Beautiful Shadow (22 page)

     That Christmas Day night, after a disastrous evening out drinking with Teddy Stauffer, the Swiss-born jazz musician and club owner who went on to marry the actress Hedy Lamarr and who helped establish Acapulco as an international resort, Pat came to the conclusion that Chloe was bad for her. As long as they kept seeing one another, she would not be able to write. It was obvious, Highsmith observed in her diary, that Chloe was still in love with her husband and that she preferred going out drinking with Teddy Stauffer to spending an evening with her. For all Pat’s bravado it’s obvious from her diary that the collapse of the relationship saddened her. In the first few days of the new year, she wrote in her notebook of a future which, like a powerful geyser, stretched high into the air only for it to disappear back into the earth as it reached its zenith. ‘How rich your flesh,’ she said of her beloved, ‘but how poor your spirit.’
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     From Mexico City, Highsmith travelled south alone, arriving in Taxco, the charming town spread out 6,000 feet above sea level, along the south-eastern slope of the Atachi hills, on 7 January. She liked Taxco so much – it was, she noted in her diary, one of the few Mexican towns where women could wear trousers – that she made plans to settle there. The origins of the town are not certain. Legend has it that in 1717 a French prospector Joseph de la Borde, later known as Jose de la Borda, was travelling on the way back from an unsuccessful trip to Acapulco when his burro stumbled upon a rock. On closer inspection the stone appeared to be glistening and snaked through with silver. Subsequently Borda’s silver mines netted him a fortune and in 1748, in order to thank God for his good fortune, the entrepreneur financed the building of the cathedral of Santa Prisca. The twin-towered Baroque fantasy still dominates the landscape; Aldous Huxley, after a visit to Taxco, described it as ‘one of the most sumptuous and one of the most ugly’ cathedrals he had ever seen, calling it ‘an inverted work of genius’,
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while Malcolm Lowry referred to it as ‘Borda’s horrible beautiful cathedral’.
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     Just as silver boosted Taxco’s economy in the eighteenth century, so the precious metal helped rejuvenate the town in the twentieth. In 1931, architect William Spratling – who had bought a house in the town in 1929 and who later became one of Highsmith’s acquaintances when she lived in Taxco – turned his hand to silversmithing and opened his shop Las Delicias. Spratling, a friend of William Faulkner and Diego Rivera, acted as something of a cultural beacon, enticing a wide range of artists and writers to Taxco. Hart Crane – who was in Mexico trying to write his epic poem about the Conquest – was a regular visitor and for years after the event residents talked of the time the poet climbed to the turret of Santa Prisca cathedral and rang the bell so loud it could be heard all around the town. This was, as Paul Bowles said, ‘something he had no right to do, but for which apparently he was not punished, drunkenness not being considered a serious evil in that tolerant place.’
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     Bowles, together with his wife, Jane, moved to Taxco in 1940, returning for another summer in 1941, and although she preferred it to Acapulco, he could not bear the town’s artistic pretensions and loathed its ‘carefully nurtured bohemian atmosphere’.
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Aldous Huxley, who had visited in the early 1930s, had taken a similar view, noting how it was populated by ‘artists and those camp-followers of the arts whose main contribution to the cause of Intellectual Beauty consists in being partially or completely drunk for several hours each day.’
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     After living in Taxco for some months, Paul wrote to Virgil Thomson of the creative lethargy which hung over the town like a stifling, suffocating pocket of heat. ‘The old, accustomed paralysis takes hold of one’s consciousness here,’ he said. ‘The place is nonexistent . . . one is tempted to look down at one’s toes and think of life and death.’
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In fact, Bowles very nearly died there, when in the summer of 1941, he contracted a severe case of jaundice, an illness which forced him and Jane to leave Taxco for good.

     When Highsmith arrived in Taxco in early January 1944, she would have been well aware of the town’s literary and artistic associations. She may even have read William Spratling’s 1932 book,
Little Mexico
, with its foreword by Diego Rivera and illustrations by the author. The slim volume is an evocative, impressionistic sketch of Taxco life in the early 1930s, details which Highsmith herself would have recognised as she strolled around the town just over ten years later. ‘Seen from above, the highway through town, the
camino real
, is a twisted vine with tendrils . . .’ wrote Spratling. ‘Signs of the zodiac, heroic bulls, stars and other favourite insignia are wrought in a mosaic of black basalt in the cobbles of the
camino real
.’
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     On a typical late afternoon, one could see a line of old women sitting on the cobblestones, baskets in their laps, hawking their tamales or steaming hot tortillas; the daily ritual of parading around the square at six o’clock when mothers would coo over newborn babies; and the menfolk sitting under the majestic trees discussing finance or news from the mines nearby. Above their chatter one could hear the soporific sound of guitar-playing and gentle singing drifting out of the unplastered adobe or palm-thatched ‘jacal’ houses.

     Highsmith’s own house, which she rented, was called Los Castillo Casa Chiquita; a sketch she made of it shows her new home to be a single-storey, traditional Mexican structure, with decorative tiles framing the wooden doorway and tall, fleshly cacti growing in her garden. Small lizards scampered in and out of the house and over its pitched roof, while through one of her windows she could hear the noisy slavering of a pig chomping on leftovers. She paid $54 a month for her rent, food and part-time maid and in her diary she said she thought the house was the most beautiful in Taxco. She had space in which to write, enough money (theoretically) for a few months in Mexico and a typewriter which she had brought with her from New York. She wrote letters home to her friends, mother and grandmother describing her life in her new environment, complaining about the trouble she had with her maid and being bitten to death by the dreaded
pulgas
or fleas.

