Beautiful Shadow (24 page)

     Drawing gave free rein to Pat’s
jeux d’esprit
, says Kingsley. ‘Images under her hand breathed a kind of reality that made the ordinary seem better than it was. Atmosphere, intention and nuance, were present in a pen stroke. This is Pat unbound, expressively so artless as to be able to see past the visible shape of things to the “itness” of whatever it was she chose to portray. I do not claim for her art any esoteric singularity, only that it has humor, personality and visual resonance – I’d know that street scene, that bell tower, that person anywhere. It was Degas, I think, who said that art does not render what is visible, it renders visible. That’s what I meant by saying that Pat could evoke the “itness” of things.

     ‘We’ll never know how much she might have refined and enlarged herself as a visual artist had she chosen to follow that particular calling. For while Pat’s life was not without its pleasures, it was art, even more than love, that released her inborn creativity and showered her with torrents of joy. She gravitated to art in all its forms, primarily to drawing, painting, sculpture, all of which and more, including woodcarving and carpentry, she turned her hand to. And quite a remarkable hand it was – noticeably larger in size and stronger than one might consider “normal”.’
⁵⁷

     It is no coincidence that many of Highsmith’s characters are artists of one kind or another. Guy in
Strangers on a Train
is an architect with a penchant for sketching the buildings and people of New York; Jack Sutherland in
Found in the Street
is an illustrator and graphic artist; Dickie in
The Talented Mr Ripley
is a painter, as are Theodore in
A Game for the Living
, Ed Coleman in
Those Who Walk Away
and Jensen in
The Tremor of Forgery
, while Therese in
The Price of Salt
is a stage designer. In that novel, Therese compares a square window open to the white sky beyond to a work by Mondrian, in Chicago she likens the ‘fuzzy’ horizon to a Pissarro painting, and at one point describes the elongated features of one of her friends as being similar to an El Greco. Sitting down and sketching gives Therese, as it gave Highsmith herself, an exhilarating sense of creating something anew. ‘A world was born around her,’ writes Highsmith of Therese the artist, ‘like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.’
⁵⁸

     Tom Ripley in the later Ripley novels is a keen amateur painter and art collector (he possesses a number of Van Gogh, Magritte, Picasso and Cocteau drawings), while the whole plot of
Ripley Under Ground
centres around the questionable authenticity of a group of paintings by an artist who we know to be dead. ‘If one painted more forgeries than one’s own paintings,’ Highsmith asks at one point in the novel, ‘wouldn’t the forgeries become more natural, more real, more genuine to oneself, than one’s own painting?’
⁵⁹

     Highsmith saw the world with an artist’s eye. Not only does she meticulously describe the objects which surround her characters with a poetic claustrophobia, but her language also teems with metaphors which are almost painterly in their visual flair. A dish of tinned peaches swim around a bowl ‘like little orange fishes’
⁶⁰
(
The Price of Salt
) and in the same novel a mountain range is described as looking ‘like majestic red lions, staring down their noses’.
⁶¹
In
The Blunderer
, Kimmel’s fat lips, are said to look like ‘an obese, horizontally divided heart’,
⁶²
a vase full of philodendrons is compared to an abstract painting and a group of willow trees reminds one character of the spectral winged figures hovering over the tombstones of the dead in Blake engravings.

     Although her strong visual imagination made it easy for her to plot out comic book storylines, when Highsmith returned to New York in July to resume her strip-writing, she felt like a failure. She had no money and had produced a novel she knew was unpublishable. Her only option, she felt, was to return to the kind of work she had first embarked upon after graduation, but this time on a freelance basis, which earned her about three times more than an equivalent full-time position. Writing for a pulp market worried her; she was anxious not to imitate the genre’s lazy plotting and stereotypical characterisation and she questioned whether churning out comic strips might somehow corrupt her own work, comparing her talent to a building that was gradually being undermined by termites.

     She would carry on writing comic strips for the next six years, but she soon got bored of thinking up new ideas and eventually regarded them as nothing more than an easy way of making money, cynically viewing each page as a visual representation of between four and seven dollars. The comic stories were written to a strict formula, one which required the minimal investment of inspiration, but at least the hack-work enabled her to set aside enough time in which she could write fiction.

As the summer of 1944 ebbed away, Highsmith’s love life was as topsy-turvy as ever. In her diary she confessed to overlapping several love affairs, including one with twenty-three-year-old Natica Waterbury, a glamorous, New York-born blonde who went on to become a photographer, pilot, patron of abstract art and sculpture, and an editorial aide of Sylvia Beach at the bookstore and publishing firm Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Highsmith realised that her emotional well-being was in a precarious position, and even when she was momentarily happy, she never expected the bliss to last, continually waiting for the end of the affair. Cumulatively Pat’s affairs had an anaesthetising effect on her emotions, ‘until where one’s heart is, is so thickly padded, nothing can any longer be felt’.
⁶³
Yet, in contrast to most homosexuals, Highsmith said, her nature was fundamentally a romantic one. Seemingly insignificant gestures and tokens thrilled her, such as the strand of her lover’s hair, a desperately longed-for letter, the scuff on her shoes she could not bear to clean off, and the telephone call that had the potential to transport her to heaven or to hell. ‘Shadowed people are we,’ she said, referring to her relationship with Natica, ‘a melancholy soul have I, for this unknown parting hangs over me even when I am with you.’
⁶⁴

