Pritchards’ pond, but, after hearing a noise, the couple come out of their house into the dark garden. David tries to reach into the pond to retrieve the mysterious object floating before him, but he falls in and, as Janice tries to help him out, she too slips into the murky water, where they both drown. Their bodies are found the next day, along with an unidentified skeleton. Ripley is questioned by the police, but once again, he escapes punishment.

     The novel has its faults – Julian Symons, usually a fan, thought that the book ended with a ‘distinctly undramatic climax’ and that the writing was occasionally ‘bad and clumsy’
⁴
– yet the work can be read as an exploration of the aesthetics of taste and an analysis of the relationship between the noble pursuits of the mind and spirit and the baser animalistic desires of the flesh. At first sight, it appears that the dualistic dynamic is split, quite neatly, between the characters of Tom Ripley and David Pritchard. Ripley, sophisticated, wealthy, and cultured, lives within the exquisite surroundings of ‘Belle Ombre’, with its harpsichord, rich art collection, antique furniture and well-stocked wine cellar, its reassuring aromas of freshly brewed coffee, rose petals and
cirage de lavande
. Pritchard, the son of a lumber merchant from Washington state, meanwhile, leads a somewhat shabbier existence. When Tom pays a visit to his rented house he looks down on the ugly wooden fireplace, painted white with ‘an unfortunate dubonnet trim’ and the ‘false rusticity’ of their furniture.
⁵
He is similarly appalled by the dining-room table and chairs – which he describes as ‘horrid made-yesterday antique’
⁶
– and the cheap floral paintings on the walls, the kind one sees in hotel bedrooms. David is literally not one of us, a judgement with which the reader is forced to concur as we align ourselves with Ripley’s point of view.

     Highsmith forces us to identify with Ripley by using her favoured technique of imprisoning the reader within his narrative perspective and by portraying the Pritchards as even more psychopathic than Tom. Not only are David and Janice ‘phoney’,
⁷
‘Weirdos’
⁸
and ‘
Mentally sick
’,
⁹
but the couple are obviously involved in some strange sado-masochistic relationship. While researching the novel, Highsmith turned to the works of Menninger and Fromm for psychological insights into sado-masochism and she asked her friends for any titbits about the phenomenon. Originally, Highsmith planned to bring the S/M dynamic to the fore, imagining a scenario in which David and Janice ask Ripley to kill someone so they can watch and another possible plotline which involved them tormenting one another. As she started to write the book at the end of May 1989, however, she decided to tone this down, suggesting the true nature of the relationship through details such as Janice’s bruising and the rumoured discovery of a whip and chain after the police search the Pritchards’ house.

     Despite this narrative trickery – the subtle conjuring by which Highsmith seduces the reader into believing Ripley’s point of view is perfectly normal and respectable – Tom’s perspective is seriously warped. Originally, Highsmith wanted to explore Ripley’s descent into madness. Perhaps, she mused, walking around an empty house for sale could precipitate a crisis of identity? Or maybe the breakdown could be brought about by an honest reassessment of his past behaviour? ‘He escapes into another person,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘A form of schizophrenia.’
¹⁰
Although Highsmith decided against exploring this idea in detail, it’s clear from a close reading of the book that Ripley, for all his surface charms, is not far from insanity. He often feels paranoid and loses himself in dream-like states – ‘Sometimes his imagination was as clear as a remembered experience’
¹¹
– and at one point he refers to himself in the third person, a symptom suggesting a degree of depersonalisation. But what, Highsmith asks, prevents him from slipping over the edge? He had a ‘screen’ that separated reality from memory – ‘it was self-preservation’.
¹²
Ripley may like to think that he is better than Pritchard, but both men are reificators, judging people by their clothes, accessories and the objects which surround them. Tom cannot bear David’s receding hair-line, his supermarket furniture, his white basket-weave shoes and his watch, with its gold stretchable strap. Ripley preferred his Patek Philippe watch with its brown leather strap. In turn, Pritchard is drawn towards Ripley, and feels compelled to torture him not because of any personal motive – the two men are, after all, strangers – but because he spotted Tom at an airport wearing an expensive leather and fur coat, an object which incited envy in him. Pritchard’s mission, he declares to Ripley, is ‘The pleasure of seeing a snob crook like yourself go belly up.’
¹³

     In Pritchard, Ripley sees a variation on his own theme, a fragment of his personality taken to the extreme and that is one of the reasons why he wants to ‘disembarrass’
¹⁴
himself of him. In truth, Ripley is just as much a sadist as Pritchard. He may not beat up his charming wife, but he still has the capacity to relish the infliction of pain – only when he thinks it is well-deserved, of course. ‘Never kick a man when he’s down, Tom thought, and gave Pritchard another kick, hard, in the midriff.’
¹⁵
And the sight of the couple falling to their deaths in the pond elicits a joyous response, a feeling of relief and merriment. He may well laugh – after all, Ripley had long harboured an irrational fear of deep water. His parents had drowned in the sea off Boston and, ever since he was a small boy, the sight of water had made Tom feel sick. In
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, he looks at a postcard of a cruise ship sailing across a fjord, an image which is enough to unsettle him, as he ‘often thought that somehow his end might be watery’.
¹⁶
Yet, of course, Tom remains safely on
terra firma
. The last time we see Ripley – for this was Highsmith’s final novel in the series – he is standing on a bridge in Moret holding the one piece of incriminatory evidence, Murchison’s ring, which he knows links him to his past murders. A policeman approaches him. Has he been caught? No, he is simply asked to move his white station-wagon. He swings his arm back and hurls the ring into the river. Now that his past is safely under water, the man with the most fluid identity in modern literature is free once more.