     She spent her mornings painting or drawing, her afternoons walking, while in the evenings she would write until late into the night. In her free time she would jot down poems about cats – in April she acquired a kitten, which she named Fragonard after the French rococo painter – read about the history of Mexico and Eastern philosophy, which she described as a ‘balm to the soul’.
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She enjoyed the juicy tomatoes which she compared to the shape of handbags with drawstrings, but after a few weeks she found herself becoming bored by the monotony of Mexican cuisine and the toughness of its meat. Some evenings she would walk down to the Hotel Victoria where she would drink with fellow Americans, noting that in Taxco people did not ‘drink to fill social intervals . . . but for total oblivion’.
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Alcohol, for Highsmith, was another way of accessing her subconscious mind and throughout her notebooks and diaries she repeatedly refers to drink as essential for the true artist, as it ‘lets him see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more’.
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Yet she was also conscious of its potentially destructive effects – especially when combined with the distracting influences of her Taxco acquaintances. She wrote in her diary of her decision to leave Taxco in May and how distancing herself from the town’s drinkers and its ‘corrupt atmosphere’
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would enable her to get down to work. For all the village’s seemingly idyllic setting, she found life there hard, especially as her money was running out. At times, it was all too much. ‘Fleas, ants, cats, dogs, the Mexicans – all prey on me,’ she wrote. ‘Some want money, some food, some flesh, but all want something, and as this is their country they get it.’
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     Despite her involvement in Taxco’s lively social scene, at times Highsmith felt terribly lonely and often thought about Allela Cornell and Rosalind Constable. In the evenings, she longed for the presence of a ‘solid embrace’, a desire she had to suppress. ‘Sometimes the desire is a ghostly counterpart of me,’ she wrote, ‘and stands beside me sadly. In the nights I lie and watch the moon  . . .’
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     In March she was visited by Ben Zion Goldberg, her ex-employer, who would often come by late at night to talk through her work. ‘He does many things in the same way as I do,’ she wrote in her diary, originally in Spanish. ‘He’s pagan, so he says (and has had success with this philosophy).’
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     In mid-March, the pair, together with some other Taxco friends, drove south to Acapulco, which Highsmith would describe in her novel,
A Game for the Living
. ‘Acapulco presented its brilliant, smiling crescent at mid-morning, a tumbled ring of golden green hills, a fringe of hotels that seemed to sit right in the blue ocean. White flecks of sails looked perfectly still on the surface of the bay.’
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     While in Acapulco, Highsmith witnessed a sea tempest whip up the ocean like a ferocious monster, a detail she would use in her unfinished, unpublished novel,
The Dove Descending
, written in 1946. The storm left the beach devastated and the water alive with phosphorescence; as she stomped her feet in the wet sand a host of green sparks shimmered on the shore.

     Back in Taxco, Highsmith concentrated on her writing. She toyed with the idea of a book of short stories about the American expatriate community in Taxco, in which she would highlight the difficulties they experienced choosing whether to keep their distance or assimilate themselves into the new environment. ‘They try to do both, and lose their souls, their mores, their minds . . .’ she wrote. ‘It is this split personality that makes the American a total failure, and tears him apart.’
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She never completed the project, but the Jamesian idea of an American at odds with a foreign milieu is one she would go on to explore in many of her novels, particularly
The Talented Mr Ripley
. As she worked, her mood fluctuated between all-consuming joy and utter desperation according to the quantity and quality of her writing. On one particularly depressing day, she wrote in Spanish in her diary, ‘I think about my life, of my work, and think I will never accomplish anything.’
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During those five months in Mexico, Highsmith worked on her novel
The Click of the Shutting
, which she had started to plan the year before. By now the work had developed into a gothic novel set in contemporary New York featuring two boys, Gregory Bulick – who lives in Greenwich Village with his boorish alcoholic father and whom Highsmith had initially modelled on herself – and George Willson, a privileged youngster whose family enjoys a lavish and opulent lifestyle. ‘In these two boys,’ Highsmith said, ‘I now see the pattern I was later to follow in so many novels, the meeting, the close friendship of two people who are unlike one another.’
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As she was writing the novel, she mused on the dangers facing the first-time novelist – that ‘every character is one’s self.’
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     The manuscript which survives is only 272 typewritten pages Although it remains unfinished, the novel is fascinating as it features what can be seen as quintessential Highsmithian themes – homo-eroticism, the allure of the double and the erasure of identity. The story opens with the sentence, ‘ “I’ll pretend that I live there,” Gregory whispered as he came into the block,’
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– a line she wrote while living at Los Castillo Casa Chiquita and one of which she was proud. The first few pages describe how the insecure adolescent follows the rich and glamorous George back to his home, imagining what it would be like to cast off his own identity and cloak himself in another, infinitely more intriguing, self. ‘He thought often, and sometimes with an eerie sense of possibility, that he could have been born George Willson instead of himself . . . Was it his body that made him what he was or something inside him?’
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     Highsmith would explore this concept in her later novels, particularly in
The Talented Mr Ripley
. The character of Gregory also shares with Ripley an indeterminate, ambiguous sexuality. Twenty pages of
The Click of the Shutting
are taken up with a description of a sexually charged dream, in which George visualises his school friends, Charles and Bernard, waking up in a life-saving station by the river. Bernard, whose eyelashes and voice are described as girlish, watches as Charles parades around the room, displaying his body, ‘holding his arms a little behind him so Bernard could admire his chest that was grooved down the center and segmented with muscle like a giant insect’s thorax or like some kind of armor.’
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