     After the collapse of each of her brief, but intense, relationships, she felt so depressed that she sometimes felt incapable of writing. Her melancholy was so deep, her spirit so paralysed, she felt she could not even summon up enough energy to commit suicide. Ultimately, she was left wondering whether any kind of emotional attachment was worth the pain. ‘Love should be reduced,’ she said, ‘to a simple, unbalanced equation: put the days of exquisite happiness in the beginning of love against the inevitable hell at the end.’
⁶⁵

Chapter 9

The strange, subtle pluckings  of  terror

1945–1948

New York immediately after the war found itself at the centre of a creative explosion precipitated by the intellectual dynamism of European émigrés who had fled Hitler to settle in America – a diverse group including Mann, Nabokov, Marcuse, Brecht, Stravinsky, and Mies van der Rohe. Some historians have gone so far as to categorise this westward move as the most important cultural event of the second quarter of the twentieth century, signalling as it did a major shift in the centre of intellectual power. America was exposed to many of the ideas that had disturbed European modern consciousness in the years between the wars, themes which were articulated by W.H. Auden’s 1947 poem, ‘The Age of Anxiety’. ‘It seems to me now that Americans were confronting their loneliness for the first time,’ wrote Anatole Broyard about the post-war years. ‘Loneliness was like the morning after the war, like a great hangover. The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it – it wasn’t there. It was as if a great bomb, an explosion of consciousness, had gone off in American life, shattering everything.’
¹

     Much of the creative energy centred on the activities of the writers and artists who lived in Greenwich Village. It was, said Broyard, who then ran a bookshop on Cornelia Street, as if the writers and artists who lived and congregated around the Village were forging an identity for themselves which was unmistakably new, one dislocated from the comfortable platitudes of the American tradition. Broyard and his contemporaries, like Highsmith, ‘didn’t know where we ended and books began . . . We didn’t simply read books; we became them . . . Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.’
²
The bleak, existential modern nightmare envisioned by Kafka particularly resonated; indeed during the post-war years, ‘Kafka was the rage’,
³
‘as popular in the Village at that time as Dickens had been in Victorian London.’
⁴

     Highsmith first read Kafka in late 1942 and early 1943. She worked her way through
The Castle
, published in America in 1930, but felt that she had failed to understand the complex novel. However, by August 1945, it was obvious she had grown more confident in her interpretative approach to the Czech-born author, and had developed a kind of empathy with him. In her notebook, she observed how an analysis of Kafka’s work in the
New York Times
by Charles Neider isolated concerns that echoed her own: how the compromise between idealism and realism resulted in guilt, how the modern world was bereft of moral certainties and how ‘everything is fluid and ambivalent, the “right” way far from certain.’
⁵
Neider went on to write: ‘Greater knowledge, by its expansion of the conscience, involves the possibility of greater sin. Therefore a sense of sin and ambivalence is characteristic of our time. And Franz Kafka is unique because he perceived these facts so completely on the imaginative, emotional, poetic planes, giving us, through his conscious dreams, a more intense and complete and, above all, experiential awareness of these factors in ourselves.’
⁶

     In February 1948, she read Edwin Berry Burgum’s
The Novel and the World’s Dilemma
, an analysis of modern prose fiction, which included essays on Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Huxley, Wolfe, Faulkner and Kafka. In the book, she read how Kafka was a ‘diseased personality’, someone who ‘verged on the psychopathic’, a novelist who wrote about the bankruptcy of faith and the breakdown of mysticism. ‘Fantasy and hallucination,’ wrote Burgum, ‘now are the last resort of a man who never had faith in humanity and could never secure a faith in God.’
⁷
After reading Burgum, she wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, ‘a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,’ who when he murders, ‘feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution’.
⁸
The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, ‘I am so similar to him.’
⁹

Like Lucille, the disturbed heroine of ‘The Heroine’, Highsmith acknowledged that she saw life through what she called ‘a distorted lens’.
¹⁰
Instead of taking events and experiences at face value, she had a tendency to exaggerate their importance and feel their impact – whether it be joy or misery – too acutely. In her notebooks, she set down her thoughts on the subject, concluding that she would not try to refocus her skewed psychological vision, but would merely make a series of minor adjustments. At times, however, her mental instability frightened her. Often she would feel gripped by ‘the strange, subtle pluckings of terror’
¹¹
which overshadowed her, an anxiety which she felt unable to explain. She worried about her hormonal problems – months could go by between her periods – and even visited a doctor, who prescribed ergot to help regulate her menstrual cycle.